Life on Mars

by Jennifer Brown

  Priya nodded and Tripp saluted me.

  “You sure this is safe?” Priya asked, her hands buried in the sleeping bag she’d brought along. She eyeballed the darkness surrounding us.

  “Aha!” Tripp yelled pointing in her face. “Who’s not so sure about the zombie thing now, huh?”

  Priya swiped at his finger and he whipped it away and right into a tree trunk. He sucked on it. “I am totally sure we are not going to be attacked by zombies, Tripp. I’m more worried that you’re going to tear down the whole forest on top of us. Watch where you’re—”

  But it was too late. Tripp, walking backward and nursing his finger, tripped over a tree root. But to our surprise, he didn’t fall. Instead, he pivoted on one toe, stretched his arms to the side, did a graceful leap, and landed, his heels together, his hands clasped at his left hip.

  “Did that really just happen?” I asked.

  “What was that?” Priya asked at exactly the same time.

  Tripp looked sheepish. “What?”

  “You didn’t fall,” Priya said. “Something is up. First you’re riding a bike, and now you’re leaping over tree stumps and not falling?”

  “And standing funny,” I added.

  “Nothing is up. I just got lucky,” Tripp said, and almost to prove his point, he turned and walked face-first into a poison ivy plant that was growing up the side of the tree.

  “No problem, guys,” he said brightly. “I’ve fallen into poison ivy so many times, the doctor says I’m immune to it now.”

  Priya and I exchanged skeptical glances. “Come on,” I said, “we’re almost there.”

  Cash was already there waiting for us. I could see the flashing spotlight before we were even all the way out of the woods.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I reminded Tripp as we hiked to the top of the hill. But Tripp was busy saying, “Whoooa,” the same way I had said it when I first came to the hill. Even Priya seemed to be mesmerized. She clutched her sleeping bag under one arm and trotted to the top of the hill, gazing skyward.

  “It’s so beautiful up here, Arty,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said proudly, as if I (1) had made space beautiful myself, and (2) had discovered the hill, neither of which I’d actually done.

  We spread out Priya’s sleeping bag, and Cash enthralled them both by letting them peer through the telescope at the various constellations and nebulae he pointed out. We sat on our blankets and talked about Huey, about his purpose and our plans to be the first astronauts (yes, I knew I was lumping myself in with an actual astronaut, but I was sort of in the moment) to discover life on Mars.

  After a while, we turned off Huey to lie on our backs across the blankets. Just looking, just talking, just telling star stories and pointing to things nobody else could follow.

  “The moon is so huge from up here,” Priya said. “It almost feels like you can reach up and touch it.” She held her hands straight up into the sky, her bracelets clanking to her elbow. “Our science teacher told us that the moon was once part of Earth. She said it was knocked off in a crash. Weird to think we’re looking at more Earth up there.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said, pulling myself up on an elbow so I was facing her. “Some scientists think another planet smacked into us and fused together with us, and the stuff that was knocked off in the impact gathered together to become the moon. They say the rocks on the moon have identical oxygen levels as we do here. They called it the um … the um …”

  “The giant impact theory,” Cash intoned.

  “The giant impact theory,” we all repeated at the same time.

  “What I think is cool is the way the pieces that were knocked off found each other and came back together to form the moon,” I said.

  Priya raised her eyes to meet mine. “It’s, like, even being scattered about couldn’t make it forget who it really was. Maybe someday it will find its way back to Earth and become whole again.”

  Nah, it’s actually moving away from Earth, I wanted to tell her, but something tickling the backs of my ears made me think she wasn’t really talking about the moon anymore, so I didn’t say it, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I knew exactly what she was talking about.

  “So what happened to the people who were on the parts that got knocked off?” Tripp asked.

  “It was billions of years ago,” Cash said. “No people.”

