Misadventures in Not Space

By Hiphung Lam

From the UNACCLAIMED AUTHOR of two SHORT STORIES YOU HAVE NEVER READ comes a tale of four friends (eventually five, if you count the extra kid) trying to find each other, trying to get home, and trying to figure out just what the noodle is NOT SPACE. Kyan, Zoe, Amanda, and Oliver embark on an epic adventure that not only leads to self-discovery

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hiphung Lam
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578756813

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Misadventures in Not Space

based on

Pollyanna’s dream

MISADVENTURES IN NOT SPACE

Copyright © 2020 by Hiphung Lam

Dream Notes

Copyright © 2004 by Suh-Yung Pollyanna Lee

All rights reserved.

Cover art & design by Sarah Sheikh Bridge

www.misadventuresinnotspace.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted for digital viewing—i.e., some illustrations have been relocated and others omitted to allow the text to flow without too much disruption. (This makes us very sad, but it had to be done.)

ISBN: 978-0-578-75680-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-0-578-75681-3 (eBook)

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chp 1 – The Mission

Chp 2 – Veering Left

Chp 3 – The Pizza Started It

Chp 4 – Tricks in the Night

Chp 5 – Falling Down a Window

Chp 6 – The Padded Room

Chp 7 – Opera for Children

Chp 8 – Stranger in My House

Chp 9 – When Nature Calls

Chp 10 – Blast from the Past

Chp 11 – Giant Extraction

Chp 12 – Separation Anxiety

Chp 13 – While You Were Sleeping

Chp 14 – Facing Your Fears

Chp 15 – The Karate Kid

Chp 16 – The Hole

Chp 17 – Oh, Chute

Chp 18 – Three Eyes

Chp 19 – Half of Zero

Chp 20 – On the Outs

Chp 21 – Control

Chp 22 – The Collector

Chp 23 – Sleeping Giants

Chp 24 – History

Chp 25 – Escapism

Chp 26 – Return to Sender

Chp 27 – Releasing the Ghost

Chp 28 – Boom

Chp 29 – Happy Accidents

Chp 30 – A Tale of Two Windows

Chp 31 – You Can’t Go Home Again

Chp 32 – Cue the Montage

Chp 33 – Into the Blue

Pollyanna’s Dream Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For

Mom & Dad

Trinh, Kieu, Long, and David

and all the black sheep...

1

- The Mission -

Kyan Pufferly had only one mission in life: to never ever, never-never ever, never-never ever-EVER become his father. Ever.

His father—Mr. Peter Pythagoras Pufferly—was quite possibly the dullest man on Earth.

Accountant.

His father was an accountant.

Oh, the horror of that day when Kyan was a mere lad of five, the day his father revealed and explained just what it was he went off to do every day—the feeling of total and utter disappointment still haunted him. That was the day Kyan’s big, beautiful head of curly auburn hair deflated, becoming stick straight and fading to a murky moth-brown. His parents never could figure out what had happened.

As Kyan understood it, his father’s job consisted of sitting at a boxy desk in a boxy office and looking at numbers—LOTS of numbers—on a boxy computer. He analyzed these numbers using various combinations of charts, graphs, reports, and spreadsheets. And his tool of choice? An adding machine. That’s a calculator that prints out all those numbers. Snoooooooze-fest!

When Kyan asked his father why in the whole-wide-alarmingly-gigantic world he had chosen to become an accountant, Mr. Pufferly had simply said, I wanted to be like my pop when I grew up. That was it. No other attempt at a reasonable explanation. Kyan could not for the life of him understand how anyone could have such a sentiment when their father was an accountant. Ugh. And to make matters worse, Mr. Pufferly’s non-working hours were filled with equally uninspiring activities. At any given moment, if you gave him four guesses, Kyan could tell you what his father was doing—because his father was only ever doing one of four things:

Working in the endless sea of numbers.

Reading the paper or watching the evening news on TV. (Mr. Pufferly voraciously consumed massive amounts of news—primarily focused on business, science, and technology.)

Tinkering with one of the windows in the house. (For some reason, one or another window always had something wrong with it.)

Watching baseball on TV.

The only one that sparked any kind of interest in Kyan was number four, but even then, his father never took him to any actual games. In fact, his father hardly ever left the house except to go to work or to buy another doohickey to fix whichever window was having problems that month.

Kyan would have turned to his mother for some inspiration, but unfortunately her interest factor was only a piddly smidgen above his father’s. Mrs. Poppy Orion Pufferly was a nurse—not bad as an initial jumping off point—but she specialized in Labor and Delivery. One would think this involved working with your hands and mailing stuff, but no, it had to do with babies—babies being born to be exact. Kyan was fine with babies, he just wasn’t particularly interested in them. Mrs. Pufferly would come home excited, bursting about what happened at work that day, but most of what Kyan gleaned from her news was either, So-and-so had her baby today! or We waited and waited, but no baby yet!

