Mothership Page 4

  Ducky squeezes me up in a hug and kisses my forehead. “We’ll figure it out together,” he says softly.

  “Go to hell,” I tell him. But I hug him back, hard.

  • • •

  It’s a hazy late August afternoon, near the end of my second trimester, that finds Ducky stuffing my suitcases into the trunk of my dad’s car. I told him I could pack it myself. I may look like the prizewinning pumpkin at the state fair, but I’m not crippled, for Jiminy’s sake. It’s getting harder to hide my bump now, and the farther my belly sticks out, the less likely it is that either my dad or Ducky will let me do anything on my own. I’m almost relieved to be going away to school, because if I stick around here, in two weeks I won’t be allowed to brush my own teeth.

  Ducky grips my hand through the open window, so tight I think he might be trying to take my fingers as souvenirs. It’s been a good summer—lazy and relaxed, with very little to mar it except for the occasional leg cramp and the fact that I’m now so ginormous that I basically need a series of pulleys and levers just to get out of bed. But I’d gain thirty more pounds if it meant one more day at home.

  “Send me pics,” he says. “Every day. I want to know what everything looks like up there. And take caps of any hot spots you think might be choice places to hit up on our trip after graduation next year.”

  “Of course I will,” I tell him. “And blink me. Like, every day. I’m going to be so bored without you.”

  “No, you won’t,” he argues. We’ve had this conversation about a billion times in the past three months, but now, knowing this is the last time we’ll have it, it’s almost sweet. Familiar. One more thing I’ll have to miss. “You’ll be too busy having adventures.”

  “Adventures, my ass,” I say, and pull him halfway into the car for a killer hug. “At least in space no one can hear your water break, right?”

  Ducky laughs into my shoulder. “You’d better hope Hanover has a better physics teacher than Ms. Schneider.”

  “Every day, you hear me?” I tell him, tugging on his ear. “You’ll blink me every day?”

  He tugs my ear right back. “I promise,” he says. And I know he will.

  Watching Ducky wave from my driveway while my dad pulls onto the street, I figure I now know what it must feel like to have your arm yanked out of its socket. I’m about to up and geyser all over my scoop neck, when my dad interrupts my reverie.

  “Did I tell you that the L.O.C. Echidna is one of the original orbiters?” he says. “Commissioned in 2046. Can you believe that?”

  Nonemotional Elvie would roll her eyes at her father right now. Nonemotional Elvie would tell her dad, Hello, you’ve been totally blabbering about how much you love these old ships for, like, months now, poring over floor plans at the dinner table, spouting anecdotes and factoids, and making me memorize the locations of all the emergency pods, and telling me four thousand times not to use the toilet during a Yeomen’s Curve. And PS, if you really think your daughter might get sucked into the crapper because of a sudden vacuum, maybe you shouldn’t shoot her off into space to begin with. But nonemotional Elvie checked out about the time her stretch marks got to be the size of the Mississippi River, and now it’s just me. Miss Sappy Pants.

  Dad’s still going on and on about the push to recommission old space cruisers as commercial real estate, seeing as they’re all stuck up there in orbit anyways, and I’m trying not to think about what I’m leaving behind—when I notice that Dad’s voice seems to be getting more distant. I turn to see what’s up.

  Leaning fiercely to the left, my father is driving with his head completely stuck out his window, still chatting away as if he did this sort of thing every day.

  “Dad! What the balls are you doing?”

  “Sorry?” He sticks his head back inside the car. My eyes must be as bugged out as beach balls. “Just practicing. You know, in case the hood pops up one of these days while I’m driving and I can’t see out the front. Be prepared for any situation, Elvie.”

  Maybe pregnancy hormones make you mental or something, I don’t know, but for some reason this strikes me as the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I let out a guffaw so loud that I nearly upchuck the pancake sundae Ducky made me for breakfast.

  Dad looks over at me then, and I think he’s going to lecture me more about preparedness, but he doesn’t. He gets this sort of sad, crooked smile on his face, and he tells me, “I’m going to miss having you around, dearheart.”

