Rabbit Robot

by Andrew Smith

  Meg said, “What about Rowan?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed and stared down at my feet.

  “What Rowan did for you was pretty heroic, don’t you think?” Meg said. “I mean, not just going out there and getting your cogs back, but the whole thing he did with sneaking you and your best friend out to Mojave Field so they could try to help you.”

  “Yeah. And now Billy took some Woz.”

  Meg shrugged. “I know. You love him, though. You wouldn’t stay if you didn’t.”

  I had nothing to say to Meg Hatfield. Of course she was right. Meg Hatfield was probably the smartest person I’d ever met in my life. I just sat there in the quiet of my room, with my face in my hands. There was nothing else I could do now.

  Meg waited. Who knows how long it was? Ten minutes? Half an hour? None of those measurements made any sense, none mattered up here in the Tennessee.

  I was dimly aware that Meg was writing something in ink on the wall beside my bed, but I didn’t want to look.

  Finally, she said, “I’m going to go now. We’re friends, right, Cager? I mean, no matter what, I want you to know that I really do like you, and I’m sorry about how mean I was.”

  “You weren’t mean.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me all the things you hate about me,” I said.

  Meg laughed. She said, “Look. This is my PIN code for unlocking the lifeboats. I mean, if you get sick of this place, and maybe if you get Billy drunk enough to fly home, or something.”

  My eyes were too blurred to read it.

  I said, “Like that’ll ever happen.”

  “Okay.”

  I stood up, and Meg said, “Just one last thing. I know this is stupid and all, but I really want to give you a good-bye kiss. You know, I don’t mean anything by it, and I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. Like Jeff did. Have you ever even kissed anyone before?”

  I thought about Katie St. Romaine. Of course I’d kissed someone before. What was Meg thinking?

  I lied. “No.”

  “Well, you should try it sometime.”

  “At the moment I don’t really feel like kissing Billy. I don’t really want to kiss Dr. Geneva, either.”

  Meg smiled.

  Then she put her arms around me and we kissed. And, yes, I had kissed Katie St. Romaine plenty of times, but it never made me feel much of anything at all. And I’d kissed Billy Hinman once on his fourteenth birthday because he’d asked me to, and then on New Year’s because I wanted to do it and it felt good. But Cager Messer had never been kissed by anyone who made him feel as magnificent, as terrible, as human, as Meg Hatfield did.

  I never wanted it to end.

  That was spoiled of me, wasn’t it?

  When I let her go, I said, “I got dirt all over your spacesuit.”

  Meg Hatfield didn’t say another word to me. Her eyes were wet. It was over, and she just spun around and left me there, alone in my empty room.

  And another thing Cager Messer had never done: He had never had his heart broken the way it was broken when Meg Hatfield and Rowan Tuttle-Finewater left him.

  I was a stubborn idiot to let that happen.

  So, that was it.

  This was how it was going to be for the rest of forever, as the meaningless segments of time we used to call days ticked by endlessly through the calendarless neveryear Billy Hinman and I welcomed in aboard the Tennessee.

  How many things were left that I’d never done?

  I looked at the wall where Meg had written her code to unlock the lifeboats.

  This is what Meg Hatfield wrote on the wall beside my bed:

  I REALLY DO LIKE YOU, CAGER.

  I’M SORRY YOU CAN’T BE WHO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE.

  I WILL MISS YOU.

  —MEG

  The Unlock Code

  That was it, wasn’t it?

  Meg’s code didn’t just unlock the lifeboats; it unlocked everything.

  Meg Hatfield’s code was the lifeboat in itself.

  I still had time.

  I prayed there would be enough time.

  Righting the Ship

  Milo wept, but at least he had some new maître d’ trousers, which looked very nice on him.

  He cried because he did not want to allow me into Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique dressed as I was, but at the same time, owing me his mechanical and despondent life, he didn’t want to stop me either.

  So he cried.

  But I was on a mission, and I wasn’t about to let something like a dress code stop me. I needed to right the ship Cager Messer was trapped on, and I didn’t have much time.

  And the bartender protested, hands raised, when I stepped around the bar and began looking over the arrangement of decorative bottles on display. I didn’t know what any of it really was—I was so inexperienced with these things—but I knew enough to look for something that would work on Billy Hinman more quickly than beer.

  “Hey! Don’t you belong on the World of the Monkeys deck?” the bartender, who looked like Abraham Lincoln, said.

  “Don’t be stupid.” I ignored him and concentrated on reading the small print at the bottom of the labels. “I’m not a cog, I’m a human being.”

  I found what I was looking for just as President Lincoln launched into a blathering soliloquy on the history and components of absinthe, which was the green stuff in the bottle I nicked to help persuade Billy Hinman to get in the lifeboat with me.

