Chapter 1: No Eraser
“No pencil, Wyatt? Again?”
That’s what Mrs. Shaw is going to say. I can hear it already.
I dump my whole backpack out on the hallway floor. Notebook. Granola bar. Three markers with no caps. A sock.
Why is there a sock?
No pencil.
If I walk into class without one, I have to use the Cup. Everybody knows about the Cup. It’s a coffee mug on the corner of Mrs. Shaw’s desk, full of pencils nobody wanted. Chewed ones. Wet ones. One with a wad of old gum stuck where the eraser should be.
I’d rather write with my finger.
The Lost & Found box sits outside the office, under the bulletin board. It smells like old lunch. I dig. Hoodies. A water bottle with something green growing in it. One light-up sneaker, still blinking.
And at the very bottom, a pencil.
I pull it out.
It isn’t yellow. It’s dark wood, almost black. When I tip it, the grain shimmers silver, like it got dipped in glitter and wiped off. The point is perfect. Sharp enough to poke a hole in the air.
There’s no eraser. The little metal band at the top is empty and pinched flat.
Like somebody bit it shut.
And it’s warm.
Not sitting-in-the-sun warm. Warm like somebody was holding it a second ago.
My skin prickles. I look up and down the hall.
“Is this anybody’s?” I ask.
Nobody answers.
“Put that back.”
I jump so hard I drop the sock.
A girl is standing in the office doorway with a stack of folders. Fifth grade, but not my class. She has the office helper lanyard on, and she’s looking at me like I just licked the floor.
“It’s just a pencil,” I say.
“Put it back.” Her voice gets quiet. “Please.”
“Why? It was in the Lost & Found. Finders keepers.”
She looks at the pencil. Then at me.
“That’s what I said,” she whispers.
What is that supposed to mean?
The bell rings.
I shove everything in my backpack, stick the pencil in my pocket, and run.
At the corner, I look back.
The girl is still in the office doorway. She’s rubbing her fingertips on her jeans, hard, like there’s something on them she can’t get off.
Her fingertips are gray.
I slide into my seat right as the announcements end.
“Pencil, Wyatt?” Mrs. Shaw says. She already has her hand on the Cup.
I hold it up.
She raises her eyebrows. “Well. Look at you. Fancy.”
“Found it,” I say.
“Then don’t lose it.”
Morning work is synonyms. Big, large. Small, tiny. Happy, glad.
I do two.
Then my hand does what it always does.
It draws.
I draw on everything. Margins. Desks. The back of my hand. Mostly monsters. Mom says I’m going to be famous someday. Mrs. Shaw says “Eyes up, Wyatt” so much it might as well be my name.
The new pencil feels good. Smooth. Like it already knows my hand.
I draw the window next to my desk. Then a cat on the outside sill. A black cat, standing up, one paw flat on the glass like it wants in. Big round eyes. Little tufts on the tips of its ears.
Kayden leans over. “What are you drawing, Monster Boy?”
I cover the page with my arm. “Nothing.”
He goes back to his worksheet. I move my arm.
Last, the tail. I curl the tip of it. One quick flick.
Done.
“THERE’S A CAT!”
Every head snaps toward the window.
I freeze.
There’s a cat on the windowsill.
A black cat. Standing up. One paw flat on the glass.
My stomach drops.
Big round eyes. Little tufts on its ears. Its tail curls at the very tip, right where I curled it.
The whole class goes nuts. Chairs scrape. Kids crowd the window.
“Is it a Halloween cat?”
“It’s a WITCH’S cat!”
“Can we keep it? Mrs. Shaw, can we keep it?”
Somebody meows at it. Somebody else meows back.
I look at my notebook.
I look at the cat.
Same paw. Same tail. Same everything.
“Did you see its ears?” I whisper to Kayden, who sits next to me. “Did you see the little tufts?”
Kayden snorts. “Monster Boy’s scared of a cat.”
“All right, all right.” Mrs. Shaw squeezes through the crowd. “Does anybody know whose cat that is?”
