Illustrations by Alison Berry
Guest art by Alice Zheng
Episode 5: Pitaya
Hana was uncharacteristically weary of what she chose to eat at breakfast and lunch. It was all thanks to the previous night’s stay in the bathroom as the Indian food’s guest of honour, a night she would rather squeeze out of her memory altogether. She refused orange juice at breakfast simply because its colour reminded her of the vindaloo, and during lunch at school she dared not glance at anything with even a speck of spice. She ended up with a small carton of milk and a deep red apple, while James and Henri devoured tuna fish sandwiches. Apparently James had not been as affected by the Indian food as she had been.
During lunchtime, as always, they sat in the shade of a large tree.
‘I guess your stomach is made out of iron,’ Hana commented, prodding James’ stomach with the stem of her apple.
‘Why? Because I’m eating a tuna fish sandwich?’
‘Of course not! Because of that vindaloo yesterday.’
‘What’s this about vindaloo?’ Henri asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ James explained. ‘Hana and I just saw a floating bowl of vindaloo, is all.’ He then took a nonchalant bite out of his sandwich as though he had just delivered the dullest news in the world.
Henri stopped eating. ‘You know, I can gladly accept our friend the river monster, Hana’s talking cat, and those lobsters that tried to eat me, but I think I have to draw the line at a floating curry dish. What did it do?’
‘Floated, mostly,’ James said between bites.
‘And you could see through it like a ghost,’ Hana added. ‘And then it vanished like a ghost.’
‘I suppose that’s enough to put you off your lunch,’ Henri said.
Hana nodded, giving her tiny carton of milk and the browning bits of her half-eaten apple a disparaging look. While James merrily chewed, she related the events leading up to the floating bowl to Henri, who listened with interest despite finding the whole thing absolutely silly. Hana would have found it silly as well if her bowels were not still smarting from the previous night’s marathon of movements. Finishing her apple, she left the core by the tree and gulped down the rest of her milk before breaking down the carton and folding it into an airplane. She then flew it to Henri, who caught it by the nose and set it beside him.
‘So you think it was warning you about your little digestion trouble last night?’ Henri asked.
‘I thought so until I found out James got a free ticket out of what I went through,’ Hana replied. ‘Now I’m thinking it was warning us of something else, but what? You know, I don’t think I told you about my river monster conspiracy theory, which could be related.’
‘Do tell.’
She was about to, too, but then she saw the look of surprise shattering the indifferent mask that had been covering James’ face for the entire lunch period. Realising she was about to inadvertently reveal her dandruff secret to Henri, she bit her tongue and then jumped up, holding her mouth as she ran to the water fountain to soothe the pain. She lapped up the water eagerly as Henri rushed to her side, asking her if she was okay; she nodded, letting the cold water splash against her lips and nose. James remained seated as he popped the last corner of his sandwich into his mouth, and then he dusted his hands of crumbs before joining the others. Hana stopped the spray from the fountain and, standing with her arms akimbo, poked her tongue out as she tried to look down at the wounded muscle.
‘Very attractive,’ James said as he mimicked her stance. Hana managed to stick her tongue out even further at him.
‘Now, what’s this about a theory?’ Henri asked.
‘Oh, uh,’ she stammered, trying to think of a new one; she found that pulling ideas out of her head was a lot harder than pulling out dandruff. ‘I left it at home.’ She then glanced pleadingly at James, now standing with his arms crossed, and he obliged by turning to Henri and nodding.
Henri raised a suspicious eyebrow but did not press her any further on the subject. The three of them looked at each other in silence until the bell, that great moderator of awkward conversations, rang out, sending them to their individual classes. Hana had to struggle to keep from running to hers, instead opting to walk at a noticeably impatient pace.
Her gym class took place indoors so as to make use of the school’s equipment, which had gone untouched due to the sunny weather. All of the girls groaned, wishing they could go outside instead, but their teacher stipulated that a few days of indoor activities were required before they could return to the outdoor ones. Anyone who had a problem with the school guidelines, she said, could take it up with the headmaster; suddenly the students found themselves utterly fascinated by the indoor equipment and split off into different groups to use it. Hana went with a group of three other girls to practice shooting hoops.
