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  This book is dedicated to Toshiko Yoshida.

  SKEETER GIG. BACK LATE, DON'T WAIT UP. DINNER'S IN THE FUDGE. LOVE, MOM & DAD

  Billy Clikk read the Post-it again.

  “Fridge. She meant fridge.” Crumpling up the yellow square, Billy chucked it at the garbage can and watched it fly in and then bounce out onto the kitchen floor. It was the third time this week he'd come home from school to find his parents gone, leaving him to heat leftovers in the microwave, do his homework, and put himself to bed. At this point they could just leave a note reading THE USUAL and he'd know exactly what it meant.

  There was an upside, though: Billy was now free to kick back and watch his favorite TV show, Truly Twisted. He dashed into the living room, leaped over the couch, grabbed the remote, and switched on the TV.

  Truly Twisted was the one program his parents said he must never, never watch. These guys took extreme sports to a whole new level: they once snuck into a church, climbed up the steeple, and bungee-jumped right into the middle of some guy's wedding. It was pretty awesome.

  When Billy got to the channel where Truly Twisted was supposed to be airing, though, there was nothing more extreme than some lame college tennis championship. “Oh, come on!” Billy cried. They'd bumped the best show on cable for a couple of scrawny guys knocking a ball back and forth.

  Billy shut off the TV and slouched back into the kitchen. He yanked open the “fudge,” pulled out a brown paper bag, and peeked inside. Cold chicken curry: carryout from the Delhi Deli, an Indian restaurant down the street. Billy used to like their chicken curry. Back before he'd eaten it once or twice a week, every week, for about three years.

  Billy pursed his lips, made a farting sound, and tossed the bag back in the refrigerator. He slammed the door a lot harder than he really needed to and stared at the floor. There, next to his foot, sat the crumpled-up Post-it note.

  “Are pest problems getting you down?” he said, suddenly doing a superdeep TV-commercial voice. “Then you should pick up that phone and call Jim and Linda Clikk, founders of BUGZ-B-GON, the best extermination service in all of Piffling, Indiana.” He leaned down and picked up the wadded note, and as he straightened up, he added a tone of mystery to his voice. The TV commercial had turned into a piece of investigative journalism. “What makes the Clikks so busy? What drives them to spend their every waking hour on extermination jobs— ‘skeeter gigs,’ as they call them? Is it really necessary for them to devote so much of their time and energy to saving total strangers from termites and hornets' nests? Is it just for the money, or is killing bugs some kind of a weird power trip?”

  Billy took aim with the Post-it and had another shot at the garbage can. This time the note went in and stayed in.

  That's more like it.

  Billy changed his posture and pivoted on one foot, transforming himself once again into a reporter.

  “And what of Jim and Linda's son, Billy? How does he feel about all this?” Billy went on, clutching an imaginary microphone as he strode from the kitchen back to the living room. “Well, let's ask him. Billy, how do you feel about all this?”

  “You want the truth?” said Billy, switching to his own voice. “I think it stinks. I think it's a lousy way to treat a devoted son who is so bright, well behaved, and good-looking.”

  Billy drew his eyebrows into an expression of great sympathy: he was the reporter again. “Tell me, Billy, do you think it bothers your parents that you have to spend so many evenings at home by yourself ? Do you think they feel the least bit guilty that you have to eat takeout night after night rather than home-cooked meals? Indeed, do you suppose—as your parents dash madly from one skeeter gig to another—that they even think of you at all ?”

  Billy stopped, stood between the couch and the coffee table, and let out a long sigh. He dropped the imaginary microphone and the phony voice along with it.

  “I don't know.” Billy flopped onto the couch. “Probably not.”

  It hadn't been so bad the previous year, when Billy's best friend, Nathan Burns, was still living in Piffling. Nathan was the only kid at Piffling Elementary who was as obsessed with extreme sports as Billy was. They used to spend practically every weekend together, mountain-biking the cliffs that led down to the Piffling River, skateboarding across every handrail in town (they both had the scrapes, bruises, and occasional fractures to prove it), and even street luging on their homemade luges, which was apparently outlawed by some city ordinance or another. The only thing Billy and Nathan hadn't tried was sneaking a ride on the brand-new Harley-Davidson Nathan's father had stashed away in the garage.

  They would have tried it eventually, for sure. But then Nathan's family moved to Los Angeles for his father's work. There were other kids at Piffling Elementary who were into extreme sports a little. They just weren't willing to risk life and limb the way Nathan was. Billy soon realized that finding a new best friend was going to take a while. In the meantime, it was looking like it would be THE USUAL for many months to come.

  Piker, Billy's Scottish terrier, lifted her head from the recliner on the other side of the room, snorted, and went back to sleep.

  BACK LATE, DON'T WAIT UP.

  Billy had never been able to figure out why so much of his parents' work was done at night. Exterminators didn't normally work at night, did they? Were they trying to catch the bugs snoozing? Kids at school thought he was lucky. “If my parents left me alone at night like that,” Nelson Skubblemeyer had said just the other day, “I'd be partyin' like nobody's business. I'd be, like,‘Yo, party tonight at my place….’” (Nelson always said the word party as if it rhymed with sauté : in spite of his name, he'd somehow convinced himself he was the coolest kid in the sixth grade.)

