by Jo Franklin
Have I mentioned that Gordon was stingy? He was my friend and everything, but he never had any money. At least we never saw him spend any. He didn’t eat lunch, he didn’t eat potato chips, and I’d never seen him drink anything but water.
Eddie and I had this theory that Gordon was saving up for something. He presumably got an allowance, and he did PC support for older people who didn’t know how to use their computers. So he probably had a lot of money put away.
“Gordon, can you loan me the money to fly to Russia?”
“No,” he said.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“No.”
I could tell he was only pretending to look at his laptop. He was ignoring me.
If Gordon was an alien, he would have been able to read my thoughts and would know how important it was for me to get to Kepler 22b. But Gordon wasn’t an alien, he was human, and he wasn’t going to loan me the money, because he’s so stingy. Granddad would say that Gordon is “tight as a frog’s backside, and that’s watertight.”
I didn’t need to create a spreadsheet to tell me I didn’t have enough money to get to Russia.
I couldn’t borrow it anyway, because there was probably no way of sending money back from Kepler 22b. And who knew what currency the Keplerites used.
“So how am I going to get the money for the flight to Russia?” I said.
There was an ominous silence.
Have you noticed there are very limited opportunities for kids to make money? I could do chores at home, but Mom and Dad only paid fifty cents per chore. It would take me eons to earn enough to go to Russia, and by that time I’d be an adult and would have missed spending my teenage years on Kepler 22b.
“Halloween’s next week,” Eddie said. “We could go trick-or-treating.”
“What use is a bag of gummy skulls and a Tootsie Roll?” I said.
“We could get some awesome costumes,” Eddie said, ignoring me.
“Jessie has a witch costume you can borrow,” I said.
“Candy store,” Gordon said.
There was a weird silence as Eddie and I tried to figure out how to go trick-or-treating dressed as a candy store.
“If we get enough trick-or-treat swag, we could open a candy store at recess and sell the candy to the other kids,” Gordon explained.
Have I ever referred to Gordon as the Geek? I meant to call him Gordon the Genius.
15
The Great Halloween Transformation
First we had to get some awesome Halloween costumes. The better the costumes, the better the swag. No one was going to give us any candy if we were wearing lame sheets with holes for eyes.
I figured I could save money on a mask and go for face paint and a crazy hairstyle. The only good thing about having an older sister was that she had loads of makeup and hair gunk.
I couldn’t make up my mind whether to dress up as a vampire or a werewolf.
VAMPIRES
WEREWOLVES
Cool
Scary
Slicked-back hair (loads of gel required)
Scruffy fur (already have scruffy hair, so no gel required)
Only go out at night (okay, because trick-or-treating happens at night)
Can’t go out at the full moon (need to check the moon on Halloween)
Might be mistaken for a dead person and buried alive
Might be mistaken for a rabid dog and shot by the police
I had some plastic fangs that would work well for either a vampire or a werewolf, but I didn’t know what to wear on the rest of me.
“What do werewolves wear?” I asked my family the morning of Halloween.
Mom and Dad both picked up their cups of coffee with their right hands and took a sip at exactly the same time. The way they are synchronized with each other freaks me out. They didn’t answer.
“Werewolves don’t exist,” Jessie said.
“They do in movies.”
“Movies aren’t real,” she said.
“Let me ask the question another way. If I dress up as a werewolf on Halloween, what should I wear?”
“Nothing. Werewolves lose their clothes when they transform, and they run around in their hairy naked bodies biting people.” Jessie grinned. “Let me know when you’re ready so I can take a photo and put it on Facebook. I’ve got 1,235 followers.”
“You could get some furry mittens and stick a little fur at the opening of your shirt.” Mom had joined the conversation. “Since you don’t have any chest hair yet.”
Why were my family obsessed with bodies—mine and theirs? They were totally unsympathetic to my sensitive alien psyche. Aliens need to be dressed all the time.
I decided to go as Count Dracula. Count Dracula had really bad clothes sense, but he never went around naked.
After school I put on black jeans, Dad’s old dinner jacket and dress shirt, and socks touched up with felt-tip marker so they looked black. I slicked back my hair with baby oil.
Then I sneaked into Jessie’s room to rifle through her makeup. She didn’t have white face paint. She had something called Instant Copper Bronze, but they must have put the wrong label on the tube, because when I squeezed some out onto my fingertips, it was white. I slapped it on really thickly. She had some red lipstick, and the way I put it on made it look like I’d just stuck my teeth into someone’s jugular vein. I also managed to stab myself in the eye with an eyeliner pencil, and the bloodshot look added to the overall effect.
Count Dracula was ready.
16
Trick or Treat?
Eddie and Gordon still weren’t allowed in my house, so they met me on the corner. I was totally unimpressed with their costumes.
“What’s this?” I tugged at the sheet covering Gordon’s head. He hadn’t even bothered to cut eyeholes in it.
The sheet twitched as if the geek inside was shrugging. I could hear the tap of fingers on keys.
