Life on Mars

by Jennifer Brown

  Vega aimed her steely eyes at me. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t do something, Armpit. You do stupid stuff all the time.”

  “Heh. Dog. Heh,” the Bacteria continued.

  “I haven’t done anything stupid in a long time, Vega. Comet! Drop it!”

  “Hello? A phone? You guys? Someone needs to call Uncle Manny.” Aunt Sarin grabbed her stomach.

  My sister planted her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. “Using my eyeliner to draw a pirate mustache and eye patch on the dog?”

  “That was Tripp!” I yelled. “And it was a superhero mask. There was no mustache. I told you that a thousand times.”

  “There was so a mustache! I saw it myself!”

  “Kids, I don’t want to interrupt, but I’d really like to use the phone now,” Aunt Sarin said.

  “No,” I countered, putting my hands on my hips to match hers. “That mustache is Comet’s natural facial hair.”

  Vega made an I’m-not-stupid face. “Dogs don’t have natural mustaches, genius.”

  “Heh,” the Bacteria laughed. “Dog ’stache. Heh.”

  “It’s not an actual mustache, it’s just his fur!” I yelled back. “Look at him!”

  Together, Vega, the Bacteria, and I all turned to the window and leaned forward, craning our necks.

  Just in time to see Comet gobble my shoe. My whole shoe. Laces and all, in one swallow. Gulp. Like a cartoon dog. It was unnatural and unsettling. And my only pair of shoes!

  “No! Comet! Aw, come on! Couldn’t you have just peed on it?” Then, as if in answer to my question, Comet got up, walked over to Cassi’s swing, and lifted his leg. Well, at least I had that little consolation.

  “Huh,” Vega said. “What do you know? His fur does look like a mustache.”

  “Would somebody pick up the phone and call Uncle Manny, please? I’m having a baby over here!” Aunt Sarin screeched, and we all turned, sort of surprised to remember that she was still in the room with us.

  Vega went into panicky overdrive. “You’re having the baby? She’s having the baby? Why didn’t you tell me she was having the baby? Oh no, oh no, I don’t know what to do. What do I do? Where’s the phone? What’s Uncle Manny’s number? How far apart are the contractions? What happens if the baby is born here? How will we get to the hospital? Should Mitchell drive you to the hospital? Should I call an ambulance? Baby? A baby? Right now, a baby?”

  The Bacteria’s mouth dropped open, and the spoon plunked on my carpet. He ran out of the room, down the stairs, and straight out the front door, shutting it behind him with a house-rattling slam.

  Vega and I looked at each other for a beat, and then we both raced to the phone in the hallway. She got there first, and Aunt Sarin recited Uncle Manny’s phone number for her. Vega started yelling into the phone, something about babies and ambulances and some other stuff that made me feel like I was going to throw up. If Aunt Sarin started doing half the things my sister was talking about, I might have nightmares forever. I paced in circles, one shoe on, one shoe off, trying to remember aloud the stars in order of brightness.

  “Sirius, Canopus, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, Rigel. Wait. No, Capella is brighter than Rigel. Or is it Procyon that’s brighter than Capella? Or is it Riccola? Wait. What am I saying? Riccola is a cough drop. It’s Sirius, Canopus, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, Capella, Rigel, Procyon, uh … uh …”

  “Armpit!”

  I snapped my fingers, stuck my finger in the air. “Right! Betelgeuse! How could I forget that?”

  “Armpit! Stop talking about stars for one second,” Vega said. “Get your things together. Uncle Manny is on the way.”

  “Oh,” Aunt Sarin moaned as Vega helped her out of the chair. “Oh, kids, I’m so sorry. You should call your mother. Tell her what’s happening, see what she wants to do. Go to the guy next door. Your mom said he’d help in an emergency.”

  Vega helped Aunt Sarin downstairs, and in minutes Uncle Manny’s car screeched into the driveway. He ran into the house and collected Aunt Sarin, his hands shaking as he grabbed her elbows.

  “Easy, easy …,” he said. He helped Aunt Sarin into the car and then glanced back at Vega. “You guys okay?”

  Vega nodded, and Aunt Sarin let out a howl from within the car. Uncle Manny looked panicked. “We’ll be fine,” Vega said. “We’ll call Mom. Everything will be fine. Go!”

