The True Meaning of Smekday (14 page)

Most everyone thinks of Smekday as the day the Boov arrived, and as the day they left, one year later. But the longer they’ve been gone, the less I care about that. The Boov weren’t anything special. They were just people. They were too smart and too stupid to be anything else.

The End

THE NATIONAL TIME CAPSULE COMMITTEE

124 F STREET, FOURTH FLOOR

WASHINGTON, D.C.

September 6

Miss Gratuity Tucci

c/o Daniel Landry Middle School

Dear Miss Tucci:

It is my great pleasure to inform you that your essay has been selected from more than 15,000 entries to be included in the National Time Capsule. Your unique story and viewpoint made your composition a true standout and the favorite of many judges. Also, you wrote easily ten times more than any of your fellow students, and we believe that should count for something. Enclosed are your savings bond, worth two hundred dollars at maturity, and twenty shares of Taco Stocko, good for a free Taco Taco at any participating Wall Street Taco Exchange.

We hope this experience inspires you to keep writing. You could well be an author one day! Many national newspapers will be printing portions of your winning essay, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people are curious about the rest of your story: Did you reunite with your mother? What became of J.Lo? What are your thoughts about the Gorg’s defeat at the hands of the heroic Daniel Landry? What is the moral to your story?

I just know one day I’ll be buying your biography.

Once again, congratulations!

Bev Doogan

Chairperson

Gratuity Tucci

Daniel Landry Middle School

8th Grade

THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY

PART 3: Attack of the Clones

That woman from the time capsule committee was right, sort of. I’m not so much “inspired” to write more as…compelled, I think you’d say. My brain won’t let me stop playing the rest of the story in my head like a movie, and I’m hoping that by writing it all down I can be finished with it.

But I won’t be showing it to anyone. I have reasons. Maybe I’ll leave instructions that no one can read this journal until the time capsule is uncovered, and I’m already gone, and I won’t have to talk about it.

No offense to you.

I’m sure you’re all nice people.

Anyway.

We left Orlando under a cloud. I didn’t even check the atlas—I just drove away from the rising sun, fast, determined to put some distance between us and the Boov, in case they should decide to give chase again. We slid through the streets and highways, following any signs that said “west,” setting out like Lewis and Clark into a wide frontier that had grown wild and unknown all over again.

We passed a flock of flamingos flying low over the wet land like gaudy umbrellas carried by the wind. They barely registered then. Thinking about them now, I realize it was the first I’d ever known that flamingos flew at all. It didn’t suit them—they looked like sprinting drag queens. But at the time they were just another part of this new, haunted America, with its empty cities and huge, sweaty eye in the clouds, watching over it all.

J.Lo was still a pale blue, curled up in his seat and staring at some point just behind the dashboard. Pig was happily dumb to the fact that the world had just ended for the second time in six months. She brushed back and forth against J.Lo and me, trying to get a reaction, then eventually gave up and went to sleep in the back.

I couldn’t drive very far. I hadn’t had any sleep. I thought maybe J.Lo would be more alert, and I didn’t have anything against letting him drive anymore, but when I looked I saw him tipped to the side, fogging up the window with closed eyes. I made it to some little town called I-don’t-know-what and found a scrap metal yard by the highway. It seemed like the right place for the three of us. I pulled Slushious between two massive piles of discarded city and curled up next to Pig.

I cautiously cracked the window for some air. I thought it would stink like every other dump, but the scrap yard just smelled like pennies. It smelled like the U.S. Mint probably smelled, back when it still made money. Back when pennies were pennies, and not little worthless copper medallions, like prizes at a Lincoln look-alike contest. Back when dollar bills were
not
just wallet-size pictures of Washington.

It was about this time that all the metaphorical bad weather was replaced by the real thing, and the clouds cracked open and rained. I think it was the kind of rain that only Florida gets, the kind that makes you want to start gathering animals in twos, just in case. I looked out the window and saw nothing. The downpour made the world look like a cable channel you hadn’t paid for, all static with an occasional flash of something you thought you knew.

Pig was awake now, restless because of the constant rattle against the windows. She sat in my lap, kneading the skin of my leg with her claws. So we watched the storm, watched the wind push the rain around in billowing sheets like the ghosts of old oceans.

I’m sorry. I always get like this when I think about that day. For what it’s worth, I fell asleep about now. Later, when I woke up, we were nearly killed in a flood, so that should be exciting.

I didn’t dream at all. I just closed my eyes, and when I opened them a second later, it was night.

I wondered for a moment if I was sick. My stomach lurched and settled over and over, and I thought, It’s like I’m on a boat. It’s like I’m taking the ferry across the Delaware. And just as I propped myself up enough to see why, the car was hit by half a washing machine.

