by Christina Li
“Oh, not here,” he said. “I was talking about my room. Hold on, I just have to get some things.”
Benji’s room was an entirely different story. The walls were painted dark blue. Things were piled all over the floor. Old sketchbooks and school folders lay haphazardly on top of each other. A set of broken chalk lay strewn on a newspaper. A beat-up skateboard in the corner. I stood in the doorway, in the small patch of carpet that wasn’t covered by comics or sketches or stray socks.
“Trust me,” he said, catching my look of doubt. “I know where everything is, I swear.” He poked around a stack of comics, pulling a couple out. He then rooted under the bed and pulled out a whole carton of Red Vines.
“You hide snacks under your bed?”
“My mom doesn’t like me eating them,” he said. “She’s a nurse, so she’s strict about that kinda stuff. She says there’s some kind of preservatives or red dye in there that’s bad for me. It’s like she thinks I’ll grow an extra arm or something.”
I caught a glimpse of even more cartons under his bed.
“It’s like what the Boy Scouts say.” He handed the carton to me. “Be prepared and all that.”
There were enough Red Vines packets stashed to last a nuclear winter. He reached down and pulled out a can of Pepsi. He cracked it open and took a long swig, to my incredulous look. “I’m not a nurse,” I said, “but that has got to be a little too much sugar.”
“No such thing,” he said. “Plus, we’re going on an epic detective mission. Gotta fuel up.” He bounded up to me. “Ready?”
We spread out the comics on his living room coffee table and sat down, our backs against the worn couch. I bit the end off a Red Vine. “Okay, let’s do this. First we’re going to reach out to Arcade Comics—”
“Already did,” Benji said. “I wrote two letters to them. Even called them once. No one answered their phone. And they didn’t respond to my letters.”
“What about asking your mom about him?”
“She won’t talk about him,” Benji said flatly. “She gets kinda mad every time I bring him up. I’ve found, like, maybe two pictures of him around the house, but otherwise it’s like he was never here.”
I crossed out my first two bullet points. Okay, then.
I looked up at the shelf above the TV, which was crammed with medals. “I didn’t know you play baseball.”
“I don’t.” Benji shrugged. “Well, I did, but it’s mostly my brother now. He’s real good.”
“Oh.” I glanced at the pictures in front of the trophy. Come to think of it, his brother did look a lot like Benji. They had the same mop of dirty-blond curls and smile. “So he’s at practice right now? I thought he worked at the store.”
“For now,” he said. “He works during his off-season.”
“You work there too?”
Benji smiled. “Nope. Mr. Voltz lets me hang around and read comics.”
“He’s my neighbor, actually,” I said. “We don’t talk much, though.” But enough about that—we had to focus. “Okay,” I said. I drew a big circle around Sacramento and then starred it. “This is where he was.” With a pencil, I drew arrows pointing out. “And now, he’s somewhere else.”
“He could even be out of the country. What if he’s in Greenland? Or Iceland? Or whichever one has the snow on it. I always get them mixed up.”
“Probably not,” I said doubtfully. “He’s a comic book artist, not a wanted fugitive.”
“Okay, you’re right.” He bit the end off a Red Vine. “So, let’s say he’s in the country. Where do we start?”
“From the beginning,” I said. I flipped to the cover of volume 1, issue 1. “So this first came out three years ago. November 1980, to be exact. Was he still here then?”
Benji shook his head. “He left when I was, like, four. Way before these comics came out.”
I quickly did the math. Benji and I were the same age, and so he must have left around eight years ago. Five years before he wrote Spacebound. “And you’re certain David Allen is your dad.”
Benji smoothed out a piece of paper in front of me. “I think it’s a pen name. His full name’s David Allen Burns. And besides, look. This was lying around our house. The drawings match up to those comics.”
