Mothership

by Martin Leicht

  There is a knock on my bedroom door.

  I sniffle up the tears I didn’t know I was crying, and wipe my face clean. “I’m changing!” I call, sitting up on the bed.

  “Elvs . . .” Cole says quietly, then opens up the door and pokes his head inside.

  I leap up off the bed. “I told you I was changing!” I screech, trying to slam the door in his face.

  “But you weren’t,” he says. Calmly. Always calmly. “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  He enters the room.

  “Elvs,” he says again, making himself comfortable on my bed. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Don’t even worry about it,” I tell him. “It wasn’t a big deal.” But I still won’t make eye contact. I’m acting like a four-year-old, but I can’t help it. I open my closet door, planning on finding a new pair of jeans, but the pile of crap I shoved in earlier tumbles out and prevents me from hiding it from Cole.

  “No,” Cole says. “It was.” He clears his throat. “I just wanted you to know that that wasn’t why I came over—” He stops. “Um, Elvs? Your floor is moving,” he tells me.

  “Huh?” For a long second I think that Cole has lost it, that the only reason he kissed me is that he’s having a stroke or something, but an instant later I see it too. The pile of heaping garbage at the bottom of my closet is indeed moving, rustling and shaking.

  “Henry Chang!” I holler, kicking at the pile. “You get out of there!”

  And now the pile is meowing too. With one swift ninja-kitty leap, the damn cat finally bursts out and skitters across the room, his freakishly long cat claws clattering against the hardwood floor until he finally knocks headfirst into the wall. He rights himself quickly, then gives a head shake and dives under the bed, right where Cole is sitting.

  Cole bursts out laughing. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” he says.

  “I don’t,” I reply, finally managing to shove the closet closed again. A second later I realize I didn’t get a new pair of jeans out, but I give up and lean against the closet door. “It’s my neighbor’s. He’s always getting in the basement window, and for some reason he loves my room.” I can see the thing under my bed, narrow green eyes staring out at me. “It must smell like kitty nirvana up in here.”

  Cole smiles, then gestures to the frozen image on the television screen. “Rebel Without a Cause, eh?” he asks.

  I raise my eyebrows. “You’re a James Dean fan?”

  Cole shrugs. “I wouldn’t say ‘fan.’ I sort of know who he is. You like this stuff, huh? I could never get into it.”

  “It’s pretty good. Crazy melodramatic, but, you know, it’s . . .” I’m having trouble describing the film. How can someone like Cole Archer understand what it is to be that angsty teen? Someone no one understands? “Here.” I pull my phone out and unpause the movie. “Just watch.” I plop down onto the bed, achingly aware of Cole’s body millimeters away from mine. We both fall silent as the TV springs to life.

  On the screen James Dean’s Jim Stark is on a school field trip visiting the planetarium—an old one with little lights projected onto the ceiling, before the invention of the migraine-inducing 3-D holo tech they use now, the kind that caused me to barf generously during my seventh-grade visit. Dean is broody and gorgeous, with narrow eyes and thick eyebrows and a smashingly luscious head of blond hair. I can see why my mom was so obsessed with the guy. On the ceiling above all the students, the stars are playing out their galactic theater, smashing into one another and swirling into black holes, when James Dean looks up at it all and declares, “Once you been up there, you know you’ve been someplace.”

  Cole picks up my phone and pauses the flat pic. He looks at me for a while, right in the eyes, and I’m half worried, half hopeful that he’s going to try to kiss me again. But he doesn’t.

  “Hey, Elvs?” he says, thoughtful. “You think we could be friends? I mean, just forget about earlier, in the garage and . . . ?” He trails off.

  I have plenty of friends, doofus. That’s what I’m thinking. What could I possibly need a slug-for-brains like you for? But of course what squeaks its way out of my mouth is, “Friends?”

  “Yeah,” Cole replies. “We could, you know, talk and stuff.”

