Paul Feig - Ignatius MacFarland: Frequenaut!

Copyright 2008 by Paul Feig

All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.lb-kids.com

First eBook Edition: September 2008

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-03993-2

Did you know that books are supposed to be dedicated to people? I didnt, but thats probably because I havent read that many books. Ill try to start, though, now that Im sort of an author and everything.

So... okay. A dedication. Um...

I guess Ill dedicate this book to Karen and Foo. You dont know who they are yet but you will if you keep reading.

Oh, and Paul Feig, the guy who likes to think he helped me write this book, wants to dedicate it to some smart kids named Michael, Katie, and Hannah.

Whatever, Feig. My dedication was way better.

Ignatius MacFarland Author

MIGHT AS WELL START AT THE BEGINNING...

My name is Ignatius MacFarland, and I am a Frequenaut.

Hmm. I guess it looks sort of weird to see it written down that way. I dont mean its weird to see my name written down. I mean the word Frequenaut. It almost looks like its French. Its not, though. At least not that I know of.

Its pronounced freek-when-naught and its based on the word frequency. The naut part is the same as it is in astronaut, even though I dont really know what naut means. Its not like Im some super smart kid or anything like that. Im pretty average, as my report cards would be more than happy to tell you. I got so many Cs one year that my dad started calling me Ignatius C. It was supposed to be funny in a dad sort of way, but it didnt make me laugh. But that didnt stop him from saying, Hey, there, Ignatius C! whenever he came home from work. I knew he said it to make me realize that I should have been doing better in school, but I still wish hed have just called me by my real name.

Ignatius MacFarland.

Thats me.

I guess my name does look as weird as the word frequenaut when its written down. But only to you. Not to me. Not anymore, at least.

See, Ive been called Ignatius all my life. But only by my mom and dad. And my mom usually only says it when she gets mad. If I used to forget to take out the garbage or polish my dads shoes (which was one of my main chores in the house from when I was five years old Cant have your dad walking around in dull-looking shoes, my mom always used to say as she handed me the stinky can of shoe polish and my dads even stinkier shoes), my mom would yell from the other side of the house, IGNATIUS MACFARLAND! HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU TO... blah blah blah. Most other people call me Iggy. Iggy or Ignats. I really dont like when people call me Ignats, though, because it sounds kinda funny and people usually laugh when they hear it.

However, Id have been more than happy to have had the kids at school call me Ignats because what they really used to call me was way worse than that. Ill tell you what they really called me if you promise never to call me it, too. I mean, now that Im a Frequenaut and all, and since Ive saved the entire human race and more and had so many adventures since the last time the kids at school saw me, theres no real reason for you to use this stupid name anyway, unless youre just trying to be mean. Seems like most of the kids in my school liked to be mean. You know, now I sorta wish I hadnt even brought this whole name thing up. But since I have, Ill just tell you what they called me and assume that youll promise to never let the words come out of your mouth.

All right. Here it is. The kids at school called me...

Piggy MacFartland.

Pretty stupid, huh? And the stupidest part of it is that it doesnt even make sense.

First of all, Im skinny. Too skinny, my grandma always said. She was constantly accusing my mom of not feeding me enough, but thats not true. Ive always eaten lots of stuff. I just have what they call a high metabolism. It means that my body uses up tons of food because Ive got a lot of nervous energy to burn it off. Its sort of like Im one of those huge SUVs that get about ten miles to the gallon. I keep putting in the fuel and it keeps burning up before it has time to make me heavier. My dad used to say that I get bad mileage. Hes a real funny guy. (And if you heard me say so, youd know I was being a smart aleck because Id say it like this: Hes a reeeeeeeal funny guy.)

So because Im skinny, it didnt even make sense that they called me Piggy, other than it sounds like an insult and it rhymes with Iggy. What a clever bunch of kids they were at my school. (Sarcasm again. Tons of it.)

And MacFartland is really annoying, too. Its not like I used to fart in class or anything. I dont think Id ever farted in front of anybody at my school. Well, there was this one time in fourth grade when I was at my desk working on a spelling test and I was concentrating real hard. When I concentrate I really tense up all my muscles my leg muscles, my arm muscles, my stomach muscles. And I guess I tightened up my stomach muscles too much because the next thing I knew, a fart came out of me. And it was a loud one, too.

Fortunately, right when it happened, Lisa Seawell did this huge sneeze right behind me. It was such an enormous, nose-emptying sneeze that she blew snot all over her test. I mean, like, a gigantic pile of it. Seriously. And everybody in the classroom started laughing. At first, I thought they were laughing because of my fart but then I turned around and saw Lisa looking down at her test with the massive green mess in the middle of it and a long string of snot running from the paper up to her nose.

When I looked over at my friend Ivan sitting next to me, he pointed at Lisa and started laughing even harder, and so I knew that my fart had gone undetected. I felt bad that Lisa had to have her terrible snot incident just so that I could be spared the embarrassment of my super loud fart, but since that big snotty sneeze was inside her anyway, it was a good thing it came out right then.

But you know what? You know what everybody at school called Lisa after that? Well, they didnt call her Snotty or Boogers or Sneezy or Ha-Choo or even Gesundheit.

They called her Lisa.

Not even Sneeza or something nose-related that rhymes with Lisa. They just called her Lisa. And yet they called me Piggy and theres nothing about me that even remotely looks like a pig, and they called me MacFart land even though nobodyd ever heard me fart.

Thats the kind of stupid school I went to.

And its sort of what led me to become a Frequenaut.

See, the thing is, even though I had a good home and my parents were basically really nice, Id always felt out of place. In my house, in my school, in the world, in life in general. I know that a lot of people feel that way but I really felt it. It was like I was dropped on Earth by aliens or something when I was a baby but it just so happened that the aliens who left me looked exactly like human beings. So when I started growing up, nobody could tell I was an alien because I looked normal.