How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend (3 page)

I
'm having a nightmare where Zelda orders the T. rex to eat me when I'm woken up by Dad's voice. I switch on the light, get out of bed, and find him pacing the kitchen in his pajamas, talking on his cell phone and scratching his bald head hysterically.

“I don't know how she did it!” he keeps repeating. “I've never seen anything like this in my entire life! It's shocking! Unbelievable!”

I shoot to the staircase and run toward Zelda's room.

“David!” Dad calls after me and makes gestures, like,
Wait a second, don't go in her room,
etc., but I shrug and pretend I don't understand, and he's way too busy on the phone to stop me.

“Zelda?” I call.

I go into her room. “Zel…”

Her gizmo lies in the middle of the room, intact, unbroken, perfectly closed, but there's no Zelda in it. I hear Dad's heavy footsteps. He stops beside me. We contemplate the gizmo for a while.

“She's gone again,” he says, looking like he ate a slug and it refuses to slide down.

A bald policeman inspects the gizmo from every angle and passes it to his hairier colleague. “Have you ever seen anyone take one of these off?” he asks.

“Not without breaking it or setting it off,” Dad answers, serving them coffee.

They're plainclothes officers. The uniformed ones are outside, confiscating pitchforks and trying to calm down the Cornouaillois enraged by the news of this third escape.

“How do you think she did it?” The policeman puts the gizmo down in the middle of the kitchen table.

Dad sighs and scratches his chin. “She would have had to… well, hmm…”

He has absolutely no idea.

They drink their coffee while staring at the mysterious gizmo. I'm having cold milk. It's breakfast time. There are croissants on the table, but no one really has any appetite.

“Maybe she managed to open it, take it off, and lock it back real fast before the alarm went off,” suggests one of the policemen.

They think about it and then shake their heads unanimously.

“This is
nuts
!” the bald policeman says, blowing on his coffee.

“Nothing is ever…nuts,” Dad mumbles unconvincingly.

There's a strangely silent gizmo and a girl who vanished into thin air to prove him wrong.

“Go get dressed,” Dad says, realizing I'm still wearing my old Tintin pajamas (more evidence of Dad's fascination for the guy). “Your mother will be mad if you're not ready when she arrives.”

He's wrong about that. Mom will get mad no matter what. And anyway it's already too late: We can hear her car roaring up the gravel path.

I hesitantly walk out and stop in front of the garage to welcome her and see if she ran over any villagers who got in her way. Her
fancy Mercedes sport coupe slides to a halt just an inch away from me. Mom gets out, blowing cigarette smoke through her nose, dragon style.

She's wearing the size-two black ensemble she uses for work. Black sunglasses. Black hair tightly pulled back. She looks like the Angel of Death on a business trip. Even the Cornouaillois stop yelling, sensing danger.

“Do you really think I have nothing better to do than come here?” she says. That's her version of
Hi, darling—how have you been?
“I'm missing a court appointment for you.”

Mom's a divorce lawyer. She's brilliant at it.

“Hi, Mom,” I say carefully.

She takes off her sunglasses. She's even scarier when you can see her cold blue eyes. “How can you let him dress you like this?” she coughs out. She's not a big Tintin fan, either. And she is very particular about how I dress, even to go to bed. She wants me to make her look chic at any time of day or night, just like any of her other fashion accessories.

Dad comes out of the house to defend his choice of pajamas.

“You!” Mom barks, pointing at him like a wound-up wrestler about to trash him around the ring. “You're going to pay for this!”

“I know,” Dad says, avoiding eye contact.

He's a strong man normally, but when Mom's around, he has the personality of a bathroom rug.

“And you!” she barks at me. “Go get dressed and then wait for me in the car while I deal with your father.”

Five minutes later, I'm dressed, packed, and waiting in the car, already slightly sick from the cigarette stench. “Can I say good-bye to Dad?” I ask when Mom joins me.

“No.” She starts the engine and reverses at high speed. The policemen hardly have time to push the villagers out of her way. She drives over the foot of Monsieur Dupuis, the mayor of Cornouaille and Dad's nemesis.

“Losers,” Mom says, lighting a cigarette and speeding away, ignoring the agonized screams.