The girls were Pitaya, whose skin was the very same startling colour of the fruit she was named after thanks to her love of the sun; Sara, the typical bookish type who preferred to study the mechanics of things rather than actually utilising them; and Bobby, who generally put too much effort into everything and exhausted everyone around her.
Hana taught the others what she knew about throwing a ball, bending her knees and using her hips, and Bobby and Sara followed her lead with disastrous results. Bobby threw the ball so hard that it bounced off the backboard and landed in the other side of the gym, interrupting a game of badminton and thus causing angry shouts to sting the ears of the four girls. Face flushed from the unwanted attention of the upset badminton players and biting her lip, Sara felt her knees go wobbly when it was her turn and, just as she was about to throw, closed her eyes and turned her head away from the ball – as if by not acknowledging it she could make it disappear. Instead of disappearing, however, it bounced off a wall and rolled into the small court of the badminton players, who looked at it in disgust before signalling the four girls to retrieve it by using obscene gestures.
Since it was her turn next, Pitaya got the ball back for them and, while returning to the net, let the ball fly up effortlessly from her fingers as if she were releasing a bird; the ball fell through the net with a satisfying swish and landed on the gym’s reflective yellow floor, bouncing to Hana’s feet.
‘Okay, new rule: do whatever Pitaya tells us to do,’ Hana said. ‘I think she might be a better teacher at this than me. Not that what I had told you was wrong, though.’
Bobby and Sara nodded and Pitaya, suddenly appearing modest, picked the ball up from the floor and looked at it shyly. ‘That was just a fluke,’ she said, rather unconvincingly. ‘It slipped from my fingers.’
Hana waved away her words. ‘C’mon, if you know something about basketball then you should probably share. Think about Bobby and Sara’s marks – do you want them to fail gym? Do you? Think about how humiliating that would be! Uh, not that you guys are bad at gym, or anything.’ She winked at them and gave an encouraging thumbs-up.
‘Okay, well, what I do is I try to let go of all my inhibitions and not worry about what other people think of me. Then I let my body turn into an elastic, or rather I think of it as an elastic, so that no part of me feels stiff, and that way I have more control of the ball; when my arms become elastics they can grab the ball no matter where it is. And then when I’m ready to shoot, I make an invisible line with my eyes, going from the ball to the net, and then I just throw. For some reason this works for me a lot of the time.’ She looked at Bobby and Sara, who were looking at her with half-opened mouths and eyes shining with wonder. Then she turned to Hana, who looked awfully proud for some reason. ‘It’s all silly!’ Pitaya suddenly exclaimed. ‘You made me say something silly! I can’t believe it; I can’t believe I let you do that.’
Bobby and Sara were at her side in a heartbeat, offering words of consolation and pats on the arm. There was no room for Hana so she remained where she was. ‘That’s not true at all! What you said isn’t silly – I don’t think anyone here would ever call such great advice “silly”. You already know more about sports than most people I know, which is that sports are a mental game as much as they are a physical one. I’ll be taking your advice, and I’m sure Bobby and Sara will too. Right, guys?’
The girls nodded, and Pitaya looked down at the basketball, smiling.
‘Okay, let’s get back to practicing,’ Hana said. They all took Pitaya’s advice but missed the net anyway.
When gym ended they dispersed and returned to their homerooms for the last class of the day. Before the class began, Hana told James and Henri about Pitaya’s exceptional basketball skills, and learned that Henri had a thing for Pitaya when he blushed at the mere mention of her name.
‘What’s going on there?’ Hana asked him.
‘What do you mean?’ Henri asked back in confusion.
‘Those red cheeks,’ she said, pointing. ‘What’s that all about?’
James started laughing, and before Henri could defend himself the teacher coughed and started up the day’s lesson, which was on how to do taxes. Everyone had to come up with a job and determine what their wages would be: Hana was a poor astronaut, James was a rich singer and Henri was a modestly-paid baseball player. James asked Hana if she would mind her spacesuit being filled with dandruff all the time and she punched him in return, asking if his moan of pain was the best his singing could get. Nobody questioned Henri’s career choice.