“Where’s your costume?” I asked Eddie. He had on jeans and a hoodie as usual, but his face was in shadow. He turned suddenly, and his eyeballs popped out and sprang toward me.
“Arghhh!” I screamed like someone in a horror movie. But I wasn’t acting.
“Ha! Fooled you,” Eddie said.
“How’d you do it?” I asked when my heart rate had slowed down enough for me to speak.
Eddie showed me the trick. He had a black mask and had treated some pop-out-eyeball glasses with glow-in-the-dark paint. When he shone his flashlight on his face for twenty seconds, his eyeballs glowed for another twenty. He looked pretty freakish.
Other Trick-or-Treaters Out That Night
37 witches
a trio dressed as the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
5 Vikings
12 vampires/Draculas with better costumes than mine
2 Wonder Women and 3 Supergirls—all adults
2 Batmen—father and son
1 Frankenstein
13 ghosts (not counting Gordon) wearing sheets with holes for eyes
16 zombies
1 Justin Bieber look-alike followed by 9 screaming girls
6 pirates, but only one had a parrot
2 police officers—they might have been real
Most of the people wandering the streets were little kids who should have been in bed already, out with their moms and dads. The little monsters kept mistaking us for adults.
“Twick or tweat?” a little girl with a pink tutu and a witch’s hat asked Eddie. She already had a plastic cauldron stuffed with candy. We had nothing to give away, so Eddie went with the trick option. He turned away, shone the flashlight in his face, and lurched at the ballerina witch. His glow-in-the-dark eyes flew out from his hood and knocked her hat off her head.
She dropped her cauldron and started bawling.
“What do you think you’re doing, scaring a little girl like that?” A woman with green skin and purple string hair came running over to us, waving her broomstick. “Go away, you brutes, ruining it for the little
ones.”
“It’s trick or treat, right?” Eddie said, but the witch mother was stuffing a chocolate spider into the baby witch’s mouth and ignored him.
The first house we came to was decorated with pumpkins and sparkly bats in the windows. We rang the bell.
An old lady wearing ripped pink tights, a silver minidress, and a tiara opened the door. She waved a silver wand topped with a glittering star.
“Entertain me,” she said. “Come on, earn your treat.” She waved the wand at us again and twirled around. “Sing! Dance! I used to be a chorus girl, you know.”
She expected us to perform to earn our candy? This wasn’t part of the mission plan.
Luckily, the ghost with no eyes was ready. Gordon’s voice piped up from under his sheet. “We wish you a merry Christmas. We wish you a merry Christmas.”
Eddie and I joined in with a gruff “We wish you a merry Chriss-muss—And a happy new year.”
“Hopeless. The wrong season and everything,” the old lady said. “Now let me inspect your costumes.”
She tapped each of us in turn with her wand, and like idiots we each stomped around in a circle. I never knew Halloween could be so humiliating, but we had to raise the money for the flight to Russia somehow.
“Nice mask but no effort anywhere else,” she said to Eddie, and handed him one sourball.
“What are you supposed to be?” she asked me.
“Count Dracula.”
“I didn’t know vampires were so tall. You must have a massive coffin. Anyway, isn’t he supposed to have a white face, not a brown streaky one? I thought you were a werewolf. Two candies for trying.” The sourballs were sticky, as if they had been in the package for five or six years.
She scrutinized Gordon. “Are you sure there’s a real person under that sheet? How can he see where he’s going?”
“He’s blind,” I said, which wasn’t a total lie. When Gordon took off his glasses, he couldn’t see. “We’re looking after him.”
“Poor thing. Here, take the rest of the package.”
The sell-by date on the bag was sometime in the last millennium. We’d never be able to sell them.
“What did she mean, ‘brown streaky face’?” I said when we were safely back on the sidewalk.
“You’ve got a brown streaky face.” Eddie nodded and his eyes flopped toward me, bouncing up and down on their springs.
I ducked down and looked at myself in a car’s side mirror. Sure enough, Count Dracula looked like he’d been under a sunlamp for hours.
“I can’t understand it. The stuff was white when it came out of the tube.”
“What was it called on the outside?” Gordon asked.
“Instant Copper something,” I said.
“Fake tan,” Eddie said. “Goes on white, skin turns brown later. You can always borrow Gordon’s sheet for school tomorrow if it doesn’t come off.”
“What do you mean? I don’t want to be a vampire with a streaky werewolf face forever. I’m an alien.”
“They won’t mind on Kepler 22b,” the ghost with no eyes said. “They’ll think it’s an Earth thing.”
He was right. The rest of my species on Kepler 22b would be so pleased to see me, they wouldn’t care what I looked like. The kids at school wouldn’t be so sympathetic.
“Dad has something in stock called Miracle Stain Removing Cream,” Eddie said. “It’s supposed to be for cleaning ovens, but I’m sure it’ll do the trick.”
If Eddie really thought I was going to plaster my face with skin-eating cream, he was wrong. I was stuck with a brown streaky face forever.
“Let’s get a move on,” I said. The sooner I was on my way to Kepler 22b, the better.
The people at the next few houses didn’t comment on our costumes. They just gave us a few candies.
