My chimp friday, p.1
My Chimp Friday, page 1
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s
Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2002 by Hester Mundis
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real
people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names,
characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s
imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & S CHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of
Simon & Schuster.
Book design by Russell Gordon
The text for this book is set in Aldine.
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mundis, Hester.
My chimp Friday : the Nana Banana chronicles / by Hester Mundis.
p. cm.
Summary: When an old friend of her father’s drops off an unusually
intelligent chimpanzee at their apartment in the middle of the night
with strict orders to keep the chimp a secret, twelve-year-old Rachel
wants to know what the big mystery is all about.
ISBN 0-689-83837-9
eISBN 9-781-44244-630-4
[1. Chimpanzees—Fiction. 2. Animal intelligence—Fiction. 3. Family
life—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M92343 My 2002
[Fic]—dc21
2001042947
To Boris,
for sharing his world
Heartfelt thanks to the late Claire Smith for providing the
magic that made this book happen, to my agent,
Wendy Schmalz, for making the magic work, and to my
editor, David Gale, for being there to bring the magic to life.
Thanks, too, to my brother-in-law Randy Van Warmer
for keeping a smile on my face by doing what he does so
well—and to my husband, Ron Van Warmer, for absolutely
everything else.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: One Dark and Noisy Night
Chapter 2: A Mysterious Moving Bundle
Chapter 3: The Morning After the Night Before
Chapter 4: Hide-and-Go-Eeeek!
Chapter 5: King of the Jumble
Chapter 6: Bad Bunch
Chapter 7: Keeping Eyes and Bananas Peeled
Chapter 8: Catching Trouble
Chapter 9: Ripe for the Picking
Chapter 10: Plan B
Chapter 11: Exhibit Ape
Chapter 12: Swinging into Action
Chapter 13: Earth Dazed
Chapter 14: Shopping Maul
Chapter 15: Package from a Dead Man
Chapter 16: A Relative Unknown
Chapter 17: Déjà Danger
Chapter 18: Rescue Rampage
Chapter 19: When Good Guys Are Bad
Chapter 20: A Stupid Mistake
Chapter 21: Out of Africa
Chapter 22: The Saddest Part
Chapter 23: Jungling for Joy
Author’s Note
1.
One Dark and Noisy Night
The buzzing was really annoying, and Rachel was getting very angry. Ticked off big-time. Mickey Phelps—the unfunniest practical joker in the whole sixth grade (and possibly the history of the school)—had dropped an alarm clock in her backpack, and she couldn’t turn it off. It sounded like the hand buzzer he had startled her with the week before. For some dumb reason she was his favorite target and his best friend. Sometimes she wondered about the “best friend” part. Yesterday in the lunchroom he had planted a grossly real-looking fake bug in her Jell-O. It was totally not funny.
Table-turning time had come.
She was just about to slip a gooey slice of pepperoni pizza under him as he was sitting down (childish but well-deserved revenge) when suddenly Mickey Phelps started to bark.
Bark?
Rachel’s eyes snapped open.
The clock on her nightstand said 2:00 a.m., and someone was at the door.
The barking was coming from Wetspot, which was almost as weird as if it had come from Mickey Phelps. The Stelson family dog was the quietest (mostly) golden retriever in the history of golden retrievers. He hardly ever barked, except when Mrs. Carey, their housekeeper, turned on the vacuum cleaner. But he had a kind of dog sense when something wasn’t right. And someone at the door pressing on the buzzer in the middle of the night like the building was on fire—which maybe it was—definitely wasn’t right!
Rachel jumped out of bed. She went to the window, listened, and sniffed the air. No sirens, no smoke—no fire. She breathed a sigh of relief. Mr. DeFina, her homeroom teacher at The Dahl Riverside School, would have called her quick deduction “specious.” He would have called it that for two reasons. One of the two reasons was that Mr. DeFina liked to use words that he believed “enriched” his students’ vocabulary, and “specious”—meaning “apparently right but not necessarily so”—was an enriching favorite of his. Rachel had won last week’s spelling bee and moved into the school’s semifinals by getting it right (beating Mickey, who goofed on “quibbling” by using only one “b”).
The other reason was that the absence of fire trucks and smoke didn’t necessarily mean there couldn’t be a fire somewhere in the building, and Rachel knew it. Still, specious or not, she just didn’t care to think about it at the moment.
She was too curious about who was at their door.
The buzzer sounded again, followed by another uncharacteristic throaty burst from Wetspot. It was almost as if after five years of occasional “woof-woofs” he had decided that tonight was the night to break his canine vow of silence. But then that would be just like Wetspot.
Wetspot just wasn’t like other dogs. He hated rawhide chew bones, and doggie biscuits, too. He sometimes groomed himself like a cat, using his paws to clean his face and licking off anything clinging to his fur or undercarriage. He never drank from the toilet. Ever! And he loved broccoli. Broccoli! (Even Rachel’s friend Brianne, who was trying to be a vegetarian, didn’t love broccoli.) If his favorite pastimes weren’t chasing tennis balls and Frisbees, you’d hardly think he had any dog in him at all.
