Iggy Loomis, Superkid in Training Read online

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group • Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  Text copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Allison • Illustration copyright © 2013 by Mike Moran

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Allison, Jennifer.

  Superkid in training / by Jennifer Allison. ; illustrated by Michael Moran.

  p. cm. — (Iggy Loomis ; bk. 1)

  Summary: Just as Daniel is adjusting to sharing his room with Iggy, his little brother, a strange boy with a big interest in bugs moves into their neighborhood, providing Daniel with a new friend but Iggy with some mutated DNA. • ISBN 978-1-101-59383-7

  [1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. Family life—Fiction. 3. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 4. Mutation (Biology)—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A4428Sup 2013 [Fic]—dc23

  2012017462

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Afterward

  To my favorite young readers:

  Max, Marcus, and Gigi!

  –J.A.

  To my superkids, Patrick and Matthew

  –M.M.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Doug Stewart, Maureen Sullivan, and Lauri Hornik, who first encouraged me to write this book, and to Andrew Harwell, who oversaw several drafts of the manuscript. A very special thank-you to my editor Lucia Monfried for her insight, patience, and excellent editorial guidance. Mike Moran: thanks for collaborating and for bringing Iggy’s world to life with your fantastic art. Rosanne Lauer and Stacey Friedberg: thank you for your attention to so many details. Jason Henry: thank you for your excellent book design. Finally, I want to thank young reader Henry Rosser, who wanted Iggy to have “more cool powers,” and my son Max, who was the very first reader for Iggy Loomis.

  I KNEW IT WOULD HAPPEN eventually, but I didn’t think my nightmare would come true quite so soon. Well, it happened today: My parents decided to move my little brother, Iggy, into my bedroom.

  Big deal, Daniel, you’re probably thinking. Lots of kids have to share bedrooms with their brothers and sisters and they don’t whine about it. A few of them even like it.

  Did I mention that Iggy has only been potty trained for a few months?

  And in case you’re picturing a cute little toddler, did I mention that Iggy breaks almost everything he touches? For example, if you have any breakable Planet Blaster Technoblok spacecraft models that you’ve just spent five hours building and Iggy walks into the room, you’d better plan on redoing all your work because Iggy can break an entire squadron of spaceships in about one second.

  And if you don’t like loud noises, you’d better buy some earplugs in case you happen to be within fifty feet of Iggy when he gets frustrated about something, which is about half of the time he’s awake.

  So why is Iggy moving into my room now instead of sharing a room with his twin sister, Dottie?

  Because Iggy destroyed his crib, and now he needs a new bed. My parents figure my bunk bed would be the perfect spot for him. Anyway, it all started this morning when Iggy and Dottie were bouncing on their crib mattresses and yelling, “Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!!”

  Suddenly, I heard a loud CRASH!, and then a more quiet, “Uh-oh.”

  Dottie piped up: “Iggy bwoke his bed!”

  My parents and I hurried into Iggy and Dottie’s room and stared at Iggy’s crib. It had totally collapsed; Iggy’s mattress was on the floor.

  “That’s it,” said Mom. “The crib won’t hold him anymore; he needs a bigger bed.”

  “He needs a bigger home,” said Dad. Dad likes to joke about sending all three of his kids to live on a farm somewhere. I know he’s kidding, sort of.

  “Maybe we could get him a big cage,” I suggested, “like the monkey house at the zoo.”

  “My bed bwoke!” Iggy announced. As if we still needed to have that part explained.

  “I think it’s time,” said Mom.

  “Time for the monkey cage?” I asked.

  “Time for Iggy’s move-in day.”

  I knew what was coming next. “Oh, no,” I said. “No way!”

  “Daniel, you knew that you and Iggy would need to share a room. You two boys together. This is just a bit sooner than we expected.”

  “Your mother’s right,” said my dad. “Iggy needs a new bed, and you’ve got a bunk bed.”

  “He can sleep on your bottom bunk, and you can have the top,” Mom added.

  “But it actually makes more sense for Iggy and Dottie to share a room,” I protested, “because they LIKE each other.”

  It’s true that Iggy and Dottie usually get along amazingly well. Maybe it’s because they’re twins. Maybe it’s because Dottie doesn’t own any toy spaceships or robots that Iggy can break. Maybe it’s because Iggy actually enjoys dressing up in Dottie’s princess costumes and playing her twirlie-twirl game, which usually ends with them crashing into something and breaking it.

  “Iggy could move in with you and Dad,” I suggested.

  “He can’t share a room with us,” said Mom.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he can’t.”

  My parents obviously didn’t want to share a room with Iggy any more than I did.

  “Iggy, honey, let’s get your things ready to move to Daniel’s room,” said Mom.

  “Daniel’s room? Oh YAY! AWESOME!” Iggy was thrilled. “Daniel’s room! COOL!”