  Talk about sniffle territory. I try to swallow down the lump in my throat, but no luck. “I’ll miss you, too,” I tell him.

  It’s at that moment that my phone buzzes in the pocket of my stretch-waist maternity jeans, and I smile, thinking how very Ducky it is to be sticking to his one-blink-a-day promise already.

  But when I flip the phone open, I see that the blink isn’t from Ducky.

  It’s from Cole.

  i <3 u more thn the starz

  I stare at the phone for a good three miles’ worth of highway. Cole Archer? He can’t even speak to me for five months after I tell him I’m carrying his love child, but as soon as I’m about to blast off into space, he suddenly <3s me? My heart skips so many beats, I’m pretty sure either me or the baby is going to pass out soon.

  “Elvie?” My dad slows the car to a stop. “We’re here.” I look up from my phone. Sure enough, we’ve arrived. It’s a relatively small shuttleport with only three launch pads. Right now there’s just the one shuttle, prepped and ready to shoot us into orbit, casting a long shadow over the entire parking lot. “You okay, kid?”

  I don’t even stop to think. I delete the message. And then, thumbs whipping through the menu tabs, I delete Cole, too.

  “I’m just great,” I say, stuffing the phone back into my pocket. And I step out of the car.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEREIN THE BENEFITS OF DITCHING YOGA CLASS BECOME ABUNDANTLY CLEAR

  So, um, invaders. That’s new.

  The first thing that happens, of course, after processing that our ship is being attacked by dudes toting guns and wearing space helmets, is that I feel an overwhelming desire to crap myself. But I refuse to be captured with soiled Underoos. Dear God, how embarrassing would that be?

  Once I take a few deep breaths to calm myself, I do what my dad would tell me to do if he were here: assess the situation.

  Poking my head out just a smidge from the top of the stairwell, I see that my helmet-wearing friends are still lurking in the halls. There are five of them, dressed in dark fatigues that are sooo five years ago. If we were on better terms, I’d inform them that they might want to, you know, invest in some plaid or something. But the guns make me think maybe they’re not here to discuss fashion.

  One thing’s for sure—I can’t stay where I am. If anyone decided to hike up this stairwell, I’d be screwed. There’s not a single good hiding place on the observation deck, and it doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that BIG OPEN AREA + SPACE INVADERS = BYE-BYE, ELVIE. So it looks like I’m going down the back stairway.

  Slinking, soft-footed, across the length of the deck, I make my way past the vending machines, past the elevator, and slowly open the door to the emergency stairwell. The door opens with a soft ka-chunk, but I hold my breath and don’t hear footsteps following me, so I push it open farther and squeeze myself through. My yoga class is in the pool on the lido deck, just two floors down. I figure my best bet is to get there so we can all work through this ship-under-attack dilemma together. Safety in numbers, right?

  I book it down the two flights, one hand on the railing, one hand under my belly, and I thank my lucky stars that I decided to go on my ice cream crusade with my most sensible yellow flats on. I’m running so fast, I could be the star of my own cardio workout vid—Get Chased With Elvie!—but when I crash into the exit, the door doesn’t budge.

  Locked shut.

  The sudden jolt of ramming shoulder-first into the door sends the Goober careening into my uterine wall. Shit. How ca
n an emergency exit door be locked? If my dad were here, he’d already be halfway into a letter to the Federal Bureau of Public Safety. Not cool, Hanover School. So not cool. I turn around on my heel and charge my way back up the stairs until, gasping, I reach the sports deck one level up. Thankfully this door opens, and I practically tumble out of the stairwell. The Goober is still kicking me like the kid’s trying to place in the Olympic freestyle, so I wrap my right arm as tight around my belly as I can, until I’m, like, choke-holding my own stomach, and I tell the thing, “When you get out of there, bub, the two of us are going to have words.” Then I straighten myself up and head down the length of the hallway.

