The Worst Woods Yet!

"Wowzers," said Snowball.

Her face was about a centimeter away from the Looney Tunes-esque bump growing — and glowing, red — out of the top of my head.

And to make matters more painful, she was poking it.

"Ow ow! Could you please stop touching it already?"

"Sorry."

Well, at least she backed off.

And as for me, I was lucky I had gotten off with just a lump, even if it was huge and throbbing with dull pain. After I got accidentally tossed by Harry, I had gone sailing till I, miraculously, hit something soft enough not to do any permanent damage.

But still hard enough to thump this lump onto my head. And boy, was it painful and raw.

Anyway, Fence and Snowball had managed to regroup with me a minute later, and now we were here. Wherever "here" was. It was shady and cool — a minor blessing considering the top of my head felt like it had a heartbeat at the moment — but I didn't like the look of our surroundings. What even were these things?

The strange, softish structure I had collided literally headfirst with wasn't the only one of its kind. More were all around — an entire forest of them, practically. They were green and smooth to the touch, about as big around as two people standing shoulder to shoulder, or just one really fat guy. They were jutting up out of the sand at intervals, forming a sort of maze that I sincerely hoped we wouldn't be lost in once we started to look for a way out, and up above the stalks tilted to the side as if under their own weight and broadened into disc-like structures that were forming a sort of canopy. That was what was shading this whole area.

It was like we had stepped into a different dimension. This was like no beach I had ever seen before.

"Great," I muttered, "just great. Of course we'd wind up here of all places — wherever here even is. This is probably the most cursed part of this entire cursed beach."

I usually wasn't one for superstition, but after the stupid volleyball fiasco, I was becoming a believer, and fast. Today was quickly turning into a bad joke, and apparently, I was the punch line.

"Never thought I'd say it," I said, "but this beach probably really is cursed, after everything that's happened."

"Or maybe," Fence chimed in cheerily, "maybe god just hates you."

"You are not helping, man."

Fence just shrugged and laughed. At me, I guess. Stupid Fence. I didn't really blame him though. I'd probably laugh too in his shoes.

"Everything that's happened so far, you mean," Snowball added. She was over by one of the thick green stalks, examining it or something. "We're not leaving till sundown, you know."

Yeah, we'd see about that. I knew there was no point in arguing with her right now, though. So instead I just asked, "What are you doing?"

"Checking out these crazy plants, what else? Come look."

I took a look over her shoulder and saw that she was inspecting the green stalks with a magnifying glass and taking some samples with what looked like a scalpel, scraping pieces of the green skin into little plastic bags.

"Fascinating!"

"What, a bunch of stupid trees?" I made a show of kicking one of them. Too hard. Damn — forgot I wasn't wearing any shoes. "Ow!"

"They're not stupid," Snowball said matter-of-factly. "And they're not trees either."

"Then what are they?"

"I don't know. But see how the stalks widen towards the top? And then flatten out?"

"Yeah, dude." Fence had his neck craned so far back he looked like he was about to fall over any second. I hoped he knew I wasn't about to catch him. "No way these are trees. But then, what are they?"

"I have no idea!" Leave it to Snowball to get excited over a mystery — in this case, a probably cursed mystery.

A probably cursed mystery that was probably going to spell bad news for me and no one else, at least if the track record so far could be trusted. I just knew this was all the curse's doing, and that things were probably about to take a turn for the even more facepalmingly dumb, with me at the epicenter of it all.

But then I thought: was this really one curse? Singular? Was whatever had nearly shot me to the top of every "most comical deaths" list of all time the same thing as what had created this crazy forest growing straight out of the sand?

When I sat back to think about it for a second, it just didn't make sense.

How could one curse be so — to use a word my little sister taught me — variegated?

I voiced my concerns on the topic.

"Maybe it's all one big mega curse, dude," Fence offered. "Ever think of that? After all, we are at—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know already. Waxing Bay, the most cursed beach in the world."

Don't remind me.

"Or maybe," Snowball suggested, "this beach is like one big congregation of a whole bunch of little curses. Like a big herd of them or something!"

"Now you're making it sound like the curse is alive, with a mind of its own."

A scary thought. And if that was the case, I was probably more toast than an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet that ran out of every ingredient but bread.

Seriously, what had I done to deserve this?

I mean, aside from how crappily I had been treating Matchstick lately.

Yeah, it was almost funny. Despite Matchstick having nothing to do with any of this — despite him not even being here — I just couldn't get him out of my head. It was like the thought of him was stuck in my skull, all gummed up in my gray matter alongside a heaping helping of guilt.

Matchstick… my one and only pet genetically engineered chupacabra… I wondered what he'd think of all of this. I wondered what he'd do if he were here right now.

Considering there was no shortage of it to go around, he'd probably dump a few chupacabra pawfuls of sand down my underwear like he did that time I made the mistake of cutting through the sandbox when I was walking him in the park.

Suddenly, Fence snapped me out of my pet owner's funk with a, "Hey, look at that, dudes!"

So me and Snowball did.

It was a strange and jagged path that extended into the distance, a lightning bolt of unforested sand cut out of the trees.

Had that been here before?

Better question: was there even the slightest chance we weren't going to follow it brazenly and with zero precaution despite not knowing where it led or what we'd find there? Was there any chance we'd stop for the half-second it would take to remember we were at the most cursed beach in the entire world and this sketchy path through these sketchy woods couldn't possibly, conceivably, at all take us anywhere good?

The looks of excitement on Fence and Snowball's faces told me what I already knew: not a chance in hell!

To be continued!