  Billy had never thrown a party while his parents were out on a skeeter gig. He wouldn't have been able to get away with it even if he'd tried. There was someone keeping an eye on him.

  DRRIIIIIIINGG

  Leo Krebs, thought Billy. Right on schedule. Billy normally didn't let the phone ring more than twice before answering. But when he was pretty sure it was Leo, the high school sophomore down the street who “looked after” him whenever his parents were gone at night, he had a policy of screening calls.

  DRRIIIIIIINGG

  Billy leaned back into the couch and did his best Leo impersonation: “Dude. Pick up. I know you're there.” Doing a good Leo meant breathing a lot of air into your voice and ending every sentence as if it were a question. Like Keanu Reeves, only more so.

  DRRIIIIIIINGG

  Billy's voice had begun to change the previous summer, greatly increasing the range of impersonations he could do (which had been pretty impressive to begin with). “Duu-ude. You're wastin' my time here.”

  DRRIIIIIIINGG

  One more ring and the answering machine would kick in. DRRIIIIIIINGG There was a plick, then a jrrrr, then: “Your pest problems are at an end…,” Jim Clikk's voice said. Billy jumped in and recited the words right along with the answering machin
e, creating the effect of two Jim Clikks speaking simultaneously. “… because you're seconds away from making an appointment with the extermination experts at BUGZ-B-GON. Just leave your name and number after the tone and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.”

  DWEEEEEP “Dude.” It was Leo, all right. “Pick up. I know you're there.” Billy grabbed the remote off the coffee table and clicked the television on. When dealing with one of Leo's check-in calls, it was essential to have every bit of audiovisual distraction available.

  “Duu-ude. You're wastin' my time here.”

  Billy reached over, grabbed the cordless phone from one of the side tables, and pressed Talk.

  “Leonard,” he said, knowing how much Leo disliked being called by his full name. Well, at least he hoped Leo disliked it. Billy didn't exactly hate Leo, but he wasn't too crazy about him either. Part of it was Leo's I'm older than you and don't forget it attitude. Most of it, though, was Billy resenting the whole idea of being baby-sat at all. He was old enough to take care of himself.

  “Dude,” said Leo in return. He never called Billy anything other than dude. Leo probably called little old ladies dude. “Look, your folks told me they wouldn't be back until, like, midnight or whatever…”

  Billy was remoting his way through a bunch of cartoon shows. He paused on an old low-budget monster movie.

  “… so I can either come over there and babysit you for a couple hours—which neither of us wants—or just check in again at ten and make sure you're still alive. Not that I want you to be.”

  “C'mon, Leonard. You don't want anything bad to happen to me. You'd be out twenty bucks a week.”

  Normally Billy would have come up with a better verbal jab than the twenty bucks line, but he was devoting most of his attention to the image on the television screen: an enormous creature with lobster claws going to great lengths to stomp his way into a cheap imitation of Disneyland. There didn't seem to be any special reason why. Maybe he'd run out of office buildings and power stations to wreck.

  “All right, dude. Ten o'clock it is. Pick up the phone next time, will ya?”

  “Okay, Leonard. And hey: tell your skater buddies to learn some new moves. My gramma can do better kickflips than that.”

  Billy shut off the phone with great relief. He knew that the money his parents paid Leo involved him physically being inside the Clikk home. Periodically Leo would skip the phone call and just arrive at the front door. On these occasions he always left behind some very clear proof that he'd been there—doodles on a notepad, a half-finished bottle of Gatorade—apparently thinking a bit of Leo-was-here evidence every once in a while would be enough to convince Billy's parents they weren't completely wasting their twenty dollars.

  Doodles on notepads. Bottles of Gatorade. Billy noticed stuff like that: details. He'd always had a knack for it, even when he was just a kindergartner. If the dark blue crayon in Crayola's big box went from being called cerulean one year to cornflower the next, Billy knew about it and had a preference. And it wasn't just kid stuff. If Billy got even half a second's glance under the hood of a Hummer H2, he could tell which parts were new, which were old, and which parts the shady repairman had used strictly to skim money off the bill.

  The lobster creature had reached the roller-coaster mountain in the middle of the amusement park and was tearing apart its papier-mâché walls. Sweaty actors with loosened neckties pointed and screamed convincingly.

  Man. This is one stupid movie. If I were fighting a monster like that, I'd just pull the zipper on his back, stick my head inside, and tell him to get a better costume.

  Billy punched the remote and jumped from channel 63 to 64. The Shopping Network: two middle-aged women going nuts over a very ugly piece of jewelry. Punch, punch, punch, punch: 65, 66, 67, 68. Boring, boring, boring, and boring. He was just about to shut the television off.

  Hub

  That guy on TV.

  That guy looked an awful lot like his dad.

  Billy sat up and leaned halfway over the coffee table, staring with all his might. Piker sat up too.

