Maya Papaya

By Hunter T. Castle

Eleven-year-old Maya Papaya’s ex-circus parents not only left her with a name like a deranged fruit salad, but her very own tail...a four-foot, furry tail with a mind of its own.

Mr. Norbert says Maya must keep the tail a super-big secret, and wear the itchy, tail-hiding pants whenever she leaves the house. That means Maya can’t have sleepovers or go swimming with the other kids, either, even thought EVERY OTHER eleven-year-old girl at her school gets to have sleepovers and go swimming.

Still, Maya lives a very happy life with Mr. Norbert and their many pets...until one day, Mr. Norbert’s computer tells Maya that she’s not really a little girl at all. Before Maya can figure out what THAT means, a knock on the door spins events in motion that send Maya all the way across the world...all the way to India, and into an adventure about the truth of her temperamental tail.

(Middle grade fantasy, chapter book, super hero, kids mystery, kids adventure, animal kids, animals, travel kids, kids science)

• Language: English
• Publisher: White Sun Press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465742810

Hunter T. Castle

Hunter T. Castle has lived or spent considerable time in India, Vancouver B.C., Albuquerque, Portland-OR, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, San Diego, Prague, London, Berlin, Sydney and Poland. The author currently lives in San Francisco, California, writing full time, playing with dogs, rabbits, owls and chickens...and occasionally chasing monkeys. For more information about Hunter T. Castle, visit the author’s Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/HunterTCastle

Book preview

SYNOPSIS

Eleven-year-old Maya Papaya has a tail. That’s right, a tail…and stranger still, it seems to have a mind of its own. Maya's tail is a big secret, though, and she has to wear these itchy tail pants and can’t have sleepovers or go swimming like her friends. She still lives a fairly normal life with Mr. Norbert, though...until a knock on the door puts events in motion that send her across the world.

…[A] fruit-salad type mixture (not unlike Maya's name!) that tosses in The Island of Dr. Moreau, Johnny Quest, Spy Kids, even a dash of Home Alone…

~ Michael Bellomo, Author of Centaur of the Crime

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Dedicated to

Maya Uemura, aka, Monkey-Girl

(also known to pull some extremely impressive moves on the flying trapeze)

I love you, Maya Papaya

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ONE

The Grumpy Computer

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Maya Papaya positively detested her name.

Wouldn’t you, if your name made you sound like some kind of deranged fruit salad?

As if she didn’t have enough problems with her tail.

That’s right...she has a tail. What of it? You want to make something about that, too? Well, if you do, then you better just watch it, is all I have to say.

Whoever Maya's real parents were, they owed her...bigtime.

But Maya never actually had a chance to tell her parents that, as she'd never met her real parents before. Not once. She hadn't talked to them on the telephone, either, or received a single letter, or even so much as a text message.

Instead, Maya lived in a house with Mr. Norbert.

Mr. Norbert was a busy man. A scientist and inventor, he spent most of his time inside a cramped attic with slanted walls on the third floor of their three-story house.

Maya imagined that room to be filled with books on interesting subjects...or perhaps a very large computer that was attached to some kind of international scientific book-collecting machine whose parts scattered all over the world. She thought this because Mr. Norbert always seemed to be reading.

She also envisioned mysterious stone figurines and symbols and bits of machinery and photographs of exotic places where Mr. Norbert had traveled...as well as objects made of glass and metal, covered in flashing lights and maybe even different animals in cages.

The truth was, Maya didn't know what Mr. Norbert kept in that room. She had never been allowed to go inside. Not once. Not even for a peek.

She only knew it had a very slanty roof because she could see it from outside, (it was, indeed, slanty).

The room also had a very large, eight-sided window that looked like a spiderweb,  only filled with several panes of colored glass.

Maya tried to climb up there once with her best friend who lived next door, Damien. She had this whole plan where she would climb to the top peak of the roof over the window and hang down to look inside. But Mr. Norbert came out looking for her when he heard the stomping sounds on the roof. He hadn't liked her climbing up there one bit.

He'd scolded her about broken heads and bones and then made her stay inside the rest of the day, color-coding his entire collection of buttons from shirts he no longer could find.

