Mothership

by Martin Leicht

  Ramona wrings about three liters of pool water out of her hair—right onto my yellow flats, I might add, which would most certainly piss me off if they weren’t already long past saving. “Must be the girls in On Your Own,” she tells me. “Over in the atrium. We were supposed to get our flour babies today. Didn’t exactly feel like showing up for that.”

  I nod knowingly. If anyone can ever find a way to explain to me how carrying around a sack of flour with a diaper on it is supposed to prepare you for motherhood, I will personally bake that person a chocolate cake with my practice baby’s insides.

  The walkie in Head Count’s hand is still crackling. “Perform a final sweep for surviving hostiles and rendezvous at the extraction point. Copy?”

  “I copy,” the butt munch replies, and he flicks off his communicator. He looks like he’s ready to bark out some orders, but I am totally over this being-kept-in-the-dark-while-people-shoot-me-with-ray-guns bullshit.

  Plus, that idiot with the busted ankle is lazily aiming his ray gun in my direction. Again.

  “What the hell is going on?” I ask him, swatting the barrel away. “Who are you guys? What do you want with us? Why were our teachers drowning the shit out of people?”

  Ninja Klutz turns his head toward the pool, where two of his buddies are busy pulling Mr. Wilks’s limp body out of the water. “Your teachers?” he asks. I nod. “They weren’t really teachers.”

  “What?” Natty squeaks, before I can get the word out myself. She’s been silent up until now, probably brooding over her ruined masterpiece some more.

  Ninja Klutz brings his visored face close to ours. “They were aliens,” he tells us.

  Suddenly Mr. Head Count is interested in us again. “That’s enough!” he snaps, jerking his head in the other camo’s direction. “Fall in line!” And our friend the ankle buster harrumphs and stands up straighter.

  Aliens? For serious?

  I peer over to where the two camos are squatted over Mr. Wilks’s bloody corpse, checking for a pulse. He looks pretty human to me. Even pretty attractive, in a dead older hippie sort of way. I shiver. All I can think about is studying The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the way Mr. Wilks’s face lit up as he talked about the symbolism found in Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi. It was the one time in an English class that I felt like paying attention, instead of literally staring into space. It’s hard for me to grasp that the whole time he was someone who’d be capable of murder.

  But an alien? No way.

  Next to me Ramona gives up on her quest to light up a soggy clove and finally tosses it into the pool. “No wonder I was failing lit,” she says.

  After bellowing a bit at the guys checking out the pool area, Head Count turns his attention to Britta and Other Cheerleader. “You two!” he shouts at them, and Other Cheerleader cowers a bit at his tone, while Britta is too busy sobbing her poor pathetic guts out to do much of anything. “They weren’t trying to kill you,” he says, waving a hand in the general direction of our slaughtered teachers. Just by the way he spits his words out, I can tell that he thinks not being a target for murder is worse than cheating on your driver’s test. “In fact,” he continues, “it looked like they were trying to get you out of here.” Other Cheerleader manages a weak nod, not seeming to understand. “So tell me, then.” He takes a step closer to them. “What makes you two so special?”

  “Bet you anything they’re aliens too,” I say. I mean, right? It makes sense. They’re way too evil to be human. But all I get are a couple of weird looks.

  Just then one of the other camo guys shouts, “Captain!” and waves his boss over. Head Count goes off in his direction, leaving the rest of us alone with the klutz.

  Who, by the way, seems to be totally staring at me. I mean, I can’t quite tell because of the visor on his helmet, but I swear that his head has not turned from my direction in the past several minutes. Which is a little bit freaky, if you ask me.

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” I finally ask him, hands on my hips—like that’s going to be threatening to a dude with a ray gun. “What’s your problem, anyway?”

  And that’s when he takes off his helmet. Just whips it off, the last dribbles of pool water cascading down his uniform.

  And out of all the freaky moments I have had today, this one is by far the freakiest.

  Dark brown hair. Perfectly sculpted eyebrows. The constellation of freckles beneath his left eye.

  No shit, the klutz with the ray gun is Cole Freaking Archer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN WHICH LIFE IN ARDMORE BECOMES SLIGHTLY MORE COMPLICATED

  “So what does ‘alien’ mean in this context? Elvie?”

