Mike Stellar Read online

  Interesting. Usually Nita wasn’t involved in my getting into trouble. Especially lately. She never got into trouble at all anymore. It was like she had discovered parental hypnosis that let her be nasty and get away with it.

  I halfheartedly banged the intercom, hoping it would work so I wouldn’t have to go all the way upstairs. It was all staticky. Stupid thing had been broken for months. Mom used to be right on top of fixing stuff like that, but lately she was all work, work, work.

  I sighed and climbed the stairs. As I reached her room, I gleefully anticipated Nita’s finally getting yelled at—even if it meant my getting yelled at, too.

  “Neeters. Mom and Dad want you downstairs,” I yelled at her closed door. She had a poster on it that said “Earthlings for Earth.” The letters were made of contorted people lying in a field of green grass.

  “Go away, freak.”

  “Okay. But they want you downstairs,” I said, giving her door a bang. She made me so mad. I hated that she hated me. But I couldn’t do anything about it except pretend that I hated her back.

  I went downstairs and I heard her door open. I slowly walked back into the living room, like an animal led to slaughter. I mentally prepared my usual defense: raising my eyebrows and frowning in confused “who, me?” irritation.

  Mom ran her hands through her hair and Dad tried to nibble on his fingernails but finally noticed he still had on his readers. The word “amazing” reflected on his left cheek.

  I laughed nervously and said, “You’re amazing, Dad.” Then he took the readers off one fingerbulb at a time, flashing words everywhere. Most people turn off their readers before they remove them, but not Dad. Nita plopped down next to Mom and glowered at the floor.

  “Well, kids,” Mom said as Dad’s left-hand reader rolled across the coffee table and flashed “dangerous” diagonally on the wall, “there’s no sense in beating around the bush.”

  She paused and Dad took her hand.

  I shot Nita a look that said, “What kind of trouble have you gotten me into?” Nita shot me a look that said, “Shut it. I’m concentrating hard on preparing the biggest hair ball noise I’ve ever made.”

  Mom smiled and squeezed Dad’s hand.

  “Kids, we’re moving to Mars.”

  There was a pause as Nita and I sucked all the air out of the room.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I heard a thump and looked around. Surprisingly, it had come from me.

  I had fallen off the sofa.

  “With parades, celebrations, and a certain amount of apprehension, Liftoff Day has arrived. A full two years after the ill-fated Mars Expedition and the loss of the Spirit, the Star City–based Project is ready to try again.

  ‘We feel infinitely confident,’ states the Project president, Aurora Hazelwood. ‘Watch out, Mars, here we come.’”

  I opened one eye. Ugh. It felt really early. Why was the viserator on so loud? I heard dishes clanking downstairs and more of the news story as I closed my eye and wished my bed would swallow me up.

  “With nearly fifty people departing Earth today, the Sojourner Mars Expedition is substantially smaller than the first endeavor. But officials assure us this is less a precautionary decision than an efficiency-based one. According to sources at the Project, this small group can quickly set up a colony and easily prepare for the arrival of a larger group.”

  I sat up in bed. I still had on my clothes from yesterday.

  Yesterday.

  If my memory was functioning, and if my brain was processing the obnoxiously loud viserator correctly, then yesterday had been real. We were moving to Mars. And we were leaving in—I looked at my MonsterMetalMachines alarm clock—eight hours.

  My bedroom door burst open and Mom stood in the doorway. “Morning, sleepyhead. Today’s the big d—” Her smile faded. “Michael? You slept in your clothes?”

  “I guess,” I muttered.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Man?”

  Incredi-freakin’-bull. How could she stand there like it was my birthday? I spat out a bitter laugh and looked at her coldly. “Excuse me if I’m not skipping down the hall at the thought of moving to a different planet, Mom.” I stomped over to my closet to find something clean to wear. “One minute I’m freaked out ’cause I have a report due, and the next minute I’m freaked out because my family is going to live in space? Jeez, Mom. Of course I slept in my clothes! I barely slept at all.” I tried to walk past her, but she grabbed my arm. Not hard, but tightly.

