The terror in jennys arm.., p.1
The Terror in Jenny's Armpit, page 1
part #1 of The First Book of Bonkers Series
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PRAISE FOR BONKERS
“You better read Bonkers right now! Or you will have no one but yourself to blame when a Snerb starts growing out of your armpit . . . Required reading for anyone who loves fast, furious, weird, bonkers adventures.”
—Jon Scieszka,
first National Ambassador for
Young People’s Literature
“The first book in the new adventure series called Bonkers is definitely, well, bonkers. It’s a fun and funny sci-fi story that will have you laughing and biting your nails at the same time, which may make it hard to turn the pages. Patrick Carman has done it again!”
—D. J. MacHale,
#1 New York Times bestselling author
“A fun, funny, and gripping read and, like all Patrick Carman books, full of memorable characters that suck you into a wonderfully weird, layered world . . . It all adds up to a fabulously good time.”
—Joe Purdy,
TV animation writer for
Arthur, Llama Llama, and Hey Arnold!
“This book is gross, hilarious, chaotic, funny, and scary . . . Maybe it’s the madcap plot, maybe it’s the deadpan humor, or maybe it’s the tale of friendship at its core, but this book grabbed me and didn’t let go. I can’t wait for the next installment!”
—Stephen Bramucci,
award-winning author of the Danger Gang series
“Patrick Carman is a lovely and kind man with a wacko sense of imagination. I couldn’t have imagined this tale if I had fifty lifetimes to think about it. It’s wild, funny, outlandish, and outrageous. Boy, does it move!!! Take the wild ride. It’s a blast!”
—Richard Kind,
actor
“This book is the pits! And I mean that in the best way. So much laugh-out-loud fun and adventures from one armpit! I love this series—you’ll go Bonkers, too!”
—R. L. Stine,
author of Goosebumps and Fear Street
“This suspenseful and hilarious Bonkers adventure has it all: embarrassing underarm problems, a mysterious abandoned lab where all the wacky and gross trouble starts, and three wisecracking friends trying to figure it all out. Patrick Carman knows exactly what tickles the funny bones for kids!”
—Rachel Lipman,
Emmy Award–winning writer/producer of Rugrats, Recess, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch
BOOKS BY PATRICK CARMAN
the bonkers series
The Terror in Jenny’s Armpit
Attack of the Forty-Foot Chicken (coming soon!)
the skeleton creek series
Skeleton Creek
Ghost in the Machine
The Crossbones
The Raven
Phantom Room
Skeleton Creek Is Real
Skeleton Creek: Seven Secret Stories
the fizzopolis series
The Trouble with Fuzzwonker Fizz
Floozombies!
Snoodles!
the pulse series
Pulse
Tremor
Quake
the land of elyon series
The Dark Hills Divide
Beyond the Valley of Thorns
The Tenth City
Stargazer
Into the Mist
the dark eden series
Dark Eden
Phantom File
Eve of Destruction
the floors series
Floors
3 Below
The Field of Wacky Inventions
the elliot’s park series
Elliot’s Park
Haunted Hike
Walnut Cup
the atherton series
The House of Power
Rivers of Fire
The Dark Planet
the trackers series
Trackers
Shantorian
standalone novels
Thirteen Days to Midnight
Mr. Gedrick and Me
The Inventors
Towervale
contributing author
The Black Circle (The 39 Clues Series, Book 5)
Ghost Vision Glasses (The Guys Read Series)
Omega Rising (The Voyagers Series, Book 3)
THE TERROR IN JENNY’S ARMPIT
THE FIRST BOOK OF BONKERS
PATRICK CARMAN
Copyright © 2024 by Patrick Carman
E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover and interior illustration by Kristin Houser
Cover layout by Sarah Riedlinger
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-212-56469-4
Library e-book ISBN 979-8-212-56468-7
Juvenile Fiction / Horror
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
This one is for my dad.
CONTENTS
1. How Did This Happen?! Also, Can We Be Friends?
2. Fen Stenson and Barker Mifflin
3. Colossal Chemistry
4. Toenails
5. It Grows! (Yeah, It’s What You Think It Is)
6. It’s Staring at Me
7. You’ve Been Burned!
8. Snerb!
9. Only the Robot Knows Danger!
10. Doctor Vernsy Von Vexler
11. The Amazing Wheelbarrow Belly Flop
12. Natty Burns Returns!
13. Terror on Old Park Road
14. Eleven Seconds
15. The Dungeons of Snerbville
16. Snerb-O-Matic!
17. Is That a Blowtorch?!
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! ALSO, CAN WE BE FRIENDS?
