Buttheads from Outer Space

by Jerry Mahoney

  Lloyd flipped to a picture of an alien out of an old black-and-white sci-fi movie.

  “Yessssss!” Mr. Mudd hissed.

  “Are they spying on us? Certainly. Manipulating us? Possibly. Planning to take over the Earth?” He switched off the projector and shrugged. “Who am I to say? All I know is, whoever they are, they’re listening to us right now, to this very report. So let me ask them . . .”

  He raised his head up to the sky as if speaking directly to the aliens who were supposedly eavesdropping on his science report. “WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING, GIANT SPACE BUTT?” he shouted.

  Then, the lights went out, the music cut off, and there was total silence.

  The next sound we heard was Mr. Mudd jumping up and applauding. “Brilliant!” he said. “Amazing!”

  Lloyd had not said a single fact that could be found in a textbook, except that NASA declared this was all a complete crock. Yet it was exactly what our teacher wanted to hear. “A-plus!” Mr. Mudd enthused.

  Lloyd returned to his seat, smirking at me. “That’s how you do it,” he said.

  “You didn’t say anything but nonsense,” I whispered. “You just said what he wanted to hear.”

  “Exactly,” Lloyd replied.

  Mr. Mudd turned the Smart Board back on. “I’ve always been fascinated by this particular unidentified orbiting object. And I’m impressed with all the photographs you found!” He flipped through Lloyd’s pictures of the weird sky thing. “You even found one I’ve never seen before.” He focused on a photo of the Space Butt passing in front of the moon.

  “Oh, that?” Lloyd said. He motioned toward me and smiled. “Well, I have to be honest. Josh actually came across that one while he was researching his report. You can really see the division between the two cheeks on that one. Right, Josh?”

  Lloyd winked at me to get me to play along. “Um, yeah. The left cheek seems especially suspicious,” I agreed.

  Mr. Mudd nodded at me, impressed. “Nice work, Josh. Just for that, I’m bumping you up to an A-minus.” He made a note in his grade book, and Lloyd high-fived me.

  “Happy birthday, Josh,” he said.

  Man, Lloyd was the best.

  If the A-plus wasn’t enough evidence, I could tell how well Lloyd did on his report by how annoyed everyone else in the class was at him. After the bell rang, while we were leaving the room, pretty much everyone was muttering under his or her breath. Things like, “I worked for a month on my presentation!” And, “I should’ve done my report on Ewoks.” And, “Next year, I’m taking chemistry.” I couldn’t help thinking that moments like this explained why Lloyd and I had never quite broken through to the top tier of popularity.

  “We’re the talk of the class!” Lloyd beamed. Sometimes, it amazed me how the two of us were able to see the same situation completely differently.

  As we entered the cafeteria, Kaitlyn Wien-Tomita came scooting up to us with her camera rolling. Kaitlyn was pretty cool—in my mind, at least. (Of course, that probably meant she wasn’t very cool as far as most other kids were concerned.)

  Kaitlyn had one of those fancy action cameras you could clip on to a snowboard or a white-water raft to capture your extreme sporting adventures. That’s not what she used hers for, though. Kaitlyn had a YouTube channel. She’d had it since second grade. Back then, she was obsessed with these toys called Purse Puppies. Each one was a stuffed dog that you carried around inside a faux designer pocketbook. Like they had a Pomeranian inside a gold purse with a label that said POOCHI instead of GUCCI. She used to do reviews of all the new ones that came out, and sometimes she would play with them and make up little stories where they solved crimes or went to tea parties.

  Not a lot of people watched her channel, but the company who made Purse Puppies heard about it, and they sent her a free French bulldog in a Hair-mès bag, a week before they sold it in stores. After that, tons of kids at school started their own channels where they played with their toys, but nobody else got any freebies, so eventually they all stopped. Except Kaitlyn. She grew out of Purse Puppies, of course. Now she was interested in Lloyd’s report for some reason.

  “Lloyd, that was quite a presentation you gave today,” Kaitlyn said as she focused her lens on us. “Care to comment?”

  “Happy to, Kaitlyn,” Lloyd replied. “I’m fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, and today, I was humbled to do my tiny part to illuminate one of the most mysterious of all, the Space Butt.”