  But it turned out Mom didn’t think everything was fine at all. I could hear her screeching into the phone from all the way across the kitchen table. Vega held the phone away from her ear, okaying and uh-huhing and yeah-I-get-it-Mom-sheeshing, and then she hung up and set the phone on the table and looked at me.

  “So basically Mom wants us to leave.”

  “Leave? Where are we supposed to go? To Las Vegas?”

  There was a knock, and the front door opened, the Bacteria stepping inside. “Aunt? Kid?” he grunted.

  Vega shook her head. “No baby here. They went to the hospital.” She looked back at me, but she was kind of talking to both of us. “Mom and Dad are coming home as soon as they can get here. But in the meantime, we’re supposed to find someplace else to go. Mom said she’ll call Brielle’s mom and Cassi can just stay there for a couple of nights. I’ll go to my friend Anastasia’s house. And you’ll have to go to Tripp’s.”

  “Tripp isn’t home.”

  Even Vega looked surprised. “What do you mean, Tripp isn’t home?”

  “I’ve been calling all day.”

  “Are you sure? Tripp’s always home. If he’s not here, where else could he be?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery. He’s been missing a lot lately.”

  Vega pressed her lips together. “What about Priya? I know she’s a girl, but she hangs out with you and Tripp all the time, so she’s kind of a boy.”

  “Engineering camp. She won’t be back until the day after tomorrow.”

  Vega stood up and huffed. “Well, do you have any other friends who are home?”

  I hated that we all already knew the answer to that question. And that we also all knew that my standing around puffing my lips out, looking up, and tapping my chin thoughtfully, like I was going through my long list of social prospects, was a lie. But that was exactly what I did. “Nope,” I finally said.

  “You’re kidding,” Vega said, swooshing her hair over one shoulder dramatically and stomping out of the kitchen. “Seriously, you can’t even have one friend, Armpit?”

  I followed behind her. “I have two friends. They’re gone. It’s summer, Vega. People go places.”

  She went into her room and began cramming things into a backpack, leaving the Bacteria to shuffle over to the pantry and scrounge for something to snack on while he waited. I stood in her doorway.

  “So, what am I supposed to do?” she asked. “I am not taking you to Anastasia’s. There’s a limit to what a sister should have to do, and hanging out with her armpit of a brother at her friend’s house is definitely past that limit.”

  “I’ll just stay home,” I offered.

  She slammed a dresser drawer and laughed. “Yeah, right. Mom would kill me if I left you here alone. You’d probably fall off the roof and get eaten by Comet.”

  Nah, I thought. Comet would never eat me.

  Of course, I never thought he would have eaten my shoe, either.

  She went into her bathroom, where I heard more drawers opening and closing. Soon she came out, zipping her bulging backpack as she walked past me and down the stairs.

  “You’re just going to have to go … somewhere,” she said. “Come on, Mitchell.”

  “Where?” I asked, but she and the Bacteria had already plowed out of the house. For a few minutes I just stood at the bottom of the steps. I would just stay home. I could handle it.

  Cassi was gone, so she’d never know. Vega had bolted, so she’d never know. I wouldn’t answer the phone if Mom or Dad called. I’d have the whole house—and CICM-HQ—to myself.

  I liked
it. No. I loved it.

  I walked over to the table and crinkled up the potato chip bag, tossed it in the trash, and closed the pantry door. See how responsible I was acting already? This would be no problem!

  Just then the front door swished open and Vega stuck her head in. “Let’s go, Arty! I don’t have all day to wait around for you!”

  Darn. She noticed.

  “I don’t have anywhere to go, remember?” I said.

  “Yes, you do. You’re going next door.”

  I slumped. “To the Moneckis? Mr. Monecki always makes me clean out his lawnmower.” He also once had me sweep out his garage and is always saying, “Here, son, you wanna make a nickel? I gotta job for youse.” There were so many things wrong with that sentence I never knew where to begin and always ended up doing some huge chore for him.

  This was going to be a horrible couple of days.

  I trudged upstairs and got out my STUDYING STARS MAKES ME BRIGHTER overnight bag from space camp. (That acronym would be SSMMB, which doesn’t spell anything, either, so apparently it’s not easy, even for adults, to come up with stuff that looks good on shirts.)