The letters on the sheet were rounded and bubbly, whereas the ones on the published comic had sharper edges. But the color scheme—red and blue and this specific shade of mustard yellow that was a little too bright—was all there. And unmistakably, Gemma Harris—with her cape and her steel-tipped boots—was there, too, sailing into midair.
It was signed in the bottom corner: David Allen Burns.
A shiver ran through me.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “This is definitely him.”
I looked up. “You’re positive he doesn’t have a phone number or anything.”
Benji shook his head and picked at the corner of the couch, where one of the seams had split. “The last phone number that Mom had for him in our house’s address book doesn’t work anymore.”
I peered at the number. It was an 818 area code, which came from . . .
I reached for a YellowPages phone book and skimmed through it. “Pasadena,” I said. I searched the map. It was a town just north of Los Angeles. I went back to the phone book. Nothing.
No address, no phone number. Benji had already told me that, but I thought with a little poking around, we could find something.
“Okay,” I said, trying to think. I flipped through the issues.
Benji peered at me. “Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, I totally get it if you don’t. It could be a total waste of time. My friend Amir once said that some states like Iowa have more cows than people, so it would be like trying to find someone in a sea of cows. Or a needle in a haystack. I guess the second one makes more sense.”
“First of all,” I said, “Iowa isn’t full of cows. My dad’s parents are from there. Also, we made a deal, remember? I’m helping you find him.” I looked up at him, and my throat felt tight all of a sudden. I said softly, “Think of how cool it would be if you saw him again.”
Benji looked down. He was quiet for a moment. “You’re right. Besides, I think he wants me to find him.”
I set the comics down. “What do you mean?”
“Okay, well, I know you haven’t read to this point so I’m probably spoiling this for you, but—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Maybe it mattered a little bit, but still, we had to find his dad. “Tell me.”
“So, volume 3, issue 2,” he said, laying it out in front of me. “It came out maybe six months ago. Gemma Harris discovers that her dad has been held captive on an exoplanet all along.”
I sat up. “You mean she isn’t an orphan like she thought?”
Benji shook his head. “Nope. Turns out, her dad was a space traveler before her, but he got stuck in another galaxy and he’s been trying to find his way back to Earth since. So she has to go on a mission to find him.”
Captain Gemma Harris has to go find her dad.
Just like—
Our eyes met.
“You see?” Benji said, almost whispering. “It’s almost like he’s sending me a message.”
“Like he wants you to find him,” I said.
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t just a big secret anymore. It wasn’t just a mystery that you could look at and think about from time to time.
It was a mission.
A bona fide mission.
My heart started racing. It wasn’t just us trying to find his dad. His dad wanted us to find him. “That means the clues have to be in the comics!” I reached for the comics excitedly. An idea sprang to my mind. “Maybe . . . we can just look in the first couple of issues, where . . .”
“Where it’s still set on Earth!” Benji said.
I skimmed the first pages. “So, mountains, deserts, some town,” I said. “She’s in a secret government science lab.” I looked up. “Maybe he’s in the Southwest somewhere
. Like Arizona or New Mexico.” I flipped through to the next couple of pages. “But then she gets brought to Washington, DC.”
Aha. Our first official city name. I wrote it down on my clipboard.
I pushed away the atlas and the phone book, and spread out the comics, and circled every Earth location I could find in Spacebound.
We were getting somewhere. The puzzle pieces were beginning to come together, and I got that excited feeling again, the tingle in my gut, the feeling when I didn’t quite know how it would all unfold, but I could see that it was the beginning of something.
Chapter Eight
Benji
RO LIVED EXACTLY a block away from Drew Balonik, which meant that a) I knew the exact way to her house, and b) the entire time we were biking over there after school, I was sincerely hoping I wouldn’t run into him.
When Ro and I came in, her mom was chatting away on the phone, waving her hands around, but when she saw us, her eyes lit up and she waved and mouthed, Hi!
“Client call, probably,” Ro whispered to me. “She’s a real estate agent. We can just—”
“Hi, honey!” Ro’s mom rushed around to the kitchen table. “And you must be Benji!” She reached out for a hug, smiling, and then held me at arm’s length. “Ro has told me all about you.”