I guess there's really no point telling Mom about Zelda's miraculous escape. It's not only that she's too busy yelling at her assistant over the phone—it's that she wouldn't care, period. If something's not about her, Édouard (her longtime partner), or one of her divorce cases, she doesn't want to hear about it.

Mom has a thing for sports cars, chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, swearing, and giving truck drivers the finger as she passes them on the highway.

The combination always makes me nauseous, but I'd never say so. Mom can't stand for me to show any signs of weakness, and she hates when I get sick.

“AHOW!”

“What now?” Mom asks, blowing a toxic cloud at me.

“Nothing.”

“So why are you howling?”

Actually, it wasn't me howling after Mom swerved like a madwoman to pass yet another truck. It came from behind the tiny backseat—right where the trunk is.

“What's wrong with you?” She squeezes my cheeks in her cold hand and inspects my face. “You've turned all green. You're not going to be sick, are you?!”

“I…I'm…nothing.”

“Don't you dare vomit in my car! I just had it cleaned.”

Mom's swearing like a sailor because we're stuck in a traffic jam trying to get into Paris. I can't stop thinking about what's inside the trunk. Mom picks up her cell phone and calls Édouard. He was her business partner before he became her lover and the reason she left Dad. He's an okay guy, I guess. Unlike Dad, he can handle Mom's bad temper, and they're always yelling at each other like it's a lifestyle.

She starts yelling at him as soon as he picks up the phone: This! That! And every freaking thing in between! One way or another, we all exist to irritate her. The only time Mom doesn't yell at him—or me—is on Sundays, right after we all have an afternoon nap. Then she becomes very cuddly and sweet for an hour or two. The rest of the time, she's a demon.

An hour later, Mom runs out of cigarettes, and we're still stuck on the highway. She moans like she just realized her liver's missing.

She phones Édouard and starts yelling at him again, this time adding the missing cigarettes to her long list of frustrations. He should understand. He's a heavy smoker, too. Whenever they're both at home, I have to lock myself in my room, stuff toilet paper in the keyhole, and open all the windows—even in the middle of winter—just so I can breathe.

Which reminds me: Don't you need to punch holes in a trunk for someone to breathe inside?

Mom is near hysterical when she double-parks in front of the tobacco shop by our apartment. She jumps out of the car like her seat is on fire.

I really pray she never tries to quit smoking—or if she does, I want at least an ocean between us.

“Zelda! It's me, David. We're in Paris,” I say, turning to the backseat.

Nothing. Not a word, not a movement.

“Are you back there? In the trunk? Can you breathe?”

Still no sign of life.

“You can talk to me. I won't tell Mom or anyone if you're in the trunk. I mean Mom would just freak out, and we don't want that, trust me. And I'm like Dad—I don't want them to put you in prison. Zelda!”

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Zelda was never in the car.

“If you're in the trunk, I want to tell you, everybody is really impressed with you. Like, the policemen—they looked like they'd swallowed a fly when they saw the gizmo. Did you really open it and close it really fast? That's the best theory they came up with.”

“Are you going to shut up, Earthling?” Zelda shouts from inside the trunk.

I knew it!

“Idiots!” Mom yells, getting back in the car. She slams the door and drops a pack of menthol cigarettes and a pile of women's magazines on my lap.

“Everybody is driving me
crazy
today.” She lights a menthol and blows the smoke in my face. “What's with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then stop looking at me like that. You remind me of your father.”

Never a good thing.

Our apartment is perfect. Mom keeps it this way, and if you move or touch
anything,
you are positively dead. If Dad lives in the middle of nowhere, Mom lives right in the center of the world—which happens to be in the middle of Paris, across the street from the Jardin du Luxembourg in Saint Germain.

The apartment is huge, and every wall is covered with expensive modern art and antiques. As far as I can tell, Mom earns tons of money.

I drop my bag in my room. I'm so nervous, I don't even care that Mom has redecorated it into a designer minimalist white nightmare without even telling me. I need to get back to the car and free Zelda from the trunk.

“You like it?” Mom asks, passing by.

“I—”

“Try not to touch or move anything. And leave the pillows exactly where they are. The man who arranged them is an artist.”