The rest of the class was spent filling out forms until everyone decided that they never wanted to become adults. Hana was more exhausted from it than she had been from anything she did in gym class, and when it was over she let out an exaggerated sigh. The teacher collected their papers, which the students were more than eager to let up.
‘So, about those cheeks,’ Hana said to Henri after class ended. The three of them lingered in the room to avoid the rush of human traffic exiting the school.
‘What about them?’ Henri asked.
‘Oh, you know,’ Hana said, grinning widely.
Henri gave her a flat look.
‘You like Pitaya!’ she exclaimed.
Henri bolted out of his chair and looked around him to make sure they were the only ones left in the room.
‘You’re not even defending yourself!’ Hana said, enjoying the situation all too much. It was not often that Henri became visibly flustered; in fact, Hana could not think of a single instance of such a thing. She found it almost adorable.
‘Okay, be quiet,’ Henri asked. ‘I think of Pitaya as a particularly good athlete with respectable dimensions, nothing more.’
‘“Respectable dimensions”?’ James asked, laughing. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means he thinks she’s hot,’ Hana said triumphantly.
Henri dropped down onto his chair, leaned into his desk and buried his face in his hands. ‘This isn’t happening,’ he said to himself.
‘It’s definitely happening,’ Hana said. ‘The impenetrable fortress of Henri is revealed to have a heart; I think this is cause for celebration.’
‘Really? Here I was hoping it would be cause for ridicule,’ James said wryly. ‘But any excuse for karaoke is good enough for me.’
Together they grabbed Henri and dragged him out of the school. As they headed to the bike racks they came across Pitaya, who had planned on biking home, and Hana asked her to join them, continuously glancing at Henri as she did so. Henri had gone back to his cool demeanour and appeared to be completely unaffected by the invitation of Pitaya, but Hana knew more than anybody that appearances can be deceiving.
After thinking about it for a bit, apparently weighing in some of the other options she had available for the night, Pitaya agreed to go with them on the condition that she stopped at home first to change and tell her parents; she said it would be a nice change of pace from her nightly jogging. Hana wrote the directions to the karaoke lounge on a scrap piece of paper, folded it and handed it to Pitaya. They waved at her when she rode away and then mounted their bikes, Hana sitting with James.
‘You know, you can be a real monster sometimes,’ James said to Hana behind him, grinning.
She shrugged as he started pedalling them away from the bike rack. ‘I guess I learn from the best,’ she said. Then she called out to Henri, who was riding down the other side of the street. ‘Are you okay, Henri? We’re only having fun, you know!’
‘I know,’ Henri called back. ‘Don’t worry about it. Karaoke’s on me.’ He then raced off ahead of them.
James looked behind him at Hana, who shrugged, and then speeded after Henri; their bikes cut through the wind like machetes, and they flew down hills until they pierced the very heart of the city. Hana kept telling him to slow down, but James said he was not about to lose to Henri in a race. When Hana explained that they were not racing he ignored her. The trees and houses became green and yellow blurs.
Henri made it to the lounge first.
‘You cheated!’ James jokingly accused when he and Hana arrived. ‘I saw the Game Genie sticking out the back of your bike; don’t tell me otherwise.’
They locked up their bikes and sat on the curb in front of the karaoke lounge, where they waited for Pitaya. Hana formed a pattern of teasing Henri about Pitaya, then promising she would stop, and then teasing him again whenever there was an awkward silence. James, not seeming to particularly care about the whole Pitaya aspect of things, challenged Henri to a race up the hill once their karaoke session was over; Henri answered with a shrug, which James took to mean that he accepted the challenge.
Apparently James was adamant about maintaining his one-sided rivalry with Henri, after having lost out to him for the school baseball team, losing out to him on various tests and now having lost to him in a race that existed solely in his mind. Hana did not get it – it was like James was trying to impress her, since she was there with him for all of those sore moments, but that was less possible than . . . than what? A river monster that managed to infiltrate their school? Lobsters that kidnapped Henri in order to sacrifice him to their god? Pulling large objects made out of dandruff from her head?
