Life on Mars

  Cassi stood abruptly, her ponytail swinging forward over the top of her head and lying across her angry eyebrows like an animal. “Fine. I’ll do your stupid dishes,” she grumbled.

  There was once a time when Cassiopeia had her head in the clouds just as much as I did. We went to space camp together, we memorized the planetarium show together, we named our bikes “Spirit” and “Opportunity” after Mars rovers, and yes, she even helped me get CICM up and running.

  But ever since getting on the overly pink and glittery cheer squad (all the members of which, I was sure, were named Brielle), Cassi had been on a mission to swear off anything and everything the Brielle Brigade thought was “uncool.” From what I could tell, the list consisted of:

  1) Parents

  2) Teachers

  3) Parents who are also teachers

  4) Getting your hair wet

  5) Siblings of any age

  6) Cartoons that feature superheroes with overly large leg muscles

  7) All other cartoons

  8) Going to a restroom alone

  9) Miscellaneous nerdiness, which, according to Cassi, included, “Math; science; or anything that had to do with stars, planets, space in general, space monsters, aliens, astronauts, rockets, or any of those geeky scientists who discovered stuff nobody cares about.”

  10) Socks that show

  So basically Cassi lived with the constant fear that someone would let it slip in front of the Brielle Brigade that she once believed, like me, that there could be life on Mars. And that she once won an award for creating a cotton-ball-and-plastic-tubing water filtration system as a prototype of what humans might use in a man-made ecosystem when we inhabit Mars. And, worst of all, that someone might discover that she was named after nerdy stars.

  And what kind of big brother would I be if I didn’t take full advantage of that fear? I hadn’t done the dishes, taken out the trash, or picked up one doggy package in the backyard in a year.

  Cassi stomped away from the table. “I wonder if Earth makes fun of Mars because Mars has no life,” she spat, taking our dishes and slamming them into the sink.

  I guessed that was supposed to be an insult because I was trying to communicate with said nonexistent life, but I actually thought it was a kind of clever joke, so I chuckled.

  Vega slapped her phone down on the table. It beeped again almost immediately. She rolled her eyes. “Duh, Cassi, it’s supposed to be, ‘If you were a planet, Earth would make fun of you because you have no life.’ ”

  Cassi was in no mood to be corrected. “Shut up, Vega,” she said, turning on the sink and dumping about half the bottle of dish detergent into the running water. “You know, Dad’s looking for a new job, and I heard him talking to Mom about us maybe having to move. How are you gonna make drooly kissy lips at Mitchell all the time if we don’t live in Liberty anymore? What if we move clear out of Missouri? What then?”

  Vega grunted and snatched up her phone. “Whatever, Cassiopeia,” she said, and in one swift motion shoved her chair back and whipped her body around to leave, her hair swishing behind her. If hair swishing were an Olympic sport, Vega would take home gold. She could swish her hair so hard it felt like a semi just drove past your face.

  “Ha-ha, Cassiopeia,” I said, pointing at Cassi. But Vega turned and glared at me. “Shut it, Armpit. If we move, what’ll happen to your nerd project?”

  “It’s a Clandestine Interplanetary Communication Module,” I corrected, my voice weak.

  Vega considered me for a moment, as if she were going to say something back. But her phone beeped (inside the Bacteria’s mind: No Hear Back Girl Push Phone Text), and she squeezed it in her palm. “Whatever,” she finally said, and walked out of the room.

  “I knew you were going to say that,” I called after her, but she ignored me. And it appeared that Cassi was also ignoring me, her back turned on me while she frantically scrubbed the dishes. So I sat at the table and chewed my thumbnail, thinking about … stuff.

  With Cassi you never could be sure if she was telling the truth or if she was just being dramatic. But if she was telling the truth about us possibly moving, it was bad news.