  Kaitlyn nodded. “So you believe in aliens?”

  “Absolutely,” Lloyd answered. “The universe is far more vast than our tiny human brains can comprehend. Seems like that’d be an awful lot of wasted space if it was just us here.” Most kids wouldn’t be so open about believing in aliens, but I guess Lloyd wasn’t worried what people would think—or maybe he just figured no one would ever see this, so it didn’t matter. “I try to remember that, to everyone else in the universe, it’s we here on Earth who are the aliens.” I had to back away a bit so that Kaitlyn wouldn’t catch me rolling my eyes on camera.

  “So if they’re watching us right now,” Kaitlyn continued, “what message would you want to give them?”

  “I’d tell them to come hang out with me and Josh. We’re the coolest guys on Earth!”

  Kaitlyn shut her camera off. “Thanks, guys.”

  “What’s this for?” I asked her. “You doing videos about aliens now?” It seemed strange, because I couldn’t imagine what kind of free products she might get for that.

  “More like local news,” she said. “I’m training to be a reporter, like Stacy Diaz-Finch of Channel 8.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Good luck.”

  “Yeah, there aren’t many big stories around here.” She shrugged. “But I’ll keep trying. It’s good practice, if nothing else. And if aliens do come visit you and Josh, I hope you’ll give me the exclusive.”

  She said it with a wink, and I think she was expecting Lloyd to make a joke in response. Instead, he replied, with complete earnestness, “Oh no, Kaitlyn. I could never betray an alien’s trust.”

  Kaitlyn backed away slowly, eyeing Lloyd like he was a lunatic. “I’d better get to my fourth period,” she said.

  I thought Lloyd was a little nutty, too, but as it turned out, I wouldn’t be thinking that for much longer.

  1 Ugh, footnotes! Is this really going to be that kind of book? Well, don’t worry. These footnotes are actually kind of cool. Whenever you see one, it means Lloyd and I wrote a blog post to explain that topic to aliens, and the footnote will tell you what page at the end of the book to flip to if you want to read it. Yeah, I know, the only thing worse than footnotes in a book is an appendix. I won’t blame you if you throw this book in the garbage right now.

  CHAPTER 2

  Every day, my parents put a note in my lunch bag. The notes are always really corny, like they’ll draw a cartoon of a man in a suit of armor, and they’ll write, “See you to-KNIGHT!” The notes mean so much to them. It’s always the first question they ask me at dinner. “What’d you think of the note today?” I usually try to answer with my mouth full of food, so I don’t have to lie.

  “Ihh wuff hurrblll,” I’ll answer, and they’ll smile proudly.

  “Thanks!”

  On the morning of my birthday2, I was bracing myself for a particularly atrocious note, because my parents always go totally overboard celebrating my birth. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I opened my lunch and confetti popped out while a tiny speaker played my dad singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Much to my relief, it was just a regular note, which said, “Choppy birthday to our favorite boy!”

  It took me a minute to get it, and then I got really excited.

  “Lloyd!” I shouted. “Look!”

  Lloyd glanced at my note and shook his head. “Your parents are weird.”

  “Don’t you get it? Choppy birthday. That means they’re taking us to Chop Socky!”

  “Aw, sweet!” Lloyd said.

  Chop S
ocky was a Japanese restaurant on Route 48, but the good kind of Japanese restaurant, the kind where they cook the food right in front of you, as opposed to not at all. There’s a giant grill at every table, and instead of them bringing the food out from the kitchen when it’s ready to eat, they let you watch them make it. I think once everyone heard about sushi, Japanese chefs had to create restaurants like this. When you know that a chef likes to serve things raw, you want them to prove to you that they’re actually cooking your meal.

  Of course, cooking food is boring, so they amp it up by juggling knives and making volcanoes out of onions. Pretty much everyone who goes to Chop Socky is having a birthday, because you can get the same food at Tokyo Town at the mall food court for about 1/100th the price, but without the possibility that your cook might accidentally slice his hand off while making it.