I look around. One item is dramatically missing: my fish tank and its occupant, Pixel, my beloved goldfish.

“Where's Pixel?”

“He died.”

She fluffs up the pillows and then uses her finger to collect a single speck of dust from a bookshelf, totally avoiding looking at my pained face.

“Mom? Did you flush him down the toilet?”

She'd threatened to flush Pixel down the toilet many times in the past.

She sighs. “I gave him to the doorman. The aquarium didn't fit the new design. But I got you a new computer.” She nods toward a brand-new white iMac on top of my brand-new shiny white desk.

“There's money on the kitchen table for your lunch,” she says, taking a last Polaroid look at my room. “If you move anything…,”
she warns, and off she goes, power walking all the way down to her office on the Île de la Cité.

Mom loves power walking. It's the only way she can smoke and work out at the same time, since “those idiots” at her gym won't let her smoke on the treadmill.

I run down the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator, flash the magnetic card at the security doors, and run to Mom's car. The alarm is going wild, God knows for how long, and I frantically press the remote to put an end to it. The car whines a last annoyed
bip-bip,
and the racket stops. Now all you can hear is Zelda hissing, puffing, and trying to shoulder her way out of the trunk.

“I'm here!” I say, and open it for her.

There are a few divorce case files on one side and a half-empty bottle of Evian water on the other. And there's Zelda in the middle, looking at me like she could bite.

“What took you so long?” she yells, springing out of the trunk like a pissed-off jack-in-the-box.

Z
elda is very pale, and she's dirty and muddy like she's been hiding in a hole in the ground. She looks like the living dead with a bad hangover, and I'm praying that the doorman was too busy feeding his new friend Pixel to see us getting into the elevator.

She moans as she falls onto my new designer-white futon—and to be perfectly honest, it doesn't look very comfortable.

“Water,” she barks.

I run into my bathroom and fill up my toothbrush tumbler. Our hands touch when I pass her the glass, and I can feel she's burning hot.

“What's wrong with you?”

“I Space Splashed out of the gizmo. I was not ready. I was still Space Flopped.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

She clutches her stomach with both hands and lies on her side. “No. I'm not going to be
okay,
Earthling. My inner organs are going to melt, and I'm probably going to die.”

Dying is a serious condition. I kneel in front of her and instinctively try to touch her forehead to check if she really has a fever.
ZAP!
She grabs my hand just before I manage to touch her.

“What are you doing?”

“I was just trying to—oooouch!”

If she squeezes my hand any harder, she's going to break a finger.

“Don't you ever try to touch me again. Understood?”

“Yes, yes, YEESS!” I manage to scream right before she squashes my hand into a pulp.

She releases it.

I walk away, shaking my hand and blowing on my fingers. “I was just trying to check if you had fever and needed to see a doctor.”

“I don't need a doctor. I
am
a doctor.”

This girl is full of surprises.

Zelda has a peculiar way of practicing medicine. She calls it
acoustic therapy,
and shockingly, it's pretty much what a lunatic would do to fix a medical problem: sing an alien lullaby to her belly button.

“Stop watching me like that, dwarf,” she complains. “You're distracting me, and I cannot hit the anesthetic notes.”

She goes back to her strange wordless melody, sounding very much like a whale at singing practice.

“Can I just say one thing?”

She shakes her head. “If you speak, it will not work. You have a particularly annoying voice.”

“I think you have a high fever, Zelda.” I nearly lost my right hand trying to confirm that.

“I know.” She lifts her sweater and starts caressing her stomach. “That is what I am fixing.”

I have my doubts about acoustic therapy, but one thing's for sure: She has incredible abs—and they're covered in very sexy tattoos.

“Mom keeps tons of medicine in her bathroom,” I say. “Don't you want an aspirin? She also takes this blue pill that turns her into a happy babbling jellyfish whenever she has a migraine.”

Zelda stops caressing her stomach and looks up at me with tired, feverish eyes.

“Your medicine is prehistoric. You have not discovered life energy, and you are thousands of years away from acoustic therapy.” And with that said, she goes back to singing to her belly button.

“The fever is almost gone,” she says after sleeping for about an hour on the futon.