In fact, Wetspot wasn’t even his real name.
His real name, or at least the name he’d had at the animal shelter, was Prince. But when they’d brought him home, he wouldn’t even look up when they called, “Prince!” Rachel had tried, “King,” but the royal promotion didn’t get his attention, either. As it turned out, he picked his own name.
It happened by accident. Well, “accidents.” Whenever Rachel’s younger brother, Jared, discovered that their new puppy had tinkled on the floor, he would point and announce loudly, “Wet spot!” And sure enough, the pup would come running, tail wagging. After three weeks, the wet spots no longer appeared—but the name stuck.
The buzzer sounded again, eliciting another series of barks.
“Coming, coming,” Rachel’s father called.
“Daddy, who’s there?” Rachel asked in a loud whisper.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he whispered back as he hurried toward the apartment door, though obviously not fast enough for whoever was on the other side. There was another buzz and louder barking.
Jared came into Rachel’s room. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, though why they were all whispering at this point was almost as much a mystery as who was at the door.
“Now, Wetspot, shhhh,” her father said, “that’s enough. You’ll wake the whole building”—which seemed at this point to be what Wetspot had in mind.
Jared covered his ears. He had on Darth Vader pajamas, but with his thick, curly hair sticking out in different directions, he looked more like a Wookie than a Jedi warrior. “What’s with Wetspot? I’ve never heard him like that. He sounds like Attila.”
Attila was the building superintendent’s dog and the most feared animal on the block—quite possibly on the whole Upper West Side. An enormous rottweiler, he had teeth that looked like a bear trap and a growl that sounded like a trapped bear. When he passed a fire hydrant he didn’t lift his leg—he karate-kicked it. Mr. Aplox kept Attila on a very tight leash on walks and chained him to a post near the storage bays when he was doing work in the basement. He constantly tried to convince people—and their terrified pets—that his dog’s bark was really much worse than his bite, but no one believed him.
No one, that is, except Wetspot. He and Attila were best friends.
“I think,” Rachel said, “that Wetspot has just realized he’s a dog. Come on!” As they went into the hall she flattened her younger brother’s hair with her palm the way she remembered her mother doing.
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Ben Stelson’s voice was remarkably calm considering the repeated buzzes that cut through the quiet apartment like a dentist’s drill. Rachel’s father was a very patient man. Her aunt Lisa swore that he had “the patience of a saint” whenever she came to stay with Rachel and Jared, and she’d stayed with them a lot in the three years since their mother had
Aunt Lisa was Rachel’s mother’s sister. She looked a little like Rachel’s mother—they had the same cinnamon-colored hair and dimpled smile—which comforted Rachel. But that’s where the resemblance and the comfort ended. Aunt Lisa was a royal pain in the butt.
When Aunt Lisa was around, Rachel couldn’t eat anything she enjoyed without getting a totally boring lecture on how bad it was for her. Soda was “unhealthy.” Fast food was “poison.” And no bread in their house was ever whole-grainey enough. As far as Aunt Lisa was concerned, if you could chew it easily, it was “practically worthless,” and if it tasted good, too, it was “totally worthless.” She was a health nut, a neatness nut, a cleanliness nut, and totally germ-a-phobic!
The most fun Rachel had when Aunt Lisa was around was kissing Wetspot on the mouth just to see the horrified look on her aunt’s face.
Oddly enough, it was not all that different from the look on the face of the man facing them when her father finally silenced the buzzing and opened their apartment door.
2.
A Mysterious Moving Bundle
Wetspot stopped barking.
Rachel and Jared stayed where they were and stared.
Standing in the doorway, tight-lipped and grimacing, was a very short, agitated man with wide, bulging eyes that gave him a permanently startled look. He wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses and had longish white hair that hung limply to the shoulders of a ridiculously large and tattered dark gray overcoat that was sizes too large for him; so much so that it looked to Rachel as if he had shrunk while inside it. The man’s face was very pale, and he appeared to be sweating, which wasn’t surprising considering the enormous coat he was wearing. What was surprising, though, was the oddly shaped blanket-wrapped bundle he was clutching.
It was moving!
Rachel inched closer.
“Why, Bucky Greene,” Rachel’s father stammered. “What a . ”
Rachel hoped he wasn’t going to say “pleasant surprise,” although she wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Her father was probably the politest man on the planet. He thanked automatic teller machines.
“What a . um . um . ” Ben Stelson caught himself about to say what Rachel feared he was about to say and said instead, “Come in, come in. Gee, Bucky, it’s been a long time. What . uh . uh . are you doing here . now? And how did you get into the building?”
Bucky Greene glanced nervously from right to left as if he were trapped in the middle of a busy intersection. “No time. No time to explain.”
“Or for a visit,” Rachel felt like pointing out, but didn’t. She was fascinated by the bundle that now appeared to be moving across their night visitor’s chest.
Jared tugged Rachel’s sleeve. “What’s he carrying?”
