The Sister Surprise

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  For my brother, Andrew. (Even though I asked for a sister.)

  —H. B.

  For my little monsters, Zakaria and Mikael.

  —A. S.

  Hello again!

  It is I, your friendly narrator. You probably remember me from the first Monster and Boy book and also from the second Monster and Boy book, which were stories that started a bit like this:

  Once there was a monster who loved a boy. And a boy who loved a monster.

  They hadn’t always known each other. The monster lived under the boy’s bed for a long time before they met, and the boy didn’t know the monster was there until one night when the monster decided to introduce himself. And now they were friends.

  So far, the monster had swallowed the boy and made him tiny and then made him big again, and the boy had taken the monster to school and they had solved a mystery together about roller skates and a hedgehog. You know. Typical friend stuff.

  After their day at school, the monster had learned quite a lot, but he still had questions about many things. One of those things was names. That was when he learned that the boy had a name, and the boy’s sister had a name. She even had a middle name.

  Does your middle have a name, too?

  The monster did not have a name—at least, not that he knew of—and he had decided something.

  He wanted a name of his own.

  1.

  One night, not long after their adventure at school, the monster and the boy were sitting in the boy’s room. The monster, who was nocturnal (mostly), was very wide awake. The boy—who was not nocturnal (mostly)—was rather sleepy. But he was something else, too.

  “You look grumpy,” the monster told the boy.

  “I am grumpy,” the boy said.

  “Is it because you don’t have fur like I do?”

  “No.”

  “Is it because you don’t have antlers?”

  “No.”

  “Is it because—”

  The boy knew that the monster would just keep guessing until he knew why the boy was grumpy. That’s the kind of friend he was.

  “I’m grumpy because I’m getting another little sister.”

  “Ooh,” said the monster. “But you already have one of those!”

  “Exactly,” said the boy.

  “Where are you getting the new one?”

  “From my mom.”

  “Why don’t you just tell her no, thank you?”

  The boy had been teaching the monster about manners. It had not been very long since the boy had taken the monster to school and they had a very exciting day—so exciting, in fact, that the boy did not plan to take the monster anywhere else for as long as possible. But just in case they did someday leave the house again, he said it was important for the monster to know good manners.

  So far, the monster had learned yes, please and no, thank you and excuse me. That last one was for unexpected body noises and not bumping into people. He knew that for sure. He thought he also knew what yes, please and no, thank you were for, but maybe he didn’t because the boy did not like his suggestion.

  “It’s too late for that,” the boy said. “The little sister is coming no matter what.”

  “You mean the even littler sister,” said the monster.

  “Yes,” the boy groaned.

  Just then, they heard a loud banging on their bedroom door. It was the boy’s little sister. (The one he had already.) “Who are you talking to in there?” she shouted.

  “How am I ever going to deal with two of those?” the boy moaned. He pulled a pillow over his head and wrapped it around his ears.

  The monster did the same thing. Or he tried to, but the pillow got caught on his antlers and ripped and then there were feathers flying everywhere.

  “Ooh,” the monster said. He meant, Oh no and also Look at that! Because the feathers were making a mess and also they reminded him of snow.

  “Want to get out of here?” the monster asked the boy.

  The boy didn’t answer. He still had the pillow wrapped around his ears.

  “WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE?” the monster asked more loudly.

  “What was that?” the boy’s little sister shouted. “Who’s in there?”

  The boy looked up. “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “It’s a surprise,” the monster told him. “Come on.”

  They crawled under the boy’s bed. They closed their eyes and joined hands.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the boy whispered.

  “I’ve been practicing,” the monster told him.

  And that was true.

  Here’s another thing that’s true: because both of them—the monster and the boy—had their eyes closed, neither one of them saw the boy’s little sister peek under the bed. And neither one of them noticed when she crawled underneath to join them.

  2.

  You are probably wondering what the monster had been practicing.

  I know I am wondering that.

  What is it, I have been wondering, that monsters do all day while their boys (and girls) are at school?

  Do they have dance parties, like stuffed animals do?

  Do they take cooking classes and ballroom dancing lessons, like cats and hedgehogs do?

  Do they design fancy outer-space cities, like dogs and guinea pigs do?

