The buttheads made super sad faces, and Lloyd glared at me in the hopes I’d feel guilty. But I knew he was up to his usual mind games, and I wasn’t falling for it. Not this time. “Keep in touch,” I said, coldly.
IAmAWeenieBurger farted sadly at Doodoo-fartmama, who then farted sadly back. They went on talking this way, and Lloyd shook his head at me, disappointed. “It’s not that I feel bad for them,” he said. “I feel bad for you, Josh. You deserved better than this.”
I was starting to wonder if I was making the right decision. Like I said, Lloyd can be very persuasive, but then I noticed something strange. The buttheads no longer looked sad. They had their backs to us, so I could see their mouths, and while a mouth on a butt is a little different than a mouth on a face, it’s still a mouth, and I was pretty sure that theirs were smiling. Not normal smiles, either. Evil smiles. “Um, Lloyd, what do you think they’re talking about?”
Lloyd shrugged. “Probably how disappointed they are in our planet.”
As I watched them suspiciously, Doodoofartmama suddenly collapsed to the floor in a sickly, stench-ridden blob. Plop! He lay there, his eyeballs floating on a pile of goop. It was different from when the aliens went number four, but equally disgusting. Then, suddenly, bubbles appeared, poking up from the surface of the sludge and popping with a little mess of yuckiness.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
IAmAWeenieBurger turned around, nervously. “No worries. He is simply texting our besties.”
“That’s going to go all the way back to your planet?”
“No, just to a spy satellite that we planted in your orbit ten million butthead years ago. Maybe you’ve noticed it. Two cheeks, a big crack. We call it the Space Butt.”
“That’s yours?” I said. “It’s not just a fragment from an ancient comet?”
Lloyd nodded proudly. “See, Josh? I really did deserve an A on my report!”
Doodoofartmama burbled on the floor like a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. One big bubble over here, then another one over there. Then, he pushed out a bubble the size of my head, and it separated from the rest of his body and began to float upward. It seeped through the window and out of the house, before sailing skyward, up through the clouds, until I couldn’t see it anymore.
IAmAWeenieBurger explained. “His butt bubble will let the other buttheads know that we’re coming home a little early.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s probably best. Maybe our cultures just don’t mix well. No hard feelings.”
“Of course not. I am only sad that we will never get to humiliate Quentin for you.” Doodoofartmama began to ooze back and forth across the floor and emit sparks.
“What? You were really going to help us defeat Quentin?”
“That is why we came! To help our Earth friends with a noble cause.”
“Yeah, Josh,” Lloyd said. “They wanted to help us, but if you want them gone . . .”
Now I was flashing an evil smile. I couldn’t help it. The thought of getting back at Quentin changed everything. “Well . . . how would you do it?” I asked.
“We would have to figure it out when we got to school.”
“School?” I said. “Oh no. We couldn’t take you to school11.”
IAmAWeenieBurger began to cry again, and I ducked to avoid getting soaked.
“It’s nothing personal. You’re just a little too . . . different.”
“Different?”
“Yeah,” Lloyd explained. “People tend to notice ‘different’ in middle school, like if your socks don’t match or your backpack has a hole in it, or, maybe, say for example, you have a butt on your head?”
“Well, my butt wouldn’t go. Just my eye! We would do an eye swap.”
“An eye swap?” I asked. “Is that as gross as it sounds?”
“Here, I’ll show you.” IAmAWeenieBurger bent down and held his fingerless hand underneath his right eyeball. Then, using his other two hands, he smacked the back of his head really hard. One smack. Two smacks. And then, his eye popped out and rolled onto his open palm.
I nearly fainted. It was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, and only two minutes earlier these weirdos had been sitting on my breakfast.
“Now, you give me yours,” IAmAWeenieBurger said. He reached his hands up and whacked me on the back of my head.
“Eek!” I shrieked, backing away. “You’re not taking my eyes!”
“Oh, right,” he said. “I forgot that’s a butthead-only thing. See, we have this cool thing where our eyes, like, transmit images to our brains through phasmic waves.”
“What are phasmic waves?” Lloyd asked.
