Leon and the Spitting Image Read online

  Leon

  AND THE

  Spitting

  Image

  ALLEN KURZWEIL

  Illustrations by BRET BERTHOLF

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  The Envelope

  TWO

  Trimore Towers

  THREE

  The Hag

  FOUR

  Coach Kasperitis

  FIVE

  The Stitches of Virtue

  SIX

  The Return of Napoleon

  SEVEN

  Animiles

  EIGHT

  Parents’ Night

  NINE

  The Three-Piece Dinosaur

  TEN

  The Birdcage

  ELEVEN

  The Ice Queen

  TWELVE

  In the Belly of the Beast

  THIRTEEN

  The Hall of Unicorns

  FOURTEEN

  The Master Piece

  FIFTEEN

  The Spitting Image

  SIXTEEN

  A Supernatural Occurrence

  SEVENTEEN

  Important News

  EIGHTEEN

  SPLAAAAAT!

  NINETEEN

  Interference

  TWENTY

  A Problem … and a Solution

  TWENTY-ONE

  2520

  TWENTY-TWO

  SOV

  TWENTY-THREE

  Plan B

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Another Envelope

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Carnival

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Joust

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Final Inspection

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Binder of Bonding

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Crusade Continues

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  At first Leon couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. Once he had, he reared back slightly. The contents of the drawer confused him. And embarrassed him. And grossed him out. The dull gray tangle wasn’t as disgusting or fascinating as, say, teacher’s spit, but it came pretty close.

  “Mr. Zeisel,” Miss Hagmeyer said.

  Still puzzling over his discovery, Leon failed to hear his name.

  “Mr. Zeisel!” Miss Hagmeyer repeated more forcefully.

  “Huh?”

  “Get your nose out of my PANTY HOSE!”

  ONE

  The Envelope

  The night before the start of fourth grade, Leon Zeisel was on pins and needles. He lay in bed thinking about just one thing. An envelope.

  Leon had first discovered the envelope one week earlier, while poking through his mom’s desk. The envelope had attracted his attention for a simple reason. His name was written across the front in thick block letters. For a brief moment he had thought the envelope might contain a special surprise—tickets to a Yankees–Red Sox doubleheader would have been sweet—but that dream disappeared as soon as he noticed the school seal and a single word stamped in blood-red ink:

  CONFIDENTIAL

  That warning did the trick. Curious though he was, Leon shoved the unopened envelope back inside the desk.

  But after a few days, curiosity turned into concern, and concern then turned into terror. Which was why, the night before school started, Leon slipped out of bed and made a beeline back to his mom’s desk. Once there, he pulled the middle drawer halfway out. That released a catch on the slim side drawer.

  Don’t rush, he told himself. Mom’s working late.

  Leon squinched his eyes shut and clucked his tongue. Only after completing his good-luck routine did he remove the envelope, undo its clasp, lift the flap, and inspect the contents—three sheets of paper, each with the phrase HOME REPORT centered at the top. His fingers started shaking and his heart started thumping as it dawned on him that he was holding a top-secret history of his life at the Classical School.

  Leon took a deep breath and began to read. Page one came from his first-grade teacher, Mrs. Sloat. She wrote: “Given the tragic loss of his father, it is not surprising that Leon is a tad delayed in the domain of manual dexterity.”

  Leon sighed. He didn’t like being called delayed. And bringing in his dad—who had died in a freak accident at a fireworks factory when Leon was four—felt like a cheap shot.

  He went back to Mrs. Sloat’s assessment: “Leon’s frustration most regularly expresses itself during craft time. He completed his macaroni necklace only with a great deal of assistance. And although a macaroni necklace might not seem important, it is. For here at the Classical School, our motto has always been, ‘Nimble fingers make for nimble minds.’”

  Geez! How many times had he heard that stupid saying!