  Of course you already knew about your stuffed animals and cats and hedgehogs and dogs and guinea pigs. Everyone knows how those creatures occupy themselves. But what about monsters?

  Well, this monster had been practicing several things. He had been practicing his manners. He had been practicing his reading skills. And he had been practicing his getting small and getting big again. He had gotten quite good at all these things, and he didn’t even need to fall asleep first in order to make something small or big anymore.

  Which is how he knew that he could close his eyes and hold the boy’s hand and focus very, very hard and make both of them tiny.

  That was his plan. And it worked!

  There was just one or two extra things that also happened.

  The first was the boy’s little sister getting tiny, too.

  The second was the appearance of the green door.

  3.

  “Open your eyes,” the monster told the boy.

  The boy opened his eyes. He saw the monster next to him, still holding his hand. He saw a huge spaceship nearby and a huge race car in the distance. He saw a strange dark sky over their heads.

  “What is this place?” the boy asked.

  “It’s underneath-the-bed,” said the monster.

  “Ohhh,” the boy said. The spaceship and race car were toys. The sky was the bottom of his mattress. He sighed a sigh of relief. Then he gasped a gasp of surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” he hollered.

  The mon
ster turned and saw the boy’s little sister. She was tiny, too. She was staring at them.

  “I remember you from the kitchen,” she said to the monster.

  “I remember you, too,” the monster said. He also remembered what the boy had told him about his sister’s name, and his sister’s middle name. The monster slowly walked toward the little sister. He bent down so his face was near her belly.

  “What’s your name?” he said to the sister’s belly.

  The belly grumbled. The monster jumped.

  “Do you have any candy?” the sister asked the monster.

  “No,” the monster said.

  “Is there candy in there?” the sister asked, and she pointed to the green door.

  “Where did that come from?” the boy said.

  The monster looked at the door. It was a beautiful green, like bright grass on a warm spring day with no clouds and birds singing all around. It had a gold handle that was shining. Almost … glowing. The monster smiled. “That’s the surprise,” he told the boy. “Surprise!”

  “You said surprise twice,” the little sister said.

  “Well,” said the monster, “that’s how much of a surprise it is.”

  “It’s just a door,” she said.

  The monster shook his antlers. “Oh, no, it’s not,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, “it’s a green door. With a shiny handle.”

  “And?” the monster said.

  “And … if we open it, there’s candy?” the sister asked.

  “There could be,” said the monster.

  “Do conversations with him always take this long?” the sister asked the boy.

  “Pretty much,” he told her. “Let me try.”

  The boy stood in front of the monster. He looked very seriously into the monster’s eyes. “I think the surprise is what’s behind the door. I think you want us to go through the door. Is that right?”

  The monster hopped from one foot to the other. “Yes, yes!” he said.

  “Before we go through the door,” said the boy, “will you tell us what’s on the other side?”

  The monster stopped hopping. “I would like to,” he said. “But I can’t.”

  “Why not?” asked the boy.

  “Because I forgot,” the monster told him.

  “Then how do we know it isn’t something dangerous?” asked the sister.

  The monster snorted. “Look how beautiful that door is!” he said. “There must be something wonderful behind it! And also,” he added, “I have a feeling.”

  “What kind of feeling?” asked the boy.

  “A feeling like a warm, sunny, birdsong day,” said the monster.

  “Do you trust his feelings?” the sister asked the boy.

  The boy looked at the monster. He looked at the door. Then he looked at his sister, and he took the monster’s hand in his. “I do,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The sister, the boy, and the monster each took a deep breath and stepped up to the green door. The boy reached out, curled his fingers around the handle, and pressed down.

  Nothing happened.

  “I think,” he said, “it’s locked.”

  4.

  When someone says “surprise!” to you, there’s usually a surprise pretty quickly after that. That’s sort of how surprises are supposed to work. Hearing the word surprise and then having to wait for something to happen is very confusing for your brain.

  It would be like if you came home from school and your mother yelled, “Surprise!” and then just kept stirring the pot of soup on the stove. Your brain would probably try to find a surprise somewhere else in the kitchen. Your brain might wonder if there was a surprise in the pot of soup, like maybe your mother was pretending to stir soup but really there was a bunch of hamsters in there. Then your brain would start to worry about the pot of hamsters and whether the hamsters were getting too hot, and you’d also probably worry about your mother and why in the name of Jupiter she was stirring hamsters, and you’d get yourself quite excited and knock over your grandmother’s antique pickle jar.

