Mothership (17 page)

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.

“Byron,” Captain Bob says to the image of his superior flickering on the view screen. My brain is fuzzy, trying to take in what I’m seeing.
Who
I’m seeing. “We’re in a bad way here, sir,” Captain Bob continues. “Heavy casualties among the students. Archer and I are the only . . .”

Captain Bob is recapping all our difficulties so far, and the guy on the view screen is taking it all in with an increasingly grim expression, but to me the entire exchange is just a haze of confusion. Because the guy Captain Bob is deep in conversation with, he’s someone I’ve seen before. In fact, he’s someone a
lot
of people have seen before.

The man Captain Bob is talking to is James Dean.

Those deep-set eyes, those distinctively fierce eyebrows. He’s sporting a goofy thin mustache, but still it’s undeniable. I’d stake my life on it. The man on the view screen is James Dean, 1950s
movie heartthrob. James Byron Dean, born February 8, 1931. Died September 30, 1955.
Died
. As in, stuck in the ground 120 years ago. Way too decomposed to be looking so fine.

“Uh, Elvs?” Cole says beside me. “Are you okay?”

I know, without even the benefit of a mirror, that my face has drained completely of color.

“Elvs?”

Just then the comm emits a loud screech, and the image of James Dean vanishes.

“Dammit!” Captain Bob screams, scrambling in vain to find another frequency. “I can’t reestablish contact!”

The girls fly into another panic. But I remain icily still. Cole places a hand on my shoulder and nudges me, as if he thinks I might have fallen asleep standing up.

“Elvs?” he repeats over the din of moaning girls and truly inspired expletives from Captain Bob.

Toomuchtoomuchtoomuch.
My brain is in overdrive, trying to take in all of the weirdness from the past few hours.
Toomuchtoo
—I take a breath. Do what my father would tell me to. I process every fact, one at a time.

Superhunky teachers.

Who turn out to be murderous aliens.

With ray guns.

Who fight with our superhot, if slightly less butch, rescuers.

Who also have ray guns.

And talk to
James Dean
like they’ve just dialed up their Internet provider.

Really, there’s only one conclusion.

I turn to face Cole, pushing out the words despite the
trembling all through my body. “Would you mind explaining to me,” I say slowly, calmly, “why Bob was just
talking to James Dean
?”

Now it’s Cole’s turn to go white. Even Bob stops cursing and snaps around.

“That wasn’t . . . Why would you think . . . Who?” Cole tries lamely.

“Who’s James Dean?” Chewie asks, sucking on her tattered braid again. The incredulous look on her face is shared by every other girl, even Ramona. They’re all staring at me now, looking at me like I’m a total chromer. And I might believe them, if I didn’t know for a fact that I am right.

“
East of Eden
?” I say. “
Giant
?
Rebel Without a Cause
? Come
on
! James Dean!” Still nothing. And while I’m not surprised that I’m the only one with a working knowledge of twentieth-century cinema, it does momentarily make me lament the sorry state of our educational system that such basic literacy is so lacking.

“He’s a movie star,” I go on. “A
dead
movie star. Yet somehow this guy”—I jerk my head toward Captain Bob—“was just talking to him, live and in the flesh.”

Natty sticks a finger into her mouth. I think she might be counting her teeth. “So you’re saying . . . that Cole and those guys can talk to ghosts?”

“No! For crying out—” I slap my hand to my forehead. “Natty, you said it yourself. They’re
aliens
.”

Now they are all looking at me like I skipped my dosage. Bob is walking toward me slowly, in a way that makes me feel none too safe. But Cole surprises me and actually laughs.

“Oh, Elvie.” He chuckles. “A few hours without ice cream, and suddenly you’re hallucinating.” This gets a few laughs from the girls, and eye rolls from Britta and Other Cheerleader. I can almost hear the cartoon steam escaping from my ears. Because I’m right, I know I am, as ridiculous as it might have seemed an hour ago. And that idiot Cole, so smug because he knows the whole thing’s so insane that no one will ever believe me. I’d like to kick him right in his stupid twisted ankle.

His ankle!

“Fine,” I say, wresting my arm away from the hand Cole has placed there—to try to shut me up, no doubt. “If you’re such a
normal
alien-fighting space commando, how do you explain your ankle?”

“What are you talking about?” Cole says, as if he has legitimately already forgotten about the whole thing.

“When you fell off the bleachers,” I say, looking to the other girls for confirmation, “you busted your ankle.”

“That makes me an alien? People bust their ankles, Elvs.”

“Yeah,” I reply. “But they don’t stop limping completely in the course of an hour and a half.”

For the first time Cole pauses. “I didn’t twist it that bad,” he says, clearing his throat. Bob’s face is turning a dark shade of red, but I’m not sure anyone notices except for me.

Natty, of all people, is the first person to log on. “You
did
hurt it pretty bad,” she says. “You fell very hard, and then you said a very loud curse word.”

“That’s true, actually,” Ramona adds thoughtfully. “I remember thinking what an idiot you were.”