  Leon recalled only one thing about Mrs. Sloat, and the memory wasn’t pleasant. He remembered her badgering him to stick his hands in Play-Doh and to feel the squishiness. Leon hadn’t liked squishiness back in first grade, and he didn’t like squishiness now.

  He turned to page two. It came from his second-grade teacher, Miss Toothacre. Her report was just as grim. Miss Toothacre wrote, “Leon continues to be hampered by a troubling lack of fine motor skills.”

  That was another dumb thing he had heard a thousand times. Leon knew only too well that “lack of fine motor skills” had nothing to do with fancy cars. Teachers used the expression to avoid calling him a klutz.

  The comment hurt. Suppose he was hampered; wasn’t that Miss Toothacre’s fault? She was the one cramming him into a bogus confidential report. Didn’t that make her the hamperer?

  Leon wiped his nose on the sleeve of his pajamas and braced himself for the third-grade report. It was now Mr. Joost’s turn to get his licks in.

  Mr. Joost wrote, “Leon’s handwriting is significantly below grade level, and he is challenged by even the most basic manual tasks, such as tying his laces. At this juncture, I would seriously encourage corrective measures. One suggestion: Flute lessons might improve his finger movement.”

  Leon had always wondered why his mother forced him to take music classes with Miss Brunelleschi. Now he knew.

  The home reports felt like strikes one, two, and three. And that made it all the more odd that the only nice words in the whole secret history came from Skip Kasperitis, the former minor-league pitcher who taught PE.

  Coach Kasperitis wrote, “Leon is a real treat and a very special kid. His coordination needs work, but there’s no question he’s a champ. And if he ever learns to master his passion, I’ll tell you this, Leon Zeisel is the kind of kid who could make magic.”

  TWO

  Trimore Towers

  A dog barked from somewhere upstairs. Leon glanced out the window. The lights on the convention-center sign snapped off. It was late. He tucked the three sheets of paper back into the envelope and tucked himself back into bed.

  Some home report, he thought as he built a tent with his blankets. I could have done a better job myself.

  That was certainly true. And what’s more, if Leon had written his own home report, he would have stuck to the assignment. There would have been no mention of macaroni necklaces, that’s for sure. He would have focused his home report on his home—Trimore Towers, a wedding cake-shaped six-tiered hotel his mother called “the finest one-star lodgings in the city.”

  For a long time, Leon had assumed that the single gold star on the plaque near the key rack meant his hotel was tops. After all, he received a single gold star from Miss Brunelleschi only when he managed to make his flute do exactly what it was supposed to—and that didn’t happen too often.

  Then his mom set him straight about the whole star system. “Adults like getting lots of stars, sweetie,” she said. “T
hey’re greedy that way.”

  Leon didn’t care what grown-ups thought. He loved his hotel just as it was. Actually the lack of stars was a good thing, Leon decided. Because the Trimore wasn’t snazzy, it attracted guests that snootier hotels turned away.

  Elegant five-star establishments would never give a room to a seal act or a snake handler. The Trimore did. In fact, it was the only hotel in the city that had an ALL PETS WELCOME sign posted above the reception desk. On some days, the Trimore lobby resembled a petting zoo.

  That didn’t make Maria, Leon’s favorite housekeeper, terribly happy, but over time, she had learned to take precautions. Along with her normal cleaning supplies, Maria relied on a highly effective product called Poop-B-Gone. Also, she kept the reception desk stocked with diapers in all different sizes. You never knew when a chimp or a llama might check in wearing a soiled nappy (or, worse, no nappy at all).

  Obviously, animals weren’t the only guests staying at the Trimore. The hotel also booked humans, most of whom attended meetings at the convention center across the street.

  Leon liked that, too. The convention center attracted all kinds of intriguing people: detectives, stuntmen, contortionists, potato-chip tasters. And the best part was, they often left behind stuff that couldn’t fit into their suitcases.