  “Wheee! Yeee! Yeee! I love cavemen in tiger skirts more than I love life itself!”

  Lourdes, our now fully dressed cruise director who was not technically alive to begin with, came up behind me and lifted the hem of my waistcloth. “Yippeee! I see your butt! Wheee!” she shrieked.

  Despite that I kind of liked it that Lourdes was looking at my butt, I felt myself turning red beneath all that dried mud, and I pushed her hand away.

  The bartender, Mr. Lincoln, was going on and on and on. “ . . . until sometime later, when Valentin Magnan concluded in the nineteenth century that wormwood produced significant hallucinogenic effects. This finding was widely celebrated by bohemian writers and artists who . . .”

  “Come with us, Lourdes. We’re leaving,” I said.

  “Yeee! Yeee! I love being kidnapped as much as I love being hanged! Yippeee!” Lourdes danced and farted as I pulled her along by the wrist.

  There was definitely something to be said for Lourdes’s optimistic outlook.

  Milo cried when I told him to come with us.

  The bartender was saying something about sugar cubes. I had never seen a sugar cube in my life, but there wasn’t time now.

  And Milo, worried, said, “But what about the customers?”

  “Milo. There are no customers.”

  The boy began sobbing with renewed intensity. “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

  Whatever.

  The Doctor and the Reverend

  Dr. Geneva, his face bubbling cog snot from the hole in his cheek where Captain Myron had bitten him, was in the middle of an argument about religious history with Reverend Bingo, who seemed to be weeping syrupy tears from the socket where Meg Hatfield had knocked his eye out with my tennis shoe, when Meg, Jeffrie, and Rowan stepped out of the elevator and onto the maintenance deck.

  “No, no, no!” Dr. Geneva was saying. “I’m afraid you are mistaken, Reverend Bingo. It was the denial of the designation Ecumenical Patriarch to Cerularius in the year 1054 and the attacks on customary unleavened bread by Leo of Ohrid that were the largest contributing factors behind the—”

  When Reverend Bingo saw Rowan and the girls, his one remaining eye widened in offended disgust. “Satan and the twinned whores of Babylon! Die, motherfuckers! Die!”

  Then Reverend Bingo lowered himself into a tackling stance and charged at Rowan. Unfortunately for Reverend Bingo, he was about as adept at tackling biblical demons as he was at throwing shoes.

 
; Reverend Bingo fell on his face and slid forward, trailing a snail slick of cog broth from his chin to his shoulder.

  “Satan! What have you done to my legs, motherfucker? I should have bought the blue car! I should have bought the blue car!”

  Rowan’s eyebrows arched like a Bactrian silhouette.

  Meg said, “He’s mad at me for knocking his eye out with Cager’s shoe. And he obviously made a poor choice in automobiles.”

  Rowan said, “I see.”

  And Dr. Geneva, unfazed by Reverend Bingo’s tirade, continued on and on and on about the Great Schism in the Catholic Church.

  The Tennessee truly was a madhouse moon to the moon.

  Bells sounded in the busy maintenance area where cogs were making new cogs—Mooneys, Rabbits, President Lincolns. Behind the work area, great columns of doorways stacked up as high as the ceiling—the portals to lifeboats that were always ready to be armed for a departure to Earth. And over the announcement system, a song played:

  Tah-rum-tee-tum tum!

  Tah-rum-tee-tum tum!

  Put your good-bye faces on,

  Put your good-bye faces on.

  Our guests will be departing soon.

  We’ll wave to them around the moon. . . .

  And all the busy cogs on the maintenance deck stopped to listen, then began filing out to say their farewells to whoever it was departing the Tennessee.

  And there were wriggling blue worms everywhere—oozing from keyboards, dripping from ventilator grates. The Tennessee was going to die.

  Jeffrie said, “These are the same things we saw crawling out of Mooney’s hand.”

  They didn’t see that I’d come up behind them, a mud-smeared caveman holding a slender bottle of green absinthe, accompanied by the downtrodden Milo and the eternally thrilled Lourdes.

  And I said, “Mr. Messer would be really mad at all this.”

  “Cager Messer!” Dr. Geneva burbled. “A most fascinating archetypical human outfit, especially given the ecclesiastical nature of the discussion I was having with Reverend Bingo! Did you know, Cager, that the caricature of the aggressive, brutish Neanderthal Ice Age hominid has no basis in—”

  Channeling my inner aggressive and brutish Neanderthal, I wanted to club Dr. Geneva with my absinthe bottle.

  Instead, I said, “Dr. Geneva, shut the fuck up.”

  And Reverend Bingo writhed in agony and eye-socket pus. “I should have bought the blue car!”

  Why did I ever think I could stay on the Tennessee?