She'd asked Mr. Norbert if she could see the inside of his secret attic laboratory, of course. But no matter how often she asked, or how nicely she asked it, or how many cookies she brought him when she asked him, he always said NO. Then he usually smiled at her and patted her on the head, muttering something about it being 'dangerous,' right before he shooed her outside and told her to go play like a good girl.

So Maya grumbled about it to their two cats, Einstein and Percy, or to Haverdash, her favorite chicken, or to the rabbit they'd named Sniffles who lived in the house and liked to hide under the sofa with the big yellow flowers on it.

Mr. Norbert also had a very old parrot with a blue head, named Willie. Willie told jokes when he was in a good mood, and complained about his cage when he wasn't. On his grumpier days, he would simply walk back and forth on his wooden perch in agitation, squawking 'too shiny! too shiny!' over and over.

When Willie was in a good mood, Maya would complain to him sometimes, too.

The parrot listened, but never offered his opinion, Maya noticed.

Maya went to school down the street with her friends, Marci and Kara and Bobbie and Damien. Unlike the other kids, Maya wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers...even though she was eleven and positively every kid at school had at least one sleepover by the age of eleven. Maya thought at first it was because of her tail, which Mr. Norbert warned her not to tell anyone about, no matter how nice they were or how many times they gave her valentines or birthday presents or picked her for games in school.

Maya’s tail was a Big Secret.

The Biggest Secret, according to Mr. Norbert.

He never told her why, not once in all of Maya’s eleven years. But Maya watched the kids at school make fun of other kids for things like smelly feet and ripped pants and frizzy hair and eating boogers, and Maya decided Mr. Norbert was probably right. After all, none of those things were quite as weird as having a tail...even if the booger part was pretty gross.

She was even willing to endure the special, itchy, tail-pants Mr. Norbert made her wear. She had to wear them everywhere, since Maya knew no other way to hide the flicky, explore-y, impatient-y thing that was her tail.

Maya's tail never really sat still when she had it outside of those pants. It whipped around her, knocking down glasses and getting stuck in the staircase bannister when it wasn't doing anything particularly useful.

Maya secretly thought her tail could be kind of handy, too.

Like when she used it to pet the cat while she washed the dishes. Or how she could juggle with it, using five oranges instead of just three. With her tail, she bet she could easily get up on the roof to look into Mr. Norbert's secret attic room.

She might even have liked having a tail, if it wasn't such a very strange thing for a little girl to have a tail. After all, Maya could hang from lamps and swing back and forth, and she didn't know any other kids at school who could do that. She could use her tail to scratch her nose...or hold her drink when she needed her hands free. Her tail could keep her feet warm and pull out her chair for her, and the cats liked chasing it.

Her tail was also really strong.

Maya could throw a baseball with it. Not only that, she could throw a baseball hard enough with her tail to make a round, baseball-shaped hole in the wall of her room. Although, the one time she did that, Mr. Norbert asked her to please not ever do it again.

She could also use it to squeeze things really hard...like the toy bucket she accidentally squeezed into a ball of lumpy metal. Or like the time she pulled off the top part of the wooden headboard on her bed and crashed it accidentally into her bookshelf.

Mr. Norbert asked her if she would please not do any of those things again, either.

In fact, Maya could do all kinds of useful things with her tail when she was actually allowed to use it...which wasn’t anywhere near as often as Maya or the tail would have liked.

Mr. Norbert got very nervous whenever he saw Maya's tail poking through the hole in her itchy, tail-pants. He would tell her to get away from the windows and close the drapes, in case the neighbors saw. He told her to make sure she never got pushed into any of the neighbors' swimming pools. He told her never to use the bathroom at any of her friends' houses, either, even if she had to go really, really bad.

When Maya got annoyed with all the dumb rules and warnings, Mr. Norbert would feel bad and offer to make her yet another pair of itchy pants. This time in blue, maybe, or lavender...or with pictures of her favorite cartoon characters all over them.

But Maya was pretty sick of those pants...even in pink, her favorite color.

