Ignatius MacFarland (2 page)

Right above me was what looked like a shooting star. I’d seen a lot of them in all the time I’d been coming up on the roof, but this one was different. It was way bigger and way louder. It had a long tail and was streaming across the sky. It flew through the ladle of the Big Dipper, streaked across the W-shape of the constellation Cassiopeia, and then blew past Orion’s face. (I know a lot about astronomy, as if you couldn’t tell.) And it wasn’t just a white tail that trailed behind it. It was bluish green, with sparks flying out of it. And it looked so close that I got worried it was going drop sparks on my house and set it on fire.

I immediately swung my telescope toward the shooting star, hoping to see it close-up. I looked through the eyepiece and lined the bright object up right in the center of my lens. There it was, burning away. But it really didn’t look like a shooting star. It almost looked like the back of a rocket engine.

My heart started pounding like crazy. Maybe my wish was coming true. Maybe a spaceship was coming to get me. Maybe they had read my thoughts that had gone out into the universe. Maybe as they were flying around the galaxy doing whatever it is aliens do, one of them read my mind and then looked at his friend and said, “You know, Zolton, we should stop by the Earth and pick up a kid named Ignatius MacFarland. I think he wants to come with us.” (Notice how he didn’t call me Piggy MacFartland? Those aliens are definitely way nicer than we are here on Earth.)

As I strained to keep the streaking light in my telescope’s view, I suddenly lost sight of it. I took my eye off the lens and saw that the shooting star had disappeared behind the big weeping willow tree in our front yard. Oh, great, I thought. What if the aliens are looking for me and now they can’t see me because of that stupid tree that drips sap all over our patio? What if there’s another kid up on his garage roof right now and they think I’m him? And what if he’s just some dumb kid who’s sitting up there with a BB gun shooting at garbage cans and cats and the aliens beam him up into their ship and call him Ignatius and the kid turns out to be some jerk who ends up shooting one of the aliens in the butt with his stupid BB gun?

Then the aliens would get all mad and beam him back down and say, “Zolton, this is a terrible planet filled with mean kids. Tell everybody in the galaxy to scratch Earth off their list of destinations. And be sure to tell them that whatever they do, they must not listen to the thoughts of some kid named Iggy because he’s a bully and if you pick him up he could end up ruining the whole universe.”

There was no way I could risk that happening.

So I stood and started jumping up and down and waving frantically as the streaking light reappeared from behind the willow tree.

“I’m over here!” I shouted. “It’s me, Iggy MacFarland! I’m on the roof over here! Come back!”

And all of a sudden, the streaking light just disappeared into thin air. The sizzling stopped.

I picked up my telescope and looked through it toward where the light had disappeared. I scanned around for a few seconds . . . and then I saw it.

A round flying object was slowly moving toward me. It was black and silent and floated through the air like a giant Frisbee. My heart started pounding even faster. I could actually hear it pounding in my ears, feel it beating in my chest. This is it, I thought. It’s finally happening. I’ve spent so much time waiting and dreaming of this moment and it’s about to happen. I’m about to have my first encounter with an alien spaceship. I’m going to go into outer space!

It got bigger and bigger and bigger and it suddenly looked like it was going to crash into me. I lowered my telescope just in time to see —

THUNK!

The spaceship hit me right in my forehead. It hit me so hard that I fell backward onto the roof and my telescope flew out of my hand and rolled down the shingles, hit the rain gutter, then spun up into the air and smashed onto the driveway. I had to dig my fingernails into the roof to keep myself from falling off and smashing onto the driveway, too. I looked down toward my feet to see the spaceship. And there it was . . .

A big, plastic garbage can lid.

I heard really loud and obnoxious laughter coming from the street in front of my house. And I immediately knew whose laughter it was.

Frank Gutenkunitz’s.

“Hey, Mac
Fart
land, congratulations! It came back!”

And with this, Frank and his two just-as-jerky friends, Donald Jenkins and Alex Roy, started laughing in that way that tells you they don’t really think something’s funny as much as they want to hear how loud they can all laugh. Well, they all laughed pretty loud.

These were the kind of guys who would make aliens stay away from Earth forever. The Earth I was hopelessly, permanently stuck on.

That night as I lay in bed and felt the throbbing lump I now had on my forehead because of Frank and his stupid garbage can lid, I was completely depressed. For that one fantastic, amazing moment before the garbage can lid hit me I had felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. When I thought that spaceship was coming to get me, it was like Christmas morning, Thanksgiving dinner, and present-opening time on my birthday all rolled into one. It was my grandma’s homemade chocolate pudding. It was the opening credits of my very favorite movie. It was everything I was hoping I would feel when I finally got the chance to leave the Earth.

And now it was gone. And for some weird reason, it didn’t feel like it was ever coming back.

3

THE PLANET GORPLOCK

Having to go to school the next day didn’t cheer me up very much. Not that it would. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been a kid who hates school. But I’ve never been a kid who loves it, either. As far as I was concerned at the time, it was an okay place to learn stuff I didn’t know, but unfortunately I had to learn all that stuff while I was surrounded by people who either didn’t like me, didn’t know me, or didn’t
want
to know me. And except for my two friends, Gary and Ivan, who were pretty much in the same boat as I was, I didn’t really feel like it was my job to get to know anybody else any more than it was their job to get to know me. What was the point, you know?

