“Finish your report on eels?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Gilchrist are coming over.”

“Okay.”

“Remember to turn a light on.”

“Okay.”

The pull chain on Max’s desk lamp swings back and forth, casting a thin shadow on the pages he turns.

The last time Max encountered the Doctor, on page 96 of Dr. Who: The Algebra of Ice, he was about to unmask an alien invasion. This particular invasion—unlike those of Dr. Who: Imperial Moon, and Dr. Who: The Devil Goblins of Neptune—was unfolding by means of a mathematical principle, the Riemann hypothesis, which has something to do with prime numbers. Max sounds out the name “Riemann” and underlines the phrase “prime numbers” with a pencil. Outside his window a garbage truck coughs, rumbles, lumbers on. Max grabs a tissue and wipes his nose—gently, gently, as his mom says. No blood this time. Good. Before he can figure out why the Doctor is using a penlight laser to melt symbols in an Alpine glacier…

“The Gilchrists are here!”

Two kids shuffle into the bedroom.

“Be good!”

The door shuts behind them.

Max recognizes the invaders from recess.

Brad Gilchrist, 5^th grade, likes to play handball in the nook outside the art room. He once sucked the empty cone of an ice cream drumstick until it was soggy as a paper bag. Lucy Gilchrist, 4^th grade, tends to lose her grip on the monkey bars, since her palms are always sweaty. But she doesn’t cry when she falls, because she’s so chubby, she doesn’t feel a thing. Or so they say. Max has never spoken to either of the Gilchrists. He once drew a cartoon of Jesus breathing underwater, and showed it to Chris Ortega, who sits behind him. But Chris didn’t get the joke, so he crumpled it for the trash.

“Um,” says Max. “I didn’t know you guys were coming over, too.”

“I didn’t know you had a cactus,” says Lucy.

Brad says, “Go ahead, Luce. Touch it.”

Max says, “Don’t touch it.”

“Can it be a cactus,” says Lucy, “if it has a flower?”

Brad says, “Can you be retarded if you touch it?”

“Miss Harper gave it to me,” says Max.

Lucy says, “I want to touch it.”

“Miss Harper is a cooze,” says Brad.

The pencil slips from Max’s fingers and sticks directly into the carpet, eraser up, by the letter N. Max has never heard anyone say that about Miss Harper. He’s not even sure what it means. But it sounds awful. Miss Harper is Max’s favorite teacher—probably his favorite of all time, including the future and alternate dimensions. She’s the one who drives him to violin practice. Max doesn’t say anything in her defense.

Brad says, “Are you in Garrett’s class?”

“Yes,” says Max.

Brad says, “He’s gross.”

“He fainted once,” says Max.

Brad says, “I hate him.”

That’s a phrase Max has never said before, not aloud, but of course he knows it, and he suspects he will use it some day. Like crepuscular. And apothecary.

Lucy sits on the edge of the bed. Something slips from her fingers and sticks to the floor. It looks like a lollipop, sour apple flavor, sucked to the verge of translucence. “Whoopsie.” She folds her arms. “Mom gave me that.” It glistens on the carpet, by the letter Q, in a fresh puddle of its own ick. “She promised to give me another one if I don’t scratch or bite anybody.”

Brad says, “Gross, Luce.”

As he bends to retrieve the pencil and the sucker, Max lets go of an audible sigh. “I wish I could teleport away from here.”

Brad snorts. “That’s impossible.”

“You know about teleporting?” asks Max.

“Nightcrawler teleports.”

“Who’s that?”

“From the X-Men,” Brad says. “Duh. Nightcrawler, Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops.” As he names his favorite mutant superheroes, he drops into a fighting crouch and waves his arms like sabers, palms flattened.

“Oh!” says Max. “I know.”

Max reaches for a paperback on his shelf. Lately he has been regretting that every surface in his room is cluttered with colorful, encouraging stickers that he peels off his A papers and affixes to the furniture for posterity. He flips to an illustration of a one-eyed giant eating sheep by the handful. It’s probably one of his favorite illustrations, ever. The sheep loose their black entrails on the grass.

