"He'll fry himself!" said Teri. "We have to do something!"
Frankie Philpot and Hal had just turned the corner, and they stopped dead in their tracks when they saw where Kevin had gone.
For Kevin it was like coming to the surface of a deep, cold ocean and taking his first breath. He felt he could breathe in forever and never exhale. It felt better than anything the glasses had ever done for him.
And then something went wrong.
Something cracked.
It sounded like a million chandeliers falling to the ground at once, and it felt like an explosion inside Kevin's brain. He was blown back and went sliding across the floor. The current between Kevin and the transformer died, and the lights returned to their normal brightness.
Teri and Josh helped Kevin up and looked into his rolling eyes.
"Kevin, are you okay?" asked Teri.
"I don't know, I..."
"The glasses—they're cracked!" said Josh.
It was true. The glasses had overloaded, and a crack in the left lens was shooting tiny sparks.
"Let's get out of here!"
Josh and Teri practically carried Kevin to the elevator. Hal and Frankie were close behind and made it into the elevator just as the doors closed. Frankie raised his camera.
"I have to get this all on tape!" said Frankie. "Somebody, please tell me what's going on!"
"You stink, Midas, you know that!" Hal grabbed hold of the glasses and tried to pull them off Kevin's face, but they didn't come.
"Somebody, please say something," begged Frankie. "Anything!"
"Siberia," said Kevin, and he disappeared along with Teri and Josh.
Frankie lowered his camera. "Correct me if I'm wrong," he said, "but did I just witness a transcontinental teleportation?"
"Siberia?" said Hal. "Why would he want to go to Siberia?" Then the elevator bell rang, and the doors opened to the lobby.
Only it wasn't the lobby.
The elevator had opened up to an endless plain of snow, beneath a troubled sky. Before them stood a man with a heavy parka, a funny hat, and a leathery face that peered in at them. Even the yak standing beside him seemed confused.
"Uh-oh," said Hal.
Kevin, Josh, and Teri picked themselves up off the bottom of an empty elevator shaft. The only light came from the cracked glasses, which still sparked like a bad short circuit. "Take us home, Kevin," said Teri.
He reached up to push the glasses farther up the bridge of his nose but realized he didn't need to—they clamped onto his head now, in a perfect fit. Kevin pictured his house, then opened his mouth to wish them home—but they were standing in his living room before he said a single word. He didn't think much of it. Until about a minute later.
13
HAUNTED HOUSE
A black hole, Kevin recalled from his ten-page report on the universe, was a sphere of darkness that swallowed everything that got near it—even light.
His parents often referred to his room as the Black Hole.
A "singularity," Kevin recalled from the same report, was that point in space at the very center of a black hole, where all the laws of time, space, and science ceased to exist.
This was a much more accurate description of Kevin's bedroom on the day the glasses fused onto his face.
It was four o'clock. The sun was still high above the horizon, but Kevin was trying his hardest to fall asleep—to be dead to the world in any way he possibly could. He curled into a ball under his blanket and covered every inch of himself so that he could barely breathe. He tried not to think. Not to think of anything at all.
"I found the wire cutters," said Josh, hurrying into the room. Underneath the covers, Kevin burped, the cracked lens of the glasses sparked, and a pepperoni pizza fell from the heavens, splattering at Teri and Josh's feet.
"Just because all that pizza's coming back on you," said Teri, "you don't have to wish it all over us!"
"Leave me alone." Kevin stirred beneath the blankets, trying not to think of food anymore. He began singing in his head, forcing everything out. "A-ram-sam-sam, A-ram-sam-sam." It was the stupidest, most nonsensical song he knew. Words that meant nothing—thoughts that could not possibly take any shape in his mind. "Goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie Ram-sam-sam."
Still, a thought did squeeze its way in. The lens sparked, and an empty glass on his desk began to foam over with root beer.
Stop thinking! Kevin ordered himself, but his mind wasn't a light bulb he could just turn off.
When they had returned home from their eventful afternoon, it hadn't taken long for them to discover that they had a new and much more serious problem on their hands.
The cracked glasses had fused onto Kevin's face, and if that wasn't bad enough, the crack was making the glasses malfunction in the worst way.
Now the glasses were having little seizures—backfiring like his mom's old car. The fractured lens would send off a random spark every few moments, and that spark would reach deep into Kevin's mind, dragging whatever he happened to be thinking about into the real world.
He didn't have to wish for it—he didn't even have to want it. He just had to think about it. Controlling what he wished for was hard enough, but controlling his thoughts was like trying to herd a swarm of bumblebees with a goldfish net. The best Kevin could do was create a wall of static in his head and try not to think of things like Godzilla.
The glasses sparked again, and some unseen liquid flushed its way through all the walls of the house. Probably more root beer.
Teri snapped the blanket off Kevin, and Josh approached, holding the wire cutters like a surgical instrument.
"C'mon, Kevin," said Teri. "Now or never."
"No!"
Josh leaned in closer, trying to push Kevin's struggling hands out of the way. "This won't hurt a bit!"
But it would hurt, Kevin knew it. The glasses were as much a part of him now as his eyes or his ears, and as Josh began to squeeze the wire cutters on the left arm of the glasses, Kevin felt a searing pain shoot through his skull. Josh might as well have been yanking out his molars.
Kevin screamed, the lens sparked, and the wire cutters turned into a rose. The thorns pricked Josh's fingers.
"Ouch!" Josh hurled the rose down into a pile that contained a sponge, a carrot, and a banana, which had originally been pliers, a hammer, and a monkey wrench. "If you don't stop doing that, we won't have any tools left!" complained Josh.
"Stop torturing me!" yelled Kevin. The glasses sparked, and an iron maiden of the Inquisition variety appeared in the corner and clanged to the ground with a deep bell toll. Kevin grabbed his blanket and covered himself head to toe.
"You should be good at shutting off your brain," said Josh. "You've had enough practice."
A Chinese star flew through the air, the four-pointed steel disc just missing Josh's head, and embedded itself deep in the wall.
Josh looked at the weapon and shuddered. "You're really good at getting rid of people you don't like, aren't you?" said Josh. "First Bertram, then Hal . . . Am I going to be next, Kevin?"
"I'm sorry," said Kevin, "it was an accident." But even so an apology seemed useless. "We're still friends, right, Josh?"
"Yeah," said Josh, "of course we are." But Josh couldn't look him in the face.
"Maybe I could run the glasses down," Kevin whispered, as if the glasses could hear him if he didn't. "Kind of the way you run down a battery."
"Tell us how," said Teri, not afraid to use her full voice.