Buttheads from Outer Space

by Jerry Mahoney

  Also by Jerry Mahoney

  My Rotten Stepbrother Ruined Cinderella

  My Rotten Stepbrother Ruined Beauty & the Beast

  My Rotten Stepbrother Ruined Aladdin

  My Rotten Stepbrother Ruined Snow White

  Copyright © 2018 by Jerry Mahoney

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Kate Gartner

  Cover illustration by Chris Garbutt

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3261-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3263-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Greg,

  my Lloyd

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  It only took three minor adjustments for Lloyd and me to turn a picture of our archenemy Quentin into a giant butt. First, we colored over his eyes with a Sharpie, making them into weird, ugly birthmarks. Then, we transformed his mouth into a long, thin, dangling turd. We finished it off by drawing a curved line down the middle of his nose, all the way to his chin. That was the crack. I’d like to say Lloyd and I are amazing artists, but, really, I have to give most of the credit to Quentin’s face, for being so butt-like to begin with.

  Once our masterpiece was finished, Lloyd held it in front of his face and did his best impression of Quentin Fairchild, the weeniest guy we know.

  “Hi, I’m Quentin, and I’m a big butt!”

  The high-pitched wheeze he made as he spoke sounded exactly like Quentin’s horrible voice. Lloyd nailed it.

  Even though we neutralized the sight of Quentin’s rotten face, we still had to deal with the headline blaring at us from the magazine cover he was on: “Eleven Eleven-Year-Olds Who’ll Change the World Someday.” Quentin was number one on the list, of course, and I was just some loser whose mom paid $7.95 for the extra-crummy double issue.

  Last year, Quentin was on a list of “Ten Ten-Year-Olds Who Hold the Future in Their Hands,” and the year before that, it was “Nine Nine-Year-Olds Who Are More Successful Than You’ll Ever Be, You Worthless Loser” (or something like that).

  The only list I’d ever been on that was distributed publicly was a list of kids in fourth grade who had head lice. An angry mom sent it around to half the PTA when the school nurse refused to name names. That was two years ago, and everyone still remembered it. That only added to my shame at not accomplishing anything like Quentin had.

  To be fair, Quentin had kind of earned all the attention. He cured feline chicken pox. You probably didn’t even know cats could get chicken pox. It turns out a lot of animals can get chicken pox, which makes you wonder why they still call it chicken pox and not just “pox.” It’s not just a disease for poultry, like whoever named it once thought.

  It happened like this: Quentin’s cat got sick. He did something I still don’t understand, and then his cat was cured. After that, it was like he was Stephen Hawking or cat Jesus or something. He won an award from the Veterinarians Association of America. He got to have dinner with the president at the White House. He was on the front page of the newspaper with the headline “Will This Kid Cure Cancer?” (Lloyd and I found the copy at the public library and wrote “Probably not” on it. This was before we had the artistic skills necessary to make faces into butts.)

  “We should be changing the world!” Lloyd insisted as he waved Quentin’s magazine cover in my face.

  “But we’re almost twelve!” I argued. “It’s too late for us!”

  It was a really good point. Everyone knows there aren’t any lists of up-and-coming twelve-year-olds. Once you hit puberty, your chance to be a prodigy has passed you by. If you haven’t done anything awesome by then, you might as well have been born a tree sloth or a patch of shower mold, because your importance to the planet is virtually zilch. You’re never going to win a gold medal or be elected to national office, so you might as well just accept your name tag and hairnet and start shoving jalapeño horsemeat into taco shells at whatever fast-food dump will agree to hire you.

  But Lloyd doesn’t get upset by things like this. He gets motivated. Every time some supposedly important newsweekly declared Quentin special, Lloyd started dreaming up ways we could outdo him. He wanted him and me to be the most famous kids on Earth. So far, we weren’t even in the top six billion. So this time, he decided to dream bigger. We weren’t just going to be the most famous kids on Earth. We were going to be the most famous kids in the galaxy.

  Maybe the universe.

  We were going to be the kids who brought aliens and humans together.

  With a blog.

  Soon, the two of us were spending every day after school posting an online guide to our home planet, all the things that aliens should know when planning a visit here. Lloyd was sure it would convince some adventurous E.T.s to make the cross-universe trip to come hang out with us. I just thought it was fun to write. It’s not like I ever believed aliens would be persuaded to come here based on something two dumb kids wrote on the freeblogz.biz domain.

  And it all started by us looking at that defaced magazine cover and imagining just who our visitors might be:

  http://peacefulextraterrestrialsguidetoearth.freeblogz.biz/home.html

  An Open Letter from Two Cool Earthlings to any Extraterrestrials Who Want to Visit Our Planet (but Not Kill Us)

  Dear Superior Alien Race,

  Hey, dudes! Thanks for checking out our blog. It should tell you everything you need to know about our awesome planet, Earth. Sure, this giant blue rock two orbits over from Jupiter has its problems: wars, hurricanes, homework. Overall, though, it’s a great place to take your intergalactic vacation. We should know. We’ve lived here all eleven years of our lives so far. Our names are Lloyd and Josh. We’re best friends, and we would be totally awesome tour guides if you want to come visit for a while.