  “How do we know?” Tripp asked. “Could have been billion-year-old people on that thing, minding their own business, sitting around in their tightie whities, playing their Xboxes, drinking a soda, whatever, and then all of a sudden, bang! They’re floating out in space. Ahhh!” He waved his arms and legs like someone flying through gravity-less space.

  “There are so many things wrong with that scenario, I don’t even know where to begin,” Priya said. She raised a finger. “One, this was back when the earth was brand-new. There weren’t any people. Two, Xbox, really? Even you should be able to remember a time before Xbox. Three …” She trailed off, her nose wrinkling. “What is that …”

  Just as she said it, I smelled it. One of Tripp’s silent but deadly after-dinner bombs. “Tripp!” we yelled in unison, both of us sitting up. Even Cash pulled himself up, groaning.

  Tripp grinned. “Sorry, couldn’t help it. Thinking about people being blown off the earth into space gets me gassy.”

  Priya jumped to her feet and began tugging at the sleeping bag. “Ew, and you did it on my bag. Get off! Get off!”

  Tripp laughed, and I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing along with him. Something told me Priya would not find the humor in it, which was something weird that happened to her when she stopped being Priya and started being a girl—she stopped seeing the inherently funny aspect of bodily functions. “It was a re-creation of the giant impact theory,” Tripp said, rolling over into the grass. He lifted his leg. “Kapow! Moon dust!”

  “You shouldn’t do those kinds of things in front of a lady,” Cash said, though he looked a little like he was trying not to laugh as well.

  “She’s not a lady. She’s Priya,” Tripp said.

  “No, she is a lady, Tripp,” I said, and I wanted to suck the words right back into my mouth as soon as they came out, because I was pretty sure they sounded like mushy gushy mush mush.

  They must not have, though, because Tripp simply tipped the empty thermos over his tongue to catch the very last drop of hot cocoa and said, “Pfft. Lady. Whatever.”

  But when I rolled Priya’s bag into a tight tube and handed it to her, she smiled at me.

  Kapow. Moon dust.

  27

  The Grouchytush Hypothesis

  My house was becoming a maze of boxes. Mom kept out only the essentials: five plates, cups, and sets of silverware; necessary clothing; and, of course, the raisins. Every minute that she wasn’t busy rolling our breakables in paper, she was stress baking. One night she even put raisins in the meatloaf. Which, by the way, proved incorrect my long-held hypothesis that meatloaf couldn’t be made any grosser.

  “When are we moving?” I asked one evening, pushing a plate of peanut butter raisin toffee bars away. The Bacteria leaned forward and grabbed one with his non-Vega-hand-holding hand. It was like the kid couldn’t get tired of raisins.

  “As soon as we’re all packed,” she said. “Dad’s new job starts in a few weeks, and we’d like to have some time to settle in before he goes to work.”

  Vega and Cassi took one look at each other and started bawling, the two of them rushing up to their bedrooms again, leaving the Bacteria free to fill a second hand with a cookie.

  “I’ll miss you, li’l dude,” he said, which kind of made me feel a little bit bad about how much I wouldn’t miss him at all.

  So with the deadline being “as soon as we’re all packed,” it seemed like the best possible way to put off moving would be to never get fully packed. So I began sneaking around at night unpacking things. Just a few things here and there—a snow globe in the dining ro
om, a stack of T-shirts in my bedroom, the toilet brush, the toaster oven. So far Mom hadn’t figured out that she’d been repacking the same things over and over again, though she kept mumbling that she didn’t understand why this was taking so long.

  Now, before you go feeling bad for my mom, just remember that parents trick kids all the time. How many times have you heard, “This shot is only going to feel like a little pinch?” And how many times has it in fact felt like someone had ripped your arm off and shoved it down a garbage disposal and then run over it with a train? That’s what I thought. Moving on.

  During the day, Tripp and Priya and I would scrounge for something to play with, something that hadn’t been packed (my house), or wasn’t girly (Priya’s house), or wasn’t broken or stolen or being hidden down the front of someone’s pants (Tripp’s house). And then at night I would meet Cash up on the hill and we would fire up Huey, tapping out new messages. We tried the obvious:

  WE COME IN PEACE

  And the less obvious:

  DO YOU LIKE ANCHOVIES ON YOUR PIZZA?

