Mothership

by Martin Leicht

  I’m steps away from the elevator when I run into someone barreling around the corner. For the third time this morning, I find myself flat on my ass. Although to spice things up, this time I’m covered with dozens of tiny, hard, and stinky round objects.

  Brussels sprouts. I’m covered in brussels sprouts.

  “Good grief, Miss Nara. Would it really hurt to look where you’re going?”

  I look up at my brussels sprout attacker. It’s none other than Fred, Hanover’s “chef.” I’m no gourmand or anything, but even I know that someone who serves up succotash more than three times a week needs to think about returning to culinary school.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, flipping over to my hands and knees before grabbing a handful of the vile little veggies to toss back into Fred’s crate. I shouldn’t be apologizing. Fred was the one who wasn’t looking where he was going. And what the heck is he even doing walking around the girls’ living quarters carrying a crate of brussels sprouts, anyway? But I’m not going to argue with a dude who holds my gastrointestinal fate in his hands.

  He just growls at me, ever the picture of friendliness. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

  “I have a pass from Dr. M,” I tell him.

  Fred harrumphs like he doesn’t believe me, but I guess playing truant officer is low on his list of priorities at the moment, because all he says to me is, “Try to stay out of trouble, will you?”

  “I’ll do that.” I plop the last sprout into the box and shuffle as quickly as I can to the elevator.

  When the lift doors open on the observation deck, I find the floor totally deserted. This is my favorite deck—completely encircled by curved, six-meter-high windows, permanently bathed in Earth light. The first few weeks after launch, anytime we didn’t have class or yoga or some other mandatory project, you could always find all the girls up here, faces plastered against the windows, staring at Earth as it shifted down below us. It takes a little less than two hours to make a full orbit around the globe, and for those first few weeks, just watching that sucker sweep by was like tweaking out in geography class. “Look, there’s Japan!” “Holy crap, it’s the Nile!” “Guys, check it. I can cover up Greenland with my thumb.” But once they’d seen Earth go by a few times, they seemed to get over it. Now the observation deck stays pretty much empty around the clock.

  The only reason most girls head to the observation deck these days is for the snack area. It’s basically just an alcove filled with vending machines. Junk food, juices, and some sort of dehydrated dessert called Astronaut’s Delight, which I think is someone’s idea of a joke. That corner of the spaceship is a pregnant lady’s neon-lit paradise. But there’s one machine that is calling to me more than any other—the one stuffed with pint-size cartons of Midnight Craving. Yes, the flavors and ad campaign that are specifically targeted at pregnant women border on the offensively stereotypical, but damn, sometimes you do just want to dive into a pint of Double Cheese’N’Chocolate Pretzel Swirl.

  The vending machines on board the Echidna work on the HONOR System—Honest Operations Necessitating Objective Reward. You do something the faculty thinks is pro, they give you points for vended nachos. I slap the button for my ice cream and hold my HONOR bracelet up to the scanner. The scanner beeps and flashes red, and then the robotic voice I’m beginning to loathe informs me: “You currently have zero HONOR points. Request for Cherry Marsala denied.”

  It’s not like I’m shocked that I’m out of HONOR points, since for some reason the Hanover faculty doesn’t seem to condone my ditching Mandarin class, or napping during study hour. Still, I could really go for some craving cream right now. I take a step back and stare at the vending machine for a minute, the scanner blinking its infuriating red eye at me in this, like, Morse code, which I am positive means “No-ice-cream-for-you-no-ice-cream-for-you.” But I do my best to ignore it, and focus instead on what my dad likes to call the “thinking behind the machinery.”

  I was six years old the first time my dad strapped a tool belt on me and took me out to the garage for what he liked to call lessons in self-sufficiency. “Elvie,” he told me seriously, “no matter how advanced a machine is, there’s a brain behind its creation. A human brain. And you”—he tapped my skull—“you have a human brain too. Right?” I shrugged. I was pissed because I wanted to be inside playing Jetman online with Ducky, not in the garage with my dad staring at a broken toaster. “You do,” he told me. “You have a brain. A good one. Which means that no machine is a match for you. Now”—he plopped the busted gizmo on the worktable in front of me and yanked a screwdriver out of my tool belt, wrapping my six-year-old fingers around it—“you can come back inside when you’ve fixed the toaster.”

