Chapter 3: Train Wreck
In the dark, nine-year-old Nancy Clancy awoke with a start, sat bolt upright, and instantly smacked her head on something hard. With a stifled groan, she fell back down onto a thin but soft mattress.
This was the third time since the living nightmare began that she’d awakened in a strange place. It was becoming a habit.
Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the dim light. She lay in a tiny compartment only a little longer than she was tall, and the ceiling was only a couple of feet overhead. A low, droning hum came from below the floor, and the room vibrated ever so slightly. Her ruined dress was gone, and in its place, she wore a baggy set of pajamas decorated with images of bowling balls and pins.
Someone next to her snored, flopped over, and threw an arm across her chest.
She yelped, sat up, and slammed her head into the ceiling again. Squeezing her eyes shut and sucking her breath between her teeth, she rubbed her forehead.
The sleeping figure snorted once, sat up herself, and likewise banged her head.
“Yowch!” she shouted.
It was Judy Moody’s voice.
Without thinking, Nancy shoved blindly at her. “What are you doing?”
“Augh! What are you doing! Stop pushing!” Judy shoved back, slamming Nancy into a wall. Nancy kicked and met something soft. Judy grunted and struck out with a fist.
Silently, they scuffled—writhing and grabbing and pulling hair, bouncing off the walls and ceiling in the narrow space. In attempting to kick and punch, they mostly banged their own knees and elbows, so they quickly fell to clumsy wrestling with occasional cuffs thrown in.
Nancy had never been in a fight like this before. She never fought with JoJo. She fought sometimes with her best friend Bree, but their “fights” consisted of not speaking to each other for a few hours. She never fought with her second-best friend Lionel, even though he was a boy. She had never even hit Grace, the meanest girl at school.
Punching and kicking were new to her; yet somehow, punching and kicking Judy Moody felt perfectly natural.
Judy was the more athletic of the two, and this probably wasn’t her first fight, so Nancy got the worst of it: When Judy’s well-aimed fist—the one with the mood ring—connected with Nancy’s jaw, it sent a deep ache into her teeth. She could tell from the sharp slash of pain in her cheek that the ring had cut into her skin.
She sucked in her breath and sprawled out. Judy landed heavily atop her and started giggling.
Nancy tried to swing again but couldn’t. She had no strength left, and she and Judy were tangled up.
“Double rare!” Judy gasped through her giggles. “That was sick-awesome!”
“What?” Nancy tried to rub her jaw, but her hand was wedged in Judy’s armpit.
“Best fight I’ve had in a looong time,” Judy said, still giggling. “You don’t hit as hard as Rocky, but still.”
Nancy again felt a twinge of detestation and disgust, an unpleasant feeling she was coming to associate with Judy. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Some sleeping-chamber thingy. We’re on an underground train. They’ve got these little rooms for us to snooze in.”
“Why are you in mine?”
“Cuz there’s only four, an’ I got the short straw.”
“Where’d I get these pajamas?”
“From me. You can borrow ’em.”
Judy flopped over onto her back, letting Nancy breathe again.
“You really hurt my jaw,” Nancy muttered, rubbing her face now that her hand was free. Moisture met her fingertips, and she could feel a scrape. Her cheek was swelling slightly.
“You got train pain,” Judy replied. “Train pain in the brain.” She burst into fresh giggles.
Nancy grumbled—but she did it quietly.
“Hold on,” said Judy. She patted herself as if looking for a pocket. “I left it here some—ah! Rare!”
She snatched up a fat black marker from beside her pillow and popped off the cap, filling the tiny room with the pungent smell of permanent ink. With a loud, irritating squeak, she wrote on the wall beside her, “JUDY MOODY SLEPT HERE.”
“What are you doing?” Nancy cried.
“Makin’ my mark. Someday, I’m gonna be super-duper famous like Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman doctor. This wall will be worth pounds of money!”
“You can’t just write on the wall!”
“I just did.”
“Judy!” Nancy snatched the pen away. After hesitating a moment, she quickly used it to dot each of her earlobes before she clamped the cap back on.
“I already got a famous elbow,” Judy explained. “It got its picture in the—hey, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re drawing on your ears?”
Nancy didn’t answer. She tried to clench her jaw, but her teeth still hurt.
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, she sighed and mumbled, “I … I put dots on my ears. To make them look pierced.”
Judy laughed hard and loud. She arched her back, kicked her feet into the ceiling, and slammed her fists into the mattress. Her glowing mood ring throbbed with a bright, pleasant violet.
“She puts dots on her ears!” Judy gasped. “Dots on her ears!”
Nancy’s face grew hot. She turned away from Judy and sulked.
After a long time, Judy’s laughter subsided. With a sigh and a few deep breaths, she said, “I thought sharing a compartment with you would be a bummer, but maybe it’ll be a not-bummer. You’re funny.”