  That’s where Maria came in. If she found an interesting freebie while cleaning a room, she’d save it for Leon. She’d presented him with blinking refrigerator magnets, penlights, a juggling pin, and a policeman’s badge. Once Maria gave him a bag of potato chips the size of a pillowcase.

  There were other matters Leon would have mentioned in his home report. For instance, how many places actually pay you to live there? And it wasn’t just his mom, the Trimore night manager, who got that deal. Leon was on the payroll, too.

  Every week the hotel bookkeeper would make out a check to Mr. L. Zeisel for the sum of three dollars.

  It was Leon’s job to maintain the lobby signboard. That meant fetching the daily VIP guest list from his mom, along with an old wooden letter box that had a sturdy brass latch shaped like a question mark. The box was divided into sixty-four compartments, ideal for separating the twenty-six letters of the alphabet—upper-and lowercase—plus all the numbers from zero through nine. (Actually, that only adds up to sixty-two, but the weird thingamabobs—the &s, the $s, the #s, and the very useful !s—filled the two spare cubbies.)

  Leon would use the letters, numbers, and thingamabobs to reproduce the VIP list on a signboard covered in black felt. Leon’s penmanship might have been “significantly below grade level,” but his signboard usually deserved an A+.

  The day before the start of fourth grade, Leon had positioned the white plastic letters to read:

  Leon loved exclamation marks. He felt they turned VIPs into VVIPs. Another benefit of exclamation marks was that they drew attention away from a major signboard problem—the missing Ws.

  No one at the hotel knew how it had happened, but all the Ws (both upper- and lowercase) had disappeared. This forced Leon to substitute side-by-side Vs. (He experimented for a while with upside-down Ms, but they kept falling off the felt.) After diligently straightening the letters and punctuation marks, Leon would latch the wooden box and inspect the work that earned him his weekly paycheck.

  Still, not everything about life at the Trimore was great. Actually, there were some things that were downright lousy. The Ice Queen, for instance.

  The Ice Queen was an ancient ice maker that occupied an alcove on the far side of his bedroom wall. The noise it made drove Leon bonkers.

  Leon hated the Ice Queen. Just thinking about her turned his blood to, well, ice. She reminded him of the fairy-tale witch of the same name. In the storybooks, the Ice Queen cast an evil spell that forced the entire village to sleep for one hundred years. But his Ice Queen, the one rattling in the hotel hallway, did the exact opposite. She prevented sleep.

  Her spell was always the same. It began with three harsh clicks, followed by a long, obnoxious buzz. Then she would tease her victims by falling silent. The silence could last one minute, it could last ten. Yet the Ice Queen always revived her hex, creating a bed-rattling hullabaloo as she spat ice cubes into a large metal bucket.

  Click-click-click-buzzzz …

  The sound from the far side of the bedroom wall forced Leon deeper under his blanket.

  Grind-groan-rumble-CRASH!

  Leon reemerged from his dark, hot bunker and looked around the room. The ice maker’s thunderous finale had been so intense it had knocked loose some of the pushpin flags stuck into the map of the world above his bed. Leon squinched his eyes and clucked his tongue, hoping a counterhex would silence the Ice Queen.

  No such luck. Within seconds, she started up once more.

  Click-click-click-buzzzz …

  Leon couldn’t stand it. Still in pajamas, he fled the hotel apartment and rode the elevator down to the lobby. He marched over to the reception desk.

  “Mom,” he moaned. “She’s doing it again.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” his mother said, knowing instantly who “she” was. “I did make some calls. But that machine is so darn old I can’t find anyone to quiet her down.”

  Leon ducked under the counter and planted himself near the key rack. “She won’t shut up,” he complained.

  His mom nodded sympathetically. “It’s the mimes, Leon. They’ve been whooping it up ever since they arrived. Maria just told me they’ve wiped out four minibars and the candy dispenser. Funny, I’d have expected the cowpunchers to be the rowdy ones, but they’ve turned out to be quiet as church mice.”

  “Mom? Can I …” Leon hesitated.