  “Michael,” she said gently, but firmly, “we’ve been over this.” She continued in an exasperated voice. “Your father and I are on the backup team. If, for some reason, a member of first team isn’t able to go on the trip, the backup members go. That’s just how it is. We’re trained. We’re ready. And we’re going.”

  I looked at her angrily. I was like a sofa or a viserator, being packaged up and thrown into a moving truck. Or whatever … moving shuttle. I wanted her to let go of my arm. If I didn’t get to the shower soon, I might start crying, and I wasn’t going to let her see that.

  “Let go of my arm,” I said to the floor, clenching my jaw. “Please.”

  She released me and I stormed off to the shower.

  “Fast, Michael,” she said. “We’re leaving the house in forty-five minutes.”

  I took a fast shower, not because Mom told me to, but because I still had to pack. Ha, I thought miserably. Pack. We each got one box for personal possessions and the lid had to fit tight. One measly box.

  I was toweling off when I heard Dad talking in a low voice out in the hallway.

  “It’s happening, Aurora,” he said. “I have to go.” There was a pause. “You should have voiced your complaints with the board—” He paused, listening to whatever Aurora was saying, then replied shortly, “I said it’s fine.” He paused again. “Marie and I—” Pause. “There were never any charges to be cleared, Aurora. You of all people should know that …” His voice trailed off as he walked to the other end of the hallway.

  Aurora is the president of the Project and works really closely with Mom and Dad. Her father, David Hazelwood, had been in charge, but he retired and dropped out of sight after the Spirit disaster. Dad never seemed too keen about Aurora, but I’d never heard him sound this angry on the phone before. Especially since he was talking to his boss.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door and I jumped, dropping my towel into the wet tub. Great. Why didn’t our house have built-in body dryers like Stinky’s?

  “Mike?”

  “Uh, yeah?”

  “Almost done? We’re on a tight deadline.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  I heard him pound back down the stairs.

  I sighed and pulled on my clothes.

  I brushed some polymer into my hair to spike it up a little, bared my teeth in the mirror to make sure I had finally freed the gunk, and left the bathroom. Nita was waiting outside the door patiently … with a smile.

  “All clean, baby brother?” she asked.

  I stared at her. That was the nicest tone of voice she’d used with me in about a thousand months. She hummed a little tune and shut the bathroom door. What was going on in this house?

  I went back into my room and tossed things into my moving box: a couple of MonsterMetalMachines that were small, my toothbrush, my readers with a few comics cards, my baseball glove. I picked up a digiframe of last year’s Little League championship game. It showed me hitting a pop fly and Stinky cheering behind me. I threw it into the box and sat on my bed. I need to talk to Stink.

  I unplugged my peapod’s cord from the charging socket on my waistband. I rolled the peapod around the palm of my hand and took a deep breath. It felt like I was trying to choke down a hockey puck, but really, I guess I was just swallowing my pride.

  I pressed the On button and held down the transmit pad. “Stink? You there?” I let go of the transmit pad and waited.

  “Stink? Hello?”

  I was about to give up when I heard
a muffled “What?”

  “Hey!” I felt happy for the first time in practically twenty-four hours. “Hey! You’re there!”

  “I’m sleeping, brain drain.”

  “Something crazy is going on. I need to talk to you.”

  “Now? Just tell me at school. I still have thirty minutes till my alarm goes off.”

  “No, Stinky, now. I’m not going to be at school today.”

  “Is this because of your report, Mike? Dude. Calm your obsessive self down.”

  “Just meet me at the place in like five minutes, okay?”

  “You’re not going to try to beat me up, are you?” He laughed, because he knew that even if I still felt mad at him, I’d never do anything like that.

  “Yeah, right,” I said, glad that he was laughing. “Just meet me there, okay?”

  “Fine.”

  I left my room and walked briskly down the stairs. Instead of following the noise into the kitchen, I decided to escape out the back door. My hand was on the doorknob when I heard, “Where in the world are you going?”

  “I just need to go say bye to Stinky, Dad,” I said, stepping out onto the back porch.

