Life on Mars

  I shook my head. “The d-door wasn’t cl-closed,” I stammered.

  “So you just invited yourself in. What have you been doing in here? What have you been messing with?”

  I backed up. “Nothing, s-sir. I’ve just … you have an official flight suit, and … moon rocks, and … I really … you … I wish I had my other shoe.”

  He took two more steps toward me. Soon he would be towering over me and I would be pressed up against the flight suit—my idea of a dream come true in any other situation—and I wouldn’t be able to get away. Just when I’d finally found something to like about Mr. Death he’d go and ruin it by eating my face. Figures. My luck always went that way.

  “Yes, I have an official flight suit. And it’s mine. Mine, you hear? Not open for grimy kids to go drooling all over. That’s why I keep it locked up. That’s why I didn’t want you in here.” He was waving that cigar around so much it practically nicked my nose, and I was glad it wasn’t lit. Who smoked stinky cigars first thing in the morning, anyway? “Didn’t I make it clear that I didn’t want you in here? Isn’t it enough that I let you stay in my house? Don’t your parents teach you to obey your elders?”

  I was nodding and shaking my head so much I was beginning to get dizzy. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, I mean, no, sir. I don’t know, sir, I’m getting confused, sir.

  He walked in a circle in the center of the room, ignoring my answers anyway. “I moved into this house for some privacy. I moved here to be alone. Alone, you get it?” He pointed at me with his cigar and again I nodded. “I tell some mopey neighbor I’ll be an emergency backup, yeah, sure, whatever, and next thing I know there’s a girl begging at my doorstep, and now here you are. So I take you in and what do I get? I get a snoop, that’s what I get! A snooping snoop! In here putting your filthy hands all over my things. Reading my articles. Looking at my photos. This is not a museum. These things are not here for you, do you understand?”

  “I th-think so,” I stammered. “I’ll just … I think I hear my sister … someone needs to feed Comet.…”

  I bent to pick up my duffel and realized a moment too late that I had scooted right up against the flight suit. As I bent, my backside plowed right into it. I watched in horror as the mannequin tipped and swiveled on its round base.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Watch it,” Mr. Death said, only everything suddenly went slow motion, and it sounded more like “Waaatccchhh iiittt.”

  I lunged forward to stop the swiveling, but my timing was off. My palm punched the flight suit chest, sending the mannequin careening off to one side, where it collided on its way down with a pedestal that held a particularly intricate-looking model rocket. The pedestal fell, sending the rocket flying across the room. It crashed into a map of the solar system, ripping a long hole in the paper, and then clattered onto a very important-looking metallic thing with Russian writing all over it. The rocket knocked the metallic thing onto the floor, and bounced to the side, sending a crack snaking down a glass case that housed a moon rock.

  In the movies, whenever something terrifying is happening in slow motion, the kid always has time to spread out a field of banana peels and marbles, balance some half-full paint cans on the tops of the doors, and rig a pillow to explode, blinding the bad guy with feathers so the kid can make a getaway.

  In real life, you just stand there and hope you don’t poop your pants.

  The swiveling, crashing, flying, and knocking down of things seemed to take forever to finish. And then when it did, there was a moment of silence, just the whir of a motorized spinning galaxy in the corner, and both Mr. Death and I looked helplessly at the mess I’d just made.

  And then he exploded. That part was in real time.

  “What the …? How in the world …?” He dropped his cigar in a nearby ashtray and stormed to the broken case. “Don’t! Touch! Anything! Else!” he yelled.

  I pulled my duffel tight against my chest. “I won’t. I didn’t. I mean, I did, but I didn’t mean to. I was trying to … Now I lay me down to sleep …”

  And then a miracle happened. There was a knock on the door, and then Mom’s voice floated in from the living room. “Knock-knock,” she called. “Hello? Arty?”

  Mr. Death grunted and left the room. I followed, pushing past him and wrapping myself around her waist.