Something is wrong with my armpit.
Normally I wouldn’t even mention it because I’m prone to injuries in the first place, so what’s the big deal, right? I mean just last week I walked into the patio door and when I got up off the ground, I was sure my elbow had fallen off. Nope, it was still attached, swelling up like a watermelon.
And don’t even get me started about what happened when I jumped off the roof of the house with an umbrella for a parachute. Hey, you take a dare, you live with the consequences, right? A rose bush broke my fall, and I survived with a few dozen scratches. I lived to stumble into trouble another day! I’ve tripped on toys, rode my bike into a tree, and cracked my head on a table (don’t ask). And that’s just in the past three days.
But this is different.
There is definitely something wrong with my armpit.
Itch level: fourteen out of ten.
It’s possible an angry kitten is living in there.
Before I get too far into this, I’ll be honest: an armpit is a private matter that should only be discussed with your closest friends. A lot goes on in your average armpit, very little of it good, so you should only talk with your bestie about what’s happening in there. Given that I’m short on time because I really need to figure out what’s wrong with my armpit as fast as I can, I’ll tell you a little bit about me and then we’ll jump right into being friends for life.
My name is Jenny and I live in a strange little town that’s not on the way to anywhere. We’ve been told to avoid talking about our town because a lot of curious things happen here, and the adults would rather not have a bunch of gawkers and news vans showing up making a big stink over every little thing. Let’s call my town . . . Nevermind.
Nevermind, nothing to see here, pay no attention to us.
Yeah, that’ll work.
Here are five things about me that will help us get to know each other better:
I am eleven years old.
I’m not clumsy, I’m adventurous. There’s a difference!
I always wear high-tops (to protect my ankles), cargo shorts (for carrying snacks and stuff), and my lucky mood ring. I know what you’re thinking. Is it really a lucky mood ring? Because if it was, wouldn’t I have avoided the patio door, stuck the rooftop-umbrella landing, and dodged the tree on my bike? Hey, I survived all those failburgs! My mood ring is lucky city.
I like to make up words. Like failburg.
I like making lists.
And there we go! We are now friends for life, so let’s talk more about me.
I live in a white house with a blue door, and while I’m not an only child I might as well be. I have two brothers, but they’re both in high school and they basically ignore me 90 percent of the time. A few weeks ago, I invited them both to watch me jump over my mom’s car with my bike and neither one of them showed up, so you see what I’m dealing with here. My brothers will be no help with my current problem.
“Jenny! Hurry up your breakfast is getting cold!”
That would be my mom yelling from downstairs. I don’t even need to be in the kitchen to know she’s pouring coffee into a travel mug, grabbing a banana, and heading for the door. Wait for it . . .
&nbs p; “Don’t get into any trouble today! Also I love you and you’re the greatest!”
And there it is. Same script, new day. Don’t get into any trouble has become her go-to Jedi mind trick when she leaves for her office. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I have been known to let my adventurous nature get me into some tricky situations. Like pole-vaulting over a card table with a yard rake (I ended up under the card table).
But Jenny, what about your dad, couldn’t he help you with your armpit problem?
Okay, for starters, I can’t believe you would even ask that. There is no way I’m letting my dad examine my armpit. Besides, while my dad works from home every day, he’s not even going to be awake until I’m long gone for school because he’s a computer programmer. Translation: he really gets cookin’ after midnight, not a minute sooner, and rarely rises before noon. Just last night he dragged me into his office to explain something about robots hiding web pages and something called robot.txt and honestly, the whole thing was a blur.
Moving on!
You should know that I hardly ever think about my armpit at all. In fact, until I woke up this morning, I hadn’t thought about my armpit in weeks. Maybe my armpit is mad because it’s being ignored, but I’m pretty sure body parts don’t work like that. I haven’t paid any attention to my belly button in at least a month, and it hasn’t complained once.
What we need to do is conduct a good old-fashioned investigation, starting with what this thing looks like. Hang on.
I have now looked in a mirror, and there does not appear to be a small angry cat living in my armpit, so that’s a relief. Now for the bad news—there’s a blotchy red spot in there, and I think it’s possible it was looking at me. I say this because while I was staring at it, the red blotch got a little redder and then it started itching again so I scratched it. Scratching it might have been a mistake, because when I did that, something really gross happened.