She shook her head, trying to dispel the thoughts like the evil spirits they were, and sent dandruff all over the parking space in front of them. James, grossed out by all of the flakes, stood up so that he did not have to look at it. Henri checked his watch.
‘I hope she didn’t get lost,’ he said.
‘What? Why would she get lost?’ Hana asked, shocked. ‘My directions were perfect!’
‘Well, maybe they were too perfect,’ James said.
‘What does that even mean?’ Hana asked.
Their doubts were soon put to rest. Pitaya arrived in a sky-blue car driven by a man who was obviously her father, if for no other reason than because his skin had the same stunning hue. He greeted the trio very formally despite never leaving his car: he introduced himself to them one at a time, shaking each of their hands through the open window and wishing them a good time. When Pitaya got out of the car it was like a revelation: she was wearing a very pretty, very red dress which made her out to be far more ladylike than her athletic nature would have people believe. The trio, still in their school uniforms, felt like dirty messes in comparison. Pitaya kissed her father on the cheek before he drove away.
‘Looks like you’re still the biggest boy in the group,’ James whispered to Hana out of the corner of his mouth. She kicked the back of his leg in response, as if by doing so she was proving him wrong.
‘I’ve never been to karaoke before,’ Pitaya said nervously.
‘Oh, it’s easy,’ Hana said. ‘All you have to do is make a fool out of yourself in front of a bunch of people. I guess it’d be hard to do in front of strangers, but not with friends. Actually, now that I think of it, you’ve never been introduced to these guys, have you?’
Pitaya shook her head.
‘Okay, well, the guy who’s holding a baseball bat for no reason is James. He’s probably the most musically inclined person in our group. And I’m sure you know Henri from the baseball team; he’s almost famous in a way. Go on, shake his hand.’
Pitaya shook his rough, strong hand. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ she said.
‘Likewise.’
‘Wow! Was that a spark I saw?’ Hana exclaimed. ‘Did you see the spark, James?’
‘I must’ve missed it,’ James said.
They went into the lounge and Henri paid for a room, putting down money for a standard one hour session. Apparently he was feeling particularly generous as he paid for pops for everyone as well, and they were all amazed by how free he was being with his money. He explained that his grandparents had slipped the money into his pocket without his knowledge or consent, since they had repeatedly offered him the money as a gift while he was visiting them but he declined the offer each time, saying that they probably needed it more than he did. Now that he had the money he might as well use it to make others happy, he said, since he certainly would not be if he used it on himself. Pitaya thought it was very noble of him and Hana elbowed James’ knowingly in the ribs at her reaction, while James, nursing his side and frowning, wondered why Hana kept hitting him. They went into their room.
‘This is where the magic happens,’ Hana said, plopping herself down on the soft leather couch. They set their drinks on the table and arranged themselves comfortably around it, sitting in the order of Pitaya, Henri, Hana and James. Then Hana stood up. ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ she said after downing half her pop. She dimmed the lights and set the karaoke machine to random.
Everyone was entranced by her performance of Fish Song despite not being able to understand any of the words; the chorus was like a mysterious call beckoning them to another world. Whether she was singing in gibberish or actually following the words on the screen did not matter. James went up next, performing a rousing rendition of Bicycle Race that Hana sung along with. By this time they had finished their pops and were full of the temporary energy caffeine brings. Pitaya declined the offer to follow, instead allowing Henri to softly sing Song for the Asking; if the size of a smile is the best measure of enjoyment, then Pitaya was enjoying herself thoroughly. Henri’s singing was gentle and sincere, and when his eyes were not closed he was focusing on hers. After such a sweet performance she finally agreed to get up and sing, and she got up to the opening piano of Perfect Day.
Her singing was even more remarkable than her athletics: the sentimental verses became profoundly moving when coming from her lips, and when the sweeping chorus came in the others felt like they were being lifted straight off the couch. When they talked about it later, the only sound they could compare it to was – and this was fairly complicated – the imaginary sound of a long-extinct and undiscovered bird being given a human tongue and using it to its fullest potential. But that was not all there was to her singing – something uncomfortably magical happened while she sang, unnoticed by all, even the person it was happening to. Only after the song ended, and Pitaya had received enthusiastic applause and cheers, did everyone realise that James now had a short, grey trunk in the place of his nose and large, floppy ears replacing his old ones.