  She patted the back of my head. “Oh, goodness,” she said. She held out her hand. “I’m Amy, Arty’s mom. Thank you so much, Mr.…?”

  Death, I almost supplied, but thought better of it.

  He grunted again, not answering her question, shook her hand, and then sat down in his recliner.

  She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Thank you for taking Arty in. We’re so sorry to put you out. We stayed the whole night at the airport so we could get on the first flight out this morning. I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”

  “He’s nosy,” Mr. Death grumbled. “And clumsy.”

  “Oh.” She glanced at me. “Well, I hope he used his manners,” she said meekly.

  “I’m not exactly high society,” Mr. Death said. Mom looked even more flustered, her fingers fidgeting around her necklace.

  “Come on, Arty,” Mom said. “We should get you home.”

  “And I’m not a babysitter, either, so I hope this doesn’t become a habit,” Mr. Death said.

  “Of course it won’t,” she said, frowning, and then turned to me. “Okay, let’s go home, let Mr.… um … let him have some peace. Thank you again,” she said over her shoulder as we headed to the bright patch that was the front door. “It was very kind of you to let Arty stay with you.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Mr. Death called out. Mom shut the door.

  “Well,” she said huffily as we walked across the yard. I was leading the way, just happy to be free, celebrating Comet-style. “He certainly doesn’t have many manners to speak of, does he?” I ran a circle around her. “He was actually quite rude.” I dropped to the ground and rolled. “I hope he wasn’t that mean to you the whole night, Arty.” I hopped in place a few times. Mom stopped and waited for me to catch up. She held my face between her hands and looked into my eyes. “Arcturus, look at me. I feel so terrible about having to leave you there. I had no idea he was so grumpy. Are you okay? Do you forgive me?”

  And looking at poor Mom like that, her eyes droopy and tired, I felt a little sorry for her. I was free now—did it really matter anymore how horrible my night with Mr. Death had been?

  “It was okay, Mom.” (Lie.) “It was actually kind of fun.” (Super lie.) “He’s got an official flight suit in there. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life!” (Truth.)

  Mom let out a sigh of relief, let go of my face, and kept walking. “Wow, a space suit? That must have been exciting. Maybe he’ll let you see it again sometime.”

  “I hope so,” I mumbled. As much as I hated to admit it, that was … a super truth.

  15

  Tripp in Opposition

  Mom felt so bad about abandoning me with Mr. Death, she was doing practically anything I wanted. Except canceling the move to Vegas. Believe me, I tried. So instead, the next night I asked Tripp over for a sleepover.

  Mom doesn’t let me have Tripp over for sleepovers very often, because this is how they usually go:

  5:00 p.m.: Tripp arrives.

  5:19 p.m.: Dad has to find his hammer to fix something Tripp broke.

  6:00 p.m.: Dinnertime, during which Tripp devours everything in sight while simultaneously ruining everyone else’s appetites by talking about something totally not dinner appropriate, like foot fungus or the longest snot he ever sneezed out or how good Heave is at turning his eyelids inside out.

  6:30–9:00 p.m.: Dad. Hammer. Various places around the house.

  9:00 p.m.–dawn: Mom repeatedly comes into my room to tell Tripp to stop talking/stop bouncing a ball against the wall/stop jumping on the bed/stop making that noise/stop … just stop.

  So normally I don’t even bother to a
sk, because I kind of feel sorry for my parents when Tripp is around. He seems to be an awful lot of work. But I was dying to tell him about my night in the Death Lair.

  He surprised me in my bedroom, where I was getting a head start on an epic fort.

  “Hey,” he said, hanging his head upside down over the fort entrance.

  “I didn’t hear you fall,” I said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?”

  He shook his head.

  “You made it all the way up my stairs and into my room without falling?”

  He nodded, grinning.

  “Are you … okay?”

  “I’m great!” he said. He tossed his sleeping bag onto my desk chair and crawled into the fort with me. “So what’s the big story?”