  “Nope,” Vega said, following me. “The Moneckis aren’t home. You’re going to the other guy.”

  I froze in place. The other guy? She couldn’t possibly mean …

  “No way. I can’t stay with that guy.”

  She turned her palms up, exasperated. “There’s no choice! What am I supposed to do? Leave you here alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t do that. Mom would kill me.”

  “She might kill you if you just … abandon me with him.” Especially if he eats my face.

  “It’s not my fault you don’t have any friends,” Vega said. “Mom told us we could go to him if we had an emergency. It’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  I crept to my window and peered out.

  There was Mr. Death, peering back at me through his window, the curtains parted just enough to show his two horrid, creepy eyes. We made contact, and the curtains snapped shut.

  My heart beat wildly in my chest, and I swallowed a thousand times, trying to get my breath.

  Check that. This wasn’t going to be a horrible couple of days.

  It was going to be my last couple of days.

  10

  A Situation of Infinite Gravity

  When I was little, I used to think a black hole was a pothole in the sky, sort of like the potholes in the grocery store parking lot. Dark and deep, filled with oily water and floating leaves and Band-Aids.

  But a black hole is really more like a force.

  Technically, a black hole is gravity. But not just any gravity. Not the gravity you and I are used to, the kind that keeps your toothpaste on your toothbrush and keeps you from floating out of algebra class. It is more like gravity times eleventy gazillion. Gravity so extreme it overwhelms all other forces in the universe. Gravity that is impossible to escape. Even light can’t escape the gravity of a black hole.

  If you approached a black hole, first your body would be stretched pretty much to smithereens. But that wouldn’t matter for long, because as soon as you were sucked inside, you’d be squished into a tiny speck by all that awesome gravity. Splat. Infinite density.

  That was exactly how I felt when I pushed open Mr. Death’s door.

  “Hello?” Vega called, peering into the darkened house over my shoulder. There was no answer, just the faint odor of cigar smoke and the hum of the air conditioner. She and I looked at each other, and we shrugged. “Hello?” she called again. Still no answer. We craned our necks so we were both peeking in through the open door.

  There was a cough from somewhere within the house. Deep, guttural, rattly. It made both of us jump and pull our heads back outside.

  Vega straightened and pushed her backpack up higher on her shoulder. “Well, he’s in there,” she said. “At least we know that much. And he grunted what sounded like a yes when I asked if you could stay, so …” She paused, licked her lips, glanced nervously back into the black hole that was Mr. Death’s living room. “You’ll be fine, Arty.” The Bacteria beeped his horn, and we both jumped again. Vega turned and gave him a hold-on signal. She turned back to me and bumped my back with her elbow. “So go ahead,” she said, though even she didn’t look too convinced.

  I took a step back. “No way. It’s dark in there.”

  She pushed me again. “You have to. I already locked the house. You have nowhere else to go. What, are you afraid of the dark now? I thought you got over that when you were three. Come on, I’m sure he’s really nice. Mom wouldn’t let you stay if he wasn’t.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s one night, Arty. I’ll come check on you if Mom doesn’t get back tomorrow, okay?”

  Again, a nasty cough echoed from inside the house. I took another step back. “He’s a murderer. A serial killer with a cemetery in the woods behind our house,” I blurted out. “I’ve seen it.”

  She cocked her head at me. “You can’t be serious right now.”

  “Or possibly a face-eating zombie.”

  She made a snickering noise in the back of her throat. “Now you sound like Tripp. Zombies don’t eat faces. They eat brains, in which case, you and Tripp are both safe. If our neighbor is into eating brains, he’s going to starve to death with you in the house.”

  The Bacteria honked his horn again. We looked back. He was head-banging to metal music in his car and had hit his forehead on the horn. He waved at us sheepishly. Talk about starving for brains.

  Vega shifted her weight impatiently. “Just go, Arty. Mom will call later.”

  She raced down the sidewalk and dove into the Bacteria’s car and they squealed away. And when I looked back at the open front door, I could swear everything around it—the flowerpot, the shrubs, the statue of a little girl with a watering can—was bending and distorting, the way stars did around the edges of a black hole. And just like falling into a black hole, I stepped numbly through the open door and into the smoky gravitational pull of Mr. Death’s living room. I could feel myself getting smaller and smaller. By the time Mom and Dad came home, all that would be left of me would be the chicken-pox scar under my chin.