Ro’s mom reminded me of those energetic people who worked out on TV in neon leotards and made burpees look a lot more fun than they actually were, except she was dressed up in fancy clothes and wore lipstick. She kind of looked like Ro, actually, just with straight jet-black hair and bangs. And a lot of makeup. If I were to draw Ro’s mom, I wouldn’t use colored pencils; I would use those bright markers Mr. Keanan had.
“Are you hungry, Benji?” She opened the fridge and started rooting around. “We’ve got some snacks we could heat up. Or some ice cream? Or a pizza! Or maybe some tea?”
“We’re okay for now, Mom,” Ro said. “We’ll just be working on some school stuff.”
Ro’s mom turned, her jewelry clinking. “Are you sure? I think we have some cookies around, if you need.” She gathered up her purse. “I have to run to my open house. You kids will be fine, right?”
“Of course,” Ro said.
“If you say so.” Her mom swept her up in a one-armed hug and planted a kiss on her head.
Ro grinned and rubbed lipstick from her forehead. As her mom strapped on her heels and ran out the door, my chest felt a little tight. I mean, it wasn’t like my mom didn’t hug me—she hugged me plenty, mostly when she was worrying about me. But it was the way Ro and her mom almost melted into each other. Like butter or something. I wondered what her dad was like.
I looked around the kitchen. “What’s up with all the plants?”
“Oh, that,” Ro said, following my gaze. “My mom’s just gotten into horticulture lately. See, there’s her English ivy.” She pointed to the leaves cascading down the window and almost into the sink. “And she’s got some desert plants, too. Aloe and mini cactuses. And there are some orchids in the library that she’s pretty proud of.”
With the light coming in from the windows, her kitchen almost looked like a greenhouse. It was kind of cool, actually.
“Come on,” Ro said. “The rocket’s in the garage.”
The garage, however, was an entirely different story. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. There was a table with a bunch of tools on it. I recognized the bottle of gold paint she’d bought at Hogan’s, along with the sandpaper and Popsicle sticks.
Ro walked over to the end of the table and fiddled around with what looked like a block with a lot of wires sticking out of it. She pressed a button, and the Doors streamed out, static and all.
“What,” I asked, “is that?”
“My radio,” she said, shrugging.
I stared at her in shock.
Honestly, who builds their own radio? Besides, I totally did not expect Ro to be into sixties rock. “Don’t you guys have cassettes or something?”
“Yeah, but building your own radio is way cooler.”
I shrugged.
“So this is my lab,” Ro said, over the guitar intros. She looked over. “What do you think?”
I looked around at all the wires. “This looks exactly like a mad scientist’s lab.”
“Hey!”
“In a good way!” I put my hands up. I knew that all this stuff was pretty safe. It’s just that whenever I thought of scientists, I always pictured the ones from my comics. Like how Dr. Bruce Banner put gamma rays through his body and then turned green and ballooned in size and became the Hulk. Or like how a lightning bolt hit Barry Allen’s supplies, and then suddenly his body could travel at supersonic speed, and then he turned into the Flash.
I glanced around the room. It was pretty dimly lit. Cracks of sunlight streamed through the windows. The walls were a muted shade of brown. If a lightning bolt hit Ro’s radio—
“Benji?”
I was getting way, way ahead of myself. “I mean, there’s some cool stuff in here. Like your . . . radio thing.” I walked over to the edge of the table, where there was a plastic cylinder surrounded by cut-out materials. “So this . . .”
“That’s it,” Ro said, coming around and fastening huge-looking lab goggles over her eyes. “It’s the rocket. In progress.”
“Whoa.” It was bigger than I’d thought, with the top already put together. I looked at her in disbelief.
Ro Geraghty, the girl who sat next to me in class, was an actual, serious, live rocket scientist, goggles and all.