“Oh, right. You humans still haven’t discovered phasmic waves.” IAmAWeenieBurger laughed mockingly.
“Shut up!” I said. “And you buttheads still haven’t invented Minecraft.”
“Excellent point,” IAmAWeenieBurger agreed. “Phasmic waves can, like, beam whatever my eye sees back to my brain, yo. So if you take my eye to school, I’ll be able to peep what’s happening.”
“Well, maybe that works on your planet,” I said. “But on Earth, people don’t just walk around carrying eyeballs everywhere.”
“Wait, Josh,” Lloyd said. “This is a great idea. We can hide the eye in your backpack. It can see our school, and nobody has to see it.” He grabbed the eyeball from IAmAWeenieBurger’s hand. “Here, let’s find something to put this in.”
With the eyeball in his hand, Lloyd walked into my parents’ pantry. IAmAWeenieBurger was standing right next to me, but he could clearly see everything his eyeball was seeing, because he cooed happily, “Whoa, those Oreos look pretty sweet! Ooh, trail mix!”
“Perfect!” Lloyd said. He emerged from the pantry with the eyeball locked up in a Ziploc baggie. “Think fast!” he shouted and tossed the eyeball across the room to me.
I’m not very good at catching things under ideal circumstances, such as when I know someone’s about to throw it and when it’s not an eyeball. So when Lloyd threw the eyeball at me without warning, I did what I usually do in sports, which is to panic and cover my face, while screaming, “Aah!”
Thump! The eyeball fell to the kitchen floor and rolled across the room.
“Oh! I’m getting dizzy!” IAmAWeenieBurger shouted as it spun in the corner.
“Come on, Josh!” Lloyd picked up the baggie and held it out to me. “It’s just an eyeball.”
I stared at it. It was veiny and curious, looking back at me from inside the bag. Shuddering, I reached out and took it from Lloyd. It gazed all around, taking everything in, as I slid it down into the mesh pocket on the side of my backpack. From there, it would have a pretty good view of my school day—and hopefully, no one would notice it transmitting phasmic waves or whatever.
Just then, Doodoofartmama’s butt bubble flew back in through the window and hovered over his sparking goo mound. IAmAWeenieBurger emitted an excited fart as it plopped back down onto his goo pile and was reabsorbed. “Cool!” IAmAWeenieBurger said. “They texted back.” Doodoofartmama’s body emerged from the sludge and retook its shape.
Lloyd elbowed me, awestruck. “Come on, Josh. You gotta admit it’s pretty cool seeing all the crazy stuff they can do.”
I wanted to agree with Lloyd, but then, the buttheads started farting at each other again. Whatever Doodoofartmama said to IAmAWeenieBurger made him very happy, and his evil smile came back. Soon, they were both laughing—and looking at us.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
They quickly stopped laughing and tried to act natural. “Nothing,” IAmAWeenieBurger said, facing us with only one eye in his skull. “Our friends just texted back a funny joke.” They looked at each other and started laughing again. I had no idea what they were saying, but it felt a lot like they were laughing at us.
Lloyd and I shared a suspicious glance. I could tell he was thinking the same thing as me. Something strange was going on, and I was no longer so sure the buttheads had only come to
Earth to play video games.
11 See page 262 for our blog about school, a terrible place to bring aliens–and a pretty miserable place for kids, too.
CHAPTER 9
When I got to homeroom, I wasn’t sure what was freaking me out more—the fact that I had an alien’s eyeball in my backpack or that at any moment, my parents might show up, desperate to make amends with me. They had never stormed out on me like that before, without a hug or an “I love you, my sweet little pookykins.” I could only assume that they were wracked with guilt at how they’d behaved, unable to function. As Mr. Hogan took attendance, I listened to the sounds coming from the hallway, convinced I’d soon hear the click-clack of tap shoes. Then, my parents would burst into my classroom, jazz hands waving, in full view of the backpack, to sing me a make-up song. It’d be a new low for me socially, humiliated in front of creatures from two galaxies at once.