‘Who invited the elephant?’ Pitaya asked good-naturedly, thinking it was a mask of some sort. James, in frightened confusion, made a horn sound with his trunk.
‘I don’t think that’s a mask,’ Hana said nervously. ‘Can you speak, James?’
‘Thank God that I can,’ James said, pulling on his ears and tugging at his trunk. ‘I still have my mouth.’
‘How could this’ve happened?’ Hana asked everyone at once, as if any of them could have provided an answer.
‘It happened while Pitaya was singing,’ Henri noted.
‘Was it that bad?’ Pitaya asked.
‘Of course not!’ Henri roared, but then he immediately collected himself. ‘I mean to say that your singing is wonderful. But maybe there was something in it that caused James to become an elephant.’
‘Change me back!’ James suddenly demanded.
‘I don’t even know what I did to make you an elephant in the first place,’ Pitaya said apologetically, flabbergasted by the whole affair.
‘We don’t even know for sure if it was your singing that caused it,’ Hana reminded her. ‘For all we know it could’ve been something in his drink.’
‘Then it’s Henri’s fault!’ cried James, and he knocked his empty pop can off the table.
‘Should we take him to the hospital?’ Pitaya offered.
‘No. I think we’ve discussed this before and decided that reporting something like this is a bad idea,’ Hana explained. ‘And besides, he doesn’t seem to be in too much pain.’ James blasted his trunk to contradict this statement.
‘Do you mean something like this has happened before?’ Pitaya asked.
Hana froze. She had nearly let slip a secret for the second time in one day and was starting to feel nervous around herself. ‘Oh, I mean we talked about it and felt that if anything strange happened to us in the future then we’d keep it a secret. It was just that kind of a talk, y’know?’
‘I think so,’ Pitaya responded uncertainly. ‘But what are we going to do about James?’
‘I have an idea,’ Henri said. He was holding his fingers under his nose and seemed like he had just pulled himself out of a long deliberation. ‘It goes back to my original theory. I think you should try singing again so we can see what happens.’
‘You just want to hear her voice again,’ Hana accused.
‘I just think we should try something while we still have the opportunity to do so,’ James explained. ‘We won’t be able to stay in this room forever.’
‘You’re right!’ Hana realised. ‘We’ve been in here maybe half an hour, maybe longer. We can’t just parade around a Jamesephant like nobody’s business; they’ll capture him and do tests on him and we’ll never see him again.’ She began biting her thumbnail in consternation, and then she pointed it at Pitaya. ‘Pitaya! Step up to the karaoke plate and get singing!’
After a few nervous syllables Pitaya took to the machine and started singing from the middle of Crazy on You. Everyone focused on James while she was singing, so nobody noticed when Henri grew large yellow eyebrows shaped like lightning bolts and a small orange beak. When the song was over and nothing had happened to James, however, they all sighed and then looked at each other. And then they stared at Henri.
‘What’s up?’ Henri asked coolly.
‘Oh, nothing, really,’ Hana said. ‘Just that you may or may not be a penguin, is all.’
Henri quacked in disbelief, and then he lightly touched his beak with his fingers.
‘I think I’d rather be a penguin,’ James said jealously. ‘Sing again!’
‘No!’ Hana shouted, but it was too late: Pitaya was already following the bouncing ball as the words to the Final Countdown displayed on the screen. James and Henri looked at each other intently, watching for any signs of their animal attributes diminishing, but when the song ended James was still an elephant and Henri was still a rockhopper penguin. They turned to Hana to voice their complaints, as if she was somehow the root cause of all this, but James quietly curled his trunk and Henri snapped his beak shut when they saw that she now had the bizarre black bill of a platypus. She looked down at it cross-eyed, wide-eyed, and then grabbed at it with both of her hands and tried to yank it off.
‘I knew this was going to happen!’ she said to them, shaking her fist. Then she sighed. ‘Okay, no more singing. Pitaya should be spared the humiliation of becoming an animal.’