  That’s quite an imagination you’ve got there.

  Remarkable, really.

  5.

  “It would help if you could remember what’s on the other side of the door,” the boy told the monster. “If you could remember that, you might also remember how to open it.”

  The monster nodded. He sat down on the floor and pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, so he looked like a furry ball. With antlers. He shut his eyes tight and squeezed them hard, and he made a kind of deep, growling sound from his belly. He did this for about three minutes, which is a pretty long time even if it doesn’t sound like it.

  “What are you doing?” the sister finally asked.

  The monster opened one eye. “I’m trying to remember,” he said.

  “Is it working?” she asked.

  The monster sighed. “Not really,” he said.

  “I’m not surprised,” she mumbled. When she said surprised, the monster remembered something. Not about the green door. About how his surprise for the boy had not worked.

  The monster sniffed.

  “Uh-oh,” the boy said.

  The monster sobbed.

  “Oh no,” the boy said.

  The monster howled.

  “Stop!” the boy said. “My parents will hear you!”

  The monster did not stop. Not even a little bit. The boy looked very nervous.

  “You can’t make someone stop crying by telling them to stop crying,” the little sister said.

  “Well, if you’re so smart, you get him to stop,” the boy snapped.

  “Okay, I will,” she told him. She sat down next to the monster on the floor. Even though they were both tiny, the monster was still much bigger than she was. She put her arms around as much of the monster as she could. She squeezed, but gently.

  The monster quieted down. He stopped crying. He hiccuped.

  “See?” the little sister told the boy. “You can’t just tell someone to stop crying.” She looked up at the monster. “And you can’t make yourself remember by turning into a ball.”

  “Then how?” the monster asked.

  “Retrace your steps?” the boy said. “That’s what I do when I lose something.”

  The monster walked backward around underneath-the-bed. “Like this?” he asked.

  “Kind of?” said the boy.

  “My mom likes to remember things by telling stories,” the sister said. “Lately she’s been telling a lot of stories about when we were babies, for some reason.”

  “I like stories,” the monster said.

  “What’s your favorite?” asked the sister.

  “Once there was a monster who loved a boy,” the monster said.

  “Is there a green door in this story?” asked the sister.

  “No,” the monster said.

  “Then it probably won’t help,” said the sister.

  “You tell one,” the monster said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The sister sighed. She looked at the green door. “There better be candy in there,” she said. Then she started her story.

  6.

  The Little Sister’s Story

  This story is about a family.

  There was a family with four people in it.

  There was a mother and a father and a sister and—

  [Here is where the boy interrupted and said, “And a brother, we get it.” And the little sister said:]

  And another sister. They were a lucky family because they didn’t have any boys who thought they knew everything all the time.

  [“That is lucky,” said the monster.]

  The family lived in a very normal house where nothing surprising ever happened.

  But there was something the family didn’t know about their house.

  They didn’t know that their house was connected to a top secret candy factory. And the only way to get into the candy f
actory was through a top secret green door. The door was pretty small, so the mother couldn’t fit through it and the father couldn’t, either. But the sisters could.

  There was only one problem. They didn’t have the key to unlock the door.

  [Here is where the sister looked at the monster. He looked back at her. He was listening very closely to the story.]

  They didn’t have the secret code to unlock the door.

  They whispered lots of different code words through the keyhole, but it didn’t work.

  “If only someone had a better idea,” the sisters said. “We need help!”

  [“It’s audience participation time,” the little sister told the monster. “You’re the audience. Participate.”

  “How?” asked the monster.

  “Give the sisters another idea,” said the little sister.

  “Oh,” said the monster. “Okay…”

  There was a long pause.

  “They could ring the doorbell!” shouted the monster.

  “What doorbell?” asked the boy.

  “The one next to the door,” said the monster.

  The boy and the little sister and the monster all looked at the green door. And there, next to the door—where there hadn’t been anything just a moment ago—was a small gold box. And right in the middle of the small gold box was a shiny button.

  “The end,” said the little sister.

  “That was a very good story,” the monster told her.

  “It was okay,” said the boy.]

  7.

  The little sister pushed the shiny button. It didn’t make a sound.