  I snap my eyes away from what I’ve been staring at, which is the back of Cole Archer’s head—namely, the soft V of hairs that forms at the nape of his neck—and turn my attention to Mrs. Kwan. “Huh?” I say.

  Mrs. Kwan lets out a quiet sigh and does that thing where she pinches her nose right at the corners of her eyes. “Line sixty-seven,” she tells me. “Second to last stanza.”

  I nod and flip to “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is hidden three windows deep on my lap-pad. Wow, long-winded much? If you ask me, this John Keats guy should have stopped sitting at home pining over some stupid songbird and gone out for, like, some soft serve once in a while. Who puts this stuff in the curriculum?

  “Ummmm.” I read the line Mrs. Kwan is talking about. She stood in tears amid the alien corn. “I don’t know,” I say. “Like, weird or, um, foreign?”

  Mrs. Kwan offers me a tight smile, like she’s not sure if she should be delighted that I answered the way I did or disappointed that I don’t answer like that more often. Whatevs. Poetry isn’t gonna get me to Mars. “Exactly,” she says, then moves on to brain-probe someone else.

  “John Keats is talking about Ruth here,” Mrs. Kwan continues, as though a single one of us is actually paying attention. “From the Old Testament. She’s homesick and in a foreign place, but she hears the song of the nightingale and it cheers her. The song finds a path through her sad heart, as Keats puts it.” I pinch myself, realizing I’m back to staring at Cole’s neck again. I turn my eyes to my lap-pad and start doodling a hamburger–hot dog wedding ceremony to distract myself. “This bird, the very symbol of beauty and immortality, has the power to charm people, to make them almost drunk with happiness. But it brings sadness, too, since it reminds us that we ourselves are mortal.” She clears her throat, which is what she does when she wants us to know that what she’s about to say is, like, superdeep. “It’s ironic that Keats would take this theme so much to heart, actually, since he died at the tender age of twenty-five.” She stops talking momentarily, and then: “Cole?”

  I snap my head up again, and catch Cole in the act of tossing a handball to one of his football buddies across the room. With the teacher’s eyes on him, he rights himself in his seat, and even though I can only see the back of his head, I just know he’s giving her one of his I’m-so-adorable-how-can-you-hate-me smiles.

  “Yeah?” he says, leaning back in his chair so far that I have to jerk back to avoid being nailed in the forehead. He settles his hands over that soft patch of neck hair. “What up, Mrs. K?”

  Mrs. Kwan smiles despite herself. But then she quickly returns to her strict teacher persona. “What do you think the poem is about, Cole? What is Keats trying to say here?”

  Cole Archer has only been at Lower Merion for two months or so, but already he thinks he owns the place. Like, just because he has beautiful eyes and lips with exactly the right amount of pucker and, okay, every time he wears shorts I get goose bumps from looking at his Michelangelo-sculpted calves, that does not mean he’s all that, you know? God, talk about being full of yourself. The guy is a goon.

  “I don’t know,” Cole tells Mrs. Kwan. “Keats is way too moody for me.” The poem’s not even up on his lap-pad. He’s been watching epic fail vids of would-be martial artists for the past half hour. “I thin
k he just likes to hear the sound of his own voice.”

  If I were the one to give this answer, it’d be Elvie in detention time for sure. But Cole’s hot, so he gets away with it. Even the teachers aren’t immune. It makes me want to upchuck, really. The one time he actually spoke to me was when my phys ed class was running laps past the boys warming up for varsity jai alai, and he asked me if I had any gum. Really. Because everyone keeps gum tabs in their gym shorts.

  When Mrs. Kwan finally turns her attention back to the nerd section of the classroom—the kids who actually have a chance at caring about bird poetry—there is a quiet psst! from my left. I look to the side, and see Britta McVicker holding out a vanilla frosted cupcake with a grin so toothy she could be the “after” shot in an orthodontist’s ad. But when she sees me looking at her, the grin turns quickly into a sneer. “Not for you, chunky,” she tells me. And really, I should probably feel flattered that she even deigned to acknowledge my presence. Britta is queen of the innies, and if you listened to them, you’d never know they went to school with twelve hundred other kids. She rolls her eyes at me with an exasperated “God,” only to flip the charm on again when Cole leans back to take the cupcake. “A sweet for my sweet,” she tells him.