Nobody does.
Except me. And I’m not saying.
She taps the glass. “Shoo, kitty. Go on.”
The cat doesn’t run. It doesn’t even look at her.
It looks at me.
Then it hops down, and it’s gone.
“Seats,” Mrs. Shaw says. “Eyes up. Synonyms.”
Everybody sits. In about one minute, everybody forgets.
Not me.
Did I draw it because I saw it?
No. I drew it first. I drew it, and then it was there.
I lean over to Kayden. “Was that cat there before? Before somebody yelled?”
“How should I know?” He rolls his eyes. “Why do you care so much about a cat?”
I don’t answer. I look down at my notebook. The drawing is still there. The cat. The tail. The paw on the glass.
I hold the pencil over the page, and the pencil feels warmer than before.
My heart slams against my ribs. I look at the window again.
On the glass, right where its nose was, there’s a smudge. Gray and shiny. Like pencil.
Chapter 2: Monster Boy
I don’t want to draw anymore.
I tell my hand that all through math.
My hand doesn’t listen.
There’s a water bottle on the desk in front of me. A blue one with a dented cap. Before I even decide to, I’m drawing it. Tipped over. Water pouring off the edge of the desk. Splash lines on the floor.
One more splash line and it’s done.
“Eyes up, Wyatt.”
I freeze. Mrs. Shaw walks past my desk. I hold the pencil still, one line short.
The water bottle sits there. Blue. Dented. Totally normal.
Nothing happens.
I let my breath out. See? It was a stray cat. Cats are everywhere. I’m being a baby.
I look at the drawing.
I look at the bottle.
I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t.
I draw the last splash line.
The bottle tips.
It rolls off the desk, hits the floor, and the cap pops. Water pours across the tile, right toward a backpack.
The girl in front of me spins around in her seat. “Did you knock my bottle?”
“I didn’t touch it.”
“So it just jumped off my desk by itself?”
I look at the pencil in my hand.
“Kind of,” I say.
“Seriously?” Mrs. Shaw groans. “Paper towels, please.”
Everybody jumps up. Half the class turns into a mop crew.
I don’t move.
I can’t.
The puddle on the floor is the same shape as the puddle in my notebook. Exactly the same.
It doesn’t happen while I’m drawing.
It happens when I finish.
At lunch I sit at the end of the table, away from everybody. I open my notebook on my knees.
Just a test. One little test.
I draw a quarter on the floor next to my sneaker. A plain quarter, heads up. I draw the last line of the rim.
Something clinks.
I look down.
There’s a quarter next to my sneaker.
I pick it up. It’s heavy. Too heavy. It isn’t silver. It’s gray, the shiny gray of a pencil scribble, and it’s warm in my hand. I stick it in my jacket pocket. My fingers come out smudged gray.
I stare at my fingers. My heart is going a hundred miles an hour, but not the scared way.
One more test.
I draw a cookie on my napkin. A big chocolate chip one. I draw the last chip.
There’s a cookie on my napkin.
It’s gray. The whole thing. Gray dough, gray chips. It smells like the inside of a pencil sharpener.
“Whoa, where’d you get a cookie?” says a kid across the table.
“Uh. I brought it.”
He squints at it. “Why is it gray?”
“It’s...” I wrap it up in the napkin fast. “Whole wheat.”
I don’t eat it. I shove it in my lunch bag.
What else could I draw?
A dog. A new bike. A snow day. A trampoline in my backyard.
I’m still thinking about the trampoline when we line up for class.
It happens right after lunch.
I come back from the bathroom, and Kayden has my notebook.
He’s standing on his chair with it open over his head. “Hey, everybody, look. Monster Boy drew his girlfriend.”
It’s my best monster. The one with the three rows of teeth.
Everybody laughs.
“Give it BACK!”
I grab for it. He holds it higher. Then Mrs. Shaw says “Kayden, sit,” and he drops it on my desk and sits, grinning.