  Thanks to all the time my dad spent poring over the floor plans of the ship with me, I had the layout of every deck pretty much memorized before I even set foot on board. So I know for a fact that if I can make it down this hallway and across the basketball courts, then the main staircase at the other end will land me directly in front of the lido pool on the floor beneath. I’m just tiptoeing past the locker room, sneaking glances over my shoulder for space intruders, when from around the corner behind me I suddenly hear a crunch-crunch-crunch that can only be a group of gunmen. Without thinking twice, I dart into the locker room and push shut the heavy green door behind me.

  As soon as I’m there, of course, I realize this is one of the worst places I could have stuck myself. If the baddies come after me, what do I think I’m going to do—shove them into the steam room and turn the heat up to high? I should’ve run. I should’ve booked it to the pool at all costs. I should’ve—

  “You having an aneurysm or something?”

  “Huh?” I whirl around, and there, straddling the locker room bench, a thin, brown cigarette lodged between her fingers, is one of my classmates, Ramona Knudsen.

  Ramona takes a deep suck on the clove cigarette and exhales all the smoke in one long puff. “Don’t tell me your water broke. An aneurysm would be way more interesting.”

  “I’m not . . .” I shake my head. “You realize we’re under attack, right?” I say, pointing toward the hallway. “There are, like, these dudes with guns—”

  “You have ice cream on your ass,” she tells me.

  Ramona Knudsen and I have never really conversed before. Mostly she keeps to herself, doing wholesome things like scratching dirty limericks onto her desk, so it’s not like we’ve ever had time to bond during knitting class or share a box of tissues while crying over The Martian Diaries. But I can respect the chick. She has that bad-girl thing going for her—torn gray tank, faux-leather skirt that she can still almost rock because she’s only five months in yet, and a streak of purple in her jet-black hair. Not to mention that when Britta tried to give Ramona crap about her eating habits last month, Ramona unloaded her entire bowl of stroganoff onto Britta’s head. The pasta was hells hot, and Britta had blisters on her scalp for a week. It was pretty much the most glorious thing I’d ever seen.

  But now is not really the time for a stroll down memory lane.

  “Invaders,” I tell her. “With guns. Outside. Didn’t you feel that jolt?”

  “For serious?” Ramona says, and for the first time she looks mildly interested. “I thought that was a drill or something.”

  “Not a drill,” I reply. “We need to get down to the pool.”

  She squints her brown eyes at me. She’s wearing so much mascara, I think it might be more effective to just glue the bottle to her eyelashes. “Eve, right?”

  It takes me a second to realize she’s asking about my name. “Elvie,” I correct her. I place my hand back on the doorknob. “We have to go. Now.” Ramona might be on my good list, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit around shooting the shit with her when there are lunatics out there waiting to shoot the shit out of me.

  Ramona shrugs as if to say Why not? then snuffs the clove cigarette out on the bench and tosses the butt to the floor. I’m just cracking the door open to scope out our escape route, when Ramona says—way too loudly for a girl who’s trying to evade a group of freaky gunmen—“Should we bring the Gnat?”

  I pinch the door closed again and whirl around. “What part of ‘We’re under attack by armed invaders’ did you not understand?”

  Ramona swings her leg slowly over the bench and rises, almost reluctantly. You’d think she was being asked to come to the front of the class to diagram the Krebs cycle or something. “The Gnat,” she repeats. “She’s in the shower.”

  I let out a huff of breath and stomp over to the showers. The second shower stall from the far wall has the curtain drawn in front of it, and sure enough I can hear a hissing sound coming from it. It’s not the sound of water running, but softer, like a sustained whisper. And the smell is foul. I whip back the curtain.

  Squatting on the floor of the shower, furiously attacking a beach-ball-and-chicken-wire contraption with a can of beige spray paint, is Hanover’s resident weirdo, Natalia Ferrera. If anyone truly belongs in outer space, it’s Natty. At the moment she’s surrounded by what I can only imagine must be art supplies—paste, glass beads, and a lot of those little fuzzy pipe cleaner thingies. Her long, kinky brown hair is spewing over her shoulders, the ends approaching what appears to have once, long ago, been a braid. Her bare feet are covered in spray paint, her fingernails are chipped and grimy, and she smells musty, which is sort of an accomplishment in space. She doesn’t even notice me either, because she’s plugged into her headphones, rocking out to God knows what sort of music as she continues to “work.”