  I stand up from the bed and take a walk toward the dresser. I open a drawer like I’m looking for something inside, then close it. “Look,” I finally say, turning around. “I don’t know what things were like back wherever you came from, but here in Ardmore friends usually like each other.”

  Cole thinks that over, then nods. When he looks up at me, there’s a smile on his face. “Milwaukee,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m from Milwaukee,” he tells me. His grin is growing broader, the confident Cole I’m more used to from school. “And I already know I like you.”

  “Well, that’s one of us.”

  “Come on, Elvs,” he pleads from the bed. And I’ve got to admit the guy knows how to push my buttons. His smile is just crooked enough to show that he’s sure he’s won me over already, but he’s playing the game anyway, to make me happy. “I’d really like to get to know you.”

  “Why?”

  Cole tilts his head. “Why what?”

  “Why do you want to know me?” I ask. “I’m nothing special.” When he looks like he’s about to protest, I hold my hand up in front of me. “I didn’t mean that in a girly, fishing way, like ‘Please tell me how special I am.’” He laughs, but it’s a gentle sort of laugh. “I just meant . . .” You’re rambling, Elvie. Get to the point. “I just meant that there’s a whole lot of people in the world, and before last week you’d never spoken more than four words to me.”

  Cole takes a deep breath and nods slowly, staring at the ground, as if I’ve just made a very profound point. Then he looks up at me with one of those melt-the-world, get-out-of-jail-free smiles of his.

  “So now you’re the boss of who I think is interesting?”

  Don’t smile, Elvie. Do not smile.

  “Fine,” I say, practically chewing on the insides of my cheeks to keep from grinning. I sit down in the armchair across the room, well away from Cole and the bed. “Friends it is.”

  “Great,” he says. He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “So, tell me about yourself.”

  “You’re going to make an excellent shrink some day, Cole Archer. You interrogate all your friends this way?”

  “No, I’m serious. I want to know more about you. Like . . . why Rebel Without a Cause?”

  I glance at the screen, where James Dean’s face is still frozen, midpout. “I don’t know,” I say with a shrug. “My mom always liked him.”

  And Cole must be more astute than I’ve ever given him credit for, because he tilts his head at that and says, “‘Liked’?”

  I sigh, leaning back in my chair. “She died,” I tell him. “The day I was born. I never knew her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cole replies. And it’s nice, that tone in his voice like he really cares. But really, what else is he going to say? “I’m really sorry, Elvs.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” I shrug it off, ready to change the subject.

  “My mom died too.” I look up at him. His face is sorrowful, serious. “When I was fifteen.”

  “Oh.” The noise just bursts out of me. I can feel my heart, like, literally aching, for this boy I thought I knew but didn’t. Clearly didn’t. “I had no idea. Just, like”—I do the math—“a year ago? How awful.”

  “What?” Cole shakes his head. “Yeah, a little over a year. She got antibacterial-resistant TB, so . . .” He trails off. “I don’t know, it just sucks, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I do. So you live with just your dad now?”

  “Extended family.”

  I come over to the bed then, and we’re sitting side by side for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes. And I see it—I think I can really see it—how he’s holding on to that same pain I am, how he’s affected, just a little e
very day, by memories and might-have-beens about his mom. And he’s leaning in, and I’m leaning in, and I know that we’re going to share one hell of a kiss. One fireworks-igniting, passionate, you-know-what-I’m-thinking-about-my-dead-mom sparkler of a kiss.

  Only Henry Chang seems to have other plans. He skirts out from under the bed and leaps, parkour-style, off the wall, straight toward Cole’s face.

  “Aaaaghsmdkekl!” Cole screams. Which is exactly the reaction most people have when they come face to claw with the destructo cat from hell.

  “Goddammit, Henry!” I screech. I rip him off Cole, and check for damage as I toss the cat to the floor. “Oh, God, he scratched you,” I say, smoothing out the cut above Cole’s left eyebrow. It leaves a smear of red on my thumb. “Shit, I’m so sorry. Stay here. I’ll get the Bactine.”

