Mothership

by Martin Leicht

  “Ducky?” I say. He looks up, his pointer finger still covered in brine bits. I give him a soft smile. “Don’t worry about me so much, all right? I’ll be okay, I swear.”

  He bites his bottom lip. “But you don’t have a plan,” he says.

  The guy is starting to sound just a little bit like my dad, which is seriously making me rethink donating my kidney to him. But I fight the urge to sock him with a couch pillow. “A plan?” I say. “I’ve got a plan.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Seriously. Check it out. I’m going to rock the bump for six-and-whatever more months, Lamaze it out in, like, an hour, and some infertile rich couple will adopt the crap out of it. Then next year I’ll get accepted early admission into the honors program at Penn State and spend all of senior year chillaxing while you’re stressing about your SATs. See? A plan.” I’ve been gunning for an engineering scholarship to the Honors College since the president first proposed the Ares Project as part of his Solar Colonization Initiative when I was still in middle school. How could I not want to be a part of that? An actual colony on Mars—the first ever terraforming attempt on another planet. Sure, there are a few small domed colonies on the moon, like New Houston, but that’s child’s play compared to what they’re planning now. Of course, the program is still in its infancy, at least ten years off—which will give me plenty of time to ace my way through college, get into a top space engineering grad program, and then hopefully qualify for one of the eight NASA postdoc fellowships to prepare engineers for Ares. I’ve had the itch for this forever, and before now there’d never been anything keeping me from scratching it.

  Ducky does not look convinced. “But what if you decide you want to—”

  “Dude, Duck.” I give him a look, one usually reserved for sitcom actors dealing with serious moments. “I have an entire book full of stuff my mom didn’t get to experience because she had me.” I point upstairs to my room, where he knows very well my mother’s book of maps is propped up on my bookshelf. “I’m not gonna let some boneheaded mistake ruin my chances of actually doing something myself.”

  “I get it,” Ducky says. “But don’t you want to think about other—”

  My death glare silences him. “I’m going to the library next week to look up adoption agencies,” I say.

  Ducky is silent for a while, scratching his mop of messy black curls. “What about Britta?” he asks at last.

  “You think she wants it? ’Cause she doesn’t really seem like the maternal type.”

  Ducky rolls his eyes at me. “If you think she’s bad now, how brutal do you think she’ll be when she finds out the father of your baby is—”

  I sock him in the arm. “Not worth mentioning?”

  “Obviously,” he says as he rubs the bruise. “But still . . .”

  “No one has to know,” I tell Ducky, and now it’s his turn to give me a look. “I’ll wear muumuus. Or, like, a neon fruit hat. You know, draw the eye away from my problem areas.”

  “El-vie. You—”

  Suddenly Ducky’s eyes snap to the TV. I follow his gaze to the screen, where an ad has popped up featuring a muscular caveman in a hairy loincloth, carrying an axe hoisted over his shoulder. The man lumbers toward us, snarling, and just as he looks like he’s going to reach through the screen and grab me, a lithe little dude with a jetpack zooms in and punches the barbarian in his baby-making area.

  “Jetman: Time Wars! Upgrade your game client today!”

  Ducky’s face is glazed over with little-boy glee as he watches the images of martians and mastodons flashing across the screen. “Dude, how did this come on?” I say, jumping at the chance to change the subject. “I told you, you gotta stop using your phone to change channels at my house. It effs with my profile settings, and I get stuck with all these nerdy ads.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t your dad?” Ducky asks weakly, wrenching his eyes away from the TV as the commercial ends.

  “Dad doesn’t MMO, nerdlinger.”

  “Then leave your phone out here next time,” he says with a laugh. “You were in the bathroom for, like, an hour. Watching soap operas without female company shrivels my man parts. PS, I can see your midriffass.”

  Instinctively I tug down the back of my shirt to cover the exposed skin just above the top of my jeans, then reach over and grab his phone off the coffee table. “At least clear your memory first,” I say, and I toss the phone clear across the room, where it wedges itself behind a wilted fern.