It had come tumbling down the junk heap and struck one of our fins hard enough to make it fold up like a cheap chair. Slushious bucked and nearly rolled. There was water seeping up through the floor, and water all around us. At least six feet of it. We were floating through a brand-new river, between banks and hills of loose metal. I watched breathlessly as pieces of scrap took wing and circled above like giant bats.

“Oh my God!” I shouted. “Oh my God, I parked us in a scrap yard during a hurricane! J.Lo!”

J.Lo was waking slowly, crawling back from the front seat. “Mlaaa-ak sis?” he murmured. “Whazit?”

Pig was frantic. She tore around the interior of the car, leaping away from the pools of water on the floor, which were everywhere now.

“Hurricane!” I shouted. “Big storm! Everything’s flooded and we’re floating! And leaking! And…I don’t get it; it was so clear yesterday!”

“It is the Gorg,” said J.Lo, looking out the window. “Their ships, they are too large. They make the weather happen whereverto they go.”

He sounded a little too calm for my taste. I tried to impress him with the seriousness of it.

“We’re
floating
,” I said. “There’s water coming into the car, and flying metal everywhere, and we were just hit by a washing machine!”

I was almost pleased when the lightning flashed and some sharp piece of garbage clawed at our roof, as if to illustrate my point.

“Yes,” J.Lo agreed. “I have unproperly sealed up the bottom side of our vehicle. I am sorry.”

“Yeah. I don’t really care about that so much as the scrap metal and floating parts.”

“We should to leave.”

“Leave?” I said. “Leave the
car
?”

Pig was panting. She had tangled herself up in the strap on my camera, and looked ready to explode into confetti at any moment.

“No,” said J.Lo. “Leaveto the metal yard. In the car.”

I stared.

“You drive,” he said. “I will to remove the water.”

Drive? I thought. We can drive?

I climbed into the front seat and took up the controls. Suddenly I couldn’t remember how to do anything. I felt it would be a bad time to accidentally cause the hood to burst into flame.

J.Lo was digging through his toolbox. Pig perched like a twitchy sparrow on the top of the passenger seat, the camera dangling from her back legs. She let out one long, raspy meow that lasted until all her breath was spent, then she inhaled and did it again.

Slowly the cobwebs left my mind and I focused on the car. I began to ease it forward, as though we were on dry land, as though we were on a safe empty blacktop that stretched for miles in every direction. And I noticed that Slushious really was moving forward. Pig noticed it too, and took to meowing in short, high bursts like the fire alarm at school.

“We’re moving,” I said. “The car is swimming.”

That wasn’t really right. When we started there were bubbles foaming all around Slushious, and then we rose a bit—not above the water, but just about to its surface. Then we began to skim along—not as fast as we would have over land, but fast enough. We left the metal yard behind and passed over what must have been the road. There was a highway overpass, and we just barely fit beneath it, as if it were only a low footbridge over a canal. It reminded me of pictures of Venice.

“Ha! I should sing something in Italian,” I said.

“Yes, please,” J.Lo answered as he looked over some device he’d found in the toolbox. It looked like two thin tubes connected by a set of tiny bagpipes. I hoped it was what he was looking for. The water in the car had risen up to the gas pedal.

“What, really? Sing something?”

J.Lo blew into the tiny bagpipes. They didn’t make any noise, but he seemed satisfied all the same.

“Yes. Please to sing. I know very little of the humansmusic.”

So I sang the first Italian song that came into my head, which turned out to be “Volare.” I’m sure I need not mention at this point that I am a rock star, and it sounded fantastic.

J.Lo rolled down a window. The wind and spray whipped like angry spirits around the car, but he ignored it and snaked one of the tubes over the side. The end of the other tube sank below the rising water inside the car. Then J.Lo blew into each of the bagpipes in turn, and the bag itself began to inflate and deflate, again and again on its own, pumping like a plastic heart in his hands. Water rushed through the tubes and out the car window, and almost immediately I could see the pool drop around my feet.

“Clever little Boov!” I shouted happily. I think J.Lo liked that.

Then something happened. I don’t know why Pig did it. I think she was afraid of the water and the wind, and there was a lot more of that outside the car than inside. But a thousand generations of weird cat biology goaded her on, and she pounced from the headrest and straight through the window. She trailed the tangled camera strap behind her, and the camera itself knocked and almost caught the edge of the glass. J.Lo made a grab for it, but it all came free, and Pig and a vintage Polaroid dropped into the floodwaters below.

I drew a sharp breath, but before I could shout or scream, J.Lo had forced the window all the way down and dove in after her.

I was suddenly alone and useless inside the car. The rain battered the roof like a drumroll. I could think of nothing to do. Not one thing. And then J.Lo shot out of the water like a salmon in a nature film and dumped Pig through the window. She was fine.