  “But I don’t even like toast!” I hollered at my dad as he shut the garage door behind him. It took me five hours to fix the damn thing. And to this day Ducky still totally kicks my ass at Jetman.

  Looking back, it probably would’ve been better if my dad had taught me how to survive hunky boys and bitchy cheerleaders, but at least now I know I can defeat this vending machine in three minutes tops.

  First I unhook my Swiss Army knife from my belt and use the mini screwdriver to pop the top panel off the vending machine’s scanner, exposing the vid card and laser reader. Then I take my dad’s lucky old five-dollar coin from my pocket and slip the sucker between the card and the magnetic strip at the bottom of the panel. After a few seconds I swipe my bracelet again, and BEEP!—“You have one million HONOR points. Request for Cherry Marsala accepted. Your remaining balance is one million HONOR points.”

  Child’s play.

  I peel off the top of the ice cream carton and pop out the tiny spoon underneath. Then I settle myself into one of the observation chairs, staring down at Earth while the ice cream melts into smaller and smaller ovals on my tongue.

  I lean forward in my chair and study Earth below. Having passed over the western coast of Africa, we’re now directly above the Canary Islands, with the Atlantic Ocean stretching out in front of us. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours poring over my mom’s giant book of maps, running my fingers over the lines of rivers she’d planned to raft down, or cliffs she wanted to climb, or valleys she wanted to hike. I’d study the careful curve of her letters in all the spots where she’d written Can’t wait! or Won’t this be fun? All the places she would’ve gotten to if she hadn’t had me and then died, like, a nanosecond later. I must’ve memorized the whole world through that book. And even though I never really officially met the lady, every time I’m up on this deck, I feel like maybe I know my mom a little bit better—staring down at her book of maps blown up life-size.

  Just as I notice the East Coast of North America coming into view, I get a pang in my belly that at first I think means I have to pee but that I soon recognize as homesickness. Honestly, I’d rather need to use the toilet. I sigh and flop back into my chair, doing my best not to squint at the continent to pinpoint which blobby part is Ardmore, Pennsylvania. I miss my dad. I miss Ducky. I even miss that goddamn high school.

  You’d think that life two hundred and fifty kilometers above Earth’s surface would be totally different from life in the suburbs of Philadelphia. But it turns out it’s almost exactly the same. I still spend more time doodling in English than diagramming sentences. I still talk to Ducky more than anyone else. And I still have to deal with mega-skank Britta McVicker. I can’t even believe cheerleaders are allowed to breed.

  From my ice cream container I hear a dull thunk. My spoon has hit the bottom of the pint without me realizing it. I’m just debating how much my hips will hate me if I go back for another pint, when from behind me comes a soft, quick rumble, and the ship rocks under my feet. It’s over almost as soon as it began, but if there’s one thing I know about orbiting the planet, it’s that bumps are bad. As I’m heading to the window to see if maybe we collided with some debris or something, there’s another thud, and my jacked-up center of gravity lands me ass-down on my ice cream carton, bringin
g the grand total to four pratfalls in one afternoon. The intercom from the far-up corner of the observation deck crackles to life, but all that I can make out is static.

  I hoist myself up onto my feet, and I’m sure I have flecks of cherry, butterscotch, and mushroom smeared on the butt of my maternity stretch pants, but at the moment I’m slightly more concerned about the ship. The lights above me start flickering, dimming and sparking back to life. In and out, light and dark. The displays by the door are glitching too, and now I’m starting to freak just a little bit. I’m trying to remember the Survival Checklist for Emergencies in Space my dad made me memorize before launch, but all I can get through is “Oxygen? Check!” before my feet roll out from under me again.

  Okay, this is starting to get old.

  And now the Goober is at it too, kicking me in the bladder.

  “Listen, bud!” I shout, flat on my back, my right elbow wedged under a chair. “Stop kicking me! I do not want to pee right now!”

  I manage to right myself again, and I make it to the window as the intercom sputters back to life. Someone is saying something over the static, I can tell that much, but I can’t make out what it is. Whoever it is certainly isn’t speaking English. The sounds are deep, creaky, guttural. Like no language I’ve ever heard.

  I press my body against the full-length window, so close to it that the Goober can probably see out too, and together we examine the length of the ship. We have a full 360-degree view from here, but I’m so busy looking for debris that it’s several seconds before I spot the obvious.