Apparently, because his mother’s job was so immensely exciting and intense (her words, not his), she tended toward the opposite end of the spectrum with her free time: knitting and gardening and other meditative activities. Sometimes, as he watched her doing these things, Kyan couldn’t help but think she was preparing for retirement. He didn’t have any grandparents with whom he could verify this information (Mr. Pufferly’s parents died before Kyan was born, and Mrs. Pufferly was an orphan who never got adopted), but he had visited his friend’s retired grandmother once, and she seemed to be occupied with similar activities.

Kyan had to admit, he was quite impressed by one aspect of his mother’s gardening: Mrs. Pufferly had a knack for experimenting and was continually splicing different plants together or cross-breeding to produce hybrids. At this very moment, there was a tree in their yard heavy with oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruit—all four on one tree! But even so, his mother’s horticultural prowess didn’t make up for the fact that both his parents would be voted leaders in the Society of Boredom Inducers, if such a society ever existed. However, belonging to a society would imply that they socialized with other people, which would be false. His parents didn’t have many friends, preferring to keep mostly to themselves—another fact Kyan found quite disheartening.

Instead of rose-colored glasses (which cause a person to perceive everything as great, or at least hunky-dory), Kyan began seeing everything through beige-colored glasses (beige makes everything blah-blah-blech). For example, every time Kyan looked in the mirror, what he noticed (besides his wretchedly dull hair) was the yawn-inducing plainness of his face. And it merely got plainer and plainer with each subsequent viewing. The three freckles on his right cheek that once formed an amazing equilateral triangle were now just regular old freckles lost in creamy beige space. (Ah! Beige!) His once cute as a button! nose transformed into a very plain, undeniably bland, squishy pug nose. And his once mesmerizing caramel eyes looked darker somehow (Did someone just call them light brown?! Such ordinary descriptors!), and was it just him or did they look a little irregular? Nope, not irregular. They were equally sized: not too big, not too small, just normal—plain, like the rest of his face.

Even now, at the hefty age of nine, the disappointment (which consumed his soul and made him feel hopelessly hollow inside) showed no sign of subsiding. Kyan could not foresee a point in time that it ever would. His parents led wretchedly boring lives, following wretchedly boring routines, and somehow this was leaking all over his own daily activities.

But Kyan was determined to change this unjust hand dealt by the cosmos (He would not go down in a burning ball of boringness without a fight!) and constantly looked for ways to create a hiccup in the tedium. However, nothing seemed to work. He begged his mother to perm his hair, which she eventually did, but the curl wouldn’t hold. After two agonizing hours, all he got was the same stick straight hair, along with the putrid chemical smell of a hair salon. And even worse, he now had a cowlick that wouldn’t cooperate for all the hair gel in the world.

One time, he tried to use his pogo stick to bounce off the roof and into the pool (while the babysitter sat glued to the TV), but his father came home just moments before take-off and forced him to come down the regular way. Needless to say, the babysitter was out of a job that day, and Kyan went back to being the boy who did NOT perform a death-defying feat. Not impressive at all.

In his latest attempt, he managed to trap an entire hive of bees in an old fish tank using a giant world atlas as a lid. He miraculously accomplished this without incurring any injuries and was very pleased to think he would have the most unique pets in the entire neighborhood. And free honey! But this little escapade into beekeeping ended about four hours later when his mother found the tank in his room, shrieked as if the thousands (Yes, thousands!) of angry bees weren’t encased in glass, took the whole thing outside, dumped it, and ran. She then proceeded to remind him that bees can’t make honey, or for that matter survive, if they can’t go out and collect pollen. He had forgotten that one minor detail.

Kyan’s well of ideas eventually trickled dry, and he teetered on the verge of accepting the inevitability of an unremarkable existence. He would just have to accept the fact that his father was the dullest person on the face of the planet, his mother came in a close second, and it really was true that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. This depressing thought was in the process of crushing its octopus tentacles around Kyan’s already shrunken soul when one fateful night, everything took a most unexpected turn.

2

- Veering Left -

It looked to be a quiet Saturday evening, like every other Saturday evening in the Pufferly household. Mr. Pufferly sat in his favorite armchair catching up on last week’s newspapers, and Mrs. Pufferly sat in her rocking chair knitting her ten-thousand-eight-hundred-and-eleventh scarf. She had never found the need to graduate on to more complicated articles of clothing because the mindless construction of a thirty-foot scarf is therapeutic. That’s what she would say whenever anyone asked her. What? Am I trying to win a knitting prize? she would add, if they kept pressing. All her patients at Hopensuch Hospital went home with a personalized fresh-off-the-knitting-needles neck wrapping.

On this particular night, Kyan was lying on his back on the thinning living room rug, repeatedly tossing his father’s favorite baseball up into the air and catching it just inches before it reached his nose. Mr. Pufferly used to tell him how, when he was Kyan’s age, he was wildly obsessed with baseball. He would play every day after school with his friends, and sometimes even by himself when no one else could come out to play. Looking at his father now, a man who hardly ever left the house for anything other than work or errands, Kyan found this extremely hard to believe.

Suddenly, a loud jangling reverberated throughout the house, shattering the sleepy monotony into microscopic bits. Everyone jumped a little. Well, except Kyan, who sat straight up—the baseball had slipped through his fingers and landed squarely on his nose.