  I didn’t want to move. Liberty wasn’t the biggest town in the world, but it was my town. I loved that you could count cows in the fields if you drove the back way to school, and that you could walk to the square for the fall festival and ride the Octopus with friends you hadn’t planned to see there. I loved the college up on the hill and knowing as you drove into town and saw the brick building roosting above the city in the middle of campus, it meant you were almost home. I loved my school, and I loved it when you sometimes saw your teachers at the community pool or the grocery store. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, they always said hi, because that was the way Liberty worked.

  I was about to start seventh grade, which meant I successfully survived sixth grade. That might not sound like a big deal, but trust me—living through a week traversing the same hallways as Ben Green and Will Sanchez is such an accomplishment, I was planning to add it to my resume someday:

  Arcturus Betelgeuse Chambers,

  PhD, MD, JD, SD, PQRSWXYZ

  • Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Massachusetts

  Institute of Technology, and Clown College

  Summa cum laude, 700.0 GPA

  Voted Most Likely to Rule the Solar System

  • Creator of the Chambers Algorithm

  • Discoverer of Great Martian Ocean

  • Didn’t die by the sixth-grade lockers

  Once, a sixth grader named Bobby McDoon claimed to have spotted Ben and Will on an Animal Planet predator show chowing down on an antelope. His claim was later proven to be false, but for those of us who regularly tried to make it in one piece from the first-floor restrooms to the third-floor science hall, the story didn’t seem far-fetched at all.

  But Ben and Will were moving up to high school. Leaving middle school behind. Which meant my posse and I had just as good a chance as any to rule the school.

  Or at least to get something of an upper hand on some of the sixth graders on the Lego Robotics team. Until at least October, anyway.

  Not to mention, I had Tripp. And Priya. Moving away from them in seventh grade would be like walking out in the middle of the best movie ever. I would always wonder how it was supposed to end. Plus, Tripp had been borrowing money from me since we were five, and by my tally he owed me $12,366. And I would never get it if I moved away.

  And then, of course, there was the little matter of CICM. I’d established the eaves on the roof outside my bedroom as the official headquarters. My house was CICM-HQ, which was still way too many consonants in a row to put on a T-shirt, by the way.

  I knew that the eaves weren’t the only place to see Mars in July. But they were the best place. They were my place. At night, my neighborhood was still and quiet. The curve where the roof met the siding perfectly matched the curve of my back. All of the street lamps were on the other side of the house. And we had only woods behind us—no neighbors junking up visibility with flickering TVs. The eaves were the perfect place.

  Since I was in a funk, I went up to my bedroom and opened my closet.

  And there it was, right between my Einstein T-shirt and my life-sized Yoda cardboard cutout.

  CICM.

  I pulled it out, being very careful not to loosen the duct tape that held the mirror system together, and carried it across the room. I sat on my bed and gave it a once-over, just to be sure nothing tragic had happened to it in the closet since last night. Its mirrors were duct-taped together in a triad, sort of like mirrors in a fitting room—the kind where you totally can’t pay attention to the stupid khakis your mom is making you try on because you’re too busy trying to count how many yous in how many positions you can see.

  The mirrors sat on a platform. Fastened to the other end of the platform, about four inches away from the mirrors, was a flashlight, its button end facing out, its light end facing the mirrors, with
a magnifying glass strategically taped over its lens. But not just any flashlight; one of those fancy superbright ones they stock with the hard-core camping gear. I bought it with my Christmas money.

  Everything seemed secure, so I dragged CICM through the window and out onto the eaves. I positioned it in just the right spot, then sat back and got ready for another night of attempting to make history, and of thinking of a better name for CICM.

  (Kid Identifying the Solar System? Nope, there was no way I was sitting next to any girl in class with KISS on my shirt. Or worse, sitting next to Tripp with KISS on my shirt.)

  At first I sat next to CICM and just looked up at the stars. Draco and Hercules were visible. And low on the horizon, barely visible from my vantage point, was Scorpius, the scorpion that continues to chase Orion menacingly around the sky. (Seriously, Orion, just get a shoe or a rolled-up newspaper or something and smack that sucker!)