  “HE’S NOT MOVING TO MY ROOM!” I shouted. Then I went to my room to think. I considered my options:

  It had finally happened. I was cornered with no escape from the little brother invasion. I looked at my favorite Planet Blaster models and sighed. I knew what would happen: Iggy would want to play with all my toys, and within hours, he would break everything.

  WHILE IGGY GOT READY to move into my room, I decided to get ready for the Little Brother Invasion.

  I have to defend my
self and my way of life, I thought. It was a matter of survival.

  I moved my favorite Planet Blaster models up to the top bunk so I could guard them more easily. It was going to be very uncomfortable trying to sleep with all that hard plastic around me, but at least everything would be far away from Iggy.

  I heard my mom, dad, and Iggy packing up Iggy’s clothes and comforting Dottie as Iggy got ready to move out of the bedroom they had shared ever since they were newborn babies. “I come back, Dottie,” said Iggy. “I visit you next day.”

  Within a couple of seconds, Iggy appeared in my doorway, waving a model rocket ship in one hand and a toy football in the other. “TA-DA!” He wore nothing except his favorite Squidboy underpants and a set of fake teeth that used to be part of a Halloween costume. Iggy calls them his “spider teeth” because they’re decorated with a fake plastic spider.

  Iggy is weird that way; he’s almost always either practically naked or wearing a costume.

  “Look, Dano!” Iggy said, pointing to his mouth. “Spider teef!”

  “Iggy, you aren’t allowed to touch my Planet Blaster stuff, okay?”

  “Okay, Dano,” he said, smiling. Even I have to admit that Iggy’s a pretty cute kid when he smiles.

  But then Iggy started climbing the ladder up to my top bunk, and the cuteness ended.

  WITHIN A SECOND, Iggy had climbed up to the top bunk and grabbed my favorite Planet Blaster spaceship—the Vortex Chariot. I tried to snatch it away from him, but his grip was surprisingly strong. Iggy pulled. I tugged harder. Finally we both fell backward, and the Vortex Chariot broke apart and fell to the floor. We stared down at it where it lay on the ground.

  “Now look what you did!” I yelled. “You’re not even supposed to be up here on the top bunk!”

  “YOU bwoke it!” Iggy shouted back.

  “I told you: Don’t touch ANY of them EVER!” I shook my pillow out of its pillowcase, then used the empty sack to store all the Planet Blaster models I could grab. I wedged the bulky, toy-stuffed pillowcase between my back and the wall.

  “Give me!! Dat MINES!!!”

  I leaned back, trying to keep the pillowcase out of Iggy’s reach. In the process, I accidentally crushed a couple more of the models. “No, Iggy, they’re mine. Anyway, there’s no such word as ‘mines.’”

  “Here,” I said. “You can have this.” I picked up a babyish looking plastic car—a lame one I haven’t played with in years—and offered it to Iggy as a substitute.

  Iggy’s face turned red and blotchy, which meant that a scream was getting ready to blow like lava bursting out of a volcano. Uh-oh, I thought. The longer the quiet, blotchy face, the louder the scream.

  I covered my ears and braced myself for the worst tantrum in history. Finally it burst out.

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Iggy threw the car over the bed railings and dove for my pillowcase filled with Planet Blaster models.

  I managed to throw the pillowcase off the bed just before Iggy could grab it. Unfortunately, my dad happened to walk into the room at that exact moment, and the plastic-filled pillowcase clobbered him in the face.

  Iggy howled. I tried to hide under my blankets to block out the noise.

  My mom rushed into the room carrying two bags of frozen vegetables. She pressed a bag of frozen peas against Iggy’s hand and gave my dad a bag of frozen carrots for his cheek. That’s one of the weird things about my mom: When people get hurt, she gives them frozen vegetables instead of an ice cube or a Band-Aid. “That will help keep the swelling down,” she explained.

  Then Mom spoke in her big-trouble voice: “Daniel and Iggy!! Sharing a room means sharing toys and taking turns without fighting. And since these toys are causing trouble right now, they are going into the Gobblebox until the two of you find a way to get along.”

  “Nooooo!” Iggy and I both cried. “Not the GOBBLEBOX!”

  The “Gobblebox” is where my parents hide our toys when we’re in trouble. When I was younger, I used to be scared of the Gobblebox, because my parents acted so mysterious when they talked about it.

  “What does it LOOK like?” I would ask.

  “The Gobblebox can be as big or small as it needs to be,” my dad would say. “It eats toys of all sizes when children misbehave.”

  “But where IS it?”

  “It can be anyplace it wants to be,” my mom would say.

  Now that I’m older, I know that the Gobblebox is just some cardboard box in the house where my parents hide toys until Iggy and I earn them back by being good. On the other hand, if I think about it too much, I can still get a little freaked out about the idea of a box that lives in my house and eats my toys.