The blotch in my armpit made a sound.
CHAPTER 2
FEN STENSON AND BARKER MIFFLIN
The sound I heard was like when a rabbit eats celery—or, as I like to say, when Bun-Bun eats snuffle sticks. I used to have an imaginary rabbit called Bun-Bun, and it ate a lot of celery, which I call snuffle. If I can imagine a pet bunny and its favorite snacks, there’s a chance I could be imagining this whole noisy blotch thing, and my armpit is just fine. I’m glad we’re friends because if we weren’t friends, I’m pretty sure you’d be saying to yourself, This Jenny character is a real pinhead. I think I’ll find a new friend. But you would never do that, right?
Let the investigation continue!
Did anything happen yesterday that could explain the terror in my armpit?
Let’s start at the breakfast table, where my two caveman brothers show up every morning and eat anything that’s not nailed down. I try to avoid this daily scene of food-eating mayhem as often as I can, but yesterday morning I was there while they ate seven bowls of cereal between them and fought over the last bagel like two hyenas. They’ve been pro wrestling fans since they were toddlers, so things quickly escalated into a Battle of the Bagel cage match. They nearly kicked a hole in the television, one of them did a flying jackhammer onto the sofa in the living room, and a perfectly good lampshade was crushed into my brother’s face. My brother’s face won.
On the bright side, I enjoyed the show while I ate the bagel they were fighting over.
Could a bagel cause an armpit rash? This seems unlikely, but I’m not ruling it out. Mr. Bagel, you are suspect number one!
While I was walking to school, Fen Stenson rolled up on his scooter and started yammering at my face. Fen is a new kid in town, and he always shows up on his scooter at the corner at the same time every morning. It’s like he’s watching me from a distance, and when I make the turn toward school, he kicks it into high gear and races over so he doesn’t have to enter the building all alone. Fen’s scooter has an annoying squeak from a recent accident, like one of those shopping carts at the store with a bum wheel. It’s possible Fen Stenson likes me.
Typical Fen small talk took place while the scooter squeaked annoyingly down the pavement.
“Jenster! How we doin’ today?”
“I’m Jenny. And you are?”
“Ah Jen-Jen, you crack me up.”
“No one here is called Jen-Jen.”
“So what we up to after school? I’m thinking we share headphones and sample the latest Swedish beats.”
“I barely understand what you just said, but I’m jumping over my mom’s car on my bike after school. You can watch if you want to.”
“Kid Lawn Dart rides again! I’m sure it’ll turn out better than last time.”
He’s talking about when I borrowed his scooter and tried to jump over a garbage can. The scooter ended up hanging from a limb in a tree—I still don’t understand how that happened—and it’s had that squeaky wheel ever since. Oh, and Kid Lawn Dart is my daredevil name. Because lawn darts are dangerous!
I don’t think talking to Fen Stenson is the cause of my problem, but I’m not going to check it off my list until I’m 100 percent sure. In case details about said suspect are useful, here is basically everything I know about Fen Stenson:
He’s originally from Sweden, or at least his parents are.
Fen is trying to introduce Swedish dance music at school. It’s not going very well.
Fen dresses like a manga comic book cosplay, including styling his hair like famous manga character Kakashi Hatake (long, spiked, and blond).
He occasionally covers his face with a mask, and often wears a headband.
Fen will tag along on just about any adventure, a fun hang, low maintenance.
I can’t think of anything that happened at school that could have caused the terror in my armpit, so let’s jump right to the end of the day when I was walking back toward my house with another friend of mine, Barker Mifflin.
“Are we doing this or what?” Barker said.
“I don’t know, are we?” I asked.
“Gotta have total agreement about going in,” Barker said. “We’re out of the planning stage now, into the real deal.”
Barker Mifflin was talking about a plan to explore the old Colossal Chemistry building at the edge of town, something we’d been talking about doing for weeks. And he was right. The planning was long gone. We were just stalling at this point.
“Are you sure it’s cool?” I asked for the four hundredth time.
“I’m telling you, Jenny, we’re cool,” Barker said in his most assuring voice. “The place has been abandoned for over a year now. Aren’t you curious what they were doing in there?”
“They were totally sneakretive in that place,” I agreed.
“Sneakretive . . . Oh, I got it! Sneaky and secretive,” said Barker.
“You’re sure you have a way in that doesn’t break any rules?” I asked.
“One hundred percent. I’ve reconned the entire outer edge of the property. They’ve completely abandoned the place.”