While I waited for the inevitable embarrassment, I heard President Quentin come over the loudspeaker. As one of the perks of his office, he got to make the morning announcements, as if the required mumble-through of the Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t annoying enough without hearing it led by his nasally voice. “Attention, fellow students,” he announced. “This is your president, Quentin Fairchild, speaking, and this is today’s State of the School Address.” He spoke as if he were the president of the United States telling the public about a war, rather than a student body president announcing a room change for French club.
“I’d like to begin, as always, with a few measured words about an important topic to our school, our generation, and our world. Today’s topic: human cloning.”
I glanced at Lloyd, wondering if he’d be rolling his eyes as hard as I was. “Some say cloning is playing God. That it’s unethical or, worse, dangerous. That we could never anticipate the outcome. I, on the other hand, welcome the prospect. Who knows how the world might benefit from having another Albert Einstein, another Abraham Lincoln, or dare I suggest, another Quentin Fairchild?” He paused, I’m pretty sure because he was expecting his listeners to break out in applause at this point. “Don’t we deserve the chance to find out?”
I looked down at my backpack, and I’m pretty sure that from the side pouch, IAmAWeenieBurger was rolling his eyeball, too.
“Brilliant point, Quentin,” Principal Hartley interjected. “I think that gives us all something to chew on today.”
“Something to chew on.” Like Quentin’s egotistical tirade was a juicy steak, instead of the rubber turd it really was. Finally, though, Quentin got to the actual announcements.
“I’d like to remind everyone that today after school we’ll hold tryouts for the Smart-Off team in the cafeteria. Please inform your homeroom teacher if you’d like to sign up. And if anyone wants to take me on for this year’s Super Brain, I welcome the challenge!”
“No, Lloyd,” I said, as I say instinctively whenever my best friend has a chance to volunteer me for something. Somehow, though, he was already giving my name to Mr. Hogan. The Smart-Off team was an academic all-star group made up of the biggest nerds in the school in every subject. There was a Science Smarty, a Math Smarty, a Social Studies Smarty, and so on. As I was only maybe the fifth-biggest nerd in any of these areas, I never bothered to try out before.
The Smart-Off team traveled to other schools in the area to compete in quizzes, because some people apparently enjoy tests so much that they’re willing to do more of them outside of school. Not me. I knew it was just a lame attempt to turn geekiness into a sport, for people who had pretty much no chance of ever making an actual sports team.
The head of the whole operation was the Smart-Off Super Brain, a position that might as well be called the Super Quentin, because no one was ever going to beat him out for it. I couldn’t imagine anyone even bothering to try at this point, except of course for me, because Lloyd was going to make me do it.
He had already crossed the room and got Kaitlyn Wien-Tomita to start filming him. “If you want to see the biggest news story to hit this school all year, come to the Smart-Off tryouts today,” he said. “Right, Josh?”
Kaitlyn turned her camera on me, and I had to think fast. “You’ll definitely see somebody being humiliated.” I smirked.
Kaitlyn turned her camera off. “Thanks for the quotes, guys. This is going to be an awesome story.”
“Nah, it’s just a boring academic competition,” I told her as she packed up her things to go to first period. “Isn’t there a soccer game today or a PTA meeting that might be more newsworthy?”
“Don’t be modest,” Kaitlyn said. “You guys have been so good for me and my channel. That video of Lloyd singing Happy Birthday in fake Japanese has nine hundred hits! I’ve got new subscribers all the way from Tokyo.”
Lloyd watched her go, a proud grin breaking out on his face. “Isn’t it great? We’re helping launch Kaitlyn’s career.”
“But, Lloyd,” I protested. “I can’t take Quentin on for Super Brain. I’ll never beat him.”
“But what if you did? He’d be devastated! He’d probably cry! It’d be amazing!”
“But it won’t happen.”
Lloyd grabbed me by the shoulders and looked right into my eyes. “I believe in you, Josh,” he said, with such conviction that I almost believed him. “You made aliens come to Earth!”
He was right about that. Contacting extraterrestrials was an accomplishment I could be at least semi-proud of. Still, it wasn’t quite relevant. “But I’m terrible at trivia!”