  “Meg, I saw your code. I’m sorry I’ve been such an idiot,” I said. “I’m coming home with you. Just give me time to get Billy.”

  Then I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Rowan, I’m sorry for being such an ass for the past sixteen years.”

  “Sixteen years and twelve days,” Rowan pointed out.

  Naturally, Rowan had been keeping track of time up here.

  “Whatever. Sixteen plus twelve days, then. Will you just let me tell you that? That I apologize. And I love you, Rowan. Okay?”

  Then I stepped up to Rowan Tuttle-Finewater and did something else Cager Messer had never done. I hugged him.

  See what space did to me? I would never look at a can opener or hair dryer the same way again.

  The things our fathers made have taken dominion everywhere.

  And the song played.

  Put your good-bye faces on,

  Put your goodbye faces on.

  Our guests will be departing soon.

  Please come back and sail with us around the moon. . . .

  Epilogue: It Took Dominion Everywhere

  So I am leaving this here for you.

  It’s really ridiculous, when you think about it: something left behind by a human being, swallowed up by all this eternal and lazy nature.

  Progress will only get a guy so far, and it will never move beyond the wall of extinction. Queen Dot was right about that.

  I haven’t taken Woz since the day Billy and Rowan kidnapped me. How long that will last is anyone’s guess. We can always hope. And it was while I recorded these final thoughts on our way back to Mother Earth that I figured it out: Love and hope are what make us what we are.

  I couldn’t see this before we came to the Tennessee. So the Tennessee saved us, and doomed us too, all at the same time.

  We are going back home—Meg, Jeffrie, Billy, Rowan, Parker, Lourdes, Milo, me, and Maurice, too, who folded himself up into a tiny little box so he could fit in the lifeboat.

  He’s the nicest giraffe any of us have ever met.

  It’s a long journey back to Mojave Field, if Mojave Field is even still there.

  We are not watching Rabbit & Robot on the way, but Maurice, who looks like a small spotted suitcase, sings to us from time to time.

  It sounds lovely.

  Acknowledgments

  About three years ago, when I was traveling on a book tour, my cell phone broke.

  How can anyone survive without this machine?

  I was three thousand miles from home and would be gone for more than a week before popping back in to Southern California. I figured me not having a phone would worry my family, but my choices for where I could go to replace it (the phone, not my family) were limited to whatever was within walking distance from my hotel. So I ended up getting a new phone—one with a number on it that leads people to conclude I live three thousand miles away from where I actually live, which is kind of cool, if you ask me.

  The other thing about the phone is that its number used to belong to two different people I do not know, but who I get calls and text messages for all the time. One of those people is named Billy Hinman.

  I started getting so many phone calls and messages for Billy Hinman while writing this book in 2015 that I decided to make him a character in Rabbit & Robot. True story: When I was working on editing this book with David Gale at Simon & Schuster, while sitting at my keyboard on the morning of September 6, 2017, I even got another phone call for Billy. It has to be some kind of sign.

  Also, Billy, I think you owe a lot of people a lot of money.

  On the bright side, you got trapped inside one of my books. One of these days maybe our paths will cross. We will go out for drinks, maybe get tattoos together. At the very least we’ll take a selfie and trap the ultimate expression of what we’ve become as human beings on a phone that is forever haunted by your life.

  So thank you, Billy Hinman, for coming to me as you did.

  There are two people I know who are the best examples, I think, of what it means to be a human being. People who are really good at being human beings are never aware of how good they are, so I should point it out—in envy, and also as an admission of my own shortcomings in that endeavor. First and always, my love, my wife, Jocelyn, who is so perfectly not a machine; and second, my friend Amy King, to whom this book is dedicated.

  You both make being human look so dang easy.

  And, Billy, if you’re out there, text me.

  About the Author

  ANDREW SMITH is the author of several novels for young adults, including Winger, Stand-Off, 100 Sideways Miles, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Grasshopper Jungle. He lives in a remote area in the mountains of Southern California with his family, two horses, two dogs, and three cats. He doesn’t watch television, and occupies himself by writing, bumping into things outdoors, and taking ten-mile runs on snowy trails.

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Andrew-Smith

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Also by Andrew Smith

  Winger

  Stand-Off

  100 Sideways Miles

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Andrew Smith

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2018 by Mike Perry

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  Jacket design by Lucy Ruth Cummins

  Interior design by Tom Daly

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smith, Andrew (Andrew Anselmo), 1959–

  Title: Rabbit & Robot / Andrew Smith.

  Other titles: Rabbit and Robot

  Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2018]. | Summary: Stranded aboard the lunar-cruise ship, Tennessee, Cager Messer and his best friend, Billy, both sixteen, are surrounded by insane robots while watching thirty simultaneous wars turn Earth into a toxic wasteland.