Rachel shrugged. “I haven’t a clue,” she whispered, “but I think we’re about to find out.”
“I’m sorry to get you up at this hour, Ben,” Bucky apologized, “but it was the only way I could leave the lab unnoticed.”
Rachel wondered how the man could go anywhere unnoticed in that ridiculously large coat.
“With the security you have over at Bio-allmeans, I’m not surprised,” her father said. “But—and this may sound like a dumb question—why did you have to leave unnoticed?”
It didn’t sound at all like a dumb question to Rachel. In fact, she edged closer to hear the answer.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. It’s”—Bucky lowered his voice—“top secret.”
TOP SECRET!
“Not anymore,” Rachel mumbled. For a biology professor who spent most of his life studying things under a microscope, her father still had a lot to learn about the Big Picture.
“Listen to me, Ben. You’re a man of science as well as my friend. You’re capable and you’re trustworthy. And, well, quite honestly I couldn’t think of anyone else to leave him with.” With that, he thrust the wriggling bundle into Ben Stelson’s arms.
“Him?” Rachel’s father looked bewildered. “Who’s him?”
What was him seemed a better question. Rachel leaned forward. Jared did the same.
Wetspot cocked his head.
Just then a small hand appeared from the top of the blanket and pulled it aside. There in their father’s arms was a very adorable and very frightened baby chimpanzee.
“Wow! Cool!” Rachel said.
“Far out!” breathed Jared.
Wetspot made a noise that sounded as if a bark had gotten stuck in his throat.
Ben Stelson made a very similar sound. “Wait a minute, Bucky. What am I supposed to do with a—”
“Chimpanzee,” said Bucky quickly. “Come on, Ben. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. You wouldn’t turn a cousin out in the middle of the night, would you?”
He wouldn’t ask that question if he knew their cousin Richard. Cousin Richard had once spent a weekend with them and crept out in the middle of the night with Rachel’s dad’s credit cards and the whole envelope of money she had collected for Girl Scout cookie orders. The police had come to the apartment when Richard was picked up, but her father never pressed charges. He called Cousin Richard “the family’s black sheep.” Rachel called him “the family’s big creep!”
“Now, Bucky, this is—”
“This is important” Bucky said, emphasizing the word so that there was no doubt that it was. “You must keep this chimp here. It’ll only be for . oh, about a week.”
“About a week! Whoa, wait a minute.” As Ben Stelson waved his hand, the chimp grabbed one of his fingers and put it in his mouth.
“I think he’s hungry, Daddy,” Rachel said, moving closer for a better look, Jared and Wetspot right behind her.
“Bright young miss you’ve got there.” Bucky Greene patted her head. It reminded Rachel of the women who patted Wetspot and said, “Cute-looking dog you’ve got there,” when her father took him out for walks. Aside from having the patience of a saint, Ben Stelson was a handsome, not-quite-forty-year-old widower and, as Aunt Lisa put it, “a catch.” She’d told Rachel that those women who patted Wetspot “had designs” on her father.
Bucky Greene apparently had designs of his own on her father, but his involved baby-sitting a chimpanzee. Rachel found Bucky’s designs a lot more appealing. There were a lot of things Rachel wanted, but a stepmother wasn’t one of them. Mickey Phelps, whose real mother lived in California, had one. She was a child psychiatrist. Mickey said she drove him nuts.
Rachel’s friend Brianne said the same about hers. Her parents had both remarried, so she had a stepmother and a stepfather. She also had a stepbrother from her stepfather, and a stepsister and stepbrother from her stepmother. Other than that, she was an only child.
Fumbling in the pockets of his huge overcoat, Bucky Greene pulled out a baby bottle. “Here. Give him this. He can drink from a cup, but this is neater when he’s moving around. It’s plain milk. He likes chocolate milk better—who doesn’t?—but save that for a treat. He eats three meals a day. Lettuce, raisins, bread . and, of course, bananas.”
At that, the chimp gave an interested “hoo-hoo.”
“I guess he really likes bananas,” Rachel said, and there was a louder “hoo-hoo.”
“Believe me, bananas are a very important part of his life,” Bucky told her, adding quietly, “and mine, too.”
“Say, that’s right,” Ben said. “Now I remember. You’ve been working on genetically engineered—”
Bucky thrust his palm in front of Ben’s face. “Shhhh.”
“Shhhh?”
Bucky nodded. “Trust me. Shhhh.”
Jared tugged Rachel’s arm and whispered, “He’s one to say ‘shhhh’ after the racket he made.”
Rachel told her brother to “shhhh.”
Bucky’s face grew dark, his voice serious. “I have to leave tonight.”
“Where are you going?” Ben asked, equally serious.
“I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” He lowered his voice again. “And if anyone asks about me, say that you haven’t any idea where I went.”
“Considering that you’re not telling me, that shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Also, you must not—under any circumstances—let anyone know this chimp is here. His presence has to be kept a secret. I’ll explain everything when I return.”
“Could you—maybe—explain a little bit now?”
“There’s no time.” There was definite urgency in Bucky’s voice.