  “Oh no you’re not. We’re on an extraordinarily tight deadline, Mike. We don’t have time for—”

  “Let him go, Albert.” Mom’s voice filtered down the hallway. “Yeager is his best friend.” I heard her start walking toward us.

  “He’ll be able to contact Yeager when we get to Mars,” Dad argued. His scientific personality just didn’t comprehend things like, well, friends.

  “That’s gonna be months, Dad!” I shouted.

  Mom held up her hand to quiet our bickering. “He’ll be back in ten minutes. Right, Mike?” I gave Mom a grateful look and bolted through the backyard.

  Stinky and I got there at the same time. Our secret meeting place was a small burrow hollowed out of the side of a hill behind our neighborhood. It was close but hidden, like an easy-access private clubhouse.

  Stinky looked rumply in his baggy jeans and “Elvis Is Alive” T-shirt. I told him to sit down and then I just let the whole story spill out of me.

  He blinked five times in a row and said, “Are you kidding me?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding you?” I held up my hands so that he could see they were shaking. I didn’t know if it was from fear or excitement, but they were jittering a mile a minute.

  “Man, that is heavy news.” He picked at an old candy wrapper on the ground. “You’re leaving today?”

  “Yeah,” I said, breathless. “At two p.m.”

  We sat silently for a few minutes; then I looked at my watch. “I have to go, man. If I’m not back soon, my dad’s going to vaporize me.”

  “Well,” Stinky said, standing up and fidgeting with his pants, “at least you don’t have to worry about your speech anymore.”

  “Ha.” I kicked a rock over and watched two little bugs scurry out from under it. “I might not have to write it, but now I have to live it.”

  “Shoulda picked a project on creating your own teacher-eating Preditator.”

  “No doubt.”

  We stood there for a few seconds, not knowing what else to say.

  “Well, hey,” I said finally, “at least we still have these.” I held up my small green peapod.

  “Will that work in space?”

  “It’s supposed to,” I said, then deepened my voice like the commercial. “This amazing device works up to one million miles away.”

  He looked skeptical.

  “The moon is only 239,000 miles away, right? And we’ll be there for at least a few weeks. Then we fly back a little closer to Earth so that we can launch from Lagrange point L1. We’ll be there another week or so, I guess, and that’s, what, only 200,000 miles away?”

  “Dude, how do you know all this stuff?”

  “I don’t always watch MonsterMetalMachines on the vis. And, you know, I can read, too.” I slugged him in the arm. “Anyway These things should work until I actually take off for Mars. And the mission’s gonna be in preparation mode for four weeks. I mean, I guess it is. The last mission took four weeks to …” I trailed off. I didn’t really want to get into the whole hundreds-of-people-lost-in-space-who-are-probably-dead thing.

  Stinky shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “So that’s four weeks we can talk until you take off on the … long trip.”

  “You make it sound like I’m going to die or something. ‘The long trip.’”

  Stinky just looked at me.

  I rolled my peapod between my fingers. “We’ll keep in touch, okay, Stink?”

  “Cool,” he said, looking at the ground.

  We stood awkwardly until Stinky one-arm hugged me and trotted off. I hightailed it back to the house.

  I ran in through the back door and flew up the stairs to finish packing. I hadn’t been in my room ten seconds when Mom burst in.

  “You better get downstairs and eat breakfast, Michael. We have a long day ahead of us.”

  I took one last look around my room. It wasn’t a huge room, or even spectacular in any way, but I’d miss it. I sighed and jammed my hands into my pockets. My fingers brushed the peapod and some grasshrinkers I must’ve left in there the other day. That’s one chore I won’t have to do on Mars, I thought. But that didn’t make me feel better. How can you live in a place with no grass?

  My breath caught funny in my throat.

  “C’mon, Mike,” Mom said softly “Let’s go eat.”

  Nita sat gobbling up pancakes at the kitchen table downstairs. I set my box by the front door, next to two other boxes, and then nearly had a heart attack when a humongous man in what looked like a deep red waiter’s jacket tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Better start eating, son. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”

  I looked the stranger up and down. There was a gold name tag shimmering on his breast pocket. “‘Mr. Shugah-bert’?” I read out loud.