  “I had to spend the night with the zombie.”

  Tripp’s mouth dropped open. “You mean …?” He pointed over his shoulder toward Mr. Death’s house. I nodded. “And …?”

  So I told him all about my night at Mr. Death’s house, from Comet eating my shoe until Mom rescuing me. I told him about the space room and the way Mr. Death had flipped his lid when I’d messed it up. Tripp hung on to every word.

  “You think he’s gonna come after you? Like, for revenge? Turn you into one of them?” He cocked his head to one side and rolled his eyes upward, letting his tongue loll out while he groaned, zombielike.

  “Of course not.” Actually, I kind of did, just a little bit. In fact, it was pretty much all I’d thought about since it happened. “Do you?”

  “Nah, zombies aren’t revenge seekers. They just go after the smell of fresh face.” He lapsed back into his zombie pose and groaned louder. “Faaace! Neeed faaace!”

  I threw a pillow at him. “Cut it out, it’s not funny!”

  “Faaace!”

  I bounced a stuffed bear off his forehead. “This is very serious, Tripp. He lives between us, you know. He’s your next-door neighbor, too.”

  “Yeah, but nobody wants to come to our house. My mom calls us ‘neighbor repellant.’ Yummy faaace!”

  He made a move to grab my shoulders, his teeth bared, and in jumping back I knocked down the blanket that had been my fort wall. “That’s it!” I yelled, and launched at him.

  We wrestled for a while, until Mom burst into my room, looking panicked, holding Dad’s hammer. “What’s broken?” she asked.

  We sat up, our faces flushed and sweaty, and gazed around the room.

  “Nothing,” we both said in surprise.

  After dinner, we waited for the sun to go down and then took CICM outside. Tripp ate a Popsicle while I flashed the lights toward Mars, the buzz of the cicadas in the trees rising and falling around us.

  “So where were you last night?” I asked. “When I was at Mr. Death’s house.”

  “Nowhere,” Tripp said casually.

  “You weren’t home. Priya checked.”

  “Oh, that. I was out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I forget.”

  “You forget where you were? How does someone just forget where they were one day ago?”

  He took a big bite of Popsicle. “I don’t know, I just forgot.”

  This made no sense. This was strange behavior, even for Tripp, who was strange enough to begin with. “What are you hiding?”

  He slid the last of his Popsicle into his mouth and fumbled the stick off the eaves. Comet caught it in the air and ate it in two chomps. “Did you see that?” he asked. “That dog is awesome! You should put him in the circus!”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “And now you’re evading.”

  “I’m not evading anything. I’m just enjoying my Popsicle while taking in nature.” He gestured toward the woods and then jumped. “Dude! Look!” He pointed to the woods again.

  At first I didn’t see it. “You’re just trying to change the subject,” I said, but no sooner had the words left my mouth than it all came into focus.

  The woods were staring back at me. Slowly, with shaking hands, I turned my flashlight toward a line of bushes. Two eyes glinted back at me from within a black hoodie, perfectly still and surrounded by vegetation at the edge of the trees. Mr. Death’s cheeks rose with a slow grin when I lit up his face. Quickly, I clicked the flashlight off, my heart pounding.

  “Is that …?” Tripp whispered.

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “He’s watching us,” Tripp whispered. “Why is he watching us?”

  “He’s not,” I said. “He’s just … setting traps. Rabbit traps.”

  Tripp turned to me. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “He’s planning his next meal is what he’s doing. He’s scoping out the best way to get up here and get us while we’re sleeping. Does this window have a lock?”

  Suddenly we both became very interested in window craftsmanship. We climbed inside and inspected the locks at the top of my window, making sure they were secure. When we finally decided they could probably mostly keep out a zombie, Tripp went over to lay out his sleeping bag.

  I clicked the flashlight back on and, trembling, shone it back into the woods.

  Mr. Death was gone.

  So was any chance Tripp and I would sleep that night.