  “Elvs, it’s okay,” Cole calls as I race to the bathroom across the hall. “Seriously, it’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

  But I’m already tearing through the medicine cabinet. Of course this would happen to me. I get the hottest boy in school up to my bedroom, and then I go and gouge his face. “You don’t want it to get infected!” I shout back. I find the bandages, then toss bottle after bottle into the sink as I search for the disinfectant. With my luck Cole will end up with cat scratch fever.

  Finally I find the right bottle and race back to the bedroom. “I keep telling my dad we need to put that stupid cat down, even if he does belong to the Connors. But Dad’s against murdering someone else’s pets for some reason. Here,” I say, sitting down on the bed to play nurse. Cole has his hand over his eyebrow, rubbing the wound. “Let me see.” I pull his hand away.

  There is no cut. There’s not even a hint of a scrape.

  My eyes dart to Cole’s other eyebrow, the right one, even though I’m positive it was the left. But of course there’s no injury there either.

  “Wh-what . . .” I stammer. “What happened?”

  Cole takes the bandages and Bactine from me and places them gently on the bedside table. “I told you, it wasn’t that bad. You really need to stop worrying so much. Come on, we were chatting. Tell me . . . tell me some more about your mom. What was she like?”

  My head is swimming with confusion. I can see Cole’s face, as smooth as ever, not a scratch on it. Just those five tiny freckles. But there’s blood smeared on my thumb, as clear as day. I shake my head, perplexed. What I know for sure is that there’s a cute boy sitting next to me, face eager like he really does want to get to know me, and I’m not going to screw it up twice.

  “She, uh . . .” I begin. I grab a tissue and wipe the blood off my hand. Then I toss it into the garbage across the room. Forgotten. I turn to Cole, giving him my full attention. “She loved exploring,” I tell him. And he smiles at that. “Well, she wanted to explore. She had all these places planned out where she was going to go, all these adventures.”

  And somehow it all just tumbles out of me. I show him my mother’s book of maps. We turn the pages together slowly, taking in every line, every red dot she marked. It’s strange, sharing all this with Cole. I’ve never even shown Ducky the maps before, even though he knows they exist. But somehow I know Cole will understand them. As we go through the maps, Cole tells me about his mom too, and about clam bakes and Brewers games in the summer and brats and Packers season tickets in the winter. It’s amazing to me that all this time beneath the cocky pretty-boy bravado, Cole is just a sensitive, homesick guy. I’m thinking on this revelation, drinking in this dreamy vulnerability, when he turns the page to the next map and his eyes go wide with astonishment.

  “Wow,” he breathes, tracing his finger over the Antarctic ice caps. “She really planned to go here? He ducks his head down low, inspecting the name of a ridge, one with a big fat red X on it. “Cape Crozier. I hear it’s pretty heinous down there. She must’ve been ballsy, your mom.”

  I smile at that. “Yeah,” I say. “I think she was.” I inspect the X too. “I just wish she could have seen it, you know? Too bad I screwed it all up for her.”

  He nods thoughtfully at that. “I’m sure that if she could have picked between seeing the whole world and having you, she would have picked you in a heartbeat.”

  “That’s just the thing, though, isn’t it?” I say, rolling over onto my back. I fold my hands over my stomach and stare up at the ceiling. “She didn’t get to pick.” Cole doesn’t say anything to that, just continues flipping pages in my mom’s book. “I just . . .” I go on. “I think maybe that’s why I’m so gung ho about the Ares Project. You know, the Mars terraforming program? Like, that’s something that would really make my mom proud.”

  “There are probably easier ways to get to space, Elvs.”

  I turn my head and look at him. “There’s nothing you feel your mom would have wanted for you?”

  “My mom, she had my whole future plotted out for me. But if she could see me now, she . . .” He lets out a little snort, almost a laugh. He darts his eyes over to me. “Good thing we’re not friends, huh?” he says. “Or the conversation might get serious.”

  And at that I have to laugh.