  The door to the kitchen creaks open then, and Ducky cranes his head around the top of the couch. “Hey, Mr. Nara!” he calls out. “What’s crackin’?”

  “Hello, Donald,” my dad replies, walking over to peer into the living room. “Elvie. How was school?”

  I don’t even bother to look up. “Endlessly diverting,” I tell him, flipping through the TV channels again. “I’m thinking of writing a musical about it.”

  Ducky kicks me in the leg. He hates when I’m sarcastic to my dad. Probably because my dad is way cooler than his stepfather, Zeke. Zeke is some bigwig stuffed suit over at OmniNews, and his idea of a good time is collecting porcelain hippos. Ducky practically lives at our house, which is fine by me. I’ll take as much Ducky as I can get, and my dad doesn’t seem to mind either. Sometimes when Ducky’s over—scarfing down multiple helpings of tuna casserole, or working on his lit homework, or even futilely arguing the merits of 3-D films versus flat pics—my dad gets this look on his face, a sort of wrinkled wistfulness, and I can just tell he’s thinking that if my mom hadn’t passed away, maybe they could have ended up with a son like Ducky.

  “What’ve you got there, Mr. Nara?” Ducky asks. “More plans?”

  “Yep,” Dad replies. “This new solar deck should reduce our heating and cooling costs by four percent.”

  I turn around and see that, sure enough, my dad is holding a stack of blue-tinted transparent LED readouts, all flashing with various schematics for yet another remodel on the house. “Dad,” I say, rolling my eyes, “haven’t you Winchestered the place enough?”

  Our house was built in 2042, when fusion tech was still a little wonky, so unlike at Ducky’s place, where everything runs smoothly all the time, our house is full of gremlins. You never know when there’s going to be a brownout, or a surge that’ll send the washing machine spurting suds into your face. And just try taking a shower that doesn’t either freeze your hair into a shampoo-cicle or steam you like a dumpling.

  To tell the truth, I think Dad likes the challenge. He’s always renovating something—drafting new plans, getting estimates, designing, gutting, hammering, welding—and I’m constantly enlisted to help. School vacations are especially bad. While Ducky spent his eighth-grade winter vacation skiing with his mom and Zeke, I helped my dad jackhammer up the uneven floor in the basement and lay new concrete foam. While Ducky sent me letters from summer camp about solar gliding, I was running new wiring through the walls for a state-of-the-art alarm system. And any sunny afternoon has the danger of turning into gutter cleaning day. Not to get all Psych 101 or anything, but I have a sinking suspicion that Dad’s constant need to refurbish our home might have something to do with missing my mom. It’s sort of an unwritten rule in the Nara household that we don’t talk about her, ever. I learned at a very early age that any mention of Olivia Nara would lead to hours of stony silent distracted Dad. There are very few pictures of her, and Dad can’t even bring himself to display them. Even her book of maps is something we don’t discuss. He just walked into my room one day when I was six, handed it to me with a “Your mother would have wanted you to have this,” and walked out without another word. So I think that, in some way, Dad keeps himself busy so he won’t have time to think too much.

  “For your information, young lady,” my dad informs me, walking over to the couch, “this new addition is essential.” He plops the plans onto the coffee table, nearly knocking over the peanut butter jar. I rescue my snack and take a gander at the schematics.

  “Dad!” I cr
y. “This deck is attached to my room!”

  “Yes, and?” He has, as usual, totally missed the point.

  “You’re going to tear out my whole wall!” I jab a finger at the plans, in which a fourth of my bedroom has been replaced by an enormous window that looks out onto the semi-wraparound deck. “That pervy little Richie Phillips next door will be able to see straight into my business.”

  Ducky starts poking me in the ribs. “Elvie, can I see your phone for a second?” he whispers, but I ignore him.

