The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (20 page)

“If you want, you can stay there and I'll go to Princeton for you,” I said.

“You'd have to wear a wig.”

“Small sacrifice.”

She looked down at her arms.

“All my scratches are really going to screw up our prom pictures.”

“I'll appreciate those pictures no matter what they look like, if they mean we got back.”

Behind us, Cad began humming and mucking around on a guitar again, but as his humming turned into words, I could hear that this time the song had nothing to do with Sophie. It was a simple melody—a few chords, a little bit of whistling here and there—the subject of which was looking for a home when you no longer feel like you belong where you grew up.
The house was there, but home was somewhere else…. My life was there, but I wasn't myself….

We listened to him finish the song, whistling and humming for the outro.

“What'
s that one called?” I said.

“ ‘Home,' ” he said. “It's an old one.”

“It's great,” I said.

Cad took his hand off the strings. “I don't need you ridiculing my songwriting any more tonight.”

“I wasn't kidding. It's a great song.”

Cad tapped the body of the guitar, examining my face to determine if I was telling the truth. “I've always thought it might be good. Skark hates it.”

“Skark is a drunk,” said Sophie.

Cad gave us a small smile.

“That might be the first time in a decade somebody has told me one of my songs is good,” he said. “Groupies excluded, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I guess I'll work on it a little more. I'll keep it down. Thanks, guys.” He went back to strumming the melody, and we went back to looking out the window.

Sophie examined my face.

“What?” I said.

“I'm sorry, but I still can't believe you only applied to one school,” said Sophie. “I kept thinking about it when I was hiding in the mall.”

“
That's
what you were thinking about?”

“It popped into my head a few times,” she said.

I stared out at a cloud of wintergreen-gum-colored space dust in the distance, which to my eyes looked like it was
forming a distinct letter
L. Loser.
Even the universe was mocking my collegiate decisions.

“What else did you think about out there?” I said.

She paused for a moment.

“I thought about how bananas are technically classified as herbs.”

Obscure facts. I loved her so much.

“Bananas are herbs?”

“Banana trees aren't actually trees. They're made up of a center stem with a bunch of leaves protecting it all over the place, which means that the bananas are essentially just the top of the stalk popping out. Ergo, the fruit is technically an herb.”

“If you tell me that parsley is a meat, I don't think my mind will ever recover.”

“Parsley's not a meat. But giraffes sleep less than an hour a day.”

“You're kidding me.”

“No joke. I was glad to be able to zone out and think about weird stuff at the enclosure. I don't know what I would have done if I had had to actually acknowledge my situation.”

“I'm so glad you're here,” I said.

Sophie put her arm around me and gave me a hug.

“I hope you get into Princeton,” she said. “If you came to outer space for me, it means I know I could call you to save me if I ever got drunk at a party or something.”

“I'll save you no matter where you are,” I said.

“I know you'll get in,” she said.

It was nice of her to say so, but I knew I was doomed. It had crossed my mind that there must be a number of good universities up in space—somebody had to be teaching youthful extraterrestrials how to engineer all these advanced technologies. Maybe I could stay and get my education that way. However, I rejected that idea when I realized whatever degree I managed to earn probably wouldn't be accepted back on Earth, and after having gone four years without a social life in Gordo, showing up on campus in a strange galaxy would have likely just made me a bizarro foreign exchange student with even fewer opportunities to fit in.

I leaned against Sophie and she embraced me. She helped me put the future out of my mind. I wished I could just major in her.

The Hyperbolic Back Roads that Skark had been dreading so much weren't all that bad, to be honest. In fact, they reminded me of a lazy river ride at a water park. An artery of heavenly bodies lined the sky in front of the bus—red giants and yellow dwarfs and a few basic water-covered blue planets that reminded me of home. The orbs' proximity to each other created a kind of natural gravitational slipstream, which pulled in the Interstellar Libertine as soon as the bus entered the orbit of its first sun.

We rode the orbit until we were plucked out of space by the overlapping gravitational pull of the
next
celestial object, which passed us along to the next, and so forth. Driver had his hands
on the wheel to steady the bus, but his foot wasn't on the accelerator. There was nothing to do but go with the flow. It was nice to be moving at a different speed, though Skark was pacing up and down the center of the bus, looking nauseated from this undulating mode of travel.

“Are you
sure
there's no way to get us through this part of the trip faster?” said Skark. “I'm sick, this is
boring
, and I'm tired of looking at these stowaways.”

“If I hit the gas, all we would do is break out of the orbit and have to find our way back in,” said Driver. “Gravity is out of whack in this part of space, so we can't skip it. Breathe. When we get to the other side, we'll be almost there.”

“Never tell me to breathe,” said Skark. “I allow air to come into me when I choose.”

Skark paced some more, giving me an angry stare every time he walked past. Eventually I got tired of it, so I stopped looking up, prompting him to smack me on the back of the head. He didn't like being ignored.

The final star in the Hyperbolic Back Roads was the largest and brightest. I held a cushion from the couch in front of my face to protect my eyes, causing Skark to scream at me to stop touching his furniture. The star dragged us around its orbit until Driver gently guided the wheel to the left, popping us out into open space.

By the time we were through, Skark was green. His motion sickness must have been terrible, because he wasn't even consuming his Spine Wine.

On the other side of the Hyperbolic Back Roads, we saw a strange comet. At first we thought it was just another point of light hanging in the blackness, hurtling past us. It was always peaceful to watch the comets wafting past—they reminded me of the outer space equivalent of birds, long tails streaming behind them, wandering from their places of birth but planning to return someday.