  The first thing we want to say is that if you have any plans to conquer or blow up our planet, it’s small and red and has ninety-seven rings around it. It’s the twelfth planet orbiting HD8673 in the Andromeda galaxy.

  OK, not really, but please don’t travel all the way across the universe just to destroy Earth. We kind of like it here.

  Next, we apologi
ze for writing this travel guide to our home planet via this primitive Earthling blog. We wish we could beam this message directly into your hyperevolved brain orbs, but this is the best technology we humans currently have. Believe it or not, when our parents were kids, we didn’t even have tech this lame, so be grateful we’re not blasting this into orbit via fax machine.

  The first thing you should know about our planet is that ninety-nine percent of our so-called intelligent life here are total donkey-butt jerks. If you come to Earth for a visit, they will probably capture you, run experiments on you, and ask you all kinds of lame questions about where the universe came from and how you conquered the hurdles of intergalactic travel and what asparagus looks like on your planet. Then, you’ll have to meet all these boring world leaders and give dumb speeches and take pictures with them for hours. Is it really worth having to poop in zero gravity on the long space trip just to put up with that nonsense when you get here? We think not.

  By far the biggest donkey-butt jerk on our whole planet is this guy Quentin Fairchild who goes to our school. He’s a nerd who hangs out with the cool kids because they think he’s going to be super rich and famous someday like the nerd who started Facebook or the nerd who started the website that that guy ripped off, who later got a sweet settlement in court. The two of us are just regular nerds, who read comic books and enjoy science because sometimes stuff goes boom. Nobody expects we’ll ever do anything important. So if you’re going to visit Earth, come to us. We promise, when you hang out with us, no one will even notice you’re here.

  Quentin treats us like we’re the biggest losers in the world. He always wins everything, and he loves to make fun of us because we’re the only ones who still bother to compete against him. Josh ran against him for student body president, and Quentin wasn’t happy just to beat him. He told half his voters to vote for a rock just so Josh would come in third. Now Josh is known as the guy who lost to a rock. Granted, if the rock can’t fulfill its duties for any reason, Josh will move up a slot, but that’s not looking likely. It’s a big rock, and it’s not going anywhere.

  That’s why we came up with the idea for this online guide to our home planet. Once you see how awesome Earth is, we know you’ll want to come stay with us for a while. That will make us way cooler than Quentin. Plus, we’ll show you all the awesome stuff our planet has to offer, like pizzas that cook in ninety seconds and bike hockey (which is a game we made up that’s like hockey, but on bikes) and Generation: Scream, which is this totally sick suspension coaster where your legs dangle out and you go so fast that there’s a sonic boom and so high that you have to breathe oxygen through a face mask. It’s at a theme park called Thrillington Palace, and it doesn’t open until next summer, but trust us, it’s going to be humankind’s greatest accomplishment yet, and we’re the species that came up with the idea of putting yogurt in tubes, so that’s saying something.

  We’ve thought a lot about what you must look like, and here’s our best guess: You’re probably about three feet tall, with butts in the back of your heads. You’re scaly in front and furry in back, with spikes down the sides of your arms. You have nine fingers on one hand and four fingers on the other, plus a third hand with no fingers at all and a belly button in the middle. Or maybe it’s an ear. We’re not sure about that one. You have two eyes, just like us, but you can swap them out with your friends if you want to see what they’re seeing.

  It goes without saying that you’re crazy smart, because you probably have about twenty brains each, including a mini brain in each of your toes. You probably speak like five languages, including your language, English like us, and something really hard like Dutch or the language ants use to tell each other where the rotting rat corpses are. You’ve come up with a way to play tic-tac-toe so that it’s not always a tie, and you can read a whole book in one second just by holding it up to one of your toe brains, even if it’s a really boring book about life in the Old West or something.

  As for us, your Earth hosts, we each have two eyes, two arms and, when you put both of us together, over two hundred Star Wars toys. What could be cooler than that, right?

  Hope to see you soon. Hyperwarp safely.

  Sincerely,

  Lloyd Ruggles

  Joshua James McBain III

  Posted by Lloyd and Josh, September 8 at 7:12 pm

  Likes: 4

  Comments: 0

  Brilliant, right?1 If you were an alien, you’d totally want to meet those guys, wouldn’t you?

  There was definitely one place where our obsession with aliens came in handy, and that was with our science teacher, Mr. Mudd. He was supposed to be teaching us about all kinds of science, but mostly, he talked about outer space. Mr. Mudd had a very strong connection to everything beyond Earth and very little connection to anything on it. I thought I’d impress him by doing my oral report on comets, but Lloyd tried to warn me against it. “Mr. Mudd will be bored,” he insisted.