  • • •

  “Thanks for helping me with the Kia,” Cole says as we walk downstairs.

  “No prob,” I reply, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. “You know, you should probably get your crash sensors recalibrated too. They can be a little wonky when you use new routers.”

  He nods.

  “And also,” I continue—like, if I keep talking, he might never leave—“you should check the contacts on your secondary battery. They looked a little worn.”

  “How about we look at those next time I come over?” he says, turning to look at me. There’s a twinkle in his eye.

  So he’s coming over again.

  “Will I see you at the dance tonight?” he asks. The question sounds hopeful.

  “Nah. I’m staying in and watching some old movies with Ducky.”

  “Oh. So you two are like . . .”

  “No! What, Ducky? Ha! No!” I clear my throat. “We’re just friends.”

  Speaking of Ducky, though . . . I look at the time. He’s going to be here in less than an hour for our marathon.

  “Could you drive me to the store real quick?” I ask Cole. “I need to pick up a few things for tonight.”

  “Sure,” he says. “Happy to help.”

  “Cool. Let me just change.” I may not be a fashion plate, but I refuse to go anywhere with grease-smeared jeans.

  I race back to my bedroom and change in a flash, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of sitting up front in Cole’s Kia. And as soon as I’ve squeezed my hips into my second-cutest pair of jeans, I return downstairs. “Okay, I’m ready. Sorry to make you wait,” I call as I plunk down the steps. “I just needed to look presenta—”

  I stop cold. Cole is not alone in my living room.

  “He knocked,” Cole says, “so I let him in.”

  Ducky is holding two grocery bags stuffed full of snacks, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looks like he doesn’t quite belong in my house. “Sorry I’m so early,” he says. “Zeke said he’d give me a ride, and . . .” He trails off.

  “No, it’s fine,” I say, bolting down the last few stairs. I’m trying to act like this is normal, like Cole and Ducky and I hang out awkwardly in my living room every day, but I’m sure my hands are giving me away. They’re darting from my pockets to my legs to my armpits and back again. Suddenly I can’t remember what I usually do with them. “Cole was just . . . He was going to drive me to the store and . . . I didn’t think you were going to bring so much food.”

  “Elvie was helping me fix my car,” Cole explains.

  Ducky just shrugs, and sets the bags down on the coffee table.

  “Well,” Cole says, “I guess I better go.” Ducky is unloading munchies and drinks out of the grocery bags, and already has a fudge-stripe cookie hanging out of his mouth. Cole glances at him, as if asking permission to leave, but D
ucky just raises his eyebrows expectantly. Cole turns toward the door.

  “Bye, Elvs,” he says as he leaves. “Sorry again about your pants.”

  “Yeah,” I call as the door closes behind him. “No prob. About the pants.”

  I join Ducky at the coffee table and dig through the last bag, looking for chocolate doughnut holes. Ducky’s giving me the same eyebrows-to-the-sky expression he gave Cole as he munches on his cookie.

  I plop myself down on the couch. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” I say. “Seriously.”

  Ducky shakes his head at me. “Honestly, I’m just shocked it took you this long to ‘fix his car.’”

  “Ducky! You know that’s not what . . . We didn’t . . .”

  But Ducky has already moved on to bigger and better things. He’s on my dad’s lap-pad thumbing through Molly Ringwald’s oeuvre. “Pretty in Pink first?” he asks. “Or Sixteen Candles? We going chronologically?”

  “You hate my face,” I say, dejected.

  He looks up at me and winks, wearing a bittersweet sort of smile. “Who could hate that face?” he scolds me, and plops the box of chocolate doughnut holes into my lap.

  Ducky selects Sixteen Candles, and the pic flicks to life, the living room lights dimming automatically. As Ducky and I settle in for the evening, a calmness settles over me. Sitting with my best friend on the couch in front of the TV—this is totally me in my element. This is happy.

  But still, my skin tingles when I remember Cole’s kiss behind my ear, and I can’t help thinking, Once you been up there, you know you’ve been someplace.