“Glad you’re amused,” Nancy muttered. Then she added, from habit, “Amused is a fancy word for happy, but in a giggly kind of way.”
“I’m kinda used to it,” said Judy. “I had to share a room with my brother sometimes, like when Grandma came over.” A moment passed, and she added, “Hey, Nancy … have you ever heard of the My-Name-Is-a-Poem Club? Y’know, the club for people whose names rhyme?”
Nancy rolled her tongue around in her mouth to test her sore teeth. She didn’t want to talk to Judy, but she didn’t want to be rude, either. “I’m a member.”
Judy slammed a fist into a palm. “Same-same! I thought so! You know Amy Namey?”
In spite of herself, Nancy smiled. “Well, I don’t know her, but we’ve exchanged postcards. I remember because I thought her last name was funny.”
Judy giggled again. “I knew it! She told me she once got a card from a Nancy Clancy. I didn’t think ’til just now—that was you, huh? So have you got postcards from Hal Sal? Wong Fong from Hong Kong? T. Hee?”
“Yes,” said Nancy. “I didn’t write back to T. Hee, though, because I thought using an initial was cheating. So you’re in the club?”
“Abso-tota-lutely! Amy signed me up! She’s one o’ my peeps. An’ she taught me how to make gum, an’ she’s gonna be a daredevil reporter when she grows up … hey, do people rhyme stuff around you all the time? Like, guys are always sayin’ ‘Howdy doody, Judy Moody’ to me, stuff like that.”
Nancy cleared her throat. “Well … I have been called Fancy Nancy—”
Judy burst into fresh guffaws. “Fancy Nancy!” she shouted. “Fancy Nancy!”
She poked Nancy in the ribs.
Nancy rolled onto her back. “Stop it!”
“I didn’t like Amy at first,” Judy added, “cuz Rocky an’ Frank kept sayin’ she an’ me were just alike, an’ I don’t wanna be alike. I wanna be different. But then we became pals.”
Nancy didn’t answer.
“My teacher, Mr. Todd,” Judy continued, “says I’m in a class by myself, though there’s actually a lot of other kids in my class. But Mr. Todd is, like, the greatest third-grade teacher ever, so—”
“No,” said Nancy quietly as she gingerly rubbed her sore cheek. “The greatest third-grade teacher ever is Mr. Dudery.”
Judy giggled again. “Dudery! Really? Do you call him Mr. Dude?”
Nancy crossed her arms, though by performing that gesture in such a narrow space, she accidentally pressed an elbow against Judy’s side. “I would never disrespect a teacher like that!”
She cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “He … he does call us dudes, though—”
Judy laughed again. “Dude!” she shouted. “Dude! From now on, I’m callin’ you dude!”
“Please don’t.”
“Whatever, dude!” Judy rolled back and forth, clutching her stomach as she chuckled. She kept rolling into Nancy, bumping her shoulder over and over again.
Nancy’s frown deepened. She went from crossing her arms to hugging herself, mostly to shrink down as much as possible to avoid touching Judy.
In spite of her dislike, though, she couldn’t help but think that Judy reminded her of Lionel. Nancy always called Lionel a goofball: he loved jokes and magic tricks, and he even performed at parties. JoJo said she loved him, but then again, JoJo said that about a lot of boys.
JoJo. Thinking of her made Nancy sniffle faintly. She remembered, too, that Judy had lost a brother, and her grumpiness suddenly turned into guilt. A tight knot formed in her stomach.
“Judy,” she said aloud, and then she stopped.
Judy quit laughing, quit rolling. The compartment was silent until Judy said, “Yeah?”
“I’m sorry,” said Nancy.
“For what?”
Nancy took a deep breath, silently counted to five, and forced the words out. “For being mad. And for hitting.”
The two girls’ shoulders were still touching. Nancy felt Judy’s go up and down in a shrug. “No big. I’ve been in a few bad mad-i-tudes myself, believe me. And the hitting was fun.”
In spite of herself, Nancy felt a smile tug on the corners of her mouth. Judy certainly had a strange idea of fun.
Judy sighed, and her mood ring settled down from violet to bluish green. “You miss your sister?”
Nancy stared up at the blank ceiling. “A lot,” she whispered.
“Yeah. I really miss the Stink-o-later, too, even though I wanna air-mail ’im to the moon sometimes.”
Nancy giggled. “Who?”
“My brother. Stink.”
“His name is Stink?”
“Well, not really. But everyone calls him that, even the ’rents.”
Nancy laughed again. “That’s awful!”
“No, that’s accurate. If you’d ever been around his sneakers, you’d know.”
Nancy couldn’t help but keep giggling. “I guess boys really can be stinky. My friend Lionel—well, I like him and everything, but sometimes … P.U.!”