  I was convinced Lloyd was wrong. I researched the crap out of comets and found out they were actually totally awesome. I ended up having to do the presentation on my birthday, which I figured was a good sign. Who gets a bad grade on their birthday?

  “Comets have been streaming through our solar system since the formation of the sun,” I told the classroom, standing in front of a papier-mâché replica of the comet Hale-Bopp. I thought that was a pretty cool fact, but when I looked over at Mr. Mudd, he was gazing out the window with disinterest. I had to get his attention fast or I was going to flunk.

  “Halley’s comet sightings happen only once every seventy-six years,” I explained, “but believe it or not, Halley’s is considered a short-period comet. Comet Hyakutake was last visible in 1996, but astronomers believe it may not return for seventy thousand years!” I saw lots of kids nodding in amazement, but when I glanced over at Mr. Mudd, he was nodding off at his desk. My report was actually putting him to sleep. I needed some comic relief, quick. “Seventy thousand years,” I continued, “or roughly as old as the meatloaf they’re serving in the cafeteria today.” I got a big laugh on that line. That settled it. Comedy was the way to go.

  “Comets are made up of rock, dust, and high concentrations of frozen gases like methane and ammonia,” I told the class, “which means, in all likelihood, comets smell like farts.” I had built in a pause in my presentation, figuring I’d get a huge laugh at that point, after which Mr. Mudd would have to tell everyone to settle down. As it turned out, I only needed half the pause I expected. The fart line got a big laugh, but all Mr. Mudd did was roll his eyes.

  It was only when I wrapped up my presentation five torturous minutes later that Mr. Mudd finally looked up, yawning as he marked down my grade. “B-minus,” he droned.

  Of course, that got the biggest laugh of all.

  As I sat back down, Lloyd shook his head, consolingly. “I told you that wouldn’t impress him.”

  Mr. Mudd was not a typical teacher, that’s for sure. He had hair like Albert Einstein. It defied gravity, sticking up in every possible direction. Like a fingerprint or a snowflake, it never took the same shape twice. His clothes never matched. Today, he was wearing a pink-and-purple polka-dot shirt with yellow-and-red plaid pants. It was almost like he went to his closet and grabbed the top half of one clown costume and the bottom half of another. He wore glasses with one lens as thick as a first-generation iPod, and the other side had no lens at all because that eye had perfect vision. He always had at least one visible booger, and we could all see it because no matter what he was looking at, his head seemed to tilt slightly backward at all times. It goes without saying that he smelled worse than a comet. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like my joke.

  While other science classes dissected worms and studied how sodas could eat the tarnish off a penny, we focused almost totally on astronomy. And most of that was devoted to alien conspiracy theories like the spaceship that supposedly crashed at Area 51. For weeks, Mr. Mudd discussed the inconsistencies in official CIA statements about t
he incident and showed us blurry videos from the 1970s of weird objects in the sky. “That doesn’t look like a weather balloon to me!” he would rant.

  Some people joked that Mr. Mudd himself was from another planet.

  If he was, Lloyd seemed to be happy visiting him there for a while.

  “What is this bizarre, unearthly object?” Lloyd asked, as he began his presentation to the class. He projected a photo onto the Smart Board. It showed a weirdly shaped something or other silhouetted against the clouds, high above Earth. It was made up of two round, egg-like halves, with a ridge running down the middle. People started giggling, not because this whole report was ridiculous, which it was, but because the object Lloyd was speaking so seriously about looked like a gigantic butt.

  “No one knows for sure,” Lloyd continued, “but it’s been spotted hovering around our planet for decades now, perhaps even for millennia.” He flipped through a few other photos of the object in different positions in the sky, ending on a drawing of cavemen pointing at the doohickey in prehistoric times. Meanwhile, he underscored his presentation with creepy techno music to give it a mysterious feel.

  Mr. Mudd was riveted. He was leaning so far forward in his chair that it looked like he was trying to climb over his desk. “Yes?” he said, eager to hear more. “Yes? Yes?”

  “Scientists have yet to give it a name, but I call it the Gluteus Extraterrestrius. The Space Butt.”

  This got a big laugh—from everyone except Mr. Mudd. “NASA once commented on this satellite, you know,” he said.

  “Oh, I know,” Lloyd replied. “They called it a fragment from an ancient comet. But why would a piece of a comet look like two bulging cheeks and a crack, am I right?”

  Mr. Mudd nodded enthusiastically. I quietly rolled my eyes. Lloyd was so good at this.

  “No one knows its origin . . . or its purpose.” Lloyd dimmed the lights. The music grew louder and louder while only a flashlight beam shined on Lloyd’s panicked face. He was really getting dramatic now. “Was it put in the skies above us by humans? Impossible. It weighs ten tons, far too much for our meager technology to have put it there way back when it was first sighted. The only plausible explanation is that it came from someone more advanced than us.”