“Dude,” Lloyd said. (When he wanted to act really serious, he called me “dude.”) “The only way you could let me down is by not even trying.”
The bell rang, and for a second I forgot about Quentin and the Smart-Off team. I realized my parents never showed up. Maybe they weren’t sorry after all. Maybe they were still disappointed in me. Maybe they’d continue being disappointed in me. This was serious.
I followed Lloyd out to the hallway. “Oh my God,” I said. “My parents really don’t like me anymore.”
“Josh, please. Of course they—” Lloyd stopped himself. “Well, maybe they don’t.”
“You think so? You think they’ll be mad forever?”
“I’m not going to lie, Josh. It could happen.” I gasped, devastated. I never realized before how much their opinion actually meant to me. “You’ll have to do something big to win them back.”
Lloyd stopped walking. It took me a moment to realize why, but when he looked up, I saw what we were standing under, and it made sense. Just over our heads was a banner reading CALLING ALL SMARTIES! SMART-OFF TRYOUTS TODAY!
“If only there was something you could do to impress them,” Lloyd said.
I groaned, finally realizing what he was up to. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll try out.” What could go wrong? If I made the team, I’d have something to tell my parents that might take their minds off their iPhone bill. And in the far more likely event that I made a complete fool of myself, at least the only people who’d ever know would be a bunch of kids even nerdier than me.
It turned out IAmAWeenieBurger picked a great day to send his dislodged eyeball to school in my backpack. Mrs. Butler had a mini-meltdown in her lesson on diagramming sentences when no one could remember where to put the preposition. “Here, maybe this will help!” she shouted, and she diagrammed the sentence “I am mad at you” on the Smart Board, and then circled the word “at” like a hundred times. Then, in Social Studies, Mrs. Schapiro did almost her entire lecture on the Bill of Rights without realizing she had a clump of tuna fish on her chin. It wasn’t until she got to cruel and unusual punishment that it slid off and landed on Justine Myers’s desk, and Justine screamed. And a food fight almost broke out in the cafeteria when Wade Rivers tripped and spilled his gluten-free pepperoni pizza all over Kenneth Booth’s limited edition Captain America soccer cleats.
IAmAWeenieBurger seemed to be enjoying it all, but he was especially interested in Mr. Mudd’s class. He kept looking around the classroom,
his eye darting in all directions. He was checking out the blurry UFO pictures on the bulletin boards, and he was pretty much the only one in class paying attention to Mr. Mudd’s extended rant on some supposed top secret government program called Solar Warden, which was supposed to build a fleet of interstellar warships or something. It was during that lecture that I realized we were ignoring a potentially valuable resource.
“Should we ask Mr. Mudd?” I whispered to Lloyd. “About you-know-what?” I motioned toward IAmAWeenieBurger’s eyeball in my backpack. “They’re up to something.”
Lloyd nodded. “Good thinking,” he said. “Perfect chance to kiss up to Mudd.” It wasn’t exactly what I meant, but I was glad he agreed.
“Let’s go after school,” I said. I knew I couldn’t do it now, with IAmAWeenieBurger watching my every move, but I was relieved to know we’d finally get another opinion on the weird alien behavior.
By the end of the day, I’d almost forgotten that before we could talk to Mr. Mudd, we had to go to the Smart-Off tryouts. It was humiliating as soon as I walked into the auditorium. Tryouts were already underway, and Quentin was answering his last question. He was wearing the Smart-Off Super Brain hat, which looks like a giant brain that you wear over your hair, because apparently just being the Super Brain isn’t embarrassing enough. They have to make you look ridiculous, too. Just to give himself an extra challenge, he’d chosen to give his answer in Latin.
“Quo qua blah blah blah Marie Curie,” he said. Something like that, anyway. As if geek wasn’t already enough of a foreign language on its own.
“Brava! Brava!” Principal Hartley cheered. “Brilliant as always!”
When Quentin saw that I had come to tryouts, he didn’t say hello or even make some mean-spirited put-down. He just laughed.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
He laughed so loud and for so long that you would’ve thought this was the Laugh-Off.
Buttheads from Outer Space Page 7