  After a few minutes of stargazing, I leaned forward, my thumb poised over the flashlight’s rubbery button, bending to make sure that the light was pointing toward the mirrors. My left hand hovered near the binoculars hanging around my neck. Maybe tonight would be the night. Tonight I would get a return flash from the red planet. Tonight I would—

  A movement caught my eye.

  Not from above but from the shadows below.

  At first I thought maybe Dad had let Comet out to do his “after-dinner business,” which was never good for me, because even though I was the human who fed him and gave him water every day of his life, Comet still barked at me like I was a burglar every time he caught me in CICM-HQ.

  But I didn’t hear any barking.

  Because it wasn’t Comet moving around down there. And, trust me, you couldn’t miss a dog like Comet. He was big and slobbery and brownish-yellow with droopy eyes and floppy ears and a tail that could double as a weapon when he got really excited—the kind of dog that could regularly eat nonfood things like Tupperware and deck screws and never get sick.

  Slowly, I leaned forward and squinted. A man dressed in a pair of black pants and a black hoodie was slinking between our house and the house next door, carrying a trash bag in one fist and a box under the other arm.

  I held my breath, freezing with my back up against the side of the house. Holy asteroid, a burglar!

  Kind of ironic that now that there was an actual burglar down there wandering around just waiting to be barked at, Comet was nowhere to be found.

  I watched as the dark figure picked his way past the trash cans pushed against the side of the house and began trekking toward the woods that went on forever behind our homes. He must have had some elaborate getaway plan involving swinging vines and tunnels and a helicopter with a rescue line.

  But just as the figure made it almost to the tree line, my foot involuntarily jerked forward and knocked into the flashlight, dislodging the magnifying glass from its tape and sending it thunking down the eaves. It landed with a clatter on the porch below.

  I winced and tried to push myself tighter against the wall of the house as the man froze in place. Maybe he wouldn’t notice. Maybe he wouldn’t notice. Maybe he … who was I kidding? Of course he was going to notice.

  He turned and looked up at me. That’s when I caught a glimpse of his face and nearly passed out. His eyes were sunken. He glared. And scowled. Scowled and glared, with a hint of murderous evil eye.

  I held my breath.

  I couldn’t move. My heart was beating in my throat and my knees were knocking together. I was certain that this was going to be the last time I ever looked at Mars, mostly because dead people didn’t tend to do a whole lot of anything. I couldn’t seem to rip my gaze away from the creepy dark figure even though he was hands-down the scariest thing I’d ever seen in my whole life (and that included the time I walked in on Vega putting some sort of hair-removing foam on her upper lip).

  And then he turned, pulled his hood farther up on his head, and disappeared into the woods.

  It was as if he’d never been there at all.

  But I knew he had.

  Because I could scrub my eyeballs with Cassi’s super scratchy loofah a thousand times, and I’d still never get that terrifying face out of my head.

  3

  The Face-Eating Zombie Constellation

  The next day, I answered the door to find Tripp crouched on my front porch rubbing his shin. I couldn’t count how many times I’d found Tripp this way—grimacing, massaging a knot on his head or sucking on a jammed finger or hopping around on one foot.

  Tripp had a real name. It’s just nobody could remember it anymore. It may have been Roberto. Or maybe I just imagined it being Roberto because Tripp had freckles and red hair and he didn’t look anything at all like a Roberto, so thinking of him as a Roberto was kind of funny.

  Actually, it may have been Jason.

  Or Todd.

  Once I asked his little brother Dodge what Tripp’s real name was and even he couldn’t remember. Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember what his real name was, either. But he did agree that thinking of Tripp as Roberto was funny.

  It didn’t matter what Tripp’s real name was, anyway. Everyone called him Tripp. As in:

  Tripped over the teacher’s desk on the first day of kindergarten and made her spill her coffee down the front of her dress.

  Tripped and fell into the pond surrounding Monkey Island at the zoo on our first-grade field trip, causing the zookeepers to have to shut down Monkey Island for two hours so they could calm down the freaked-out monkeys. Which actually kind of made him a rock star for all of first grade.