  Of course, I always bring Lloyd along on my birthday dinners because he never really gets to celebrate his own birthday. He’s the youngest of nine kids, so by the time he came along, his parents were tired of throwing parties. It was always one kid’s birthday or another, and besides, there was never enough cake to go around. One year, they held a raffle to determine which kids would get cake on Lloyd’s birthday. Lloyd lost. He had to blow out a candle wedged between two saltine crackers and a slice of American cheese. After that, he told his parents not to bother anymore.

  The first thing I noticed when the waitress sat us down was how familiar our chef seemed. His name tag said Hiroshi, but I was pretty sure I had never met a Hiroshi in my life. When my mom saw him, she squealed with joy.

  “Teddy?” she said.

  “Hi, Mrs. McBain,” Hiroshi replied.

  My dad stared at the guy, confused. “Who’s this?”

  “Oh, Don, you remember Teddy Woo, don’t you? He used to mow our lawn.”

  “They call me Hiroshi here,” Teddy said. My mom ran around the hibachi to give Hiroshi/Teddy a hug. She asked how his parents were, then he told her he was majoring in history at the University of Delaware, and then he asked my mom if she wanted white or brown rice with her combo platter.

  Teddy/Hiroshi was a really good chef. He made a smiley face on the grill in oil, and then he set it on fire. He made two shrimps look like they were dancing together to the Taylor Swift song playing on the speaker system. He shouted out Japanese phrases with the enthusiasm of someone who’d just won a hundred thousand dollars on a game show.

  One thing that stinks about Chop Socky is that even though it’s your birthday, they still make you eat vegetables. Next to the chicken and the noodles, Hiroshi cooked up a big, steaming pile of broccoli. Yuck. Broccoli doesn’t even deserve to be called a vegetable, if you ask me, because I’m convinced it was never intended to be edible. Sure, it comes out of the ground, but so do rocks and sand. Broccoli is a much closer relative to them than it is to carrots or corn, which I can at least swallow without gagging. In my mind, the only good reason to eat broccoli is in the hope that someday we’ll eat it all, and it’ll be wiped off the face of the Earth.

  The chefs at Chop Socky try to make eating broccoli “fun” by turning it into a game. After they cook it, they fling it with a spatula over the grill, and you try to catch it in your mouth. It’s pretty much the worst game ever, because the only prize for winning is getting to eat broccoli. Thankfully, Lloyd had come up with a great plan to beat the broccoli game.

  We watched my mom try about five times to catch the broccoli in her mouth, while my dad shouted, “Come on, Debbie!” at her. Finally, she caught one, and we all cheered.

  My dad got his on the first try, and he stood up to take a bow. “Come on, Hiroshi! Give me another one!” he said. Then, he caught that one, too. “One more! I’m on a roll!” he said. He ate four pieces of broccoli before he finally missed one. Hiroshi bowed to him in respect for his broccoli-catching skill.

  Then, it was my turn. Lloyd winked at me, reminding me to do exactly as he’d told me. Hiroshi flung a floret at me, and I jerked my head around like a maniac so it looked like I was trying to catch it, but then I missed on purpose. “Aw,” my dad said. “Give him another chance!”

  Hiroshi flung a second piece of broccoli at me, and I did the same thing. Another miss. “Keep trying, Hiroshi!” my dad said. “He’ll get one!”

  I missed another piece, and another. My dad started laughing. “C’mon, Josh,” he said. “It’s not that hard.” A small forest of broccoli was building up at the base of my stool.

  Soon, half the restaurant was watching and cheering me on.

  They must’ve heard my dad say my name, because they started chanting, “Jah-osh! Jah-osh!” (It took me a minute to realize that “Jah-osh” was supposed to be “Josh.” You really need at least two syllables in your name for it to be chantable.)

  Hiroshi would fling, I would miss, and everyone in a five-table radius of us would go, “Aww!” Then, the cycle would repeat. “Jah-osh!” Fling, miss, “Aww!” “Jah-osh!” Fling, miss, “Aww!” You’d think my dad would’ve caught on, but all he kept saying was, “Wow, Josh. You are really not good at catching broccoli in your mouth!”

  From across the room, I saw Kaitlyn Wien-Tomita, who was dining with her mom, dad, and grandma. Kaitlyn had her camera trained right on me. I could just imagine this going viral. “Broccoli klutz epic fail.” Thankfully, Hiroshi was onto me. By the time the twentieth piece of broccoli had fallen on the floor, he said, “I’m sorry. The manager won’t let me throw any more broccoli to this boy without charging you extra.”