And for just one shining second, even Britta seems to be
on my side. “You
were
limping a lot earlier, baby,” she says.

“Well, yeah, uh . . . I mean, it hurts and all,” Cole stammers, losing his grip on the conversation. “But it’s getting better. See?”

He walks a few steps, favoring his right ankle as he goes. “It’s a little tender, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with—”

“You twisted your left ankle,” I tell him.

He immediately stops walking. His shoulders slump. “Right, yeah—right, left,” he stammers. “I know. I was just, you know, leaning on it to show you that it’s fine. I know I twisted my left ankle.”

“Cole,” I stop him. “It
was
your right ankle.”

“Shit!” He stomps his perfectly healed right foot on the ground. “Goddammit, Elvie!”

Bob turns his attention from me to Cole and grabs him by the collar. “You have got to be the
stupidest
. . .” he starts, but he seems to get choked up on his own frustration. “If we ever get back in touch with Byron, I’m going to need a really good explanation why he insisted you be added to my squad.”

But I’m not listening. I’m not sticking around to hear any more of Cole’s bullshit. My former grunt buddy is an alien. Which means, by extension, that my soon-to-be-baby is an alien. And call me weak-stomached, but darn if that news doesn’t suddenly give me the urge to throw up everything I’ve ever eaten.

“Elvs!” Cole calls after me as I race from the bridge. All around us, girls are screaming, gasping, shouting unanswerable questions. “Elvs, wait. I can explain!”

I do not wait. I’m gone.

•  •  •

It’s not like there are a lot of places to go to be alone with your thoughts when you’re on a disintegrating spaceship about to be sucked into Earth’s atmosphere. But I manage to find a spot. I decide to go to a place where generations of overwhelmed girls have gone before me. The toilet.

I’m sitting on the back of the toilet, feet up on the lid, with the stall door closed, trying to settle my churning stomach, when I hear footsteps on the tile.

“Elvs,” Cole says.

I do not respond. If that freak wants to get me, he’s going to have to do something crazy, like crawl under the door.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell you. I wanted to tell you, but I . . .” He trails off.

I thumb a tear out of my eye and try to do my sniffling as quietly as possible, but Cole obviously hears it. “God, Elvs, I hate to see you cry,” he says. I can see his shoes just outside the stall. He’s probably got his hand on the stall door, pining-style.

I jerk out my foot and kick the door with a
whump!
and I see Cole take a startled step back. “Good thing you’re not looking at me, then, huh?” I say.

He sighs.

I rub the sides of my face, elbows resting on my knees, and stare at those shoes on the other side of the stall door. I thought I knew him. I mean, I know we were only together once, but still, I somehow fooled myself into thinking I knew who he was. What food he liked, what music, what made him laugh, how sad it made him to think about his mother. But all this time . . .

“So I was right?” I say at last. “That guy on the view screen, he really is James Dean? And you really are a freaking alien? You told me you were from Milwaukee.”

“Ummmm.” He holds the word out superlong, like maybe if he never gets to the end of it, he won’t have to explain this whole sorry situation. “Sort of.”

“How the hell are you ‘sort of’ an alien?”

“Well.” He takes a deep breath, and his feet move back, away from my line of sight under the stall door. I hear him hoist himself up onto the sink counter. He is obviously preparing himself for show-and-tell time. “I am from Milwaukee.”

“Oh, really?” I snort. “So, what, all that cheese you consumed gave you invincibility or something?”

“I
am
from Milwaukee,” he insists. “Born and raised. It’s just that, well, I’m not technically . . . human.”

And suddenly the urge to yack has returned in full force. Before I know what’s happening, I find myself kneeling on the bathroom floor with my hands on the bowl of the toilet, puking. Which I realize is totally gross, but toilet seat germs are low on my list of priorities at the moment.

“Oh, God,” Cole says. I can hear his footsteps coming closer, but thank goodness he doesn’t try to penetrate my fortress of toilet-tude. “Elvs . . .” My name hangs on his lips so long I can practically see the ellipsis. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yeah,” I reply. I swoop back a lock of loose hair and pause for one last yack. “Just refunding my breakfast.”

“Elvs.”

I reach up to flush the toilet, then shift so that my back is resting against the side wall of the stall. I don’t have the
strength to move any more than that at the moment. From under the door I can make out Cole’s legs as he situates himself cross-legged on the floor directly outside the stall. I bunch my knees up in front of me and wrap my arms around them, trying to steady my breaths.

“You all right?” he asks again.

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Tell me,” I say. “I’m ready now. Tell me everything.”

And just like that, Cole begins.

“I’m an Almiri,” he tells me. “It’s a species that came to Earth a long time ago. Like, thousands of years. They were originally from a planet on the other side of the galaxy. I’d tell you the name, but, uh, to be honest, I can’t really pronounce it. They never bothered to translate it into any human language.”

I nod, taking it all in. My eyes are still squeezed closed, sparks of light pricking the darkness. “So the Almiri,” I say softly, “they look just like humans? Even though they’re from a completely different planet?”