  Tripped on the first day of middle school and landed on a ketchup bottle, which squirted right into Amber Graham’s hair. He was officially no longer a rock star after that.

  Tripped and broke his wrist/thumb/ankle/tooth/collarbone/sliding glass door/aquarium/Grandma’s prized china plate collection.

  Tripp and I had been part of a best friend trio with Priya since preschool, when he fell into me and knocked me face-first into the sandpit. You would think being best friends with such a klutz would be embarrassing, but actually it wasn’t. I managed to look really graceful and cool while I was around Tripp. Like a gazelle leaping through the forest. Except that I’d found that comparing yourself to a gazelle leaping through things made people look at you funny and say that you’re weird, so I tried not to do it too often.

  “I hit that thing,” he said when I opened the door. He pointed toward a moving van at the house that separated his house from mine. The house had been empty for months, ever since the Feldmans moved out. “I didn’t see it and I walked right into it,” Tripp finished. He stood, tested out some weight on his foot by bouncing up and down a little.

  “You didn’t see that giant moving van,” I repeated.

  He shook his head. “Sprung right up on me.”

  I believed it. I’d seen surprising things spring up on Tripp many times before. Whole walls, for example.

  He bounced a few more times, then smiled. “I’m good,” he said. “Do I smell cookies?” He pushed past me and walked into the house, following his nose toward the kitchen. “So who’s moving in? Hope he’s our age and has a motorcycle.”

  The last thing on earth Tripp needed was a motorcycle.

  We rounded the corner into the kitchen, where Mom was sliding warm oatmeal cookies off a cookie sheet onto a cooling rack. Tripp made a beeline for them, stumbling over a stool leg and almost taking the entire cooling rack to the floor with him but catching himself just in time.

  “Hello, Tripp,” Mom said, completely unfazed. Mom was used to Tripp, too. I suppose once you see a kid take out the entire handrail on your basement steps, almost losing a few cookies seems like no big deal.

  “Hey, Other Mom,” Tripp answered, cramming a cookie into his mouth.

  “We’ve got new neighbors,” I said, picking up a cookie and sniffing it, then putting it back onto the cooling rack. “Have you met them?”

  Mom shook her head. “No
, but I think it’s just one man. Nobody your age.” She plopped more dough onto the cookie sheet in little mounds. If she didn’t stop, we were all going to turn into raisins. We would have to change our name to the Raisin Family. I would have to wear raisin pants, and every time I opened my mouth to talk, a raisin would fly out, and I’d just keep growing raisin-ier and raisin-ier until eventually I turned into a giant raisin monster and then Tripp would have to come after me, shooting an oatmeal cookie batter cannon at me from his motorcycle until I—growling, of course, because all giant monsters made of food growl—exploded and rained down tiny bits of raisins on the whole city.

  Actually, that sounded kind of awesome. I picked up the cookie again and ate it in two bites.

  “Does the new guy drive a motorcycle?” Tripp asked.

  “I didn’t see one,” Mom said. “I think he’s a bit older.”

  “Aw, man,” Tripp said, “just some boring old guy, then.”

  “How do you know he’s boring? You haven’t even met him yet,” Mom said.

  Tripp’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, you’re right. He could be mean and scary with gnarled-up fingernails and acid breath, and he could sleep in a coffin. That would be so cool!”

  “Well, now you’re making him sound like a vampire, Tripp,” Mom said.

  Immediately I thought about the guy I’d seen the night before. “Mom,” I said, “have you seen him? What does he look like?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t. I think your dad has. You can ask him later.”

  I didn’t need to ask Dad. Deep in my gut, I already knew. The burglar in the hoodie I’d seen last night … was moving in!

  I grabbed Tripp’s sleeve and pulled. “Come on, let’s go,” I said.

  “Bot om ayting,” he said around a mouthful of cookie.

  “You can eat it and walk at the same time.” I actually had my doubts about that. Tripp could do almost nothing and walk at the same time.

  “Where we going?” he asked when we got outside on the sidewalk.