J.Lo hung there for a moment by his fingers. Then he said simply, “Camera,” and dove back under.

I realized what he meant. The camera was free of Pig’s legs and still in the water.

“No!” I shouted, much too late. “Forget the camera!”

The only answer I got was a sneeze from Pig. She looked like a miserable wet hairbrush.

The window was still open. “You’re not going to jump again,” I asked. “Are you?”

“Mrooooowrrr,”
said Pig.

I went to wrap her in a towel, which made her fidget and growl, but eventually she gave in to it and any other indignity I had planned. I probably could have dressed her up in a sailor suit if I’d wanted.

But all I could think was that J.Lo had been gone an awfully long time. Hadn’t he? Thirty seconds, a minute? I started to count under my breath: one alligator, two alligator. When I had sixty alligators I gave in to panic.

“Okay…okay…” I whispered, looking all around me, looking at the rushing current outside. “Think. Think think think think think. I need a rope!”

I scattered J.Lo’s tools around the car, searching for some kind of rope, or something that could be used like a rope. I should have paid more attention to anything that looked like a pencil sharpener made of lemon Jell-O that, when cranked, would spit out superstrong yarn that smelled like ginger ale. I only mention this because J.Lo really did have such a thing. He told me so later. But at the time I was too busy looking for an honest rope, and too distracted to notice that J.Lo had resurfaced and was peering over my shoulder.

“If you areto looking for the pink squishable gapputty,” he said suddenly, “it is smooshed in the gloves box. You will have to use brown.”

I jumped and grabbed for the toolbox, but it tipped over and everything tumbled out. I stared at J.Lo like he was a ghost. The fact that an alien was at least as weird as a ghost wouldn’t occur to me until later.

“What?” I said.

“You will have to use brown.”

“Brown. Brown what?”

“Squishable gapputty,” he said. “The pink is smooshed into the gloves box.”

He was just hanging there, arms folded over the window’s edge like he wasn’t waist-deep in churning water during a hurricane. I had trouble swallowing. I was so sure he’d drowned.

“Why,” I said. “Why is the pink gapputty smooshed in the glove box.”

“It was rattling.”

“The putty?”

“The gloves box,” J.Lo said as he hoisted himself inside the car.

“And just so we can put this behind us,” I said, “squishable gapputty
is
…”

“Something you smoosh into places for making them stop rattling.”

“Right.”

“I supposed you were looking for it. It is the only thing missing fromto my toolsbox.”

I just fell forward and hugged him. I didn’t think about it. I squeezed my arms around him and hugged. His body gave more than I expected, like dough, except for a hard boxy shape that cut into my hip. It was the camera. He’d brought back the camera.

J.Lo patted my head. “If this is about the gapputty, you can still use the brown. Is just as good, just not pink—”

“Shut up,” I said, and pulled back to look at him. Then I climbed into the front seat so he wouldn’t see me cry.

“We better get to higher ground,” I said. “Roll up the window.”

I found a half-finished building a half mile away. It was just a skeleton of girders and partial floors, and I could thrust Slushious up through the gaps until we were a few stories above the rising water. Here we waited out the storm. This took two days, and J.Lo and I managed to explain a lot to each other about humans and Boov. He didn’t understand, for example, about families. I began to get why he never seemed to think Mom’s abduction was as big a deal as I did.

“So…the humansmom and the humansdad make the baby all by themself,” J.Lo said slowly. “Aaand…afters they make the baby they…keep it?”

“Yes.”

“As like a pet.”

“No.”

“No?” J.Lo frowned and opened and closed his hands.

“No. Not like a pet. Like a baby. It’s their baby,” I said, “so they love it and take care of it. The mother and father together. Usually.”

“Usually,” he repeated. “But not with Tip?”

It was funny to hear someone just ask this question like it was nothing at all. It didn’t bother me to talk about my dad, but people always figured it did.

“No, not with me,” I said. “My mom raised me, of course, but I never knew my dad, and he never knew me.”

“Ah, yes,” said J.Lo. “This is the way it is being with the Boov. Nobody knows their offspring, and nobody knows their parents.”

“Nobody?”

J.Lo explained. It seemed that, of those seven Boov genders he’d mentioned before, nearly all had some part to play in order to make a baby Boov. When a female had an egg to lay, she did it and just walked away. There were special places to leave them all over the cities. And if a passing boy, or boyboy, or whatever, saw that there was an egg that needed attention, he did what needed to be done and left. Eggs that were ready to turn into Boov were collected by those whose job it was to do so. Somebody else had the job of feeding and raising the babies, and still another Boov taught them. The closest thing the Boov would ever have to a family was the work unit they were assigned to as adults.