The only person other than Gary and Ivan I felt at all close to in the school was a guy who wasn’t even there. No, I’m not making a joke. You see, down this one hall that leads to the library, there was a picture and a plaque on the wall honoring this guy named Chester Arthur, although everyone used to call him Mr. Arthur. Well, at least the people who still talked about him anymore called him that. To be honest, I don’t think most students in the school called him anything because they never knew him in the first place. I hadn’t ever met him, but for some reason I felt like I knew him. Or at least understood him.

See, he was an English teacher at our junior high about five years ago and all the teachers and kids who used to go there said that he was a really nice guy. They also said that he was sort of an unhappy guy. Apparently he was always trying to write books and plays and become famous so that he could stop being an English teacher and start being a big-shot artist guy and move to New York or California.

But nobody ever published his books or bought any of his plays or anything else he wrote or painted or composed because, well, I guess the stuff he did wasn’t very good. I even heard that he made the drama club put on a musical he wrote that was so bad everybody left at intermission. But since he was such a nice guy, everybody told him the play was good and excused their having to leave by saying that the cookies the snack bar served at intermission gave them food poisoning, which didn’t make him feel any better since he was also the person who baked the cookies. So he was just this cool teacher that everybody liked who was really really unhappy being who he was and probably thought that nothing he did was right.

And that’s why I felt kinda close to the guy.

And it’s also why a lot of people think he died.

See, the plaque under his picture read, “In memory of Chester Arthur, taken from our world by accidental means, but always and forever in our hearts.” The part that says “accidental means” is where there seems to be a lot of disagreement. Because a ton of people said that his death wasn’t an accident at all; they say it was something he made happen himself. Because his house . . . well . . . exploded.

The gas company blamed it on the guy who built Mr. Arthur’s house and the guy who built Mr. Arthur’s house blamed it on the gas company. But a lot of people in the town blamed it on Mr. Arthur. They said that he just decided he didn’t want to be a teacher anymore and since he didn’t seem to be good at anything else, he decided that he didn’t want to be
anything
anymore. So they say one day he turned on all the gas in his house, and, you know . . .

BOOM!

Nothing left of the house, nothing left of Mr. Arthur. No body, no anything.

I never knew if I believed Mr. Arthur did this or not, simply because I could never imagine
anybody
doing it, no matter how bad they felt. I mean, I’ve been depressed before, like after the time I tried to put on a carnival in my backyard to raise money for muscular dystrophy and nobody showed up except Gary and Ivan, but I never even thought about blowing myself up. I just ate about a thousand Oreos and went to bed.

To me, the people the people who said he killed himself just sounded like they were spreading around one of those stupid rumors that people make up when they don’t have enough to think about in school, like the rumor that Mr. Calaphon, our janitor, tears the heads off of rats he finds in the boiler room and drinks their brains. I mean, Mr. Calaphon is sort of a weird guy, but there’s no way he’s rat-brain-drinking weird.

But whether Mr. Arthur really blew himself up on purpose or not, I still liked the guy, since even his face in the picture looked like he was sort of lost and trapped, which I could completely relate to. I guess he found a way to get out of coming to that stupid school every day. It just wasn’t a way I would ever choose.

As I sat in my science class and listened to Mr. Andriasco tell us about how dinosaurs had evolved into birds, I couldn’t concentrate. Since Ben Kramer was sitting in the desk in front of me, and since Ben Kramer weighs about fifty more pounds than I do and Mr. Andriasco couldn’t see me from the chalkboard if Ben was sitting in front of my desk, I was doodling in my notebook instead of taking notes. I couldn’t help it. When I get upset about something, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything except what’s bothering me. And right then, I was drawing spaceships and aliens and whole new worlds in my notebook because that’s what was on my mind.

“Evolution takes a very, very,
very
long time,” I heard Mr. Andriasco saying as he wrote something on the chalkboard. His voice sounded really far away and echoey to me, like when the TV’s on and you’re about to fall asleep. “All things on this earth evolved through the processes of elimination and mutation. If something was eliminated, its genes ended and it was gone. If something survived, it reproduced and eventually its genes would mutate. And if those new genes made it stronger . . .” Echo echo echo. There were times when Mr. Andriasco could be really interesting but today’s lecture didn’t sound like it was one of them.

Which is why I was so surprised by what happened next.

All of a sudden, right as I was drawing a third eye on the alien who was stretching out his hand to shake mine and saying, “Welcome to Gorplock, Iggy,” my notebook flew out from under my pencil.

“Ah, Mr. MacFarland. I see the world of art is calling to you more strongly than the world of science.”

I looked up to see Mr. Andriasco standing over me, holding my notebook up to his face, and looking at it. The expression on his face told me that there was a big load of teacher sarcasm headed my way.

“Perhaps your alien friends here would care to help you with your midterm exams, which you’ll clearly need assistance passing since you don’t seem to think you need to listen to my lecture and take notes.” (Hey, I didn’t say it was going to be
good
sarcasm. He was not a funny guy at all.)