“One point six seven.” Gordon’s voice was more muffled than usual because of the sheet. “That’s how many pieces of candy we’re averaging, one point six seven per house. It’s going to take us a long time to get enough for the candy store.”
He was right. My shopping bag contained two gummy snakes (small ones), six cola bottles, and three oranges. Oranges! Who gave oranges at Halloween?
“We can’t give up yet,” I said. “How much do you think we can sell this stuff for?”
“Fifty cents. Seventy-five on a good day,” the muffled voice answered.
No way was that enough to get me to Russia.
The lights were off at the next house, and there was no carved pumpkin on the step. Eddie rang the bell anyway.
“Trick or treat,” he said in an upbeat voice when the door opened.
The man didn’t need to dress up in a costume. His own white hair and matching bushy eyebrows made him look like a nutty professor.
“Wait here,” he said.
He went away and returned with a huge bucket. Things were looking up.
“Trick!” he shouted as he chucked a bucketful of water over us. “That’ll teach you. Spongers!” He slammed the door in our faces.
“That’s it. I’m going home.” Gordon pulled the sopping sheet from his head and threw it on the ground. “I’m not helping you anymore.” He tilted his laptop, and water trickled onto the sidewalk.
“It’ll dry out,” I said.
Gordon the Geek, my second-best friend, flipped me off and left.
17
A Spark of Genius
Okay, I admit it, the trick-or-treating thing was a waste of time. The grand total of our fundraising efforts was two gummy snakes. Eddie ate the cola bottles. I gave the oranges to Mom.
Luckily, Gordon’s laptop did dry out. Otherwise I’d have lost my second-best friend and might have been stuck on Earth forever.
Jessie’s high school was hosting a bonfire with fireworks. I didn’t want to go. Looking up at the night sky, knowing my real home and family were out there, would just depress me. I managed to persuade Mom to let me stay inside because of the hypothermia. Amazingly, she said I could invite Eddie and Gordon over to keep me company.
We were in my room. Eddie wanted to see the fireworks, so we turned off all the lights and opened the curtains. My two best friends lazed on the floor watching the pyrotechnics while I lay on my bed looking at the ceiling and thinking how far away Kepler 22b seemed now.
“Aren’t you supposed to be exercising?” Eddie asked as he stared out the window. “You know, getting fit to be an astronaut?”
“What’s the point?” I said. “No money. No chance of joining any space program. No Kepler 22b.”
“Have you ever seen ET?” Gordon’s voice came out of the shadows. His laptop was closed. Eddie said the light would ruin the fireworks show. There was a streetlight right outside my window, so it wasn’t pitch-black anyway.
“ET is for kids,” I said.
“Yeah, but did you see it when you were a kid?”
“Sure.”
Bang!
“That was a good one.” Eddie pointed out the window as rockets exploded overhead.
“ET was abandoned on Earth,” Gordon said. “He was an alien kid like you.”
“He wasn’t like me. He could hardly speak, and he was bald, and he was very short even though he had a long neck. Tell him, Eddie. I am not ET.”
“Woo-hoo!” Eddie said to the fireworks outside.
“ET didn’t have to go anywhere to join the space program,” Gordon said. “He called up his mom and dad to come and get him.”
There was a weighty pause in the room. You could almost see it, but the lights were out.
I sat up in bed. “Are you suggesting we try to phone Kepler 22b?” Maybe it was time to promote Gordon the Geek to first-best friend.
“They might not realize they left you behind. Or maybe they think you’re happy with your human family after all this time.”
“Maybe you aren’t an alien after all.” Eddie pushed his face up against the window, smearing the glass with nose grease. He licked his finger and added some spit. “This is
an alien.” He pointed to the smear on the glass, which could have been a picture. It had two heads.
“Shut up, Eddie! Gordon, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You are a genius. How do I phone home?”
18
The Supreme Communications Device
Eddie and Gordon drove me nuts sometimes, but they were the best friends an alien misfit like me could ever have hoped for.
It took him a week, but this time Gordon truly outdid himself.
“Behold! The Supreme Communications Device!” Gordon said as he opened his briefcase.
“What’s that?” Eddie stabbed a greasy potato-chip–flavored finger at a USB port stuck in the middle.
Gordon snatched the circuit board away. “I constructed this in a static-free environment.”
Eddie licked his finger. “It’s okay, Gordon. Cheese and onion today. They were out of static.”
Gordon moved his device out of Eddie’s reach.
“I am missing two vital components. A keyboard and a communications satellite.”
“We can use your laptop,” I said. “That’s a keyboard.”
“No we cannot,” Gordon said.
That’s when I realized Gordon was my second-best friend for a reason. He wasn’t prepared to sacrifice his laptop for the mission.
“Okay, so where can we get a keyboard?” I asked.
“Leave that to me,” Eddie said.
Eddie was the best friend an alien could have. He always delivered. No doubt his dad had received a shipment of laptops.
With Eddie supplying the keyboard and Gordon building the communications device, it was only fair for me to provide the satellite.