Judy laughed. “Oh yeah! Once, Frank ‘Eats-Paste’ Pearl invited me to his birthday party, an’ it was all boys! You could smell it from a block away!”
They both cracked up.
“Does he really eat paste?” cried Nancy.
“He only ate it once. On a dare, he said.”
“Gross!” Nancy laughed again.
“He used to be my ‘pest’ friend, but now he’s one o’ my BFFs. I found out he likes to collect stuff, like me.”
“Ooh la la! I have an aunt who collects interesting pebbles.”
“Rare!”
“And I collect tutus! Sort of—”
“Bluck!”
“What do you collect?”
Judy shrugged again. “Oh, y’know. Pizza tables. Doll parts. Band-Aids. Scabs.”
Nancy stopped laughing, and her stomach clenched up. She could feel the smile sliding from her face. “Scabs?”
“Yeah. They’re way more not-boring under the microscope than belly-button lint.”
Nancy didn’t answer. A scab collection was really gross, and unlike smelly boys, too gross to be funny.
“And ABC gum,” Judy added.
Nancy could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. Against her better judgment, she whispered, “What’s ABC gum?”
“Already-been-chewed. I stick my collection on my lampshade.”
And that was the most disgusting thing Nancy could imagine. She rolled onto her side so her back was toward Judy, and she said, “Good night.”
“Huh?”
“Just … just good night.”
Another moment of silence passed.
“Huh,” Judy said. “You’re even moodier than me.”
When Nancy awoke again, she thought for a brief moment that she was in her bed back home. She had always wanted a fancy canopy bed, but because she couldn’t have one, she had, back in first grade, tied two broomsticks to her bedpost, draped a sheet over them, and tied the sheet to the curtain rod.
A few months ago, she took the sheets and broomsticks down. She still wanted a canopy bed, but the make-believe one no longer satisfied her.
Gradually, as she came to, she remembered where she was—in a sleeping compartment with Judy Moody. For a moment, she wondered if this was the fourth time she’d awoken somewhere strange, or if this still only counted as three.
She was surprised that she’d slept. Normally, she had a hard time sleeping in strange places. Once, her family had stayed in a cabin, and she’d lain awake all night, listening to crickets and owls. When she spent the night at Mrs. DeVine’s, she’d been unable to sleep until she crawled into bed with JoJo.
She hoped this didn’t mean that sleeping with Judy was just as good as sleeping with her little sister. The very thought annoyed her.
Her mother and father sometimes said that JoJo was a handful, or that she was going through a phase, or that she was rambunctious—but Nancy knew those were just polite, fancy ways of saying naughty. She wondered for a moment if a naughty little girl like JoJo could grow up into a naughty big girl like Judy.
Nancy swallowed a lump. Did that mean she could come to detest her own sister?
A bright light made her squint as someone lifted the wall to her left, a wall that was actually a door. Cam Jansen, with her sharp blue eyes, stood there with a faint, amused grin on her face. “Wake up, sleepyheads,” she said. “Cuddle time’s over.”
Nany looked down and saw Judy’s arm across her chest again. Judy had rolled over some time during the night and was now pressed against Nancy’s back. Even with the bright light, she was still snoring away.
Nancy nudged her. “Don’ wanna go t’ third grade,” Judy mumbled. “College gives you cocoa … with sprinkles …”
She snored again, loudly.
Cam’s grin grew larger. “Let me handle her.”
Nancy rolled out and dropped a few feet onto a thinly carpeted floor in a long, narrow hall with yet more gunmetal-gray walls. She could still feel the faint hum coming up from the floor. This looked much like a train car, but she couldn’t hear the clickety-clack clickety-clack she would expect a train to make.
Cam grabbed Judy’s legs and pulled, dragging her halfway out of the compartment. Judy snorted awake, flailed her arms, and kicked. Her bare foot caught Cam in the jaw, and Cam fell back against the wall opposite, laughing quietly.
Judy sat up, a grumpy frown on her face. Her red hair jutted out in all directions like spikes, and a curly clump stuck out right on the top of her head. She rubbed her eyes and mumbled incoherently. Her mood ring was black.
“Someone’s not a morning person,” said Cam.
“Roar!” Judy replied.
Cam laughed. “Hit the showers, you two. And hurry up. Everyone’s waiting.”
Showering was yet another new experience for Nancy, as she usually took bubble baths. The bathroom was compact, and the shower was small and cramped, like a tiny hall closet, but it had two showerheads and just enough space for two girls. Standing next to the tall and lanky Judy, with her knobby knees and pointy elbows, Nancy was suddenly self-conscious about her own chubby legs and protruding stomach. Judy, however, clearly didn’t care: she scrubbed up as quickly as possible, stepped out of the shower, roughly toweled herself off, and climbed right back into her tiger-striped pajama pants before throwing on a faded blue T-shirt that said, “I AM GIRL HEAR ME ROAR.” Then she donned a new white lab coat, a plastic toy stethoscope, and a blue backpack, and she was done. She didn’t even bother brushing her hair; she let it flop into her eyes and frizz out around her ears.