  Emma Zeisel looked at her son’s pale, anxious face. The dark circles under his eyes worried her. “Tell you what,” she said. “Go fetch me a sandwich, and I’ll fix up a bunk for you down here. How does that sound?”

  “It’s a deal,” said Leon. He was already starting to feel better. “You want the usual, Mom?”

  “I do,” said Emma Zeisel before she had to turn away and help a cowpuncher change rooms because of a backed-up toilet.

  The Trimore’s coffee shop, like the hotel that housed it, was a small operation. Four booths, six stools of counter service, and one very plump woman who kept the whole place going.

  “Hey there, Frau Haffenreffer,” said Leon to the woman in question.

  “Still up?” said Frau Haffenreffer with a look of concern. She knew he was starting school the next day.

  “Can’t sleep, and Mom needs a sandwich.”

  “The usual?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ordering!” Frau Haffenreffer said to herself. “One tongue on rye! Extra hots! Extra mustard!” She then walked over to the sandwich station.

  While she prepared the food, Leon kept himself busy by inspecting the pastry in the glass case near the cash register. There was a lot to inspect. Frau Haffenreffer took baking very seriously. And even with fingers as fat as Twinkies, she had absolutely no trouble whipping up elegant pastries, cookies, and cakes.

  “So, Leon,” she said, returning with the tongue sandwich neatly wrapped in wax paper. “How should we top this off?”

  “I’ll have a sugar-dusted chocolate-chip cookie, and Mom will take one of those messy custardy things.” Leon pointed to a pastry in the case.

  “And a napoleon for your mother,” Frau Haffenreffer confirmed.

  Leon watched as she arranged the sandwich, cookie, and napoleon inside a cardboard box. After determining that everything was neat and tidy, she closed the lid and yanked some red string from a spool chained above the counter.

  With a series of lightning-fast motions worthy of a ninja warrior, Frau Haffenreffer tied up the box. She completed her attack with a single effortless slice that severed the string from the spool.

  For the longest time, Leon had wondered how she made that final cut look so easy. Eventually he had figured out the trick: Frau Haffenreffer wore a special ring fitted with a tiny hooked b
lade that looked like the horn on a horn beetle.

  Leon took the food to the back office behind the reception desk.

  “What do you think, sweetie?” said his mom, taking a bite of her sandwich. “Is the tongue tasting me while I’m tasting the tongue?”

  Leon squelched a smile. Though he’d never admit it, he liked when his mom said goofy things. She pointed to a pair of battered leather armchairs she had pushed together to form a makeshift bed. “As soon as you’ve finished your cookie, I want you to get some sleep. You have a big day tomorrow. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Leon. He curled up under a hotel blanket. It was scratchier than the ones upstairs, but he didn’t care. He was happy to be far away from the Ice Queen and the confidential home reports—and happier still to be close to his mom.

  Leon woke feeling exhausted and, because of the home reports, sad. He looked for his mom, only to discover that a hotel crisis involving a drunken mime had called her away from Reception. After getting dressed (in the school clothes thoughtfully laid out on top of a nearby file cabinet), Leon made his way into the lobby, where the signboard caught his eye.

  Hotel guests were forever rearranging the plastic letters, sending private messages to one another, spelling out nasty words. And sure enough, the sign no longer welcomed mimes and cowpunchers. It now said:

  The announcement made Leon stop in his tracks. It didn’t matter that his mom had used only capital letters and that she had messed up the spacing. And it didn’t matter that she’d been chintzy with the exclamation marks. For just a moment, while he stared at the sign, Leon Zeisel felt a little better, ready to face fourth grade.

  THREE

  The Hag

  It was raining heavily when Emma and Leon Zeisel pushed through the revolving door of the Trimore and walked to the curb.

  “Did you remember your travel book, sweetie?”

  Leon patted his backpack. “Right here, Mom.”

  “How about your milk and taxi money?”