Max says, “Cyclops!”

A single glance at the illustration causes Brad to laugh, and Lucy, behind him, to giggle. So it’s another thing where everyone knows what’s going on except for Max. Even the chubby girl. Max replaces “The Odyssey for Kids” on the shelf. Only recently he learned that not all book titles end in “for Kids.” Brad and Lucy must have been reading the “for Adults” version. That’s why they laughed. Sometimes he feels like everyone else is living in a duplicate world: a place where worms can teleport, “The Odyssey” is rated R, and Miss Harper is some kind of cooze.

When he considers all the things he doesn’t understand, and probably doesn’t want to, Max sits on the floor and stares at his hands.

“I’m bored,” says Lucy.

Brad says, “What do you do for fun?”

Slumped on the carpet beside the lollipop stain, Max waves to a rectangular tool on the desk. “Tonight I was going to use a tape measure to see if my room is dimensionally transcendental.”

Brad says, “The men shine alley what?”

As carefully as the gap in his lateral incisors will allow, Max says, “Dimensionally transcendental. It’s when a place is much bigger on the inside, than it is on the outside. Like Dr. Who’s time machine.”

Lucy says, “Doctor whose?”

“Dr. Who.”

“Whose doctor is Dr. Who?”

“I don’t think he’s anybody’s doctor.”

Brad nearly falls on the bed laughing.

Max’s stomach clenches at the sound of the Brad Gilchrist laugh—the same laugh he blurts on the handball court at recess, when somebody trips and skins a knee chasing one of his long throws.

“Come on.” Max grabs the tape measure. “I’ll show you.”

The bedroom door tends to squeal on its hinges. Max opens it swiftly, so as not to alarm his parents. The clink of silverware and the slosh of grown-up conversation drift up the stairs. Brad, eager to trespass into the hallway, carries the 0 end of the tape measure to the top of the stairs, where the wall of Max’s bedroom tapers off. Lucy drags the heavy end down the hall. Max waves at them to spread out, go further, stop there.

Lucy whispers, A hundred twenty-six!

They reel the tape in.

Max closes the bedroom door silently.

Brad says, “Now what?”

Max says, “We measure the wall from the inside. If it’s bigger, then someone used a superior alien technology to make this room dimensionally transcendental. Probably one of the Time Lords.”

Stretching the tape measure again, Brad and Lucy are focused, quiet, industrious. It’s almost as if they’re enjoying themselves. Remarkable, Max thinks, what a bit of Dr. Who and a common purpose will do. Brad Gilchrist, the tyrant of handball, just needs a secret task to undertake, and he turns into someone Max could be friends with—in an alternate dimension. Lucy squints at the small print on the tape measure. Max crosses his fingers, hoping she won’t say “a hundred twenty-six.”.

But his eye is drawn to the puddle of ick where Lucy dropped her lollipop. Max feels the excitement leak out of him, like when cough syrup wears off. There is nothing special or alien or extra-dimensional about this room. It’s just a place where books are read, and clothes are folded, and little boys go to sleep.

“Brad! Lucy!”

The door swings open, knocking the tape measure from Brad’s hand. The metal tape hisses across the carpet, snapping as it coils into the rectangle that Lucy has promptly dropped at her feet. She cries out, even though it didn’t touch her.

“Coats on!” says a voice outside. “Time for Brad and Lucy to go.”

Adults confer in the hall, creaking the floorboards with their weight. It’s “really coming down out there,” and the Gilchrists “should probably borrow our chains.”

Max goes to his window. How did he fail to see it was snowing? He just nods when Brad and Lucy oblige him with goodbyes. The door shuts behind them. “I hate being lonely,” he says aloud. The Gilchrist van rolls down the driveway and vanishes in the dizzying snow. He resolves to tell everything that happened here to Miss Harper.

Copyright 2009 Brian Hurley

A promise: If I write ever write anything quite stupid here, it will also be quite brief.