  Oh, yeah—the final reason that Cole Archer is dumber than a sliced banana? He’s dating Britta McVicker. Talk about vomit in my mouth. If he can’t see that Britta McVicker is the spawn of Satan, he should be checked for functioning brain waves. But Britta and Cole were LM’s “it” couple almost the instant Cole arrived.

  “Thanks,” Cole says as he takes the cupcake. Then he sees me glaring at him and winks. “Hey, Elvs.”

  Elvs? For serious?

  “Douchetard,” I cough. Still, my heart skips a beat. Cole knows my name.

  Well, part of it.

  Cole raises an eyebrow before turning around and taking a massive bite out of the frosting while from my left Britta squeals with happiness. And they continue their bite-squeal-bite flirtation, all through Mrs. Kwan’s boring-ass lecture about symbolic birds and my general wonderment about how one might go about committing suicide with nothing but a lap-pad and a bottle of hand sanitizer, until Cole finally finishes the damn cupcake. That’s when the back of his neck—which, okay, yeah, I was staring at again—turns as purple as an overripe plum.

  I’m shifting my way forward in my seat—because I think he might be choking to death on cupcake crumbs, and I’m wondering if Britta could possibly get a life sentence for that—when I see it. Scrawled on the inside of the cupcake foil is a note from Britta.

  Want to do it in the handicapped bathroom after gym?

  Who said pod people can’t be romantic?

  “God, talk about a gag-fest,” I tell Ducky as we walk home from school that afternoon. “You should have seen it.”

  “I feel like I have,” Ducky replies. “You’ve told me the story in painstaking detail about, oh, nine hundred times now. You’ve painted me quite the mental picture.”

  I kick a pebble over in his direction. “Stop being so dramatic,” I say. “I didn’t tell you everything yet. I didn’t tell you about what kind of cup—”

  “Chocolate with vanilla frosting.” Ducky kicks the pebble back to me. “And rainbow sprinkles.”

  I bite my bottom lip. Okay, so maybe I’ve been obsessing just a smidge.

  “Look,” he says as a car zooms by on the road beside us. “Britta McSicker is evil. We know that. Let’s move on.”

  I laugh. “I think you mean Britta McPricker,” I tell him.

  “Britta McLicker.”

  Ducky and I have been walking to and from school together since we were eleven, after our month-long campaign to convince my dad that we would be safe from international terrorists and/or wild beasts on the bucolic streets of Ardmore. No matter what happens in school—and usually because of it—my walk with Ducky is always my favorite part of the day. I mean, sure, Ducky spends almost all his time at my house anyways, but the walk is special. Like how he insists on buying me an iced tea from Louie’s Pizza Palace almost every day, or how, when we cut through the old graveyard, he makes up life histories for all the people whose gravestones we pass over. I’m almost—almost—not looking forward to getting my license this year, because if my dad ever actually lets me borrow the car, I’m afraid I’ll end up playing designated driver for all of our friends, and I’ll lose that time with Ducky for good. Luckily I don’t turn sixteen for a month and a half, so I have plenty of time for walking.

  “All I’m saying is,” Ducky tells me after a good five minutes of excellent Britta puns, “you spend a whole lot of time talking about someone you claim to hate.”

  I scrunch my eyebrows together. “Are you saying I’m secretly in love with Shitta McFlicker?”

  Ducky scratches his head. “No. Not with Britta.”

  I flick him right in the forehead for thinking such putrid thoughts. “Um, gross,” I say. “As if.”

  “As if,” he replies, rubbing his forehead. “I can’t think of a conversation in recent memory that hasn’t turned to Cole.” He clasps his hands to his chest, in what I’m pretty sure is supposed to be an impression of me, and he makes his voice all high and girly. “‘Who cuts their hair like that?’ ‘Where did he come from, anyway?’ ‘I didn’t even know they made cologne that smells like a spring morning.’”

