Seventh Grade vs. the Galaxy Read online

  “No!” Ari shouts to Becka, squeezing between her and me. I’m glad that he’s coming to his senses—until I watch him clench his fists with the same rage. “Let me.”

  What?

  “Take it back,” he commands. “Tells us that you love her.”

  “What? No! Listen, they did something to you. You’ve got to snap out of it. We’ve got to refuel that engine. The Minister—”

  “The Minister!” Becka interrupts.

  “The Minister!” Ari repeats. “Long live the Minister! Long live the Minister!”

  He clicks the Pencil, still in his hand, and out pops a large picture in a fancy frame, with brush strokes like a museum oil painting. The picture is of an Elvidian woman—red eyes, white hair, sharp nails—holding a scepter made of lasers and sitting on a shimmering black throne. Now that’s an alien queen. It’s like she knows that Elvidians already kind of look like fairy tale monsters and has decided to embrace it. As soon as the image appears, Ari and Becka bow down to the floor.

  “Long live the Minister,” they say over and over. “Long live the Minister.”

  “Stop it!” I shout, staring down at Ari. “Please. I’m your friend, remember? Your best friend. You have to listen to me. We—we need to do something.”

  He slowly rises up, squinting at me with flared nostrils.

  “You’re right,” he says.

  But the way he says it . . . it’s all wrong.

  Becka gets up and stands next to him, the floating picture of the Minister hovering between their shoulders.

  “Yes,” she says. “We need to do something.”

  The two of them step closer to me.

  “Something needs to change,” Ari says. “If you don’t love her—if you don’t believe in her—we can’t be friends anymore.” He says it as if this is the most obvious thing in the world. “In fact, we’ve never really been friends.”

  “What? You can’t think that’s true.”

  “I think all sorts of things now,” he says. “Like how you’ve always made fun of me for liking Becka.” I look over at her, waiting for some reaction. But nothing. Not even a blink. They’re both total zombies. “For thinking that I’m not good enough for her.”

  “That’s not—”

  “No!” he barks.

  Becka sidesteps over to him and grabs his hand. They interlock their fingers.

  “No,” he says again. “You don’t believe in me. You think I’m a joke. But I’m not listening to you anymore. You’re not smarter than me. Not more important than me. No one likes you.”

  “Not me,” Becka volunteers.

  “And not me,” Ari says. “I’ve felt bad for you. Because your mom left and your dad went nuts being around you. But just because you’re a loser doesn’t mean we have to be friends. I deserve better. Better than you.”

  “Ari,” I choke. “Think about what you’re saying. Please.”

  He laughs and it gives me goosebumps. How am I going to fix this? I know he doesn’t mean it. But still . . . maybe he’s not totally off base. I’ve always made fun of him for his crush on Becka (which is ridiculous, isn’t it?). I’ve barely paid attention to him lately (but I had an excuse, didn’t I?). And Doctor Shrew . . . I mean . . . I was under a lot of stress and . . .

  No. That was unforgiveable.

  And maybe everything else was too.

  “Good-bye,” Ari says, wrapping his arm around Becka. “See ya never.”

  They leave the room and I’m left by myself, clueless and terrified and sad. I don’t even call out after them. I just stand there, staring into the red-eyed face of the Minister in the floating picture in front of me.

  What do I do?

  I close my eyes and reopen them a second later.

  ***

  “Jack,” Ari says. “Will you pass me that Pencil over there?”

  Wait. What?

  We’re back in the history room. The books are stacked neatly on the shelf, Becka is nowhere in sight, and the floating image of the Minister is gone.

  “Ari?” I ask.

  “That’s me,” he says. “Now will you please pass me that Pencil over there?”

  I look behind me and, sure enough, the Pencil is exactly where it was a few minutes ago. My mind is racing. What’s happening? Where did Becka go? Why are we here again? It’s like life just rewound itself.

  And it hits me.

  I thought that the brainwashing hadn’t worked on me. That I had come out of Orientation fine and that Ari and Becka had been reprogrammed. But I was wrong. I haven’t come out of Orientation at all.