  Where was Mom with her hammer when I needed her?

  16

  Official Mission: Bread and Jam

  When it comes to politeness, moms can never be trusted. My mom, in particular, was the politeness queen. She believed in all kinds of torture, like sending thank-you notes and giving the neighbors plates of cookies that you totally could have eaten yourself and bringing gushy gifts to your teachers at the end of every school year.

  So when she handed me a basket full of freshly baked bread and some jars of jam, I knew something polite was about to happen, and I was going to be the victim.

  “You need to take this next door,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “To Mr. Monecki? Why?”

  She brushed flour off her shirt. “No, the other guy. The one who took you in.”

  “I just spent the night there. It’s not like I was an orphan or anything.”

  She gave me That Look. The one where she raises her eyebrows and dips her chin and which would work really great on a cop show where she was a crooked cop who was about to punch you square in the middle of your forehead. “It’s the polite thing to do, mister,” she said.

  I tried to hand the basket back to her. “But why don’t you take it?”

  “Because you’re the one who stayed there, and it’s good for you to learn to be polite, even when you don’t want to be.” She pushed the basket toward me.

  “But he’s mean. You said so yourself.”

  “He’s not going to hurt you. And maybe if you’re nice to him, he’ll be nice back.” She gave the basket another push and gave me another Don’t-Test-the-Crooked-Fuzz look. “Honestly, Arty, it’s some bread and jam. Just hand it to him, tell him thank you, and come back.”

  I tried on the pouty face that used to work when I was four. Like everything else that used to be adorable but gets a lot less cute when you’re no longer four, it didn’t work.

  “If you don’t come back in five minutes, I’ll rescue you,” she said. “I promise.”

  I sighed—dramatically—and headed to the house of doom next door, feeling like Little Red Riding Hood about to meet the wolf.

  I knocked on Mr. Death’s door and waited. And waited. And waited some more. But just when I thought I’d gotten really lucky and would get to just leave the basket on the porch, the door opened.

  “What do you want?” Mr. Death said. “Come to destroy more of my stuff?”

  At first I was frozen. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what I wanted. But then, thankfully, my body moved all on its own, moving the basket upward. Mr. Death and I both watched it, as if it were floating magically between us.

  “What’s this?” Mr. Death asked.

  “
Bread,” I said. “Jam. Mom. Thank you.” Not the most sense I’ve ever made—a little cave-mannish—but definitely better than I had been doing. Come to think of it, I sounded a lot like the Bacteria.

  “I see,” he said, and reached out a gnarled hand to take the basket from me. “Well, I hope she’s not expecting anything back from me.”

  “No, sir,” I said, and started off the porch.

  I was halfway to the hedge that separated our yards when he called out. “Hey, kid!” I turned. “Perseids meteor shower peaks tonight. You should look northeast after midnight. And turn off that blasted flashlight. You’ll see more.”

  A meteor shower. Otherwise known as one of my favorite things of all time. If you stretched out on your back under a meteor shower, every time you saw one, it felt like space was reaching out to you.

  In my worry about moving and what Tripp was up to and trying to survive living next door to Mr. Death, I had completely forgotten about the Perseids shower. Mr. Death had saved me from missing it.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  But he had already shut the door.

  The basket was still on his porch, but the bread and jam were gone.

  17

  The Surprisius Meteor Shower

  I watched the shower in my backyard, Comet lying next to me in the grass.

  About an hour after I got out there, Mr. Death came outside in his black hoodie and eased down onto the grass in his backyard, too.

  When Mom woke me up a few hours later and told me to go inside, Mr. Death was gone. But for a while we had been under the same sky, enjoying it exactly alike.

  And I still had a face.

  The next day I left a note on Mr. Death’s porch:

  Two weeks. Neptune in opposition.

  Tiny blue dot, but best time to see it.

  Mom had her way of saying thank you; I had mine.

  18

  Astro or Naut?