  Protruding from the starboard side of the Echidna, like a giant tumor, is another ship.

  Another ship?

  I race to the door, ignoring the Goober kicking me the whole way, and I’m just about to fly down the main staircase when something passing by the foot of the stairwell makes me reconsider that course of action.

  Dudes in helmets. With guns.

  Da-fuh?

  I duck behind the door and try to hide the best someone can with a fetus jutting out her front end. I don’t know who these dudes are, and I can’t see their faces, but I know for a fact that they weren’t on board ten minutes ago. The faculty doesn’t pack heat. They usually stick with demerits. Which means that the L.O.C. Echidna is under attack.

  Lights flickering, intercom crackling, I suddenly realize: Everyone else is on the lido deck doing underwater prenatal yoga except me.

  And that’s when I think something else. Probably the most real, true thought I’ve ever had.

  Oh, shit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN WHICH WE PAUSE FOR A BRIEF FLASHBACK

  “No guns allowed,” Ducky says, reaching his scrawny arm across my face to dip a deep-fried pickle chip into the peanut butter jar. “The whole point is to think of nonviolent forms of torture.”

  I push his hand away and grab for my phone to flip the channel on the TV, finally stopping on an infomercial for the Food Atomizer 9000. “Turn those greasy, fatty snacks into a light, refreshing mist!”

  “Whatever, Gandhi,” I say. “I’m not going to shoot her. I’m going to make her think I’ll shoot her so she wets herself in front of the French club.”

  Ducky ponders this as he crunches down on my newest hormone-inspired concoction. It took several failed efforts, and we lost three bottles of peanut oil, two jars of gherkins, and a few patches of skin in the attempt to get the frying process down, but now every taste bud on my tongue is grateful we persevered. Pickles and peanut butter washed down with butterscotch milk shakes must taste disgusting to anyone who isn’t incubating a fetus, but Ducky insists on eating whatever I do, as part of some solidarity thing.

  “Nope,” he says after he licks the peanut butter off his bottom lip. “No guns.”

  We’ve been playing Most Ingenious Ways to Destroy Britta McVicker, the game that Ducky invented this afternoon to cheer me up. I have to say it’s working pretty well, although my ideas keep leaning toward physical pain and/or public humiliation, whereas Ducky seems intent on working on a strictly psychological level. Like sneaking into Britta’s house every morning to swap out her bra with a series of nearly identical brassieres with infinitesimally larger cup sizes, causing her to believe that her boobs are shrinking. I had no idea what an evil mastermind Ducky was until he busted that one out.

  Playing the game with Ducky, I can almost forget that Britta’s been trying to destroy me for the past two and a half months. Or that she’s coming pretty close to succeeding. She’s always been a bit of an ogre to anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path—she even made Miss Langhoff cry back in second grade with her point by point criticism of her slingbacks—and I’ve had the bad luck to be in her path a lot. (I’m pretty sure that whatever schedule-bots have assigned our teachers for the past eight years have been downloaded with a virus specifically designed to make Elvie’s life miserable, because Britta and I always have at least four classes together.) But lately she’s been particularly gruesome. It’s like, now that she doesn’t have a boyfriend at her beck and call, she’s hell-bent on making the entire human population as unhappy as she is, and I’m the closest victim. Her latest pièce de résistance was having my likeness superimposed as the “before” example in a poster for poor hygiene awareness that was then snapped all over the school. The posters were so effective that the principal is beginning a policy on mandatory showers after gym.

  I swear that pic was taken during my bout with food poisoning last year.

  I sigh as I reach for another pickle chip, and Ducky raises a concerned eyebrow.

  “Yes?” he asks me.

  I shake my head. “I’m just glad it’s almost summer, that’s all.” There’s only one more week of sophomore year left, but honest to God I’m not sure I’m going to make it. “It’ll be nice to be Britta-free for a few months.”

  He thinks on that. “Do you think she’s been more evil lately because she”—he glances down at my stomach—“knows?”

  “Nah,” I say quickly, popping the pickle into my mouth. I’ve put on a couple pounds, sure, but I’m not showing yet. I haven’t even reached the end of the first trimester. And Britta’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Although, God help me if she ever does find out about this baby. And the father.