Nancy took longer, as she disliked few things as much as being dirty; cleanliness, after all, was next to fanciness. She soaped herself up thoroughly and tried to soak for a few minutes—though that was hard to do in a shower—before she rinsed herself off.
Her thick, tightly curled hair was almost impossible to brush. Usually, she didn’t comb it wet, and she typically applied a leave-in conditioner, but today she didn’t have much choice. After she stepped out of the shower, she tidied up her hair as well as she could and then set a clump of it in a ponytail.
Cam knocked on the bathroom door and peeked in. “Mouse and Finally say they grabbed some clothes from your house, Nancy, but I don’t know if they got the right things.”
Nancy wrapped herself in a towel and followed Cam, who gestured to a small alcove stuffed with several of Nancy’s possessions. Judging by its contents, the cat and dog really had grabbed items at random. There were three dresses that no longer fit, and she couldn’t find any matching socks.
After a few minutes of digging, she finally pulled on a pair of black leggings, some rainbow-striped leg warmers, one green sock and one red one, a fuchsia tutu, a translucent shawl of fake silk, a blue boa, a string of plastic pearls, three butterfly hairclips, and a broad straw hat with faded plastic flowers peeking out of the hatband. She considered some jewel-encrusted high heels, but decided that, considering the circumstances, she’d be wiser to go with sneakers. Her sneakers were pink, and she had bedazzled them with glitter and plastic rhinestones, though many of the rhinestones had subsequently fallen off.
Once dressed, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and released a contented sigh. Now in her fancy clothes, she felt like herself again.
Judy, slouching with her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, took one look at her and cracked up.
Nancy merely stood there in front of her makeshift closet, arms crossed and nose in the air, as Judy grabbed her stomach, doubled over, and laughed.
I don’t care, Nancy thought. At least I’m not the one walking around in half my pajamas.
But she did care. Kids didn’t used to make fun of her for her clothing choices, but within the last year, a few had started. Grace, the most unpleasant girl in Nancy’s class, even mocked her for drawing dots on her ears—just like Judy, in fact. It was as if everyone was outgrowing dress-up except her.
But maybe she was outgrowing it, too: after all, Nancy had taken down the bows and boas hanging from her walls, and she had dismantled her makeshift canopy bed. She had even found that she was self-conscious about being the only one at ballet practice wearing a romantic tutu while all the other girls were in leotards. Things like that had never bothered her before; in fact, she used to be proud of them. But more and more, she found that she wanted to fit in rather than stand out.
For the briefest moment, she wished she’d put on her borrowed bowling ball pajama pants and a T-shirt. Maybe Judy would think it was cool and grown-up. Maybe fanciness was only something for little kids.
That was certainly a disturbing thought.
Cam led them through a thick metal door at the end of the hall and into another long room, though this one—without the sleeping compartments or shower stalls built into the walls—was considerably wider. Mouse sat on her haunches on a table and batted at a toaster until she pressed the lever down and two pieces of toast dropped inside.
Behind Mouse, out on the open floor, Junie B. Jones was holding over her head a barbell loaded with several weights. Junie B. wobbled back and forth, but nonetheless managed to keep the weights in the air.
“Wowie wow wow!” she shouted.
Nancy merely stared in shock.
Nearby, Amelia Bedelia, wearing a short black dress and a frilly white apron, was upside down, balancing on one hand as, with the other, she rapidly threw knives into a large red target. With a decisive thump, each knife landed near the center.
“Ah, you’re awake at last,” Mouse purred with a smug grin. “Fancy Nancy and Moody Judy, allow me to reintroduce you to the members of your team: Camera Jansen, Junie ‘Bruiser’ Jones, and Ninja Maid Amelia.”
With a loud crash, Junie B. dropped her weights to the floor. She danced around in her stocking feet. “Yippee!” she called.
Lying nearby, Finally smiled indulgently. “Remember, Junie B.,” she said quietly, “it will still be several days before the nanoprobes finish replacing all your natural tissues with hardened versions. You need to go easy at first.”
Amelia lithely flipped onto her feet and waved as she offered Nancy a genial yet empty grin. “I like this outfit,” she said as she smoothed her apron. “Maybe I should be a housekeeper when I grow up.” She knelt down to rub Finally’s belly, and Finally barked contentedly.
“So what’s up?” Judy asked with a deep scowl on her face.
“Breakfast,” Mouse replied, and her toast popped.
