Mothership (3 page)

It’s not like I’m shocked that I’m out of HONOR points, since for some reason the Hanover faculty doesn’t seem to condone my ditching Mandarin class, or napping during study
hour. Still, I could really go for some craving cream right now. I take a step back and stare at the vending machine for a minute, the scanner blinking its infuriating red eye at me in this, like, Morse code, which I am
positive
means “No-ice-cream-for-you-no-ice-cream-for-you.” But I do my best to ignore it, and focus instead on what my dad likes to call the “thinking behind the machinery.”

I was six years old the first time my dad strapped a tool belt on me and took me out to the garage for what he liked to call lessons in self-sufficiency. “Elvie,” he told me seriously, “no matter how advanced a machine is, there’s a brain behind its creation. A human brain. And
you
”—he tapped my skull—“you have a human brain too. Right?” I shrugged. I was pissed because I wanted to be inside playing Jetman online with Ducky, not in the garage with my dad staring at a broken toaster. “You do,” he told me. “You have a brain. A good one. Which means that no machine is a match for you. Now”—he plopped the busted gizmo on the worktable in front of me and yanked a screwdriver out of my tool belt, wrapping my six-year-old fingers around it—“you can come back inside when you’ve fixed the toaster.”

“But I don’t even
like
toast!” I hollered at my dad as he shut the garage door behind him. It took me five hours to fix the damn thing. And to this day Ducky still totally kicks my ass at Jetman.

Looking back, it probably would’ve been better if my dad had taught me how to survive hunky boys and bitchy cheerleaders, but at least now I know I can defeat this vending machine in three minutes tops.

First I unhook my Swiss Army knife from my belt and
use the mini screwdriver to pop the top panel off the vending machine’s scanner, exposing the vid card and laser reader. Then I take my dad’s lucky old five-dollar coin from my pocket and slip the sucker between the card and the magnetic strip at the bottom of the panel. After a few seconds I swipe my bracelet again, and
BEEP!
—“You have
one million
HONOR points. Request for
Cherry Marsala
accepted. Your remaining balance is
one million
HONOR points.”

Child’s play.

I peel off the top of the ice cream carton and pop out the tiny spoon underneath. Then I settle myself into one of the observation chairs, staring down at Earth while the ice cream melts into smaller and smaller ovals on my tongue.

I lean forward in my chair and study Earth below. Having passed over the western coast of Africa, we’re now directly above the Canary Islands, with the Atlantic Ocean stretching out in front of us. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours poring over my mom’s giant book of maps, running my fingers over the lines of rivers she’d planned to raft down, or cliffs she wanted to climb, or valleys she wanted to hike. I’d study the careful curve of her letters in all the spots where she’d written
Can’t wait!
or
Won’t this be fun?
All the places she would’ve gotten to if she hadn’t had me and then died, like, a nanosecond later. I must’ve memorized the whole world through that book. And even though I never really officially met the lady, every time I’m up on this deck, I feel like maybe I know my mom a little bit better—staring down at her book of maps blown up life-size.

Just as I notice the East Coast of North America coming
into view, I get a pang in my belly that at first I think means I have to pee but that I soon recognize as homesickness. Honestly, I’d rather need to use the toilet. I sigh and flop back into my chair, doing my best
not
to squint at the continent to pinpoint which blobby part is Ardmore, Pennsylvania. I miss my dad. I miss Ducky. I even miss that goddamn high school.

You’d think that life two hundred and fifty kilometers above Earth’s surface would be totally different from life in the suburbs of Philadelphia. But it turns out it’s almost exactly the same. I still spend more time doodling in English than diagramming sentences. I still talk to Ducky more than anyone else. And I still have to deal with mega-skank Britta McVicker. I can’t even believe cheerleaders are allowed to breed.

From my ice cream container I hear a dull
thunk
. My spoon has hit the bottom of the pint without me realizing it. I’m just debating how much my hips will hate me if I go back for another pint, when from behind me comes a soft, quick rumble, and the ship rocks under my feet. It’s over almost as soon as it began, but if there’s one thing I know about orbiting the planet, it’s that bumps are bad. As I’m heading to the window to see if maybe we collided with some debris or something, there’s another thud, and my jacked-up center of gravity lands me ass-down on my ice cream carton, bringing the grand total to four pratfalls in one afternoon. The intercom from the far-up corner of the observation deck crackles to life, but all that I can make out is static.

I hoist myself up onto my feet, and I’m sure I have flecks of cherry, butterscotch, and mushroom smeared on the butt of my maternity stretch pants, but at the moment I’m slightly
more concerned about the ship. The lights above me start flickering, dimming and sparking back to life. In and out, light and dark. The displays by the door are glitching too, and now I’m starting to freak just a little bit. I’m trying to remember the Survival Checklist for Emergencies in Space my dad made me memorize before launch, but all I can get through is “Oxygen? Check!” before my feet roll out from under me again.

Okay, this is starting to get old.

And now the Goober is at it too, kicking me in the bladder.

“Listen, bud!” I shout, flat on my back, my right elbow wedged under a chair. “Stop kicking me! I do not want to
pee
right now!”

I manage to right myself again, and I make it to the window as the intercom sputters back to life. Someone is saying something over the static, I can tell that much, but I can’t make out what it is. Whoever it is certainly isn’t speaking English. The sounds are deep, creaky, guttural. Like no language I’ve ever heard.

I press my body against the full-length window, so close to it that the Goober can probably see out too, and together we examine the length of the ship. We have a full 360-degree view from here, but I’m so busy looking for debris that it’s several seconds before I spot the obvious.