  And even the downright dumb:

  KNOCK KNOCK

  WHO’S THERE

  THAT’S WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO FIND OUT!

  “I don’t know if we’re ever going to find anyone,” I said one night as we traipsed back through the woods. Our traipsing had gotten much slower these days, and Cash usually had to stop a couple of times and bend over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath along the path.

  “You shouldn’t give up on something you believe in, kid,” he said between coughs, his cigar burning between his fingers. I had noticed that Cash had begun looking a little gray, and his skin had started to hang looser than usual, the whites of his eyes dull like eggs fried in bacon grease.

  “Maybe you should give up smoking those things,” I said, finally working up the courage to say what I’d been thinking since we met. “It’s not good for you. They make you cough a lot.”

  He spat in the weeds at the side of the trail and glanced at me. “Come on, let’s go.” And we took off again, him leading the way like he was trying to prove to me that he could.

  I got home that night and unpacked more things than usual, starting with a whole shelf full of bed sheets and ending with the TV trays that Mom had spent an hour wrestling just right into a box that afternoon.

  She came down the stairs just as I pulled the last tray out of the box.

  “Arty, what are you doing?” she said, and I whipped around like I’d just been caught stealing something. Which I kind of was. Stealing all her hard work.

  I lowered the tray to the ground.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re unpacking those trays. Why?” She came into the room, gathering her pink fluffy bathrobe around her. She stopped and her eyes grew big, like something had just dawned on her. “You’ve been unpacking things. I haven’t been going crazy after all. It’s you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I knew there was no way I was going to convince her when I’d been caught tray-handed. I sat on the hearth. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to make you think you were going crazy. I just wanted it to take longer.”

  “The packing? But why? You like to see me work?”

  I shook my head miserably. “I don’t want to move.”

  “Oh, honey.” Mom moved through the box maze and sat on the fireplace next to me. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders, and I couldn’t help it. I nestled my head against her and closed my eyes like a little kid. “None of us wants to move,” she said.

  “Then why are we?”

  She took a deep breath. “Because we have to. This is important for your dad, and a family supports one another through important decisions.”

  “But I’m losing everything important to me,” I said. “Priya, Tripp, the observatory, CICM, Cash, everything.”

  She leaned away so she could look into my face, which I ducked, trying to hide from her. It was much easier to whine when nobody was looking at you. “You really like that mean old coot, don’t you?” she said, and her voice was filled with wonder, rather than the irritation it’d been filled with all the other times she’d talked about him.

  “He’s an astronaut.”

  “He’s a Grouchytush,” she said, and I smiled, even though smiling tended to mess up whining efforts.

  “Mom. He’s an astronaut.” I said it more slowly this time, eyeing her importantly. “And he’s not mean. Well, not that mean.”

  She tucked her lips in on themselves and nodded. “I should have seen that earlier. He’s an astronaut. Of course you’d love him.”

  I blushed. “I don’t love him. Gross.” But I supposed in a weird way I kind of did. Not like in a gushing, slobbery way like Vega and the Bacteria, and not in the totally obsessed way of Cassi and the Brielle Brigade, and definitely not quite in the same way Comet loved Cassi’s swing. But in my own way, yeah, I guess I did.

  “Well,” Mom said, patting my knee and standing up, smoothing her robe over her knees, “you have a couple of weeks left with all of them. Make the most of your time. Don’t sit around moping before you’re even gone. Besides, it’s not like when you move away, it’ll be the last time you’ll ever see them again.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said.

  I guess she was right. There was still plenty of time.

  28

  Two Moons Named Fear and Panic

  There was a strange white car with Kansas license plates in Cash’s driveway the next day.

  I sat on the porch steps and stared at it, willing it to go away.