  “Honey,” Dad says, “we need to reduce our energy output. It’s just smart thinking. And this way we can stockpile more of our own energy in the well in case of brownouts. You remember last summer?”

  “Elvie . . .” Ducky’s whispering is more insistent, as is the prodding I’m getting, but I’m still too annoyed to pay him any mind.

  “Where am I supposed to sleep while the construction’s going on?” Ducky’s prodding is becoming too much to ignore. I round on him. “Dude, Ducky, what’s your problem?”

  Ducky is trying to grab my phone from under my leg, which is, hello, so not cool. I’m about to give him a good wallop, when I notice that my dad has this, like, utterly perplexed look on his face. And he’s not looking at us.

  He’s looking at the TV.

  I turn to the screen and immediately suck in my breath.

  “From the makers of Bumpy Roads cocoa butter, Face Your Baby acne cream is strong enough to attack even the fiercest of pimples but also pH-balanced to nurture your growing baby.” On the screen a round-as-a-globe thirtysomething chick is smoothing goop onto her smiling face. “Now with your recommended daily dose of folic acid!”

  Adorable, lovable nitwit Ducky’s been using his phone to look up baby things for me . . . and to change channels. All without bothering to clear his search history first. Guess who’s not getting a spare kidney for his birthday.

  “Elvie?” my dad says. He’s staring at me, forehead wrinkled.

  I try to play it innocent. “Uh, yeah?” I reply.

  My father smoothes the front of his pants. “Is there a reason that our television seems to think you might be interested in advertisements for”—he clears his throat—“maternity products?”

  For a split second I think that maybe Ducky has done this all on purpose, to force my hand with Dad. I’m ready to pounce on him, but one look tells me he feels awful enough already. I sigh. I might as well do this now. “Dad?” I say. He’s gonna blow a gasket, but he might as well blow it now, while I still have some mobility to duck. “I’m pregnant. Two and a half months.”

  My dad does not blow any gaskets. He doesn’t blow any anything.

  “Dad?” I say. He hasn’t fainted, or screamed, or stormed out of the room, which I’m pretty sure are, like, the only options the parenting handbook gives you when your barely-sixteen-year-old daughter tells you she’s knocked up.

  He sucks in a deep breath through his nose, nods quickly, and, without saying a word, turns and walks across the room to his desk.

  Dad is riffling through the bottom drawer of his antique gray filing cabinet. He’s had that old rusty thing for years, but I never thought there was anything in it. As I head over to see what’s up, Ducky hot on my heels, I see that it’s filled with all kinds of LED readouts and even old papers. My father must be the only person on earth who doesn’t simply upload everything to his lap-pad or phone.

  “Uh, Dad?” I say. “What are you doing?” He doesn’t answer, just continues rummaging, and I raise my eyebrows at Ducky, who shrugs. I’m starting to wonder if there’s any chance that instead of telling my dad I was pregnant, I accidentally told him I needed Great-Grandmom’s old meatloaf recipe.

  “Found it!” he shouts, straightening up to his full height. He is gripping a thick green folder bursting with papers. Ducky and I lean in to stare as he slaps it onto the desk. The plastic tab on the top of the folder reads TEENAGE CRISES.

  Inside the larger hanging folder are many thinner beige folders, each full of papers of their own. They all have labels of potential teen disasters—TRIAXOCIL OVERDOSE, AUTO ACCIDENT, FLUNKS HIGH SCHOOL, JOINS A CULT. Dad thumbs past each one until he finds the one he’s looking for—PREGNANCY. He grins and hands it to me. “Here’s everything we’re going to need.”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. “So glad I could help fulfill your dream of solving a crisis, Dad,” I tell him.

  He’s definitely not listening. He’s so proud of his own preparedness, he’s practically giddy. “Look, I’ve got a scenario for every option.” He opens it up, and a storm of pages and LEDs tumble out onto the desk. For Christ’s sake, he’s even got notes scribbled on cocktail napkins. “Can’t say I was expecting to need any of these, but, well, that’s why you have a crisis folder in the first place, right?”