YOW! he yelped, rubbing his nose furiously.

The jangling started up again, and it took a second for them to realize it was the telephone—they weren’t accustomed to getting phone calls on Saturday evenings.

Mrs. Pufferly sprang into action. She vanished through a doorway and was in the kitchen before the half-knitted scarf could even plop silently into the yarn basket.

Hello? ... Nancy? ... Wait, what? ... Slow down, I can’t understa— Oh! Oh my! Yes, OK, we’ll be right out!

The receiver clanged loudly into its cradle as she whooshed back into the living room.

Nancy’s gone into labor! They’re right outside! Let’s go! She whooshed out another door, this one leading to the front entryway.

Wha—? Oh dear! exclaimed Mr. Pufferly, bumbling out of his chair.

Kyan and his father stumbled into the hallway as Mrs. Pufferly opened the front door. A tidal wave of people and sleeping bags poured in from the porch. The wave consisted of Oliver Lee (Kyan’s best friend), Amanda Lee (Oliver’s barely-older sister), and Zoe Something-or-other (Amanda’s best friend). Drawing up the rear was Mrs. Lee, the aforementioned Nancy and (fun fact) childhood friend of Mr. Pufferly. Kyan had a vague notion of what ‘going into labor’ meant, but all the yelling and fast talking was quite unexpected.

Oh my! exclaimed Mrs. Pufferly. Nancy, we were coming to the car, you didn’t have to get out.

Oh, that’s all right! huffed Mrs. Lee. There’s an issue to be addressed—an issue! And I think so much better on my feet!

The two families had planned it all out in advance: the children would stay with Mr. Pufferly while Mrs. Pufferly accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Lee to the hospital. Simple, right? The only unexpected element was the presence of Zoe, who just happened to be sleeping over on this fateful Saturday night. Nobody saw this as a big deal, but apparently it was…well, according to Mrs. Lee.

I’m COMING! Mrs. Lee yelled to her husband, who was sitting in the car, honking the horn. I’m so sorry, Peter, she said, turning her attention to Mr. Pufferly.

She clasped a somewhat alarmed-looking Zoe tightly by the shoulders in front of her very-bulging belly. The poor girl was getting shaken to and fro, bumping into The Belly as Mrs. Lee spoke.

"I can’t believe I’m asking another favor—and now of all times! But they were having a sleepover, and she can’t go home tonight because there’s no one there, and I have no idea what else to do or where else to take her…"

Please, don’t worry about it, Nance. It’s no trouble at all. Mr. Pufferly attempted to release Zoe from Mrs. Lee’s death grip, but her hands stayed firm, showing no signs of setting the frightened child free.

"It’s just that we told Allen and Alicia that we’d take Zoe tonight, and so they’ve gone off on a romantic getaway. Otherwise, we would have taken her straight home."

Zoe’s head wobbled as she bumped against The Belly for the sixth time. Kyan noticed that Mrs. Lee was emphasizing more than normal, and sometimes it seemed like the emphasis was on the wrong word. Perhaps this was a byproduct of going into labor.

It’s fine, really, insisted Mr. Pufferly.

"Are you sure? Because we can find some alternate arrangement, I’m sure. I just have to think…"

NANCY!! Mr. Lee yelled from the idling station wagon.

"ALL RIGHT!!! My goodness, you’d think he’s the one having the baby. So, you’re really OK taking Zoe too?"

Yes, of course.

Everything will be fine, Nancy, said Mrs. Pufferly. We really should be getting you to the hospital.

"Yes, OK, I just wanted to make sure that it isn’t too much of an imposition."

Not at all, said Mr. Pufferly. Please, don’t worry about it. It’s not a problem.

Yes, let’s not worry about anything except bringing your new bundle of joy into the world. And even then, let’s not worry because it’s unnecessary anxiety, and that’s completely unproductive, said Mrs. Pufferly. She gently encouraged Mrs. Lee out the front door and down the walkway.

"All right then. Good night! Thank you so much! Be good, children!"

And with that, the car door slammed shut, and the station wagon sped off into the night as Mr. Pufferly and the children waved in the glow of the porch light.

3

- The Pizza Started It -

So, kids, what shall we do tonight?

Kyan hoped his dad wouldn’t come up with some wretchedly dull activity and embarrass him in front of the others.

They were sprawled out in the living room, sitting quietly: Mr. Pufferly in his armchair, the girls on the sofa, Oliver on the pile of sleeping bags, and Kyan on the floor. The girls looked at each other. Oliver started picking at some melted fabric on one of the bags where it apparently had had a close encounter with a campfire. Kyan scanned the floor, looking for his father’s baseball.

I know! continued Mr. Pufferly. What about a movie and some gosh-golly greasy pizza? Does that sound good?

Kyan exhaled in relief. At least it was a run-of-the-mill, utterly normal suggestion. It even had the possibility of being considered fairly decent, but then…

"How about Bradley Boo Boo’s Big Adventure in the Ghost Corral?"

Kyan couldn’t help but slap his forehead and groan. He hadn’t meant to, but it came out quite loudly.

All right, said Mr. Pufferly, "it sounds like we’ll have to work on the movie