  “Shut the front door, the air conditioner’s on,” a voice commanded from beyond.

  My hands shaking, I reached back and pushed the front door closed with a soft click.

  And was enveloped in darkness.

  11

  Terror: The Alpha Star in the Neighbor Constellation

  I stood for a long time in Mr. Death’s living room, afraid to move, afraid to run away, afraid to do anything. I listened for him, but mostly all I heard was that raspy coughing, which he did a lot. And also the sound of a lighter scratching to life, followed by the smell of cigar smoke, which wafted into the living room in plumes. My fingers sweated and ached from gripping the handle of my duffel so tightly.

  I sorely wished I’d had the time to write a letter to Tripp—something cryptic about how if I went missing, to send the police into the woods behind Mr. Death’s house with cadaver dogs, and instructions to avenge me in some really cool way. And then I got a little lost in a daydream about Tripp going all superhero and hanging Mr. Death upside down from his toenails from the top of Cassi’s swing set.

  Tell me where you’ve buried him or I will unleash my sidekick, SuperTripp would say, and Comet, wearing a superhero mask over his eyes, would lift his leg perilously close to Mr. Death’s forehead.

  I was so lost in my daydream I forgot where I was for a moment, until I heard movement creaking slowly down the hallway toward me, and the smell of cigar smoke got stronger.

  My heartbeat kathunked in my chest, and I looked around the room frantically. I changed my mind. I didn’t want to be avenged. Avenged people were pretty much always dead. I didn’t know much about what it took to be the first astronaut to walk on Mars, but I was pretty sure “alive” was going to be a prerequisite.

  Finally, as the footsteps got closer, I made out the shape of
a table and scurried underneath it. A few seconds later, Mr. Death’s shadow came into the room, the glowing orange end of his cigar burning in front of him. He coughed, long and loud, like Bigfoot hacking up a bear who was hacking up a Volkswagen. With a bad muffler.

  “You in here?” he growled, sounding out of breath. I said nothing. He waited for a few seconds. “You hungry?” Nothing. He moved down another hall, slowly, slowly. “Kid?” he said, but I remained tight lipped. Just hunkered under the table, shivering and wishing I had stowed away in the Bacteria’s trunk or hidden out at CICM-HQ. And especially wishing that Aunt Sarin’s pushy baby, Castor, hadn’t chosen today to be born.

  Stupid Castor. If I died here, it would be all his fault. I should have put that in a letter to Tripp, too. Blame Castor, the note would say. Let Comet eat one of his shoes.

  Which reminded me …

  I glanced down at my one shoeless foot. In all the hustle and bustle of everything that had happened, I had forgotten all about Comet eating my shoe. I was hardly an athlete with two shoes on—how would I outrun a murderer half-shoed? I wouldn’t be able to, and I would die wearing only one shoe, which seemed like a very undignified way to go.

  The creaking returned. I gripped my bag handle tighter and swallowed, peeking around the corner.

  “I know you’re in here somewhere,” he said. “Too shy to come out, are you? Well, I’ll get you out eventually.”

  The blood in my veins turned into icicles. I could feel it jaggedly bumping and jumping around beneath my skin. He would get me out? How? What was that supposed to mean?

  “You can have the bedroom on the right,” he barked, and then disappeared from where he’d come.

  I waited until he sounded far enough away, and then I crawled out on my hands and knees and, carefully, trying not to hit any squeaky floorboards, stood up.

  I looked to the front door and back again. I could just slip out of here. Sneak out unnoticed and run away. Go sleep in Comet’s doghouse for a couple of nights. Sleep in the rocket ship at the school or in Mr. Monecki’s gazebo or under the cloaking branches of Priya’s weeping willow tree, where we used to hide out when Priya had swiped her mom’s candy bar stash. He’d never find me at any of those places. Plus, those hideouts all had the added bonus of me staying alive through the whole night. Or at least allowing me a few minutes to write my avenge note to Tripp. Because that note was really starting to take shape in my head, and it seemed such a shame not to get it on paper.