  This is Orientation.

  It must be some sort of . . . simulation. Not real, just like the voice said. I’m a little relieved, and a little afraid, and really don’t want to experience all that again. But I don’t have a choice. And it goes almost as it did before, except this time, it ends with me on the floor, having been tripped by Orientation Becka, while Orientation Ari does a clumsy slow dance with the painting of the Minister. Becka’s cackling like a madwoman, Ari looks like he’s about to plant one on the canvas Minister, and I squeeze my eyes shut again. And again. And again.

  ***

  Sometimes it ends with me getting made fun of. Once or twice, they beat me up. There’s this one version where I poke a hole in the painting, which makes them both cry. And sometimes, when I’m too mentally exhausted to resist, I pretend to agree. Tell them what they want to hear. That the Minister is perfect. That I love her and believe in her. By the twentieth or thirtieth or fortieth time, I forget—for a few seconds—that this is a simulation and that I’m not talking to the real Ari and Becka. Maybe I should consider trusting and loving the Minister. If they like her so much, she can’t be all that bad, right?

  I blink.

  ***

  “Jack? Jack!”

  It’s Ari’s voice.

  “Come on, Jack, wake up.”

  That’s Becka.

  “You don’t want me to pour water on you again, do you?”

  My mind clears and I force my eyes open. We’re back on the bridge of the ship and I’m sitting in the captain’s chair, just as I was before Orientation. But are we really back? How do I know this isn’t just another trick?

  I look over at Ari, who seems absolutely exhausted. I can see it in his eyes.

  “You okay?” I ask him.

  He squints in my direction and bites the inside of his cheek.

  “Yeah,” he says, like he’s scared of me. I wonder what Orientation Jack was like. Not great, I assume. “You?”

  “Yeah, fine. What about you, Becka? You all right?”

  It’s weird. Toward the end, I could feel myself giving in. Getting lost. But now . . . now, it’s different. It’s like remembering a movie you saw a long time ago. A terrible movie. But a movie, not a memory.

  Becka stares at me without blinking—and tilts her head weirdly, straining her neck as far as it’ll bend.

  “Long live the Minister,” she says robotically. “Long live the Minister.”

  “No,” Ari whispers.

  She looks at him and smiles coldly.

  “I don’t understand,” Ari says, turning to me in a panic. “Why is she still like this? Are we . . . am I . . . still inside?”

  Oh no. If the brainwashing worked on her—if Becka still believes all the things it made her believe—I don’t know how we’ll ever win her back. And if we’re still inside Orientation . . . I’m not sure how much more I can take.

  “Long live the . . . gotcha!”

  Ari and I look at each other. “What?” I yell.

  Becka lets out a snort of laughter. “You should’ve seen your faces.”

  Ari’s hyperventilating. He slumps down into his chair.

  “That wasn’t funny,” I tell her. “How could you . . .”

  And that’s when I look at her. Really look. She’s smiling and her hands are resting confidently on her waist. But in and around her eyes, that telltale Becka strength is sapped. She’s as sh
aken as Ari and I. Maybe more. She isn’t messing with us for fun. She’s coping.

  “Let’s just focus,” I say. Yelling more at Becka doesn’t seem right. We need to put this behind us. It’s over. “What time is it?”

  I look at my reflection in the glass of the window in front of me and then back at Ari and Becka. I don’t look any different. Neither do they. We aren’t older. At least, I don’t think we are. But my Orientation lasted a long time. And I have a feeling that theirs did too.

  “How much time passed while we were in there?” I ask Ari.

  Ari looks down at his screen. “Four,” he mumbles.

  “Four what?” I ask. “Days?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Weeks?”

  Did it all happen in real time?

  He looks up at me, all the color gone from his face.

  “Four seconds,” he answers. “Just four seconds.”

  18

  Now that we’re through the Orientation bubble, it doesn’t take long to reach our destination: Elvid IX. (We humans may not be the most advanced species in the galaxy, but at least we give our planets decent names. “Earth,” “Mars,” and “Jupiter” have a lot more pizzazz than “Human Planet 3,” “Human Planet 4,” and “Human Planet 5,” right?)