  Thanks a lot, Iggy, I thought as I watched my mom and dad leave with all my favorite stuff. It was only my first day sharing a room with Iggy, and I had already lost my favorite Planet Blaster models.

  I guess things can’t get any worse than they are now, I thought.

  Unfortunately, I was completely wrong. As it turned out, things could get much, much worse.

  MOM SAID IT WAS TIME for Iggy to take a nap in what used to be my bed, so I left him alone. I stood in the front room, just staring out the window and trying to decide what to do next. I wasn’t in the mood to read a book or play with my friend Chauncey Morbyd, who lives down the street. Instead, I watched the new kid, whose family had just moved into the house next door.

  The new kid seemed to be very into gardening because he was outside with shovels and rakes and some other strange-looking tools that I guessed were for planting flowers or vegetables.

  I thought about going over there to introduce myself, but I’m kind of shy about meeting new people. I mean, I’m not the type to just go up to a complete stranger and introduce myself out of the blue with a bunch of pleased-to-meet-you stuff.

  Just then, the doorbell rang, so I jumped up to answer it. I knew it would be Chauncey Morbyd. He usually comes over to my house at least once a day to look for a decent snack since his mom doesn’t let him eat any sugar.

  It turned out I was right.

  “Do you have any gum?” Chauncey asked, after I opened the door.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Can you ask your mom?” Chauncey walked right into the house. He never waits to be invited, which really bugs my parents.

  My mom was downstairs in the basement doing laundry. I didn’t feel like walking all the way down there, so I opened the door and shouted down the basement steps: “MOM—DO WE HAVE ANY GUM?”

  “NO!” was the answer.

  “She said no,” I told Chauncey.

  “Can you ask your dad?”

  “He isn’t here; he just left to take Dottie to a playdate.”

  Chauncey spied my mom’s purse and rummaged through it, looking for chewing gum.

  “Cut it out!” I whispered. “We’ll get in trouble.”

  “Ha!” Chauncey held up a dirty, smushed stick of gum from the bottom of Mom’s purse. “She does have gum!”

  I heard a creaking sound and turned to see Iggy peering out at us through a crack in the doorway. When he saw Chauncey, he ran out of the bedroom: “HEY, CHAUNCEY! I A BIG BOY NOW! I SWEEP IN DANO’S BIG-BOY BED!”

  “Hey, Iggy!” Chauncey leaned close to Iggy, as if he was about to tell him a big, juicy secret. “Remember that bag of old Halloween candy in your room? Do you still have it?”

  Iggy and Dottie both have secret stashes of very old Halloween candy, and each time he comes over, Chauncey makes them give him some.

  Iggy shook his head. “Mom throw it away. But I know where Mom hided some marsho-wowows!”

  Chauncey turned to me: “Huh? What are ‘marsho-wowows’?”

  “He means marshmallows,” I said.

  Iggy climbed up on the kitchen counter and opened a cabinet, where Mom
kept some stale, multicolored marshmallows. They were old and hard as rocks, but Iggy and Chauncey didn’t seem to mind. They both stuffed a couple handfuls into their mouths. Chauncey even stashed extra marshmallows in his pockets to save for later.

  My mom always says that eating candy gives Iggy the “sugar crazies.” She might have a point because a minute later, Iggy and Chauncey were running around the house, playing a game called “Squidboy Fights the Blue Freaks.” I figured I might as well join them, so I started running around, too.

  I don’t recommend trying this at home unless you have the really sturdy type of little brother, but here’s how you play Squidboy Fights the Blue Freaks, in case you’re wondering:

  Playing Squidboy Fights the Blue Freaks with Iggy is usually pretty fun, but this time Iggy kicked me in the face when I jumped on him.

  “Ow!” I yelled. I sat on Iggy a little harder than usual to punish him and, just my luck, that was the moment my mom walked into the room to see what all the yelling was about.

  When he saw Mom, Iggy started crying just to get me in trouble.

  And just my luck again, Mom happened to look at the carpet and see a wad of pink chewing gum—gum that must have fallen out of Chauncey’s mouth.

  “Who left GUM on the floor?!” Mom demanded.

  “Not me, Mrs. Loomis,” Chauncey lied. “My mom says gum is bad for my teeth. It must be Daniel’s gum.”

  “It is NOT my gum, and you know it!”

  That’s the trouble with Chauncey. Whenever he comes over, I always get in trouble.

  Mom said it was time for Chauncey to go home since the three of us weren’t playing nicely.

  That was fine with me; I didn’t appreciate Chauncey getting me in trouble, and I wasn’t in the mood to play another game of Squidboy Fights the Blue Freaks either.

  “Iggy, go back to your nap,” said Mom.