  While Ducky may have a remarkably awesome falsetto, the fella’s seriously asking for a beat-down. Laughing, I flick him again in the forehead, then the arm, then his puny-boy chest, his arms grasping to catch me before I can get the flicks out, but I’m too quick for him. “Uncle?” I say. Flick, flick, flick!

  “Never!”

  Flick!

  He doesn’t give in until I flick the tip of his nose. “I didn’t say that thing about the cologne,” I tell him as he rubs the red out of his pores.

  Ducky laughs. “I apologize,” he says. “You are clearly not obsessed with the guy. My mistake.”

  “Thank you.” I stick my hands into my pockets, and we walk for a while in silence, until I remember what I’ve been meaning to ask him. “So,” I say, “Spring Fling is next week.”

  “Yeah?” Ducky perks his head up.

  “I’m thinking Molly Ringwald marathon?” Every school dance, Ducky and I hole up at my house and watch old flat pics together. Last month it was British gangster flicks, and before that there was an unfortunate period when I was pretty into vampires. The movie marathons are our miniature rebellion against the mindless drones at school preening in off-the-rack evening wear. When you’ve got popcorn, nachos, and a four-liter of GuzzPop, who needs dresses and mirror balls?

  “Oh,” Ducky says, and I don’t have to have been best friends with the guy for eleven years to know that he hates the idea. “Yeah. Molly Ringwald. That sounds good.”

  “I thought you liked all the Ringwalds.” My good ol’ buddy Donald Hunter Pence IV actually got the nickname Ducky from a Molly Ringwald flick—Pretty in Pink—way back in kindergarten, the year we officially became PIP: Peas in a Pod. Up until that point he’d always gone by Donald, which he hated, or Donald Duck, which some of the more creatively-challenged five-year-olds in our school thought was hilarious. So when we were watching the flat pic one afternoon at my house and Molly’s totally awesome partner in crime, Duckie, showed up on-screen—with his funky, floppy hair and his funny round little glasses—well, it seemed like an obvious transition. I decreed then and there that all best friends should be named after waterfowl. And my Duckie has been Ducky ever since (as a five-year-old I felt little need to check the spelling). I asked him once if it bugged him having everyone in school call him that, and he looked at me, deathly serious, and replied, “Anything’s better than Donald.”

  “I do like them,” Ducky says with a sigh. “It’s just . . .” But he trails off.

  “Would you rather catch up on some old episodes of Martian Law? We haven’t watched any in a while. It doesn’t have to be Molly Ringwald.”

  �
�No, that’s fine,” Ducky says. “Really.”

  “Hey, stealth spaz,” I say. “Spill.”

  “It’s just . . .,” he says again, then shrugs. “I was thinking we could, maybe, you know, go to the dance this time.”

  As soon as Ducky says it, I get this feeling in my stomach like I’ve swallowed a fossilized hair ball or something. “Why would we do that?” I ask slowly.

  “Well, the whole crew is going,” Ducky says. But he’s kicking a rock while he says it. He won’t even look at me. “Jennie and Leo and Greg and Malikah . . .” He counts them off on his fingers. In my head I’m pairing them off in the most logical combinations. Why all our friends suddenly feel the need to mingle with the innies and dance in circles with their hands on one another’s waists is beyond me, but I’m not on board.

  “So who’d be your ‘date’ in this madding crowd? Malikah?”

  Ducky clears his throat. “Uh, no,” he says.

  Okay, I swear I’m not operating on dial-up here. I know that boy plus girl plus spending lots of time together can sometimes lead to one or more of the involved parties falling for the other one. And I think—I’ve thought it for a couple months now, actually, ever since I caught Ducky watching me in the mirror while I brushed my hair—that maybe that whole falling thing has happened to Ducky. And that sort of sucks. Because I don’t want to date Ducky. I don’t want to date anyone. I went on one date, once, with Ricky Goldfarb back in seventh, and he tried to kiss me on the mouth, and I bit his lip so hard it bled. Maybe when we’re, like, forty, Ducky and I can fall for each other. Until then I wish we could just keep watching flat pics, playing Jetman, and having contests to see who can launch the foulest moon rockets.

  Ducky stops walking and looks at me, and I think for a second that he might say it—an awkward, stumbling declaration of love that up and ruins our whole friendship.