  I swallow and return my focus to watching TV.

  “So,” Ducky says after we’ve been watching the infomercial for a while, and I can tell by his forced-casual tone that he’s been thinking pretty hard about what he wants to say next. “How’s your urine flow?”

  I cough so hard, a glob of pickle shoots across the room and sticks just below the TV screen. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve been checking out that new site I told you about,” Ducky says. He tosses another chip into his mouth while he says it, as though talking about my pee is what we always do with our after-school time. “They said you’re supposed to document how much you go, every day of the first trimester. I signed you up for a free online account so you can track it.”

  I didn’t want to tell Ducky I was pregnant. I did not. But I was starting to get hormonal and teary at, like, everything—big things like Cole skipping town, obvi, but also not-so-big things like accidentally oversteeping my tea. I guess what finally tipped him off was the unfortunate incident at my sixteenth birthday dinner, where Dad lopped the head off my panda cake and I cried for well over an hour. I was able to pass it off as normal girl hormones to my Dad, but Ducky was not so easily deceived. He wrung the truth out of me that night, and since then he’s quickly earned Best Bud of the Millennia status with how awesome and supportive he’s been. He comes with me to doctors’ appointments and spends time researching alternative birthing practices and prenatal nutrition. I’m really hoping he’ll go and get E. coli soon so I can donate my kidney and make it up to him, but so far he seems totally healthy. Which if you ask me is just being selfish.

  “Gee, thanks, a pee diary,” I say, grabbing a handful of pickle chips. I forgo the peanut butter, letting the tangy brine tic
kle my tongue.

  Ducky seems to have missed the I-don’t-really-want-to-talk-about-my-pregnancy tone in my voice. “Did you check out those vitamins I told you about? They’re chewy. You like chewy.”

  “I can’t get them without a prescription, and I can’t get a prescription without parental consent.” I reach for my milk shake to wash down my snack, but before I can get to it, Ducky puts his hand on top of mine.

  “You have to tell him, you know.” He’s giving me that sweet, deeply concerned look—the one that makes me want to punch him right in his sweet, deeply concerned face.

  I pull my hand away from Ducky’s and grab my phone, aiming it at the TV. “Wait, this is the best part,” I say, and turn up the volume.

  As the woman in the infomercial sprays atomized chili cheese fries onto the tongues of ten kilted Scotsmen, who spontaneously break into the world’s worst bagpipe rendition of the classic tune “Funky Cold Medina,” Ducky pokes me in the knee with his big toe, trying to get me to look at him. But I ignore him so long that he finally gives up.

  Ducky’s right, of course. Sooner or later I need to tell my dad about this thing in my uterus. Because he’s a pretty smart guy, and I’m thinking he just might notice when a baby blows out my girl parts six and a half months from now. But—call me crazy—I’m not exactly superstoked to tell my father that his only darling daughter went and got herself fertilized a week before her PSAT.

  The infomercial finally comes to an end, only to start all over again. And as I’m double-barreling the straws of my milk shake, giving myself serious brain freeze, that’s when I notice Ducky—pressing his finger into the bottom of the pickle bowl with this total puppy-dog look of concern as he studies the coffee table. It’s obvious that while I’ve been zoning out on junk TV, he’s been busy worrying about me.

  I know I shouldn’t think this, but part of me seriously wishes it were Ducky’s baby I was having, instead of Cole’s. Not because I’d want to, ew, do it with Ducky (Ducky is ruling the Friend Zone with an iron fist), but because I know he’d actually be cool about it. He definitely wouldn’t bail on me the second I told him he’d knocked me up, for one thing. He’d, like, squeeze me up in a hug and kiss my forehead and tell me we’d figure it out together. All the things Cole Archer was too busy packing up his suitcase to have the time to do. If it were Ducky’s baby, maybe I’d actually want to keep the thing. Because Ducky would make a hell of a dad. He might even be amenable to sticking around, going to PTA meetings while I’m off colonizing planets—assuming this little detour hasn’t nixed that plan. And because I wouldn’t mind having a miniature Ducky around all the time, with the same shaggy black curls, goofy brown eyes, and long pointy elbows (seriously, they could, like, cut paper). But it turns out that the kind of guy you want to raise a baby with isn’t always the kind you want to make one with in the first place.