And she was actually trying to get a rocket up into space.
Mad Scientist Concocts Top-Secret Spaceship Rocket in Garage Lab!!!
“So these go into space?”
“Well, not this one,” she said. She paused and picked up what looked like a tube and a mess of wires. “These are just model rockets. They only fly to a max of a couple thousand feet.”
Still, that was way cool.
“You think you wanna get one to space someday?”
She nodded. “Absolutely.”
I had no idea she was so serious about it. I mean, I didn’t think it was a joke or anything—I’d seen her sketches stuffed with equations and those hieroglyphic-y math symbol things. I didn’t know she actually wanted to launch a rocket, like those ones I saw on TV. Still, she sounded so confident that I actually kind of believed her.
“Okay,” I said. “So how can I help?”
“Well,” she said, coming over. “You have to know a couple of things about the rocket first.”
She pointed to the top, the middle, and then the bottom, where one of the fins was jutting out. “Nose, airframe, fins. Airframe is the body of the rocket. I’ve trimmed the fins a little to make it fly higher. It’s supposed to go over fifteen hundred feet, according to my calculations, but I think we can push it to sixteen.” She pointed to the plan. “We’re also going to add a radio transmitter in there”—she pointed to a mess of wires over at the end of the table—“to send signals back to the ground.”
“You’re building another radio?”
“Shouldn’t be that hard,” she said. “I mean, usually people just launch the rocket itself, but I wanted to add something to, you know, keep track of speed and how high it goes and all that. I was going to get a rocket camera, but that’s too expensive to order. So I thought I’d just build a radio instead.” She straightened up. “Anyway. The point is, if we stick to the plan, we’ll be A-OK. Got it?”
“Yeah,” I said, even if I didn’t understand half of what she said. I looked at the rocket. “But hey, we should put some space blasters on this.”
“What?”
“Wouldn’t that be cool? Like if we were under attack, we’d be prepared. Oh, and we could add some forcefield shields while we’re at it.”
“That’s impossible,” she said curtly.
I looked down. Jeez.
“But,” she said, grinning a little, “we could add on some sonic jet packs, just for some extra speed.”
>
“Now we’re talking.”
“I’ll consider it for the next prototype.” She handed me the hammer. “Ready?”
Honestly, I’d never expected to get excited about a science project. It was just supposed to be a part of a deal, right? Ro would use her genius brain to think of ways to track my dad down. I would put up with an hour here, maybe two, tops, scribbling out numbers until Ro knew just how bad I was at calculating things. I could help paint the rocket, if anything. I would do the least work possible to get my name on a science fair poster so Mom would get off my back and I could keep Mr. Keanan’s art class. Win-win. Well, win mostly for me.
But as Ro grinned across the table with that wide smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes, her goggles huge on her face, and the Beatles hummed out of her janky radio, and as I joked about all the cool things we could possibly add to the rocket, I realized, This isn’t half-bad.
This could actually be kind of fun.
I didn’t get my first letter from Amir until the beginning of November. It came in a skinny envelope, and Mom made sure to personally hand it to me.
“I miss that kid,” she said. It was true—she especially loved Amir and would constantly invite him over for dinner. She’d even insist he bring home a batch of her slightly overcrisped brownies. “Tell him I said hello.”
“Will do,” I said. I raced to my room and carefully tore the side open and shook the letter out.
Hey, Ben Franklin, Amir began, and I grinned at my old nickname. Sorry for the prolonged wait. I’ve been so busy in my move that I’d lost track of time.
I rolled my eyes at the word prolonged. Of course. I’d forgotten he was practically like a walking thesaurus.
I have to say, New Haven’s like an entirely different world from Sacramento. First of all, our current house is way tinier than our old house. I have to share a room with two of my sisters. Can you even imagine? The third one’s at college, so we don’t see her as much anymore, but when she comes home to visit, it’s all four of us in one room. Sometimes I can barely even hear myself think.
