Saving Professor (Part 18)

Collier was two minutes late to Alexander’s house. Professor had dropped him off at the front door.
Collier walked through the familiar doors and into the blank room. He started down the staircase and entered the cluttered office.
Alexander was nowhere to be found.
I’ll just wait until he gets here, Collier thought. He sat in a swivel chair and spun around and around.
Then he had an idea. He eyed the chair that Alexander always sat in.
“This is my chair. My chair. Mine, not yours. That means that you can’t sit in it. Understand?” Alexander had once said. He had enforced that rule more than once.
Making sure no one was around, he crept up to the chair.
“Why am I tiptoeing?” he whispered. “Why am I even whispering? There’s no one even around.”
He stood above the blue leather office chair. Then, in one swift motion, he sat down. Air swished out of the seams under him.
“Ha. See that, Alexander? So much for your rules. If you ever find out what I’m doing—“
“I would kill you.”
Collier spun around. Alexander rose out of an empty tin trash can, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Collier, did I scare you?”
Collier didn’t answer.
“Yes, on a regular basis I would probably do something to you. But I plan to share something very important with you today. And, besides, if I did kill you, then there wouldn’t be anyone to carry on my plan, now would there?”
Collier shook his head, but he was thinking about Petra. She would be there. But Alexander wouldn’t know that.
“Anyway, we can’t waste any time. Let’s get on with my plan.” Alexander peered curiously at Collier.
“Haven’t said anything yet today, have you? Cat got your tongue?” Alexander laughed hysterically. Finally, when the humor apparently faded, he was left gasping for air. “Anyways—that was so funny, wasn’t it? Oh, but you wouldn’t know why. The reason why that was funny is because…”
Alexander ran across the room and hovered over a box. He turned around, put a hand up to signal Collier to wait, and then turned back around with his hands cupped.
He ran over to Collier, hands still cupped, with his grin larger than ever. Slowly, he uncapped his hands. In his hands lay a kitten. It had soft, white fur with a bushy tail. It stirred and twisted its head upside down against Alexander’s thumb. It lifted its eyelids and revealed the purest blue eyes.
“His name is Frisky,” Alexander whispered softly.
Frisky attempted to stand up, so Alexander gently lay him on the table. Frisky stood up, arched his back, and began to purr. He rubbed his head against a nearby chair in pure delight. Then he looked straight up at Collier and meowed a soft, high-pitched meow.
“He’s so cute!” Collier exclaimed.
Alexander smiled.
“You finally said something!”
Collier ignored him and scooped the kitten up.
“Why’s he so small?” he asked.
“He’s a kitten. Why else would he be so small?”
“Well, kittens aren’t usually this small.”
“Then he’s a baby kitten.”
Collier was about to point out that a ‘baby kitten’ didn’t make any sense, but he decided against it.
“Why’d you get him?” he asked, instead.
“I found him on the side of the road. He was a lot dirtier. I washed him up nice and clean.” Then he took Frisky back up and walked him over to the box. “You stay in there, little Frisky. I’ll get you back out later.” Then he turned back to Collier. “Time to get to work,” he announced.
“What was the important thing you had to tell me?” Collier asked.
Alexander’s face turned a lighter shade of red.
“Oh. That was the cat. There’s really nothing that much more important.” Then his face lit up again. “I did figure out more on the project, though!”
Collier nodded.
“Let’s see it, then!”
Alexander dug through a large stack of paper, and then pulled out blueprints, which he excitedly began showing to Collier.
He pointed to a basket of lemons scrawled on the graphed paper.
“See? Here are the balloons.”
He showed Collier a sketch of some sort of a stick with half a lemon at the end.
“This is the air pump.”
He traced an arrow that led to a drawing of a cup piled high with lemons.
“So I’ll put the balloons in here, and—“
Then Alexander seemed to notice his drawings for the first time. He lowered them and started scrutinizing them.
“Huh. This is the wrong paper. This is my diagram of how to make lemonade. Why didn’t you tell me, Collier?”
Collier was speechless.
What would I tell him? he thought. That he’s crazy?
But Alexander was already busy looking for the right diagram. Finally, he held it up and proudly handed it to Collier.
Apparently, Alexander was going to use a swimming pool cleaning machine to blow up the millions of balloons.
“It’s a reasonable choice,” Alexander was saying.
“But… how would that work? Do you even know what one of these machines does?”
“Well, I can at least find out, can’t I?” Alexander snapped back. Then he regained his calmness. “It will do as I say.”
“It’s a machine.”
“And I’m Alexander!”
Collier raised his eyebrows.
Alexander picked a piece of kitten fur off his vest.
“Alexander the Great, if you please,” he added. Then, still intrigued with the fur, he said, “Go home.”
“Go…”
“You heard me. Go home. You have a big day tomorrow.”
Knowing better than to argue or question, Collier made his way to the old-fashioned telephone in the corner of the room to call Alexander.