I have no way to confirm that, and I'm not about to try to touch her again. I prepared ham and cheese sandwiches and a milkshake with strawberry syrup and a few drops of vanilla extract. I lay the tray beside the futon. “Try the milkshake.”

She takes the glass hesitantly. She's going to love it. I got the recipe from the Disney Channel years ago—it's a real killer.

“It's not poison. Milk is good for the stomach.”

She smiles, like I've said something particularly naive. It's the first time I've seen her smile. She gets these cute little wrinkles on the sides of her lips.

She drinks my milkshake. “Thank you.”

We might be a “primitive planet,” like she said, but some of us have an advanced sense of hospitality.

She sighs and puts down the milkshake. “I'm cured!” she decides.

She's good—she fixed an imaginary illness with an imaginary therapy in, like, no time.

She stands up, stretches, and moves on to the next problem: “Clothes. Quick.” She shoots straight for Mom's room.

“You don't need to go in there,” I say, trying to stop her from reaching Mom's ultrarestricted walk-in closet. “You can have any of my clothes instead.”

“Don't be absurd. You are half my size.”

She can be so harsh sometimes!

I freeze and gasp. She has dropped her oversize jeans in the middle of Mom's room, and now she's peeling off her sweater. I look away and turn around, like watching the pigeons outside the window is way more interesting than looking at her getting naked. “Zelda! Please, put something on! I mean…unless it looks too expensive.”

Mom has a standard punishment for anyone touching her beloved designer clothing: death.

“By Zook! I found proper clothing, Earthling!”

I hear her shuffling things around in the closet and then sliding into something,
slip slap slop!
Whatever she found, it sounds like it's made of rubber.

“Turn around,” she orders.

Okay. I turn around carefully. Ta-da! I look briefly and blush like a tomato in spring.

Four things:

1. Zelda has no modesty whatsoever.

2. She has many more tribal tattoos than I could ever imagine. Her upper legs, arms, shoulders—no part of her body has been spared.

3. She's wearing Mom's teeny-weeny black Speedo bikini, the one Mom uses to show how fit and trim she is. Édouard has a name for it: Outrageous.

4. Power Girl has
nothing
on her!

“This is exactly what we wear in Vahalal,” she says happily. “You mean this is how you dress to…walk around in public?” “Of course.”

“Zelda. That is a swimsuit. On Earth, women wear them to… swim or…” I can't think of any other reason to wear Mom's Out-rageous Speedo. “Put
that thing
back where you found it. I'll get you a clean sweater and a fresh pair of comfy jeans. Okay?”

She's not even listening to me. She's already moving to the deep end of the closet where Mom stores her gigantic collection of high boots and dangerous stilettos. “I need something of the highest quality. Tough, flexible, protective, and comfortable for combat.”

That definitely sounds like most of Mom's footwear. She chooses a pair of knee-high leather boots, then sits on the floor and zips one on.
Ziiiiiiiip.

“Where'd you get all those tattoos?” I say, looking at the ones on her back.

“Tattoos?”

“The drawings all over your body.”

“They are not drawings,” she says, zipping up the second boot.
Ziiiiiiiip.
“They are biological markings that show who I am and what I have done.” She stands up to show me a tattoo on the inside of her left arm, a symbol that looks like a six-legged ant on steroids. “This one, for example, proves that I am a Vahalalian.” She shows me another one on the inside of her thigh. “This one recalls my exploits during the Unholy Wars. Each of the lines represents a
sinner I slaughtered.” She moves the Speedo just slightly. “Here, that is the Battle of Loki. See it?” She shows me the tattoo on the base of her…well, left bazoom, and
poof,
half the neurons in my head explode.

“Do you still doubt me?” she says, readjusting her bikini top.

I manage to stop staring at the Battle of Loki and look up to her eyes, shaking my head numbly. No. I don't doubt it anymore: This girl is another level of nuts.

“Please, not that vase! It's a Philippe Starck. It's worth a fortune.”

“I need it. Look.” She measures it against her arm. “It will make a perfect arm shield.”

“Mom adores it. Please put it down.”