My face is on fire.
I flip to a clean page. My hand is shaking. I’m not even thinking. I’m just mad.
I draw Kayden’s shoulder. And on it, a spider. A big, fat, hairy one, the size of a cookie. Eight legs.
Seven legs.
I stop with the pencil on the paper.
Don’t, says the smart part of me.
Kayden looks over at me and mouths, Monster Boy.
I draw the eighth leg.
Kayden screams.
There’s a spider on his shoulder. Big. Fat. Hairy. It scuttles across his collar and down the back of his shirt.
“Get it off, get it OFF ME!”
Kayden is out of his chair, spinning, slapping at his own back. Kids are screaming. Somebody climbs onto a desk. Kayden yanks his shirt up over his head, and the spider drops to the floor.
Mrs. Shaw grabs the dictionary off her desk.
WHAM.
The whole room goes quiet.
She lifts the dictionary.
There’s no spider. No legs. No guts.
Just a smear on the tile. Gray and shiny. Like somebody scribbled hard with a pencil.
Mrs. Shaw frowns at it. She frowns at the dictionary.
“It’s gone, Kayden,” she says. “It’s squashed. See?”
“It was IN MY SHIRT!”
Kayden is crying. Not fake crying. Real crying, with his shirt still half over his head.
I gasp. I didn’t know I was holding my breath.
It isn’t funny.
It isn’t funny at all.
I close my notebook and jam it in my backpack. Then I take the pencil and shove it all the way to the bottom, under the sock, and I zip it shut.
I’m done.
I can’t eat dinner.
“You love tacos,” Mom says. She puts her hand on my forehead. “Are you getting sick?”
“I’m just tired.”
“Bed, then. Early.”
I don’t argue.
My backpack hangs on the back of my desk chair. Zipped.
I lie in the dark and look at it.
It’s just a backpack.
I close my eyes.
I don’t know how long I sleep. When I wake up, the house is dead quiet. The clock on my dresser says it’s the middle of the night.
Then I hear it.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
It’s coming from inside my backpack.
Chapter 3: Two More Nights
In the morning, the backpack is still zipped.
I unzip it slowly. Like something might jump out.
Nothing jumps out. The pencil is right where I left it, under the sock.
My notebook is not.
My notebook is sitting on top, open.
I didn’t open it.
There’s a drawing on the page. A drawing I didn’t make.
It’s my room. My dinosaur lamp. My window with the broken blind. My poster of the shark. My bed, with a boy asleep in it, his hair sticking up in the back.
Me.
And standing at the foot of my bed, there’s something else.
Tall. Thin. Just an outline. No arms. No face.
The lines look like mine. Only better. Sharper. Like the best drawing I ever made.
My skin prickles all over.
I pick up the pencil. It’s warm. And it’s shorter than it was yesterday. Shorter by a whole fingernail.
I grab my eraser, the good pink one from my desk drawer, and I rub the tall thing as hard as I can.
It doesn’t come off.
It smears.
The lines go darker. Fatter. Blurrier. The tall thing gets bigger, like it’s leaning closer to the bed.
I stop. I can’t breathe.
At the bus stop, I throw the pencil in the trash can. I push it all the way down, under a banana peel.
I get on the bus. I don’t look back.
In class, I reach in my pocket for a tissue.
The pencil is in my pocket.
Warm.
My stomach drops.
Under my desk, I try to snap it. I put both thumbs in the middle and push.
It bends.
It bends like a rubber pencil. Like that dumb trick where you wiggle it and it looks floppy. Except this isn’t a trick. It’s really bending.
I let go.
It springs back perfectly straight.
Next to me, Kayden keeps checking his collar. Every few minutes, he slaps the back of his neck.
“Sorry about the spider,” I whisper.
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Why are YOU sorry? You didn’t put it there.”
My face gets hot.
“Yeah,” I say. “Still. Sorry.”
At recess, I don’t go outside. I go to the office.
