Suzanne Collins - Gregor the Overlander

"Ball!" cried Boots in distress. "Ball!"

Gregor reached his arm between the dryers and pulled out an old tennis ball Boots had been chasing around. He picked off the dryer lint and tossed it across the room. Boots ran after it like a puppy.

"What a mess," thought Gregor, laughing a little. "What a sticky, crusty, dusty mess!" The remains of her lunch, egg salad and chocolate pudding, were still evident on Boots's face and shirt. She had colored her hands purple with washable markers that Gregor thought maybe a sandblaster could remove, and her diaper sagged down around her knees. It was just too hot to put her into shorts.

Boots ran back to him with the ball, dryer lint floating in her curls. Her sweaty face beamed as she held out the ball. "What makes you so happy, Boots?" he asked.

"Ball!" she said, and then banged her head into his knee, on purpose, to speed him up. Gregor tossed the ball down the alley between the washers and the dryers. Boots flew after it.

As the game continued, Gregor tried to remember the last time he'd felt as happy as Boots did with her ball. He had had some decent times over the past couple of years. The city middle school band had gotten to play at Carnegie Hall. That was pretty cool. He'd even had a short solo on his saxophone. Things were always better when he played music; the notes seemed to carry him to a different world altogether.

Running track was good, too. Pushing his body on and on until everything had been drummed out of his mind.

But if he was honest with himself, Gregor knew it had been years since he'd felt real happiness. "Exactly two years, seven months, and thirteen days," he thought. He didn't try to count, but the numbers automatically tallied up in his head. He had some inner calculator that always knew exactly how long his dad had been gone.

Boots could be happy. She wasn't even born when it happened. Lizzie was only four. But Gregor had been eight and had missed nothing; like the frantic calls to the police, who had acted almost bored with the fact that his dad had vanished into thin air. Clearly they'd thought he'd run off. They'd even implied it was with another woman.

That just wasn't true. If there was anything Gregor knew, it was that his father loved his mother, that he loved him and Lizzie, that he would have loved Boots.

But then -- how could he have left them without a word?

Gregor couldn't believe his dad would abandon the family and never look back. "Accept it," he whispered to himself. "He's dead." A wave of pain swept through him. It wasn't true. It couldn't be true. His dad was coming back because ... because ... because what? Because he wanted it so badly it must be true? Because they needed him? "No," thought Gregor. "It's because I can feel it. I know he's coming back."

The washer spun to a stop, and Gregor piled the clothes into a couple of dryers. "And when he gets back, he'd better have a really good explanation for where he's been!" muttered Gregor as he slammed the dryer door shut. "Like he got bumped on the head and forgot who he was. Or he was kidnapped by aliens." Lots of people got kidnapped by aliens on TV. Maybe it could happen.

He thought about different possibilities a lot in his head, but they rarely mentioned his dad at home. There was an unspoken agreement that his dad would return. All the neighbors thought he'd just taken off. The adults never mentioned it, and neither did most of the kids -- about half of them only lived with one parent, anyway. Strangers sometimes asked, though. After about a year of trying to explain it, Gregor came up with the story that his parents were divorced and his dad lived in California. It was a lie but people believed it, while no one seemed to believe the truth. Whatever that was.

"And after he gets home I can take him -- ," Gregor said aloud, and then stopped himself. He was about to break the rule. The rule was that he couldn't think about things that would happen after his dad got back. And since his dad could be back at any moment, Gregor didn't allow himself to think about the future at all. He had this weird feeling that if he imagined actual events, like having his dad back next Christmas or his dad helping to coach the track team, they would never happen. Besides, as happy as some daydream would make him, it only made returning to reality more painful. So, that was the rule. Gregor had to keep his mind in the present and leave the future to itself. He realized that his system wasn't great, but it was the best way he'd figured out to get through a day.

Gregor noticed that Boots had been suspiciously quiet. He looked around and felt alarmed when he couldn't spot her right away. Then he saw a scuffed pink sandal poking out from the last dryer. "Boots! Get out of there!" said Gregor.

You had to watch her around electrical stuff. She loved plugs.

As he hurried across the laundry room, Gregor heard a metallic klunk and then a giggle from Boots. "Great, now she's dismantling the dryer," thought Gregor, picking up speed. As he reached the far wall, a strange scene confronted him.

Gregor twisted around in the air, trying to position himself so he wouldn't land on Boots when they hit the basement floor, but no impact came. Then he remembered the laundry room was in the basement. So what exactly had they fallen into?

The wisps of vapor had thickened into a dense mist that generated a pale light. Gregor could see only a few feet in any direction. His fingers clawed desperately through the white stuff, looking for a handhold, but came up empty. He was plummeting downward so fast, his clothes ballooned around him.

"Boots!" he hollered, and the sound bounced eerily back to him. "There must be sides to this thing," he thought. He called again, "Boots!"

A bright giggle came from somewhere below him. "Ge-go go wheee!" said Boots.

"She thinks she's on a big slide or something," thought Gregor. "At least she's not scared." He felt scared enough for the both of them. Whatever strange hole they had slipped into, it must have a bottom. There was only one way that this spinning through space could end.

Time was passing. Gregor couldn't tell exactly how much, but too much to make sense. Surely there was a limit to how deep a hole could be. At some point, you'd have to run into water or rock or the earth's platelets or something.

It was all like this horrible dream he had sometimes. He'd be up high, somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, usually like the roof of his school: As he walked along the edge, the solid matter under his feet would suddenly give way, and down he'd go. Everything would disappear but the sensation of falling, of the ground closing in on him, of terror. Then, just at the moment of impact, he'd jerk awake, soaked in sweat, heart pounding.

"A dream! I fell asleep in the laundry room and this is the same old crazy dream!" thought Gregor. "Of course! What else could it be?"

Calmed by the notion that he was asleep, Gregor began to gauge his fall. He didn't own a wristwatch, but anybody could count seconds.

"One Mississippi... two Mississippi... three Mississippi ..." At seventy Mississippi he gave up and began to feel panicky again. Even in a dream you had to land, didn't you?

Just then, Gregor noticed the mist beginning to clear a little. He could make out the smooth, dark sides of a circular wall. He seemed to be falling down a large, dark tube. He felt an updraft rising from below him. The last wisps of vapor blew away, and Gregor lost speed. His clothes gently settled back on his body.

Below him, he heard a small thump and then the patter of Boots's sandals. A few moments later, his own feet made contact with solid ground. He tried to get his bearings, not daring to move. Total darkness surrounded him. As his eyes adjusted, he became aware of a faint shaft of light off to his left.