I make a move to take it back. She grabs the neck of my T-shirt and holds me at a safe distance, coolly examining the vase from different angles. She touches it with the tip of her tongue. “Is it carbon based?” she asks, like she could
taste
that.

“It's fiberglass and wood. Very unique. Give it back.” I desperately try to reach for it, but she has such long, strong arms. “Please.”

“If I break the wood off…”

Break
is such a cruel word. “Choose something else! We can cut some cardboard and paint it.”

“I need this artifact.”

“It's
art
!”

“What you Earthlings call art is useless. Weapons and shields are necessary.”

It's a tough universe out there.

She lifts the vase above her head and then slams it against the wall.
Clunk!

“Noooo!”

There's no reasoning with this girl. She has broken Mom's vase in two and now slides her arm into the fiberglass part, looking very pleased with herself.

We're so busted! “Mom will kill both of us for this.”

“No. She will just kill
you.
Good-bye and good luck, Earthling,” she says, shooting toward the door with nothing on but a tiny bikini, knee-high leather boots, and a broken vase around her left arm.

“You can't possibly go out dressed like that.”

“Why not?”

“This is France! You're practically naked. You're going to start a riot! Please!”

She sighs, grabs a black coat hanging in the foyer, and buttons it over the swimsuit. “Are you happy now?”

“No!” She's chosen Mom's absolute favorite summer coat. “That's a Lagerfeld!”

But Zelda doesn't care. She opens the door, pausing in front of the mirror to inspect her reflection, and then grabs Mom's vintage Cardin sunglasses to complete her outfit.

“You
cannot
take those glasses,” I say with a trembling voice. “Mom would rather give
me
away than see those gone.”

“Your problem.” Zelda shrugs. “I must go find my chosen one. Good-bye, dwarf.”

I follow her to the staircase. “You're going to bring the coat back, aren't you?”

“Stop following me!” she says as she crosses the road toward the park.

“Mom really loves that coat. Seriously. It means the world to her.”

And the sunglasses! There're, like, five pairs of them left in the entire world, and those were given to Mom by one of her clients as a token of his appreciation for getting him divorced so quickly. Mom adores those glasses.

“Okay, dwarf. Take the coat back and leave me alone.”

She's about to take it off. It's one o'clock. The Jardin du Luxembourg is crowded with people on their lunch breaks, kids going to the pond with their miniature sailboats, old people feeding pigeons. She's about to show them all her tattoos—or biological markings or
whatever
they are—and create a scandal.

“Keep the coat on!”

“Not if you keep following me.
What is wrong with you?
”

I don't know. She's bonkers, no doubt. Way more than anyone Dad ever fixed, even that poor boy who thought he was three people at the same time. But…I'm…I just…I want to…to
be
with her, very badly. “I can be useful.”

“I doubt it.”

“I know this city inside out. I know…
Earthlings.
I'm able to talk to them without smashing anything on their heads. I…I'm very good with maps! Er…there are so many ways I can help you. I can be, like, your…
guide.
”

She takes off Mom's sunglasses and stares right into my eyes. She looks a bit scary. “Are you offering to become my Pudin?”

“What's a Pudding?”

“A Pudin: a lower life-form renouncing its freedom to serve a Traveler.”

“Oh. You mean like…
a slave
?”

“Exactly, Earthling.”

Slave
sounds bad. Still, it's better than “that miserable guy she abandoned in the middle of the park.”

“Sure,” I say. “I can be your Pudding or Pudin or…anything!” As long as she lets me stay with her.

“Good.” She puts both hands on my shoulders and starts making noises like a dolphin:
Quikidizikzik taaak taaak!

“What was that?” Does she want fish?

“I swore you in. You are now officially my Pudin and will serve me until you die or until I leave this planet.” And—
zoom
—she walks away at high speed.

“Where are you going?” I call after her.

“To the Temple of Zook, Pudin.”

I love it when she calls me that.

“Zook? Your goddess? Here in Paris?”

“There's a Temple of Zook in every major city in the universe.”

“Oh, but of course!”

She stops. “Are you mocking me again, Pudin?”

I might have laughed a little. “Sorry.”

“Do you realize what being a Pudin means?”

“I guess we're like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I'm Sancho.”