  “The ‘t’ is silent,” he said with a big smile.

  “Mr., uh, Shuga Bear? Your name is Sugar Bear?”

  “It’s pronounced ‘Shoo-gah-bear,’ actually. I’m your mom’s executive assistant.”

  “My mom’s who?”

  “My assistant,” said Mom cheerily, putting her arm around me. “You’ve heard me talk about Leslie before, honey. He’s going to be accompanying us on our trip. He’ll be making sure our every need is taken care of.”

  “THIS is Leslie?” I asked, shocked. “I always thought Leslie was, you know, not a dude.”

  Mom maneuvered me over to the table and dropped a stack of steaming pancakes in front of me. “Eat up, so we can go.”

  “Where’s your box, cheese face?” I asked Nita as I reached for the syrup.

  “I don’t need a box,” she answered with a smug smile. She pulled the syrup just out of my reach.

  “Why not? You starting over from scratch on Mars?” I leaned over the table and snatched the syrup from her hand.

  “I’m not going to Mars.”

  “Ha. Yeah, right.” I squirted syrup onto my pancakes and shoveled in a gloopy bite.

  “Seriously. I’m not going. I’m gonna live with Gram instead.”

  I sighed, spraying chewed-up pancake back onto my plate. I didn’t know if she made up stories for attention, or what, but Nita was almost nineteen. That was way too old to be a big fat liar.

  “Mom,” I said, “could you please tell Nita to quit being such a pants-on-fire liar, and to go pack her box?”

  Mom briefly looked uncomfortable. Then she squatted down and put on her big ol’ smiley smile. Yuh-oh.

  “Well, the thing is, Michael …,” she started, and it felt like the pancake I had just swallowed was really a ton of firecrackers.

  “Nita isn’t going with us.”

  I was dumbfounded. I could only open and shut my mouth like a floundering fish.

  “She, uh … she didn’t pass the security clearance.”

  Finally I spat out, “What?!�
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  Nita grinned at me from across the table and started humming a cheerful little tune that made me want to smash my pancakes in her face.

  “Because of her association with those people, Nita wasn’t approved to come on the trip. She’s going to Gram’s after she drops us off at the Project,” Mom explained.

  Mom was talking about Nita’s membership in Earthlings for Earth. It’s this group of people dedicated to cleaning up the environment and putting an end to off-world colonization. The EFEs don’t believe that it’s right for people on Earth to pollute our planet and then go do the same thing on other planets. They aren’t a very radical group, mostly just a lot of noisy people with colorful hair who chain themselves to rockets. So it wasn’t like Nita was some criminal mastermind. She was just my dumb sister who had dropped out of the Project Academy and was going through this dumb phase where she thought she could save the world with a bunch of other dumb people.

  “Well,” I huffed, standing up so quickly my chair fell over behind me. “If Nita’s not going, I’m not going. I want to live with Gram, too.”

  Just then Dad marched into the room. “All right, everyone, it’s time to go.” He handed me the book from Mrs. H. “Thanks for letting me look at this, Mike. Better put it in your box. You don’t want to forget it!”

  “But—” I said, not knowing what to complain about first. I didn’t need that stupid book on Mars.

  “Oh, here, I’ll do it,” he said, and grabbed the book back. He shoved it into my box.

  Mom whisked my plate off the table as if the preceding five minutes had never occurred. She took Nita’s plate and tossed it into the washer, too.

  “Leslie, would you mind grabbing the boxes? Kids, follow me….” And she headed out the front door without so much as a glance behind her.

  Nita and I looked at each other—she was smiling; I was breathing fire—and then Dad shoved us along. The drivedropper spat out the electri-car and the doors slid open.

  I stammered, “But, I don’t want—I’m not go—”

  “Oh, everything is going to be fine, honey,” Mom said, patting my arm as she gently pushed me into my seat. “Don’t you worry about a thing. Belt.”