Pitaya, suddenly faced with the anthropomorphic personifications of her favourite animals, let the microphone drop and rushed towards them, embracing them all at once. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, guys! Oh, you’re all so cute!’
‘Get off!’ James cried, pushing her away.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Pitaya apologised.
Hana went back to pulling on her bill and Henri looked at his watch. ‘I don’t mean to alarm you guys,’ he said, ‘but we’re just about out of time. We have to head out of here.’
‘We can’t go out looking like this!’ James said, tugging on his trunk and pointing at it.
‘If anyone asks then we can just say they’re masks you made for school,’ suggested Pitaya. ‘After all, I thought James’ trunk was a mask at first. I mean, if that sounds like a good idea to you guys. I don’t know what else we can do.’
‘It’s good enough for me,’ James said, and the others agreed.
Hana hit the lights, and as they left the room they hid their faces by pretending they were rubbing their eyes; Pitaya distracted the rest of the clientele by waving and smiling at them.
‘We hope you had a good time,’ said one of the attendants in passing.
‘Oh, it was remarkable,’ Pitaya answered back, and then realised she had meant it.
Incoming customers brushed past the animal trio, sending shivers of worry up their spines, and when they finally made it outside they breathed a collective sigh of relief. They quickly hid behind some nearby bushes as they tried to figure out what they were going to do about this new fix they were in.
James’ suggestion of cutting off the animal bits would only have been appealing to those with no concept of excruciating pain, and when this was pointed out to him he yanked on his trunk and realised they were right. Hana wondered how they could possibly get away with looking how they did for longer than a day, and her wonder turned to dread when nobody seemed capable of answering her. And Pitaya kept fidgeting, for while she was filled with awe at the sight of the three animal people, she also realised she found their company extremely unsettling, like being around the grotesque puppets of an old fantasy film. All this occurred while Henri, the only one remaining calm in the storm of excitement, gave the appearance of thinking hard again, his two index fingers pressed firmly under his beak. As soon as all hope seemed to be completely lost, his eyes lit up.
‘I have an idea,’ he said.
‘I don’t think I like your ideas anymore,’ said the duck-billed Hanapus sulkily.
‘Just hear me out,’ Henri requested.
Hana stood with her hands on her hips, venturing into deep thought herself. Looking at Henri’s giant eyebrows, she realised he wanted to go back to normal as much as anyone did, and that his plan would be better than theirs by default since they did not actually have one. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
‘As am I,’ James said, his enormous ears flapping. Pitaya leaned in close to hear him out as well.
‘I was thinking about how Pitaya’s singing changed us into animals, even though there was nothing abnormal about her singing except for how beautiful it was,’ Henri said, and Pitaya blushed at the compliment. ‘Then I started thinking of ways to reverse the effects, and it struck me that we might be able to reverse them if we reverse her singing.’
‘So you want me to sing backwards?’ Pitaya asked.
‘No, I want you to sing forwards,’ Henri said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘My idea is to have you sing forwards into a tape recorder and then play it backwards,’ Henri explained.
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ James admitted.
‘I guess it’s pretty convenient that I have a tape recorder now, huh?’ Hana said, smiling.
‘You mean the one from that lobster party?’ James asked.
Hana nodded.
‘“Lobster party”?’ Pitaya asked.
‘Oh, we had a party where we ate lobsters,’ Hana quickly explained. ‘And . . . got a tape recorder. Anyway! How are we going to get to my place?’
‘I’m not leaving my bike behind, so we should ride there,’ James said. ‘We’ll just ride so fast that we look like blurs to anyone who sees us.’
‘I guess Pitaya’ll have to ride with Henri,’ Hana said, winking at James.
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ James said, shrugging flatly.
‘Should I distract your family while you get the tape recorder?’ Pitaya asked Hana.
‘Only if it comes down to it,’ she said. ‘I’m usually pretty good at running upstairs to my room before my family can stop me about anything, but it could be more difficult with James and Henri. At the very least you can stop to introduce yourself if they think anything’s going on.’
With the plan fleshed out, and everyone in agreement on it, they returned to the bike rack and saddled up. As James suggested, they rode their bikes as fast as they could, and even managed to break their own speed records despite the added weight. Pitaya held onto her seat for balance, but when a bump nearly knocked her off of it she grabbed onto Henri’s waist instead; Hana’s cheer was caught by the wind and whisked away before it could reach their ears. She punched James in the back to get him to look at the symbiotic duo but instead he howled in pain and rode even faster, thinking that that was what she wanted.
Soon they arrived at Hana’s house and, after leaning their bikes against its side, went over the plan again, which only took a single sentence to summarise because of how simple it was. Hana cracked the door open and peered inside, accidentally hitting her bill against the side of the door, and when she saw that the coast was clear she waved everyone into the foyer. Luckily her family was too engrossed in a television show to even bother greeting them, and Pitaya was thankful she did not have to act as a decoy, despite it being her suggestion. Together they flew upstairs to Hana’s room and landed on her bed. Hana shut the door behind them and began searching frantically for the tape recorder, hidden somewhere amongst the wrinkled clothes, battered books and miscellaneous sports equipment. She ended up finding it under a baseball mitt, which was under a white gym shirt, which was under a library copy of Martian Time-Slip.
‘Now we can record Pitaya’s singing!’ Hana declared triumphantly, but then her expression fell. ‘Wait a minute – what if this has all just been a ruse by Henri to get a tape of Pitaya singing?’
‘I assure you it’s not,’ Henri said, his beak snapping as he spoke.
‘Okay, okay. Here – you’d probably know how to use this thing more than I do.’ She handed the tape recorder with its attached microphone to Henri, who popped it open to make sure there was a tape inside and then began fiddling with the buttons. ‘Be careful with it,’ Hana requested. ‘I don’t want to lose the message from the talking cat.’
Pitaya stood bolt upright from her perch on the edge of the bed. ‘Pardon?!’
‘Oh, uh, I mean . . .’
‘I distinctly heard you say there’s a message on there from a talking cat!’ she accused. Apparently all of the strangeness was beginning to get to her.
‘I was just joking,’ Hana explained nervously, but then Henri accidentally hit the play button.
‘Item number four: scour the lake for fresh fish,’ spoke a deep voice from the recorder’s speakers. ‘I cannot go long without fresh fish.’
And then Henri quickly fumbled to stop it.
Pitaya pointed at the tape recorder with a stabbing motion that tore through the air. ‘So what was that, then?’
‘Oh, that was just my uncle,’ Hana said, brushing away the truth. ‘Now, let’s focus on the matter at hand.’
Pitaya apprehensively and slowly let her accusing finger drop.
‘I found a blank spot,’ Henri stated. ‘Here, Pitaya, take the microphone. When I press Record you’ll need to start singing.’ He then handed her the microphone.
‘What should I sing?’
‘Anything,’ Henri said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Okay, here we go.’ He pressed the record button and all of the sound in the room was vacuumed into the tape recorder. Pitaya searched her head for a song and began singing the opening lyrics to Sometimes; Henri cut her off before she could reach the chorus, however.
‘All right, now to reverse it.’ He pressed the play and rewind buttons at the same time, making it seem like Pitaya was singing backwards. There was something oddly ethereal about it.
‘I don’t think it’s working,’ Hana said, but as soon as she said it her bill fell off and bounced onto the carpet. She gasped.
The same thing happened to James and Henri – their animal parts fell off and landed around Hana’s room. After touching their faces in disbelief they all gave each other celebratory high-fives.
‘I’m never doubting you again,’ Hana said apologetically to Henri, rubbing her precious nose and grinning.
‘I don’t think we’ll be listening to Pitaya sing again, either, for that matter,’ James noted.
‘Which is a shame,’ Henri said, ‘because you really do sing really well.’
Pitaya’s dragon fruit skin darkened once again at his compliment. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘I guess you’ll just have to learn how to sing backwards,’ Hana suggested. ‘It didn’t sound all that bad on tape, and you’d probably be starting a new style or something.’
Pitaya hesitated. ‘After tonight I think I’m done with singing for a bit,’ she said. ‘But maybe I’ll look into it.’
To Be Continued In Episode Six: The Boy with Like in His Heart
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Episode 15
Volume 2
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