Mike Stellar (8 page)

“Drink this, too. You’ll need your energy, since you were up so early this morning.”

I broke the seal on the vial and took a minty sip. It did not go well with the eggs. I was about to ask if I had to drink the whole thing when Mr. Shugabert’s disembodied voice broke in and said, “Mike. School starts in approximately fifteen minutes. For optimal arrival time, you should leave in two minutes.”

“See there,” Dad grumbled. “You don’t even need to map out a route.”

I pushed my plate away and went into my room without a word. I grabbed my school stuff and marched to the front door.

“Hey,” Dad said as I pushed the button and the door whooshed open. “I need you to take this with you.” He shoved an old book at me. It was the one that had been on his mattress the night before.

“Why?” I asked. I didn’t want to lug some heavy thing with me the whole day.

“Your teacher is an expert on these things and I’d like her to look at the binding. I’m worried it’s in bad shape.”

“Whatever,” I said, snatching the book from him.

“Be gentle with it, Mike,” he said impatiently. “Don’t let any pages fall out.”

“Fine!” I said. I shoved it in my bag and stomped out the door.

“What is their problem?” I muttered to myself, walking down the hall in front of our apartment. I just couldn’t figure out why Mom and Dad were acting so protective and weird. And what was that blue light, anyway? And the humming noise? Maybe I could pop by on my way home from class this afternoon. After all, I now knew where those handy buttons were located….

“Hello.”

I wheeled around and saw Larc walking next to me, her feet perfectly in step with mine.

“Uh, hello,” I said.

“Your name is Mike.”

“That’s right,” I said, instinctively not being too friendly.

“My name is Larc.”

“I know,” I said, giving her a quizzical look. “We met yesterday.”

Her eyes glinted and a smirk formed at the corner of her mouth. “I vomited on the shuttle yesterday.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. This girl had obvious memory and …
conversational
issues, and I had stuff to think about. So I started walking faster.

“Yes. But I feel better today.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, staring straight ahead.

“Are you excited about class?”

Man. Would this girl never shut up? I kept walking.

“I’m pretty jazzed. I bet we get to learn a bevy of fascinating space facts.”

I looked at her like “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Plus,” she said, leaning her pale face toward mine and grabbing my arm to stop me, “I can tell you what the blue light is. And the humming. I know all about the humming.”

I stared at
Larc, gaping. How did she know about the blue light? And more importantly, how did she know that
I
knew about the blue light?

She smiled at me, flashing those teeth mottled with blue braces. I yanked my arm from her grip and kept walking. I wasn’t sure I wanted to delve into taboo subjects with this girl. I couldn’t tell if she was setting me up for some kind of practical joke or what. Kids were always causing me grief, and sometimes it seemed like the girls were the worst. At least with the boys, I
knew
when they wanted to come after me. But with girls, well, they were trickier. They’d smile at you kind of pretty and lure you in. Then
whap.
Someone would drop a grasshrinker in your pants and you’d spend the next three hours in the nurse’s office waiting to resize.

“Don’t you want to know what I know?” asked Larc in a singsong voice.

“No,” I growled, even though I was dying to find out what she knew.

“Fine,” she said, and walked ahead of me, her white ponytail bouncing from side to side.

I slumped my shoulders and grumbled to myself. Should I be nice to this girl? It didn’t
seem
like she wanted to be mean to me. But really, was it even that important for me to figure out what was in the hallway? It was probably something stupid. But if it was something stupid, why did it have that crazy net? And why did I get into so much trouble?

I quickened my pace to catch up to Larc. Without looking her straight in the face, I saw with a sideways glance that she was smirking.

“Okay,” I said in a low voice, with a little more attitude than I intended, “what about the blue light and the humming and—”

She cut me off with an excited whisper. “It’s an escape pod.”

I frowned. “So? There’s an escape pod right by my apartment. There’s nothing exciting about that.”

“No, dummy, it’s a special escape pod, with faster thrusters
and
search-and-rescue capabilities.”

My shoulder rose in a kind of half shrug and I said, “I still don’t get it. If it’s an escape pod, it shouldn’t be a
secret. People have to know where the escape pods are, duh. Plus, the pod by my apartment doesn’t have a blue glow and it doesn’t make any noise. I think you’re just making this up.”

She grinned and hoisted her backpack farther up on her shoulder. “Oh, I’m not making it up.”

“How do you even know that I was over there?”

“I saw you and your dad coming out of the hallway.” She laughed. “Boy, he looked furious.”

“You saw us?” I asked. “But Dad looked all around…. There was no one within a mile of us.”

“He didn’t look up, did he? I was coming back from the cafeteria with some doughnuts for my dad when I saw you guys down in the lobby. I would have brought some doughnuts back for my mom, too, but I don’t have a mom. Maybe sometime I can bring doughnuts to you and your dad. And your mom.”

I had to figure this girl out. She wasn’t like any girl I’d ever met before. I couldn’t decide if she was kidding me or if she was genuinely trying to be helpful. She had this spark in her eye like she was totally in control of the situation (and yet totally joking around at the same time). And she acted like we’d been best friends for years. I didn’t even know anything about her!

“Anyway, the escape pod by your apartment doesn’t run on plasma propulsion,” she said, stopping just outside the classroom door.

“What?”