  “Natty!” I whisper-shout at her. “Natty!” Still no response. I turn around to look at Ramona, who just laughs and lights up another clove. “Hey, Gnat!” I rip the headphones out of the girl’s ears, and she finally looks up.

  “Oh, hey, Elvie,” she says, totally blasé. She loosens her grip on the spray nozzle for a split second and gives the can a good shake. “What’s up?”

  “What’s up?” I say. I look again at Ramona, who is absolutely no help. “What’s up is that the ship is under attack, and the three of us”—I point to Natty, Ramona, and myself—“need to get down to the pool, ASAP.”

  Natty’s eyes go bug-round, and her chin drops. “The ship is under attack?” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. I hold out a hand to hoist her up. “Come on. We have to get going.”

  “Oh, but . . . oh. I . . . oh.” I would never have thought that the Gnat could look even more frazzled than before, but there it is. “Attack?” she says again.

  “Yes,” I repeat. I’m starting to think the paint fumes have damaged her brain cells. “Now let’s go.” Even Ramona looks ready to book it.

  “But what about my baby?” Natty asks.

  “It’s kind of attached,” I tell her. “Two-for-one combo meal.”

  “No, I mean”—she holds up the desecrated beach ball contraption in her hands—“my baby.”

  I can’t believe I’m trying to save this nut bar.

  “It’s not . . .,” Nat continues. “It’s . . . Well, I mean, it’s not finished yet, but it’s going to be a swollen tonsil. You know”—she looks up at me, eyes wet—“as, like, a representation of the lightness and darkness of man.”

  “Natty,” I say, and I try to make my voice steady. I can only imagine that her getting pregnant in the first place must have been part of some elaborate performance piece. “We gotta go.”

  That’s when we hear the scream. It’s a girl, definitely, and piercing—the kind of scream a girl doesn’t even know she has in her until she absolutely needs it. It’s definitely muffled, so I can’t be sure where it came from—our floor? another deck?—but I know exactly what it means.

  I’m racing back toward the locker room door, and this time Natty doesn’t argue. Ramona’s ditched her cigarette and is hot on my heels too. I wedge the door open a few centimeters and put an eyeball up to the crack. No invaders to the left or the right—at least not as far as I can see.

  “Looks like the coast is clear,” I whisper over my shoulder. �
�On three.” The girls nod. “One. Two.” I push the door open as quietly as I can. “Three!”

  We’re scuttling down the hallway, toward the basketball courts, and I keep shooting glances backward to see if we’re being followed, but it looks like no one is on our trail. But it’s on one of these glances that I notice something else.

  “Natty!” I growl. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “It’s art,” she insists, still carrying the giant tonsil as we careen toward the door to the courts.

  “I’m telling you, freak,” Ramona calls back, well ahead of both of us. She’s making excellent time for someone wearing chunky-heeled boots. “That is not art. It is—”

  “Shit,” I wheeze.

  “Hey!” Natty hollers. “You know, guys, when you say things like that about my work, it really—”

  “No,” I tell her, one hand tucked between my belly and my pelvis. God, it’s hard to run for your life with a fetus inside you. “I meant”—I point down the length of the hall behind us, where Natty’s bare feet have left beige-colored tracks to our exact location—“shit.”

  “Ohhhhhhh,” Natty says, eyes buggy again. “Shit.”

  Ramona agrees.

  At least we are almost to the basketball courts now. With any luck the invaders won’t find our trail. With any luck they are all off on other floors, terrorizing other girls. With any luck we’ll be—

  “There they are!” comes a deep, booming voice behind us. “Sir, this way!”

  “SHIT!” Together Ramona, Natty, and I run like we have never run before, and within seconds we have reached the doors leading to the courts. We throw them open and race inside.

  The basketball courts are sunk a half level deep into the sports deck, and we’ve come in right at the top of the bleachers. We start plunking down the bleacher steps as fast as three pregnant teens can go, but still there’s no way we can make it to the court-level entrance at the far end before those freaks behind us catch up. That is just the sad physics of pregnancy.