  Ari brings us in close to the giant ringed planet. He’s not a half-bad pilot—but he’s not a full-good pilot either. That’s understandable, I guess, seeing as he’s thirteen and doesn’t really know how to fly a ship. We only do two unintentional barrel rolls as we head into orbit.

  “Meant to do that,” Ari lies both times, clenching his teeth.

  It’s a rule: Everything looks epic from space. But up close, Elvid IX is an eyesore. It’s one endless city from pole to pole, packed with sky-high, rounded smokestacks that spew pillars of soot into the air. And it’s overcrowded with swarms of ships doing the same thing from their exhaust lines. Pro tip: Don’t take any deep breaths on Elvid IX. No shallow breaths either. Don’t even hiccup.

  Becka’s scans tell her that the hazy atmosphere is toxic from all the pollution. And even though it’s daytime on this side of the planet, it’s dark as night down here. The air is so thick and dirty that it literally blots out the suns.

  “Welcome to Nine,” the Minister tells us. “Pride of the galaxy.”

  I yelp, Ari falls off his chair, and Becka snorts like a bull about to charge—until she looks down at her display.

  “Just a recording,” she explains. “It started downloading when we entered the atmosphere.”

  Just like in the floating picture from my Orientation, the Minister is holding her laser stick and sitting on her throne. She’s wearing a shiny black robe that looks cut from whatever the buildings are made out of on Elvid IV. And she does not look friendly.

  “Can you turn it off?” I ask.

  “Nope,” Becka answers. “It’s playing by itself.”

  “Whether you are visiting for business or leisure,” the Minister continues, “you have made the right choice. If Nine doesn’t have it, it doesn’t exist. Your ship’s data bank should now have access to a free public map—including of our planet and many of its most prominent landmarks—along with an Elvidian dictionary that should be fully compatible with all internal reading systems. While here, you absolutely must see the sights: the tallest statue in the galaxy—”

  “A thousand bucks says the statue’s of her,” Becka mutters.

  “—the largest shopping mall in existence, the Great Nine Zoo, and, of course, the First Elvidian Mines. And that’s just the beginning. But remember,” the Minister adds, leaning forward on her throne, “always be on the lookout for miscreants and disruptors. Not everyone in the galaxy is as civilized as the Elvidian people and those we dutifully serve. We need you to keep us safe and secure.”

  “Welcome to Nine,” she says again. “Long live the Minister.”

  The recording cuts off as we dip below the clouds.

  “Did she just ‘long live’ herself?” Becka says.

  I chuckle, mostly out of relief that the recording is over. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hear “Long live the Minister” again without reliving the memory of Orientation Ari and Orientation Becka. It’s not pleasant.

  “What now?” Ari asks as we fly around one rising column of smoke after another.

  I still don’t love the Minister. But she makes a good point.

  “You heard her. We absolutely must see the sights.”

  ***

  “I thought we were going to the zoo,” Ari grumbles.

  “I doubt there’s fuel at the zoo,” I point out. He touches us down inside the mall’s parking lot and finds an open space between a purple egg rocket and a ship that looks like a mechanical butterfly.

  The mall is shaped like a pyramid with a smokestack at the top. A smooth volcano, I guess, with flat sides and sharp edges. The pyramid’s surface is a giant billboard: every inch of it is covered with flashy advertisements, bright enough that you can see them through the smog from pretty far out. My digital contacts are doing a decent job translating the Elvidian words—at least for basic stuff like tables and jetpacks and ships.

  But eighty percent of the ads still make no sense to me. What’s “THERMOWAVE EXOLINING”? And why would anybody need “SEVEN FLOORS OF SHREDDED HAND TOWELS”? That last one’s got to be a mistranslation. Then again, maybe not. According to the map that auto-downloaded into the 118’s data bank, the mall is over seven hundred stories tall. So it might literally sell everything.

  “Where’s the fuel?” Ari asks.