“Plasma propulsion. That’s why the hidden pod glows blue and makes a humming noise. It’s the magnets. That’s also why the pod is so far down a hallway. It has to be away from the captain’s controls or the magnets will interfere with all of the instruments.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I argued, remembering possibly the only thing I learned in astrophysics. “Plasma propulsion is what makes ships able to travel far out into the universe. An escape pod would never need that kind of power unless …” I trailed off.

“Unless it was going to be launched into—or from—deep space.”

“But the
Sojourner’s
pods are only meant to be short-range. That way if we have to escape for some reason, people won’t get lost and it’ll be easier to rescue everyone. That’s what my mom said, at least.”

Larc raised her eyebrows in a way that made my stomach drop. Then she opened the classroom door. There were already several kids sitting at desks and rustling their stuff.

“Who
are
you?” I asked as she chose a desk in the front of the classroom.

“I told you, my name is Larc.”

“Right. But where are you from? You’re not from Star City. I would have seen you in school. And how do you know all this stuff?” I sat down at the desk behind her.

She turned in her seat and said, “One: I
am
from Star City. I was, uh, homeschooled by my nanny.”

“Your
nanny?”
I said.

“Natalie Jones. The nicest lady on the planet.”

“Hang on. Isn’t Natalie Jones the name of the park out by the Project airfield? It is. Natalie Jones Park. I air-board at Jones Park all the time.”

Larc blinked a couple of times and acted like she hadn’t heard me. “And two: I
know
stuff because my dad works on a lot of special projects. He’s the most skilled astrorobotics employee the Project has.” She drew circles on my desk with her finger. “Plus, I’m a good listener. People tend to not notice when I’m in a room, and, well, they chat.”

“Not notice you? Yeah, right.” I didn’t mean it as a compliment. This was the freakiest girl—person, really—I had ever met. She was probably two feet taller than me; her hair was crazy white, her skin almost translucent. And those blue braces … Plus the supposedly one-size-fits-all jumpsuit she wore was way too short. I could see the tops of her Project-issued socks and a blindingly white patch of skin on each of her legs.

I furrowed my brow and bent down to grab my handheld from my bag.

I froze.

At that moment I caught a whiff of something very familiar. Something I thought I’d never smell again: the
commingling of burnt coffee beans and sweet old-lady perfume.

I closed my eyes, hoping that I was just imagining things, until I heard …

“Sleeping, Mr. Stellar? Not a great way to start off your first day in class.”

My eyes shot open and so did my mouth. What was
Mrs. Halebopp
doing here?

“Your original teacher
was unable to make the trip,” Mrs. Halebopp said in her gravelly voice. “I was called in at the last minute. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Mrs. Halebopp.” She paused and ran her fat gray tongue over her lips. “I’ll be your teacher for the duration of this trip.” She shot me a smirk.

I thought I was going to faint. Or throw up. Or throw up and then faint. Up until that moment the only thing this trip had going for it was that I never had to find myself in Mrs. H’s clutches ever again. But here she was, leaning over my desk, her snarled beehive blocking out the light, just like she’d been doing every school day all year.

“I hope you’ve been working on your speech, Mike.”

I gripped my desk and looked into her bottomless eyes. “Well, uh, to be honest, I …”

“Didn’t think you were going to have to finish it after all, did you?” She cackled. “Well, look on the bright side. It’s going to be a new assignment for this class, which means you’ll have a leg up. Of course, I’ll grade you harder because you’ve had more time for research, and I’ll expect your speech to be longer—and given earlier—than everyone else’s, but …” She trailed off.

I didn’t know what to say. I closed my eyes and tried to wish her away.

Mrs. Halebopp swept herself over to the holoboard hanging in the front of the classroom, leaving me in a wake of burnt coffee stench. She began writing the rules for the assignment, which by this time I had memorized.

Larc turned around in her seat and whispered, “I think she likes you.”

I stared at my handheld, not wanting to get caught whispering.

“Seriously,” said Larc, braces glinting. “I’ve never seen her take such a liking to—”

“What do you mean you’ve ‘never seen her’?” I blurted out in a fierce whisper. “You were homeschooled, remember?”

Larc sucked in her bottom lip, smiling. She turned
back around in her seat. And before I could even try to figure out what Larc was hinting at, Mrs. Halebopp winked and motioned for her to go to the big teacher’s desk at the front of the room.

I had never, ever seen Mrs. Halebopp wink. The sight frightened and captivated me. I thought I could actually hear rusty creaking coming from her eyelid.

Larc flounced out of her seat. I stared after her in disbelief. She and Mrs. H held a short private conversation and then Larc returned to her seat. I tapped her on the shoulder.

“What was that all about?” I whispered.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she singsonged over her shoulder.

I glanced up at Mrs. H hulking behind her desk. Seeing that she was shuffling some papers and not looking at the class, I leaned forward and whispered to Larc. “Do you know her or something?”

Without turning around, Larc just shrugged. Then Mrs. H was up, passing some kind of awful pop quiz to the class.

“Though I have all of your records, I’d like to see how you do on this quiz. It will help me understand what level I should begin teaching on. Beginner …” And here she looked squarely at me. “Or advanced.” She looked at Larc with a smile. “Write out a timeline
of Venus Aldrin’s greatest accomplishments. You have ten minutes.”