  “Looks like your pal has company,” Dad said. He was up on the ladder again, this time cleaning out the gutters.

  “He didn’t say anything about having company,” I said, frowning.

  “Maybe it’s surprise company,” Dad said. “You should probably stay away until his guest is gone.”

  My frown deepened. “But we were supposed to get Huey out tonight.” I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and unfolded it. “I translated the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ into Morse code. Took me forever.”

  I heard a sigh and the clap of the screen door closing behind me. Cassi, in her cheer clothes, had stepped out onto the porch. “Ick, make him stop talking like that, Daddy. Brielle is coming and if she hears him, she might die from his nerdiness.”

  “What was that?” I said loudly, my voice echoing down the street. “I couldn’t hear you over the clinking of the medals you earned in space camp. Mom must be packing them. I hope she remembers to keep them with your space rover obstacle course completion certificate.”

  She glared at me, her fists planted on her hips in perfect cheerleader formation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You’re the space nerd, not me.”

  “Are you sure?” I yelled. Brielle’s mom’s car turned the corner and crept toward us, the sun glinting off the windshield. “Because I definitely have a sister, named CASS-EE-OH-PEE-AH, who knows exactly who Phobos and Deimos are.”

  “Okay, shh, Arty … Daddy …”

  “And that sister of mine, the one named CASSIOPEIA, looks a lot like you. Who are Phobos and Deimos again? I’ve forgotten. Huh. If only Cassiopeia were here to remind me …”

  “Shut up, Armpit! Dad, make him stop.”

  “Oh! I know who Phobos and Deimos are! Pick me!” Dad said, raising his hand like we were in a classroom.

  Brielle’s car thumped into our driveway, and now we could make out Brielle’s upturned I-just-smelled-the-inside-of-Tripp’s-gym-shoe face. “If she’d remind me, I could stop talking about it. Phobos and Deimos, Phobos and Deimos … I wonder if Brielle might know.” I snapped my fingers and made like I was going to follow Cassi off the porch and to the car.

  Cassi turned abruptly and through a barely open mouth she hissed, “Fine. Mars’s moons. Happy now?”

  I grinned. “Yes! Thank you, Cassiiiiii.” She started down the driveway. “But I’d be so
much happier if I knew what Phobos and Deimos meant in Greek.”

  She shot a half-scared, half-furious look at me and loped down the driveway. Just as she opened the car door, I snapped my fingers and shouted, “Oh, yeah! Phobos and Deimos! Fear and Panic!”

  She slammed the car door shut and they backed out of the driveway, and I would have felt really proud of myself for having given her such a hard time if my eyes had not immediately gone right back to the strange car in Cash’s driveway.

  “You think they’ll leave soon?” I asked.

  “Who?” Dad asked, then followed my gaze. “If you had plans, I’m sure his guest will be gone in time.”

  But they weren’t. The sun began to set, and Tripp and I played catch in the front yard. The car was still there. The sun moved lower in the sky, and Mom made raisin spice cupcakes. Tripp and Priya and I ate them on the porch. The car remained. The sun lowered and Priya had to go practice her cello, and Tripp went home to babysit his baby brother Guts. The car was still there. I ducked inside to eat dinner. I thumbed through a Discovery magazine. I watched half an episode of a cartoon. I packed a snack and made a thermos of Kool-Aid and rolled up a blanket and stuffed everything into a backpack. I loitered around the kitchen. I watched Mom pack the last of the knickknacks in our living room. And the car was still there.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. Just as I saw the first firefly blink, I went to Cash’s door, hoping Dad wouldn’t catch me and yell at me for not giving Cash and his company some privacy.

  A woman opened the door. She had short gray hair and a smooth, friendly face and was holding a dish towel in one hand. There was a lamp on behind her in Cash’s living room.

  Wait. That should go in all caps.

  THERE WAS A LAMP ON BEHIND HER IN CASH’S LIVING ROOM!