  He looks up at Ducky then, as though noticing him for the first time. “Is it yours, son?”

  It takes a second for Ducky to grasp what my father is asking him. When it finally does dawn on him, he goes completely bug-eyed. “Mine? Mine?” he sputters. “Oh, no. I mean, no sir, Mr. Nara. I wouldn’t—I mean, not that I wouldn’t, I mean not that I would—We haven’t . . .”

  “You don’t know the guy, Dad,” I say.

  Dad rubs his chin. “Do I want to?” he asks, and I shake my head. “I see,” he replies. “Then I’m assuming we won’t need this.” He points to an LED with a listing of local chapels.

  I fight off the brain nova I’m getting from the idea of my dad trying to marry me off to either Ducky or Cole, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Dad,” I say, “I really appreciate that you’ve gone to all this work and everything, but I’ve already figured it out. I’m going to look up adoption agencies all on my own, so you don’t have to—”

  “Are you an expecting teen mother?”

  The voice is coming from the television.

  We all turn to the screen. A tall, strong-jawed dude walks down a long corridor, carrying a baby and talking to the camera.

  “Teen pregnancy can be a confusing time, and research has shown that the comfort and support of kindred spirits can greatly improve the health not only of the developing child, but of the mother as well. The Hanover School is a brand-new safe haven for confused young mothers-to-be. Our mission is to give otherwise unprepared young ladies the tools they’ll need to raise a child in today’s fast-paced world.”

  The dude is giving the camera the ol’ smoldering eyes routine, with just the right amount of sexy stubble accentuating his chiseled jawline.

  “At the Hanover School we’ll provide you with a plethora of options. You’ll have access to our world-class infant care preparation courses, day care facility database, and even adoption agency networks, all right at your fingertips.” Now the studly mister is joined by a whole team of similarly steamy men. The whole thing is so cornball that I think it must be a joke. I’m just waiting for one of them to pull out a wrench and ask if my pipes need cleaning. They’re all holding babies, though, which is kinda ruining the vibe.

  “The Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers. Come and experience a learned faculty, a supportive staff, and most important, new friends. Not to mention views that are out of this world!” The camera pulls back and out of a window, and suddenly it’s clear that the hottie brigade is on the deck of a huge spaceship or something, waving out at the stars. Now I know this is a movie.

  As the ad ends and turns into a promo for a new sitcom starring two robots and a superchimp called Two Robots and a Superchimp, I let out a snort. “Pregnant space school? Puhleeze. And why was everyone in that commercial a megahottie? Aren’t there any uggos at the Hanover School?”

  My dad has an unsettling twinkle in his eye. “A low-Earth-orbit cruise liner. A school on a low-Earth-orbit cruise liner . . .”

  “You can’t be serious,” I say, but my dad is already punching up the info on his phone.

  “I’m going to download an application now,” he says. “Want to make sure you get in before all
the spots fill up!”

  “Dad, you’re kidding, right?” I look to Ducky for backup, but instead he bites his bottom lip and avoids looking me in the eye, which I know means exactly one thing.

  “Ducky!” I poke him in the shoulder. “No way. No way do you agree with him. Space school for pregnant girls?”

  He looks me in the eyes then, and I almost wish he didn’t. Because the shitbird looks more busted up than I’ve ever seen him. “You can’t go back to school next year, Elvie. You know you can’t. Britta will murder you and that baby. Besides, you’re always talking about going out into space one day.”

  “How much do you think I’ll actually see floating in circles in a rusty tin can?” I say weakly. But even as the words are leaving my mouth, it’s already hit me. Ducky is right. My dad is right. A new school is probably my best option. And you can’t get much farther away from Britta without a passport to the moon.

  “But . . .” I’m close to tears now too, and I hate Ducky for making me cry. I hate him. “A whole year?” My cheeks begin to quiver, and I know I’m a goner. “How am I going to . . .”