Mr. Norbert also wouldn't let Maya have any other kids over to play, except sometimes Damien, because he lived so close. His house and the house of the Evans' brothers sat the closest to hers, at the end of the same cul-de-sac.

Damien lived next door. Instead of a blue house with purple shutters and an overgrown backyard filled with plum trees and avocado plants and Mr. Norbert's herb garden and chicken coop and his weather-making inventions and singing glasses, Damien lived in a very neat and tidy house with a very neat and tidy front lawn.

Damien's house, rather than being such a very bright shade of turquoise blue, was a much tidier-looking brown. Damien's parents had a very tidy garden in the back, mostly made of white sand and bordered by a tall, bamboo fence. Dotted with larger black rocks, Damien's garden had little bridges and ponds with gold and white fish and trees with red leaves.

Maya sometimes wished she could live in the pagoda at the very back, only Damien told her it got very cold the one night he camped out there.

Damien's father sometimes made gardens for other people, too, although his job during the day had something to do with computers.

Maya secretly wished that she lived in a house of a more usual color, too. Even if it meant she no longer got to play on Mr. Norbert's slanty roof with the weird pointy things all over the top and the giant lightning rod with a tiger on it...or pet the chickens or the rooster, Mr. Tiny. Or dig around in the garden next to Mr. Norbert's bug and slug playground, which he put up to entertain the bugs and slugs so they would forget to eat his plants.

Damien's parents were very nice to Mr. Norbert...and to Maya herself...but Maya suspected Mr. and Mrs. Yoshida thought they were pretty weird. She couldn't really blame them, what with all of Mr. Norbert's rusting inventions in the backyard and the condominium he built for the birds and the owl that lived in the crooked tower at the top of the house. Also, there was the fact that Mr. Norbert often stood on the roof in his bathrobe, staring up at the sky.

Still, the nooks and crannies that hid behind the walls of Mr. Norbert's house made the best forts and hidey places. Maya just knew she would have the best house on the street for having friends over and playing games...if Mr. Norbert ever let her have friends over for playing games.

Still, Maya liked Mr. Norbert.

He was always very nice to her, if a bit nervous and worried-seeming.

Mr. Norbert only left his little attic room according to his strict, weekly schedule. He left it to play with Maya on every-other Saturday. Mr. Norbert and Maya flew kites when it wasn't raining and climbed trees and picnicked on the hill behind the crooked house with the purple shutters. On days it was raining, they drew pictures and played board games and Mr. Norbert told her stories, like the one about Benjamin Franklin and the key and the lightning and how electricity was all important and stuff.

Even more rarely did Mr. Norbert leave the little blue house without Maya.

When he did, it was a Very Big Deal.

Mr. Norbert would tell her about it, at least a day or so before he planned to leave. He would lock the door to the attic, and leave notes around the house warning her about hot stovetops and telling her where to find the peanut butter and bread and where the cereal boxes were hidden and how to cook soup without making too much of a mess. He would leave more notes with numbers for her to call In Case of Emergencies. He had another note that told her to go to the neighbor's house if any of a list of things happened that he also wrote out in his neat hand.

He told her not to answer the door while he was gone...for any reason.

He also told her to be a good girl. Even with all of that, he still looked worried as he patted her on the head and hugged her goodbye.

Maya would watch from the window while Mr. Norbert backed his dented, hearse-like car out of the garage and down the driveway. She watched him make a precise, three-point turn. Then she watched him drive away down the small cul-de-sac and onto the larger street beyond.

Even more rarely...in fact, not a single time Maya could remember, at any point in her life...did Mr. Norbert leave the house in his car and forget to lock the door to his attic study.

But on the day when this story starts, that is exactly what Mr. Norbert did.

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Maya knew that day would be unusual.

Something unusual was happening even by the time she tumbled and stomped her way down the crooked staircase for breakfast.

She knew this, because Mr. Norbert muttered more than usual under his breath, all the way through breakfast.

He ate his eggs and crunched his toast, all the while mumbling about numbers and tapping the glass of the window to whistle at the little brown birds with the red heads that twittered and hopped on the branches outside the glass.