  “Nice try, son,” my dad said. “Well, maybe Lloyd’ll get one!”

  “Oh no. I can’t,” Lloyd said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m cabbage intolerant.” Man, my best friend was a genius.

  “Cabbage intolerant?” my dad repeated.

  “Yeah, broccoli is part of the cabbage family. So is cauliflower, radish, turnip. I can’t eat any of them.”

  “What would happen if you did?” my dad asked.

  “I would barf my guts out,” Lloyd said.

  What made the broccoli game even more painful was that I was desperate to get to the main course: my present. Since I was about two years old, I’d been begging my parents for an iPhone3. But they read some article in a parenting magazine that said the best age to get your kids a phone was twelve, so they kept telling me I had to wait. Lloyd knew he’d never get an iPhone, at least not until Apple came out with something newer and cooler and one of his older brothers gave him a decade-old iPhone that was destined for the garbage. That meant all our hopes of joining Bueller Middle School’s tech-savvy elite rested on my shoulders.

  Finally, as Hiroshi wiped the grease off the grill, my dad reached down for the iPhone-shaped package at the foot of his stool.

  “Thank you!” I shouted, ripping open the wrapping paper before he even handed it to me.

  “I’m guessing you know what this is,” my dad said.

  I’m not sure, but I think when I first saw it, I made a sound only dogs could hear. It was the most high-pitched squeal I’d ever made in my life. There, in my hands, was my own iPhone. Shiny, perfect, mine.

  “Whoa!” Hiroshi said, impressed. “That’s the newest one. You guys must’ve waited in line hours for that!”

  My mom smiled and put her arm around me. “Josh is worth it. We love him so much!”

  “Turn it on,” my dad said. “We loaded it with games for you.”

  I swiped my finger across the screen and saw app after magnificent app. All the best games were there. Catch the Donkey, Extreme Bubble Wars, Zombie Pizza Parlor, and about fifty different versions of Angry Birds.

  “Do you like it?” my mom asked.

  “I love you!” I said, giving her and my dad a huge hug. I could’ve hugged them all night, but I didn’t want to spend that long apart from my new iPhone.

  “Hiroshi, will you take a picture of us?” my mom asked.

  “No, Mom, don’t you know anything about iPhones? We’ll just take a selfie!
” I opened the camera app and reversed the lens, as if I’d been doing it my whole life. I couldn’t believe it. My first selfie. I stood between my parents, and Lloyd leaned over to photobomb us. I had to stretch my arm way out to fit us all in the frame. “Hold on. Move in a little tighter,” I said. I tilted the camera back and forth trying to get just the right angle. “OK, hold still.” I had never actually taken a selfie before, and it was only when my arm was stretched out as far as it could go that I realized I didn’t have a free finger to snap the picture with.

  I took my index finger off the edge of the phone and tapped the shutter button, but as I did, the phone came loose and fell out of my hand.

  “NOOOOOO!” I screamed. It seemed to happen in slow motion, as my brand-new, beautiful, perfect iPhone plummeted at full speed toward the ground.

  2 See page 247 for our blog post about Earth’s five bajillion holidays.

  3 We talk all about iPhones (and other, less-cool inventions) in our blog on page 248.

  CHAPTER 3

  My mom gasped. Lloyd dove for the phone, but it was too late. It kept falling toward what was sure to be a brutal, untimely death.

  Only it didn’t die. It just stopped falling somehow. There was no thud or crash, only a soft little squish sound. When I looked down to find it, there it was, sitting safely on top of all that broccoli that Hiroshi had flung at me. It was a small mountain of disgustingness, with my gorgeous iOS device at its peak, unharmed.

  “I don’t believe it!” I said. “The broccoli broke its fall!”

  “It’s a Chop Socky miracle!” Lloyd said, high-fiving me.

  I picked up the phone, and there wasn’t a crack on it. It turned on. The camera app had even saved the picture I took, although it was a little blurry because it was falling as the shutter snapped and my mouth was wide open because I’d just started to scream. But the phone was now coated with a weird slimy gunk. “Oh, yuck!” I said. “Chop socky sauce!”