Normally, Driver was excellent at avoiding the comets, so what happened with
this
particular comet couldn't be considered his fault. Initially the rock was a far-off speck, silhouetted against a swirling purple-and-white nebula. It was streaming toward us, but it wasn't going faster than any other comet we had seen, and Driver didn't even look at it twice as he pulled back on the controls, lifting the bus to safety.

He peered into the back of the bus, where I was eating an egg roll I had found in a Styrofoam to-go container. I was hungry again.

“Hey, back there,” said Driver. “Good-sized glower should be passing underneath us in a couple of minutes, in case you want to take a look. I don't know how many comets you've seen up close, Sophie, but it's worth checking out.”

“I wouldn't like to see
any
comets up close,” said Sophie. “I'm done with danger.”

“It's coming right past,” said Driver. “But don't worry, I'll keep us comfortable.”

Sophie glanced out the window, then quickly pulled back, startled. She yelled to the front of the bus.

“
I thought you said that the comet was going to be beneath us,” she said.

“It is.”

“It's changing directions,” she said.

“Impossible,” said Driver. “Comets don't change trajectory unless they hit a gravitational field or some other object. They're just chunks of burning ice…
whoa.
”

Driver yanked the wheel just as I was about to pop the nub of my egg roll into my mouth. It slipped from my hand and hit the floor, gathering dust as it tumbled to a stop. I decided not to try to eat it again.

“What's going
on
up there?” yelled Skark.

“Sophie's right,” said Driver. “Somehow this thing changed its course and is heading toward us. Hold on, I'm going to try something else.”

I looked out the window and saw that the comet was
close.
Driver was maneuvering out of the way when it abruptly dropped, cutting off our path. Driver jerked the bus to the side, but again, the comet was there, coming at us at full speed. Each time it moved, streams of superheated air shot out of various spots all over its surface, and as we got nearer, I could see that it looked like it was made of metal rather than ice.

“It's not a comet, it's a
ship
,” said Driver. “I'm going to back us up.”

But there was no point. Before Driver could put the bus in reverse, the comet had zipped underneath us and was trembling, as if it was staring angrily at the Interstellar Libertine.

“What's it doing?” said Sophie.

“It looks like it's getting ready for something,” said Cad.

Hooks shot out of the comet and lodged in the side of the bus.

“That was
totally
unnecessary,” said Skark. “They could have contacted us without damaging the exterior. Do they have any
idea
how much it costs to have this thing detailed?”

“At least the hooks didn't break through the hull,” said Cad.

There was a drilling sound outside the bus.

“I think the hooks are breaking through the hull,” said Sophie.

A glittering, angry-looking obelisk punctured the wall. Its tip folded back on itself, sealing the hole while at the same time leaving a tubelike protrusion at its end. Liquid began sputtering from the tube and pooling on the floor of the bus. The dribble became a spray that drenched the walls, furniture, and ceiling, splattering the band and slathering the inside of the bus.

“What is this stuff?” I yelled, covering my mouth with my hand so I didn't swallow any of the goo. It stuck to my skin, cold and gelatinous.

“It's
awful
,” said Sophie, squinting her eyes against the torrent. “Make it
stop.
”

“Everybody
get away
from the tube,” said Driver, trying to clear the glop out of his eyes.

“Does this
stain
?” said Skark. “This
better not
stain my couch. I feel like it's going to stain.”

The goo was solidifying on our arms and legs, making it
impossible to get away, not that there would have been any place to run even if we could have moved.

I watched the goo turn Driver into a petrified lump as he tried to take shelter underneath the steering wheel. It glued Cad to his bed as he tried to shield himself with a blanket. It froze Walter as he was jamming himself beneath the kitchen sink.

Sophie was closest to the tube when it started spraying, which meant she was hit the worst, rapidly mummified by thick layers of the goo. I could no longer see her face, but I could hear her struggling beneath the heavy cover.
“Mmmmmff.”

By the time the spray stopped, one of my eyes was somehow still mostly uncovered, with just a clearish coating on it that was turning my vision purple, like I was all of a sudden looking at the world through Prince's eyes. The Interstellar Libertine started to shake, and for a moment I thought that we were going to be towed toward the comet.

Nope.

The drill sent out thin blades that cut a jagged rectangle in the side of the bus. The panel fell out of the wall and drifted into nothingness, and—frozen like statues—everybody aboard tumbled outside.

Which was how I ended up floating in space.

Weightlessness.

I tried to yell, but the goo was sticking my mouth shut; I tried to breathe, but it was clogging my nose.

The eighteen years of my life played in front of me, and it was nothing but an endless series of homework assignments interspersed with scenes of sexual and songwriting frustration. I wish I could say that having been given a second chance to prepare for my own death, I thought about my parents and my family and approached my end with dignity, but this wasn't the case—I thought about myself, cursing creation for allowing me to die a virgin, and sniveled and whimpered inside my mind.

But after a few minutes, I realized something—I had been blubbering and mourning my passing, but I
wasn't dead.
The coat of goop was silencing me and restricting my movements, but it was also saving my life. In addition to protecting me from the subzero temperatures of space, it seemed to be
breathing
for me; I could feel it forcing oxygen through my skin into my blood. It was an odd sensation, not needing my lungs anymore.

When I realized I wasn't going to die—at least not immediately—I started to relax, and the floating became soothing. I looked around. Nothing else to do. I saw stars slowly rotating below my feet, and above my head I saw red blankets of cosmic debris.

My brain was having difficulty wrapping itself around the vastness of space, and the incomprehensible distances between where I was drifting and the wonders that I was observing. The thought popped into my head that all of creation looked a bit like a computer screen saver from the early nineties, which was a manageable concept that allowed me to temporarily get a grip on myself.