He tried to talk to the birds, too. Maya heard him explain in a low, serious voice a very difficult-sounding equation to one very confused-looking red-tufted bird. Taking the opportunity to smear twice as much jam on her toast as usual, since she knew Mr. Norbert wouldn't notice, Maya watched Mr. Norbert frown and mumble more numbers as the bird cheeped at him and hopped around on its perch.

Maya doubted Mr. Norbert would have noticed if she decided to eat a whole cake for breakfast, right in front of him.

Mr. Norbert only forgot the birds couldn’t answer him when he was thinking about some very very hard problem that he couldn't quite solve. When he put his breakfast plate with his half-eaten eggs inside the television cabinet and muttered to the cat to keep an eye on things for him, Maya knew it must be a very difficult problem indeed.

The cat, Percy, looked at bit startled.

Mr. Norbert then went upstairs, where Maya heard a great deal of stomping and muttering and glass and metal objects clanging about. She was just trying to decide if she should go outside for awhile and see what Damien was up to, when the phone rang.

When it did, Mr. Norbert came crashing down the stairs, his oval face looking a bit pinched behind his thick eyeglasses.

Don't answer it! he shouted.

He came to a skidding, sliding stop in front of the low table where the old-fashioned phone sat. But Mr. Norbert didn't answer it either. He stared at the phone for a full minute, even though it was quite clearly ringing.

When Maya moved to get it for him, he waved his hands frantically, blocking her way.

Don't touch it! he cried out.

Maya watched, a little alarmed as Mr. Norbert picked up the black receiver gingerly with his fingers, holding slightly away from his ear and mouth. After whoever was on the other end identified themselves, Mr. Norbert looked enormously relieved. He also looked as if he'd been expecting someone else entirely and was very, very happy to be wrong.

Maya watched him, puzzled, as he mumbled into the black plastic receiver as he walked up the stairs, his hand held over the talking piece. He tripped a few times on his untied shoelaces, nearly falling down in his haste to get back to the attic.

She waited for a little while at the bottom of the staircase, listening to the silence.

Then, just as quickly, the commotion started up again. She heard doors opening and shutting and objects landing heavily on the floor with a BUMP and some that skidded over the wood...

Not long after that, Mr. Norbert left the house.

Maya watched him tumble back down the stairs. Putting the phone on the coat rack next to his rain boots, he squished his Sunday hat on his head and pulled on his big black coat. He was still mumbling to himself as he walked out the door.

He came back a few seconds later for his shoes and his keys. Then he wandered out again, running into the door jamb on his way out and calling out for her to be a good girl.

As soon as she finished waving goodbye from the window of the crooked house, Maya ran upstairs as fast as her feet would carry her.

Truthfully, she did the same thing every time Mr. Norbert left the house for more than a second, (even just to walk down the driveway to get the mail). She sprinted to the top of the second staircase on the third floor, and checked the handle of the attic door.

Maya fully expected the door to be locked. The attic door was always locked, but she tried it every time anyway, thinking that one day...one day...it just had to open. She'd started the ritual so long ago she couldn't remember not doing it. It was like touching the roof of the car when going over railroad tracks, or jumping over cracks in the pavement, or making a wish after finding a penny on the sidewalk. It just had to be done.

So Maya didn't expect the door to open.

When it did, she nearly fell down the staircase herself.

For a moment, Maya didn't even go inside. She just stared at her fingers on the door handle, and the open door just beyond them.

She really couldn't believe he'd actually left the door unlocked. Mr. Norbert never did that, no matter how distracted he was with his work, no matter how many cooking recipes he tried to explain to the cat, or how many times he put his keys into the refrigerator or wore a tea cozy on his head, thinking it was his good hat. Mr. Norbert was very, very careful when it came to making sure no one could get into his attic work space...especially when he wasn't there.

Opening the door carefully, Maya poked her head into the opening and looked around.

She didn't know what she expected to see. She didn't know what she expected to happen, either. Maybe for an alarm to go off, loud enough that Mr. Norbert might hear it and come rushing back. Maybe for a big cloud of bats to come flying at her from the ceiling, screaming at her to stay out. Maybe some kind of invisible gas that would knock her out, leaving her sleeping on the