  Becka forwarded a copy of the map to her ring and is now staring at a miniature rotating hologram of the mall in her palm.

  “Gimme a second,” she answers, turning the map halfway around and zooming in.

  Ari powers down the engines and a tunnel automatically extends from the walls of the parking garage. It moves toward one of the ship’s main entrances and seals itself against the door like a jetway attaching to a commercial spaceliner.

  “Got it,” Becka says a second later, holding out her hand. A small green blip is flashing toward the top of the pyramid. “There are two stores up on one of the high floors that both sell fuel for light speed engines.” She looks back down at her hand and swipes some more. “But forget that for a sec. There’s a lot of cool stuff in here.”

  “Like what?” Ari asks.

  “Later,” I interrupt, shaking my head. “First we get fuel. Then maybe we can explore.”

  “Don’t be boring,” Becka tells me, swiping from one level of the mall to another. “There’s a zero-g restaurant, a cloning store, an arcade—”

  “With alien video games?” Ari spurts out. “Like what?”

  Becka accesses the listing and scrolls through. “Um, a lot of flight simulators. Some sports stuff. Skee-ball, maybe? And there’s a time machine, I think.”

  “A what?!”

  She reads more. “A time machine. Can take you back up to a couple days. Looks like there are a lot of rules, though.”

  Ari turns to me. “We have to go.”

  “We have to do what we came here to do,” I tell him.

  I’m not being boring, right? I mean, we’re here for a reason. We can’t afford to be irresponsible.

  “Maybe we can go later,” I say.

  “It’s a time machine,” Ari explains, shaking with excitement. He grabs me by the collar of my T-shirt. “We can go earlier.”

  I don’t even know what that means. “We’ll go, okay? I promise. But first let’s find the fuel. Please. I need to know we can get home.”

  Ari sighs and lets go of me. “Fine. As long as you promise.”

  “I promise. And in the meantime, any ideas on how we can buy fuel without any money?”

  “We could ask nicely,” Ari says sincerely, as the three of us leave the bridge and head toward the exit hatch. “Explain that we need it to get home.”

  “We could steal it,” Becka suggests, ignoring Ari’s suggestion
.

  I roll my eyes at her.

  “What?” she asks, shrugging. We step through the tunnel and into the mall. “We’re criminals, aren’t we? And like you said, we’ve done well so far.”

  “We’ve been lucky,” I say. And luck runs out eventually.

  19

  Money’s always been tight in the Graham house: Everything I’m wearing is a hand-me-down. My parents only ever give me Christmas/birthday combo presents (even though my birthday’s in June). And I’ve never even been to a real mall. Shopping’s not really our thing.

  But even if I had visited one of the malls on Ganymede, nothing could have prepared me for this.

  “Is that a dragon?” Ari asks.

  We’ve entered the mall through a tunnel from the parking garage and are now standing outside the weirdest pet shop ever. Becka has been studying the map to get our bearings, but Ari’s question sidetracks her. He’s staring up at a massive aquarium in the front window.

  “Technically”—Becka snickers, checking the map—“I’m not making this up, I swear. According to the translation, they’re giant sea monsters.’”

  I glance at the aquarium, which is bigger than my dorm room on the 118. At first, it looks empty, except for some pebbles and fake plants, as if it’s galaxy’s biggest goldfish bowl. But as I squint to see through the murky water at the back of the tank . . . BAM! A truck-sized sea dragon—with sharp teeth, silvery scales, and pointy claws—rams its slimy face against the glass. It does it again, staring out at us like it could use a snack.

  I jump back. “Okay, guys, no more distractions. Let’s go find that fuel.”

  But Ari and Becka are already heading into the store.

  “Hey!” I call out, trailing after them. “Wait up! And—”

  My ring chimes with a text. Another hidden message from my dad? I open my palm and flip my hand: No name. No time stamp. No location. Just three words: “You must leave.”

  So not my dad this time. But every bit as urgent and mysterious. I think about the voice I heard before Orientation—wondering if this is the same person—and type back: “Who are you?” But the ring just tells me that THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED.