Mike Stellar (3 page)

Dad was wearing his readers and the walls reflected them as he came down the stairs. They shone on the wall in a distorted font.
Historical! Brave!

Mom went up and kissed him on the neck.

“Howdy, little lady.”

“Ugh,” I moaned. “There’s a
kid
in the room, you guys.” I grabbed the remote and flipped on the viserator. It shot whorls of three-dimensional static through the room.

“Man,” I grumbled. “Someone really needs to fix this thing. It’s been shooting static like this for ages.” Mom and Dad briefly looked over at me and stared at the static.

“Hey, what’s this?” Dad asked suddenly. I twisted around on the sofa. The fat book from Mrs. H had slid out of my bag onto the table. The fingerbulbs of his readers clattered as he clumsily picked it up and tried to flip through it. “This book is fantastic. Look at the binding.” He held the book up like it was a newborn baby. “Where did you get this old girl?”

I made a face. “From another old girl. Mrs. Halebopp gave it to me to help research a report I’m writing.”

“Well, wasn’t that nice?” Dad said absently. “Mind if I take a look? I’ll get it back to you soon.”

I shrugged and turned around to watch the vis. Dad’s new love affair with old-fashioned books was nerdy. At least he still used his readers for news. It seemed like lately he was always in his study, staring into his palms as the fingerbulbs flashed the day’s headlines over and over.

The static whorls finally disappeared and a three-dimensional commercial appeared.

A guy was standing in a yard with weeds up to his knees, and his hands on his head. An announcer’s voice boomed, “—latest technology! Just grasp the grasshrinker and throw directly on your yard. In minutes the grass will shrink to a well-manicured size!”

Stupid grasshrinkers
, I thought. I was supposed to shrink the lawn last weekend but I forgot. I quickly flipped the channel, hoping Dad wouldn’t hear and lecture me. I flipped and flipped, trying to find
MonsterMetalMachines
, and it suddenly hit me that my show wasn’t going to be on. Every channel was full of news about Liftoff Day tomorrow. I had totally forgotten about it. Blah.

Dad sat next to me.

“Exciting stuff!” he said with a big smile. He looked happier than I had seen him in a long time.

“Yeah,” I said. Mom sat down on my other side.

“Michael,” she said, glancing at Dad, “there’s something your father and I would like to talk to you about.”

Dad took the remote and turned off the viserator.

Yuh-oh.

Turning the viserator off always meant trouble. And whenever Mom said “your father and I,” that really meant something not good was about to happen. I knew that car ride home had gone too easy.

“Would you please run upstairs and get Nita?” she asked.

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—”