Me vs. the Multiverse: Enough About Me - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

S. G. WILSON lives in Austin, Texas, with his partner, kids, and cats (plus a bearded dragon). He was born and raised in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and graduated from Ball State University with a degree in English and journalism. He lived and worked in New York as a magazine writer and editor for the better part of a decade. As a freelance journalist (writing as one of several Steve Wilsons out there), he's covered pop culture, technology, travel, parenting, food, and other topics for the New York Times, GQ, Newsweek, Travel & Leisure, Smithsonian, Salon, and other publications. He also cowrote the biography Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story (Advocate Books, 2005). He's a member of SCBWI and the Kids Listen Network.

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1

How Juvenile of Me 

So this one time in juvenile hall, I went sleepwalking and peed on my cellmate Lil Battleship, the most dangerous kid in lockup. 

Then my watch had to go and narc on me about it. 

“This is not a good deed!” blared the robotic voice of the MeMinder X on my wrist, blasting the last dregs of sleep from my mind. Dad had built his latest version of the smart watch with a Good Deed Tracker, an app that read your pulse, temperature, and other vitals to sense a guilty conscience. He would have been thrilled to know his snitch-on-a-wrist could tattletale on me even in my sleep. But I saw no reason to celebrate: the stupid thing woke up Lil Battleship too. 

“Meade?!” The groggy giant looked himself over, peering at the stains on his shirt. He touched the puddle of pee in his bed and sniffed his finger. Suddenly, he wasn’t so tired. “Meade?!” 

Eardrum and Slime, the two other juvenile delinquents who shared our room, started to stir. 

“You peed on me?” Lil Battleship looked more hurt than angry, which made me feel even worse. Though he beat up other kids all the time, he’d never picked on me. We’d sort of become friends. Now all bets were off, especially as our audience woke up. 

“He peed on you?!” shouted Eardrum. Most anything from his mouth came out as a shout. 

“That’s cold!” said Slime. “You can’t take that lying down!” 

If those two hadn’t egged him on, Lil Battleship might have forgiven me. After all, I’d told him about my sleep-peeing problem, and he’d claimed to understand. I didn’t go around telling just anyone what my bladder made me do at night, but Lil Battleship and I had bonded super fast over comics, cats, and the desperate need for a friend in a very unfriendly place. One time he’d confessed to me his love of weepy Hallmark Channel movies, so it had seemed only fair that I share a deep, dark embarrassing secret too. Since I couldn’t exactly fess up that I’d traveled between dimensions in a hotel elevator, the next best thing was my stories of where I’d gone wee-wee at night. I just hadn’t ever expected him to become part of another chapter in that saga. 

Let’s get one thing straight. I hadn’t sleep-peed in years, not since the time I went in my tub of Legos as a kid. So why now? Why would I revert to my worst bad habit at the worst possible time in the worst possible place and on the worst possible person? 

One word: stress. Being stuck at the County Youth Development Center six months into a long sentence will do that to you. It was a tough place filled with tough kids, and I didn’t deserve to be there. I know that’s what every prisoner says, but in my case, it was true--even if nobody in their right mind would’ve believed my excuse. 

Three months earlier, two especially stupid and annoying versions of me from parallel Earths--Dare Me and Click Me--posed as yours truly during a very public crime spree around my town. They’d littered the internet with videos of me doing graffiti, smashing windows, stealing stuff, and lots of other wholesome activities. Overnight I’d racked up a record more sizable than most of my fellow inmates combined, and the evidence was online for everybody to see. 

I’d become the internet’s favorite juvenile delinquent. 

Though I’d never so much as shoplifted a piece of candy before, the judge threw the book at me. It hadn’t helped that I’d run away from the cops when they’d tried to arrest me in front of my entire school. Sure, that resisting-arrest charge was on me, and, yeah, so was the breaking-and-entering citation for busting into both branches of the Janus Hotel. But I’d had a good reason. Namely: saving the entire planet, plus scads of other alternate Earths throughout the multiverse. 

But at this particular moment, I was just a bed-wetting moron who couldn’t even manage to wet his own bed. 

As Eardrum and Slime jeered in the background, Lil Battleship grabbed my shoulder. Not hard enough to hurt, but not light enough for me to shake free. Maybe at one time I could have broken his hold with the fizz, the mysterious energy that let me borrow the talents of other Mes. But the fizz had gone flat a long time ago, and I’d given up hope that it would ever come back. 

Lil Battleship leaned in to whisper, “Look, I get it, you were sleep-peeing, like you told me about. But I can’t let this stand. Gotta save face. So where you want it? I’ll stop at one punch, but I gotta leave a bruise somewhere people can see. You want it in the eyes, the nose, or the jaw?” 

“Decisions, decisions,” I croaked. My words got drowned out by Eardrum and Slime chanting “Kill him!” over and over. 

Then, just like that, they went silent. I glanced their way and saw what had shut them up. 

A monster stood between them. 

It was the general shape and size of a wild turkey, but with a few . . . extras. Instead of feathers, thick and floppy brown fur covered its body. Tusks--actual white and pointy tusks--poked out from either side of its bulbous beak. It was like some sort of mutated cross between a dodo and a woolly mammoth. A woolly dodo. 

Eardrum and Slime both stood stock-still as the mop-bodied bird bobbed its head between them, pecking at their pockets like a pigeon hoping to score some crumbs. One of its tusks got hooked on Eardrum’s waistband, and the woolly dodo tugged and tugged to get loose. With every yank, a soft whimper escaped from Eardrum’s chattering teeth. By the time the bird had unhooked itself with a snap of underwear elastic, it was all too much for Eardrum: he fainted from sheer fright. 

Slime started to scream, but a hand reached around from behind him and covered his mouth. Mud and fungus coated the hand and the rest of the figure it was attached to: a filthy boy who emerged from the shadows. Somehow, under all that sludge, I saw a familiar face. 

It was me, if I’d had the bad luck to fall into the deep end of the muckiest, most bug-infested swamp. He wore nothing but a raggedy, stained loincloth and some twigs. A literal bird’s nest clung to his tangle of hair. 

I’d seen this mess of a Me before. He was Caveman Me, whose napping body Meticulous Me had tripped over when I dumped him off on a prehistoric Earth. If Caveman had somehow gotten here, that could only mean . . .  

“Looking for me, mate?” said a voice beside me. My voice. With a British accent. I whipped my head around just in time to see another hand squeezing Lil Battleship’s shoulder. My friend’s eyes rolled up into his head as he fell back into his pee-soaked bed like a tree falling to the squishy ground after a rainstorm. 

In his place stood a Me I knew all too well. 

My mortal enemy, my evil double, the worst Me in the multiverse. Meticulous Me.

2 

Caving In 

Meticulous had picked up the paralyzing nerve pinch he’d used on Lil Battleship from Acupuncture Me. He’d learned countless skills from our other counterparts too. But there was one talent he’d come up with on his own and refined through years of practice: acting like a puffed-up jerk. 

“Really, Average Me?” he said. “Sleep-peeing? Don’t you think that’s a little naff at our age?” 

Meticulous was bad news all around. His early experiments with the origami drive had turned perfectly innocent...