Evan’s fingers cracked so loudly, they sounded like a tree falling!

Conan squeezed Evan’s hand harder and harder until Evan screamed in pain. When Conan finally let go, the hand looked like a slab of raw hamburger.

“Nice handshake you got there!” Conan exclaimed, grinning.

He snapped his finger against Andy’s nose, then headed off quickly toward the street, taking long strides, laughing to himself.

“Great guy,” Andy muttered, rubbing her nose.

Evan blew on his hand, as if trying to put out a fire. “Maybe I can learn to be left-handed,” he murmured.

“Hey—where’s the Monster Blood?” Andy demanded.

“I—I dropped it,” Evan replied, still examining his hand.

“Huh?” She kicked away a clump of weeds and stepped over to him.

“I thought I could shove the can into my back jeans pocket while Conan was talking to you,” Evan explained. “But it slipped out of my hand. I dropped it.”

He turned, bent over, and picked it up from the tall grass. “Good thing it didn’t roll or anything. Conan would have seen it.”

“He wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had it,” Andy said.

“What are we going to do with it?” Evan demanded. “It’s already caused us trouble. We’ve got to hide it, or throw it away, or—or—”

He pulled open the lid. “Oh, wow! Look!” He held the can up to Andy’s face. The green goo had grown nearly to the top of the can. “It’s starting to grow a lot faster. I guess because we exposed it to the air.”

Evan slammed the lid on tight.

“Let’s bury it,” Andy suggested. “Here. Right under this tree. We’ll dig a deep hole and bury it.”

Evan liked the idea. It was simple and quick.

They squatted down and began digging with their hands. The dirt beneath the tree was soft. The hole grew deep before they had worked up a sweat.

Evan dropped the blue can of Monster Blood into the hole. Then they quickly covered it with dirt, smoothing it out until it was impossible to tell a hole had been dug.

“This was a good plan,” Andy said, climbing to her feet, playfully wiping the dirt off her hands on the back of Evan’s T-shirt. “If we need it, we’ll know where it is.”

Evan’s red hair was matted to his forehead with sweat. He had a wide smear of dirt across his freckled forehead. “Huh? Why would we need it?” he demanded.

Andy shrugged. “You never know.”

“We won’t need it,” Evan told her firmly. “We won’t.”

He was very, very wrong.

“Hey, Dad, what’s up?” Evan stepped into the garage.

Mr. Ross stopped hammering and turned around. He smiled at Evan. “Want to see my newest work?”

“Yeah. Sure,” Evan replied. Every weekend, his father spent hour after hour in his garage workshop, banging away on large sheets of metal, making what he called his “works.”

He chiseled and hammered and sawed, and put a lot of effort into his sculptures. But to Evan, they all looked like banged-up sheets of metal when they were finished.

Mr. Ross took a few steps back to admire his current project. He lowered his heavy mallet in one hand and pointed with the chisel he held in his other hand. “I used brass for this one,” he told Evan. “I call it ‘Autumn Leaf.’ ”

Evan studied it thoughtfully. “It looks like a leaf,” he lied. It looks like Dad ruined a perfectly good piece of brass, he thought, trying to keep a straight face.

“It’s not supposed to look like a leaf,” Mr. Ross corrected Evan. “It’s supposed to look like my impression of a leaf.”

“Oh.” Evan scratched his curly, red hair as he studied it some more. “Neat, Dad,” he said. “I see what you mean.”

Then something else caught his eye. “Hey—what’s this?”

Evan carefully stepped over several jagged, bent shards of metal. He made his way to another metal sculpture and ran his hand over the smooth, shiny surface. It was an enormous aluminum cylinder that rested above a flat wooden base.

“Go ahead. Spin it,” Mr. Ross instructed, smiling proudly.

Evan pushed the cylinder with both hands. It spun slowly over the wooden base.

“I call it ‘The Wheel,’” his father told him.

Evan laughed. “That’s cool, Dad. You invented the wheel!”

“Don’t laugh!” Mr. Ross replied, grinning. “That sculpture was accepted at the annual arts competition at your school. I have to take it to the auditorium later this week.”

Evan gave “The Wheel” another spin. “I’ll bet no one else made a wheel that really spins,” he told his father. “You can’t lose with this, Dad,” he teased.

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor,” Mr. Ross muttered with a frown.

Evan said good-bye and made his way out of the garage, stepping carefully over the jagged pieces of brass and tin. As he headed to the house, he could hear the clang clang clang as his dad hammered away on his impression of a leaf.

*  *  *

In the halls after school on Monday, Evan hurried around a corner and bumped right into Andy. “I can’t talk now,” he told her breathlessly. “I’m late for basketball tryouts.”

He glanced down the long hall. It was nearly empty. The gym door opened, and he could hear the thump of basketballs against the floor.

“How come you’re late?” Andy demanded, blocking his path.

“Murphy kept me after class,” Evan told her with a groan. “He put me on permanent hamster duty. I have to take care of Cuddles every afternoon for the rest of my life.”

“Bad news,” Andy murmured.

“No. That’s the good news,” Evan replied bitterly.