She’s there, stapling papers at the front counter. The girl with the lanyard. Her name tag says SADIE.
She sees the pencil in my hand, and every bit of color drains out of her face.
“You picked it up,” she says.
“You said to put it back.”
“I know.” She puts the stapler down. Her hands are shaking. “It was mine. I found it in that box too. It drew stuff. Little stuff at first.”
“Then it drew your room,” I say.
She nods.
“Three nights,” she says. “It draws a little more every night. On the third night, it finishes. So yesterday morning, before my third night, I put it back in the box.” She swallows. “And yesterday, you picked it up. And it stopped drawing me. I felt it stop.”
The office is very quiet.
“What happens when it finishes?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I never let it.”
“How do I get rid of it?”
“You can’t throw it out. You can’t break it. You can’t erase it.” Sadie looks past me, at the Lost & Found box. “You put it back. And somebody else picks it up.”
I turn around.
A little first grader is digging through the box. She’s looking for a mitten. She’s humming.
“No,” I say.
Sadie closes her eyes.
“Then you have two more nights.”
After school, I lock my bedroom door.
I have a little plastic sharpener shaped like a dinosaur. You stick the pencil in its mouth and twist.
It’s a pencil, right? Pencils get used up.
I stick it in and twist.
The pencil SHRIEKS.
A thin, high squeal, like a balloon letting out air. Smoke curls out of the dinosaur’s mouth. My fingertips burn like I grabbed a hot pan.
One curl of shaving drops onto my desk. It’s silver.
I look at the drawing.
One line of the tall thing’s foot has gone faint. There’s a little gap in it.
It worked!
I twist again.
Nothing. The blade won’t bite. It’s like trying to sharpen a rock. The pencil gets so hot I drop it, and it rolls across the desk, and the dinosaur’s mouth is clogged with sticky silver gunk.
I suck on my burned fingers and stare at the pencil.
It’s shorter than it was this morning. But not from me.
It got shorter all by itself. Last night.
While it was drawing.
It only gets used up when it draws.
I try to stay awake. I really do.
I sit up in bed with the lamp on and the pencil in my fist and the notebook on my desk, all the way across the room.
At some point, my eyes close.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
My eyes fly open. The lamp is off. Mom must have turned it off when she checked on me. Moonlight comes through the broken blind. The clock on my dresser says 12:01.
My fist is empty.
On my desk, the notebook is open. The pencil is standing straight up on its point.
Drawing.
All by itself.
I throw off my blanket and lunge across the room and grab it. It’s hot. It jerks in my hand like a fish. Then it goes still.
The dinosaur sharpener is still clogged with silver gunk. I can’t do anything but hold on.
I look at the page.
The tall thing has arms now. Long, thin arms, reaching toward the bed. Toward the boy.
Toward me.
Slowly, I turn around and look at the foot of my real bed.
In the dark, there are lines. Faint gray lines, hanging in the air like somebody sketched them there.
Tall. Thin.
And it has arms now.
Chapter 4: The Last Line
I hold the pencil the rest of the night.
When the sun comes up, I can’t see the gray lines anymore. That doesn’t mean they’re gone.
At school, I can barely keep my eyes open. Mrs. Shaw is talking about fractions. Her voice sounds far away.
“Eyes up, Wyatt.”
I look down.
There’s a drawing in the margin of my worksheet. A tall, thin shape.
I’m holding a regular school pencil. Yellow, with an eraser. I don’t remember drawing anything.
I erase it fast. It comes right off.
Regular pencil. Regular eraser.
I tell myself that’s all it is.
At recess, Sadie finds me by the bike rack.
She looks around. Then she pulls something out of her hoodie pocket and pushes it into my hands. A battery sharpener. Black and heavy, with a little window to see the shavings.
“It’s from the office,” she whispers. “Mrs. Kemp has two. She won’t notice till Friday. It has new batteries.”
I stare at her.
“It only gets used up when it draws,” I tell her. “So tonight, when it tries to draw the face, I grind it down while it’s drawing.”