  The TV screen was filled with unsteady handheld video: some kind of ticker-tape parade. Street signs in a foreign language, early-morning sunlight. Dark-haired people with open-necked shirts, shouting, cheering. And there, in a big convertible sailing slowly through the crowds…

  That's Dad!

  No, it can't be.

  Billy pressed the VCR button on the remote and then hit Record.

  Bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep “No tape!” Billy jumped off the couch, leaped over the coffee table, and fumbled for a blank videotape from the shelf under the TV, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the screen. Piker jumped down from the chair and began whining loudly.

  “That can't be him,” said Billy. “It's impossible.”

  Billy's heart was beating faster. He tore the cellophane off the videotape and crammed it into the VCR as quickly as he could. He punched the Record button and sat down on the coffee table to continue watching the program.

  “That's not Dad. It just…can't be. This stuff was obviously shot in a foreign country. Dad never goes to other countries. Except, like, Canada.”

  But the man had the same face as Billy's father: the wide forehead, the slightly grayed wavy hair, the enormous protruding jaw. There was a woman seated next to him. It was hard to tell because she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but that was… Billy's mom, wasn't it? She had the same perky nose, the same thin-lipped mouth, and—from what he could see, anyway—was wearing the exact same style of thick-rimmed glasses.

  No. Way.

  Billy was now leaning so far forward that his face was no more than ten inches from the TV screen. He noticed something about the trees and buildings in the video: everything was dripping with some kind of thick, purplish liquid. As if kids had gone on a rampage with giant purple-yolked eggs.

  What the heck is that stuff ?

  Piker barked once loudly.

  A woman's voice accompanied the video, no doubt providing valuable information, but none of it was in English. A small icon in the lower right-hand corner of the TV screen confirmed what Billy already suspected: this was the International Channel, that weird cable station that went from Middle Eastern movies to Korean soap operas to Mexican news programs every half hour or so.

  Billy trained his eyes on the pixelated faces before him. The camera zoomed in, went drastically out of focus, refocused on a palm tree, then finally brought the faces into some degree of detail. It was them. There could be no mistaking it. These were the same two people he'd eaten breakfast with, gone to monster truck shows with, and opened presents with every Christmas morning for the last twelve years.

  The footage cut abruptly to a woman behind a desk reading the news. She had deeply tanned skin and almond-shaped eyes. Though she had yet to say a single word in English, Billy could tell by the way she paused and shuffled the papers in front of her that she was switching from one news story to another.

  Billy was now off the coffee table and on his feet. He pressed Rewind and watched the video again. And again. And again. He memorized the details: the fruits in the market off to the side of the road (there were papayas, mangos, and bananas by the truckload), the make of the convertible (it was a black 1965 Lincoln Continental, in near-perfect condition), the footwear of the people in the crowd (sandals, one and all). He tried to decipher the words on street signs. One looked like it said DELA ROSA, another DELA COSTA.

  This stuff was definitely shot in a foreign country. My parents…are…in a foreign country.

  Billy rewound the tape for yet another viewing.

  At least they have been pretty recently, or else why would this be on a news show? It's morning where they are, nighttime here. This isn't just another country. They're on the other side of the freakin' planet here.

  SKEETER GIG. BACK LATE, DON'T WAIT UP.

  Billy felt his knees buckle slightly, as if they were straining under the weight of not just his body but somethin
g else. Something heavier. Something much, much heavier.

  “Skeeter gig?” said Billy. “Skeeter gig?”

  A shiver ran down his spine and he swallowed hard. “My parents didn't go on any skeeter gig. They… they snuck off somewhere… without telling me.

  “Mom and Dad don't do stuff like this. It's, like, a major event with them when they cross the state line into Illinois. And now they're on the other side of the world? This is just way too weird to even be possible.”

  Then it hit him: he'd been tricked. “Mom and Dad lied to me.”

  They were words he'd never had to say before.

  Billy was pacing madly around the living room, flipping through the cable guide. Piker followed along behind him.

  When he got to the page he needed, he ran his finger down until it landed on the rectangle that corresponded with the channel and time slot he'd been watching:

  FILIPINO NEWS DAILY

  “The Philippines? That's, like, twelve hours ahead of central time, so…it was live: morning there, nighttime here.

  That footage was shot in the Philippines. Mom and Dad went to the Philippines!

  “But why? What would they do that for?”

  His mind was racing, trying to come up with explanation, possibilities.

  Maybe they needed a special kind of insecticide. Something you can't get anywhere but the Philippines.

  Signs in foreign languages. Confetti. His parents

  “Maybe they got called to the Philippines for a skeeter gig. Maybe Mom and Dad are, like, Philippine bug experts or something.”

  His heart was pounding at an incredible rate. He felt sweaty all of a sudden, feverish. Piker trotted after him as he marched back into the kitchen, stopped in front of the refrigerator, opened it, and pulled out the brown bag.

  Okay. Say they're Philippine bug experts. When are they going to come back? What's gonna happen when they come back?

  Without thinking about it too much he opened the bag, pulled out the container inside, got a spoon, and started eating the ice-cold chicken curry. He didn't sit down.