Protruding from the starboard side of the
Echidna
, like a giant tumor, is another ship.

Another ship?

I race to the door, ignoring the Goober kicking me the whole way, and I’m just about to fly down the main staircase
when something passing by the foot of the stairwell makes me reconsider that course of action.

Dudes in helmets. With guns.

Da-
fuh
?

I duck behind the door and try to hide the best someone can with a fetus jutting out her front end. I don’t know who these dudes are, and I can’t see their faces, but I know for a fact that they weren’t on board ten minutes ago. The faculty doesn’t pack heat. They usually stick with demerits. Which means that the L.O.C.
Echidna
is under attack.

Lights flickering, intercom crackling, I suddenly realize: Everyone else is on the lido deck doing underwater prenatal yoga
except me
.

And that’s when I think something else. Probably the most real, true thought I’ve ever had.

Oh, shit.

“No guns allowed,” Ducky says, reaching his scrawny arm across my face to dip a deep-fried pickle chip into the peanut butter jar. “The whole point is to think of nonviolent forms of torture.”

I push his hand away and grab for my phone to flip the channel on the TV, finally stopping on an infomercial for the Food Atomizer 9000.
“Turn those greasy, fatty snacks into a light, refreshing mist!”

“Whatever, Gandhi,” I say. “I’m not going to
shoot
her. I’m going to make her
think
I’ll shoot her so she wets herself in front of the French club.”

Ducky ponders this as he crunches down on my newest hormone-inspired concoction. It took several failed efforts, and we lost three bottles of peanut oil, two jars of gherkins, and a few patches of skin in the attempt to get the frying process down,
but now every taste bud on my tongue is grateful we persevered. Pickles and peanut butter washed down with butterscotch milk shakes must taste disgusting to anyone who isn’t incubating a fetus, but Ducky insists on eating whatever I do, as part of some solidarity thing.

“Nope,” he says after he licks the peanut butter off his bottom lip. “No guns.”

We’ve been playing Most Ingenious Ways to Destroy Britta McVicker, the game that Ducky invented this afternoon to cheer me up. I have to say it’s working pretty well, although my ideas keep leaning toward physical pain and/or public humiliation, whereas Ducky seems intent on working on a strictly psychological level. Like sneaking into Britta’s house every morning to swap out her bra with a series of nearly identical brassieres with infinitesimally larger cup sizes, causing her to believe that her boobs are shrinking. I had no idea what an evil mastermind Ducky was until he busted that one out.

Playing the game with Ducky, I can almost forget that Britta’s been trying to destroy
me
for the past two and a half months. Or that she’s coming pretty close to succeeding. She’s always been a bit of an ogre to anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path—she even made Miss Langhoff cry back in second grade with her point by point criticism of her slingbacks—and I’ve had the bad luck to be in her path a
lot
. (I’m pretty sure that whatever schedule-bots have assigned our teachers for the past eight years have been downloaded with a virus specifically designed to make Elvie’s life miserable, because Britta and I
always
have at least four classes together.) But lately she’s been particularly gruesome. It’s like, now that she doesn’t have a boyfriend at
her beck and call, she’s hell-bent on making the entire human population as unhappy as she is, and I’m the closest victim. Her latest pièce de résistance was having my likeness superimposed as the “before” example in a poster for poor hygiene awareness that was then snapped all over the school. The posters were so effective that the principal is beginning a policy on mandatory showers after gym.

I swear that pic was taken during my bout with food poisoning last year.

I sigh as I reach for another pickle chip, and Ducky raises a concerned eyebrow.

“Yes?” he asks me.

I shake my head. “I’m just glad it’s almost summer, that’s all.” There’s only one more week of sophomore year left, but honest to God I’m not sure I’m going to make it. “It’ll be nice to be Britta-free for a few months.”

He thinks on that. “Do you think she’s been more evil lately because she”—he glances down at my stomach—“
knows
?”

“Nah,” I say quickly, popping the pickle into my mouth. I’ve put on a couple pounds, sure, but I’m not showing yet. I haven’t even reached the end of the first trimester. And Britta’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Although, God help me if she ever
does
find out about this baby. And the father.

I swallow and return my focus to watching TV.

“So,” Ducky says after we’ve been watching the infomercial for a while, and I can tell by his forced-casual tone that he’s been thinking pretty hard about what he wants to say next. “How’s your urine flow?”

I cough so hard, a glob of pickle shoots across the room
and sticks just below the TV screen. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve been checking out that new site I told you about,” Ducky says. He tosses another chip into his mouth while he says it, as though talking about my pee is what we always do with our after-school time. “They said you’re supposed to document how much you go, every day of the first trimester. I signed you up for a free online account so you can track it.”

I didn’t want to tell Ducky I was pregnant. I did
not
. But I was starting to get hormonal and teary at, like, everything—big things like Cole skipping town, obvi, but also not-so-big things like accidentally oversteeping my tea. I guess what finally tipped him off was the unfortunate incident at my sixteenth birthday dinner, where Dad lopped the head off my panda cake and I cried for well over an hour. I was able to pass it off as normal girl hormones to my Dad, but Ducky was not so easily deceived. He wrung the truth out of me that night, and since then he’s quickly earned Best Bud of the Millennia status with how awesome and supportive he’s been. He comes with me to doctors’ appointments and spends time researching alternative birthing practices and prenatal nutrition. I’m really hoping he’ll go and get E. coli soon so I can donate my kidney and make it up to him, but so far he seems totally healthy. Which if you ask me is just being selfish.