Sadie looks at the sharpener. Then at me.
“What if it finishes first?”
“It won’t.”
“Wyatt.” Her voice cracks. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
“I know,” I say.
That night, I’m ready.
Lamp on. Mom’s flowered garden gloves on my hands. The battery sharpener in my lap. The dinosaur sharpener next to me, scraped clean with a paper clip, just in case.
The pencil is in my fist.
The notebook lies open on the floor. Everything is drawn. My room. Me. The tall thing at the foot of the bed, arms out, hands almost touching the boy’s face.
Everything but its face.
The clock on my dresser says 11:58.
11:59.
12:00.
The pencil goes hot.
Not warm. Hot. I can feel it through the glove. And it goes soft, like a crayon left in a car. It strains in my fist, pulling toward the notebook like a dog on a leash.
POP.
The lamp bulb blows. The room goes black.
At the foot of my bed, something stands up.
It isn’t faint anymore. It’s gray lines piled on gray lines, so many that it’s almost solid. Tall. Thin. Its head bends against my ceiling.
Where its face should be, there’s nothing. Just smooth, blank gray.
It turns that nothing toward me.
My heart slams. I can’t breathe. I can’t move.
Then I can.
I jam the pencil into the battery sharpener.
WHIRRRRR.
The pencil SCREAMS. Not a squeal this time. A scream. Silver shavings pour into the little window. Smoke fills my nose.
The tall thing lunges.
Its hand closes on my wrist. It’s cold, so cold it burns. Gray smudges bloom on my skin. It pulls my hand toward the notebook. Toward the blank place where its face goes.
“NO!”
I pull back. I keep the pencil in the sharpener. WHIRRRR.
The arm holding me starts to come apart. Gray dust falls off it like dirty snow.
It’s working. It’s WORKING!
Then the sharpener slows down.
Whirrr.
Whirr.
The batteries. The brand-new batteries are dying. It’s eating them.
“No, no, no, no.”
The sharpener stops.
The pencil rips free. It drags my hand down to the paper, and the point touches the page, right where the face goes.
Scritch.
A line. The start of a mouth.
I yank my hand back. I grab the dinosaur sharpener off the floor and stuff the pencil in its mouth and TWIST.
The pencil screams.
The glove smokes. My fingers burn right through it. I keep twisting.
The tall thing’s other hand finds my face.
It’s cold. It smells like pencil shavings. Its blank gray nothing leans down, close, closer, right in front of my eyes.
I twist.
And twist.
The pencil is a stub. Then a nub. Then just the little metal band.
I twist one more time.
Crunch.
The metal band drops out of the dinosaur’s mouth and bounces on the carpet.
The hand on my face goes soft.
Then it falls. The whole tall thing comes down, from the top, like a sandcastle when the wave hits it. Gray dust. Gray shavings. They pour onto my carpet in a pile as high as my knees.
Then it’s quiet.
I’m sitting on my bedroom floor in the dark, breathing so hard it hurts.
The notebook is still open next to me. The drawing is gone. No room. No boy. No tall thing. Just a gray smear.
“Wyatt?” Mom calls from down the hall. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” My voice cracks. “I just dropped something.”
Before the bus comes, I sweep up every bit of gray dust, and the metal band, and the shavings, into a trash bag. I tie it in a double knot and carry it all the way out to the curb.
The gray cookie in my lunch bag is gone. So is the gray quarter in my jacket pocket.
At school, the smudge on the window is gone.
Sadie waves at me from the office. Kayden doesn’t call me Monster Boy, not even once.
It’s over.
It’s over.
In math, Mrs. Shaw is talking about decimals. I’m so tired I could sleep on my desk.
“Eyes up, Wyatt.”
I look down.
There’s a drawing in the margin of my worksheet. In my regular yellow pencil. In my own lines.
A bed. A boy asleep in it.
And something tall standing at the foot of it.
It doesn’t have a face yet.
