Seventh Grade vs. the Galaxy Page 5

  I blink the water out of my eyes and look around. We’re in a small, closet-sized room, surrounded by shiny black walls on all sides. They’re smooth like glass and don’t have any grooves for doors, windows, or even air vents. We’re trapped inside a box. And while there aren’t any lights in the room, the walls seem to be letting in some light from whatever’s on the outside.

  “Where are we?” I ask, looking around.

  I’m not claustrophobic exactly. Small spaces don’t scare me. But they do make me kind of anxious. My heart moves a little faster, I notice every time I have to take a breath, and my hands get all clammy. Ari says that I get “claustronervous,” but I don’t think that’s a thing. I asked my mom about it once, but she just laughed and ruffled my hair. I close my fingers into a fist to calm down, feeling my nails dig into my palms.

  “No clue,” Becka says.

  So I try a different question: “How long have I been out?”

  Ari opens his mouth to answer, but Becka interrupts. “Don’t. He needs to be told gently.” She looks me in the eye.

  “Jack, I’m so sorry. You’ve been asleep . . . for two years.”

  My heart practically stops in my chest. Two years? How is that possible? I look down at my shoes. Same size, I think. Is there a mirror in here? I need to see what I—

  “Nah,” she chuckles. “I actually just woke up a few minutes ago, and Ari got up right after that. Hard to tell how long we’ve been unconscious, since our rings aren’t getting any service.”

  “I wanted to use my Pencil to make a basic clock, but it’s gone,” Ari adds before I can tell Becka what I think of her sense of humor. “Someone must’ve confiscated everything in our pockets while we were unconscious. There’s food, though.” He pushes over a small pile of what looks like sawdust. “At least, we think it’s food.”

  He takes a pinch and puts it on his tongue. “Definitely probably food.” He eats a little more. “Almost for sure.”

  “Why would you eat something you only think is probably food?” I ask.

  “It’s not bad,” he explains. “A little garlicky, but I don’t really mind it.”

  “But how do you know it’s food?” I ask, lowering my voice to a whisper. “And how do you know it’s not poison?”

  Ari eats some more sand out of his palm. “First,” he says with a full mouth, “it was next to the water when we woke up. And second, I figured it wasn’t poison because, if someone wanted to hurt us, they could just hurt us. Whoever shot us when we were on the 118 used a stun gun. And now we’re trapped here.” He knocks on the walls. “With no way out. Whoever’s holding us captive has all the power anyway.”

  He’s got a point.

  “Plus,” he adds, “I threw a little over my shoulder before I ate it, for luck. So we should be good.”

  Not exactly airtight logic, but I’m starving, so I grab a fistful of the dust and shove it into my mouth.

  “A little garlicky?!” I yell, spitting out clumps of sand. “Are you sure it isn’t just literally a pile of garlic powder?”

  “Um,” Ari says, which is all the answer I need.

  I grab the empty jug of water and try to pour the remaining drops onto my tongue. I consider leaning down to lick the puddle of water on the floor.

  “It’s not that bad,” Ari says, licking his fingers like he’s finishing an ice cream cone.

  I glance at Becka, who flares her nostrils. We’re on the same page about this, at least.

  “So what now?” I ask, looking around and wondering if we could just smash the glass all around us. I push against the closest wall with both of my hands, but the surface feels rock solid.

  “Don’t bother,” Becka says, rubbing her knuckles. They’re bright red. No point in me trying to punch through the walls if T-Bex can’t.

  Suddenly, there’s a rumble—almost a growl—coming from the wall directly in front of me. An opening appears. Not a door exactly. Just a small open square that wasn’t there before, as if, in the blink of an eye, someone carved a hole in the thick glass.

  “The scanners tell me that you are all awake now,” says a calm, female-sounding voice from all around us. “About time. Please exit your cells and proceed down the corridor.”

  Cells? As in, more than one?

  I’m suspicious of these instructions. I’m suspicious of everything. But Becka doesn’t hesitate. As soon as the opening appears—before the voice even finishes up—she lunges forward out of the cell like she’s diving for home base.

  Ari runs out of the cell after her. And—what else am I supposed to do?—I follow close behind. We’re inside a long hallway, carved of the same smooth black rock as the walls of the room we just escaped. The hallway is closed at both ends, but all along the sides, people are emerging from cells like ours.

  “Becka?!” someone shrieks. Diana runs toward her at full speed, and they collide in the kind of hug that would leave most people with broken bones.

  Diana is crying. Maybe even Becka’s tearing up a little. (But she’s working so hard to block her face from view that you’d never know it.)

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Ms. Needle yelps, grabbing me and Ari by the arms. “Are you all right?”

  Everyone’s here. The students. The teachers. The three crew members. And Principal Lochner, who makes his way over to us.

  “Where are we?” Ari asks. “What’s happening?”

  “We don’t know,” Ms. Needle says, talking at a million miles an hour. “We were evacuating the 118, heading down to the hangar bay, when we started hearing that strange countdown. But—just as it ended—these people came out of nowhere. Right out of thin air. We couldn’t see their faces. They were wearing armor. Masks. I’m almost glad you weren’t there. It was terrifying. They shot us. Knocked us out and brought us here!”

  “I think the same thing happened to us,” I say.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ms. Needle continues, speaking even faster than before. She’s exploding with guilt. “We didn’t notice you were gone until it was too late! We were already boarding the shuttles when we took attendance again. I don’t know how I lost track of you three. You were my responsibility. But we wanted to get everyone off the ship. We were running so quickly. And that voice, it was counting down to—I don’t know what. We almost left the ship—left the ship without you . . .”

  She trails off, her eyes swimming with tears. Now I’m exploding with guilt too. I mean, there’s no reason for her to feel like she abandoned us.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “We wandered off.”

  She opens her mouth and leaves it open. Principal Lochner crosses his arms. “Where exactly did you go?”

  But I can’t actually answer that question, right? Play it cool, Jack. Just play it cool.

  “Um, we were in the bathroom?”

  Ms. Needle raises her eyebrows so high, they look like they might fly off her forehead.

  “He means,” Becka clarifies, “that I left my mother’s necklace—you know, Ms. Needle—the one she gave me for my tenth birthday. It was my great-grandma’s. Family heirloom.” She’s clutching a silver chain around her neck like it’s the most precious thing in the world. “I left it in my backpack outside the bathroom near the dorms. And I didn’t want to go alone. Didn’t think that was smart, you know? So Jack and Ari volunteered to come along. I’m so sorry. We were just gone for, like, two minutes. We should have told you first. But things were so crazy. I just wasn’t thinking straight. All I knew was that I couldn’t lose my Nana Sue’s necklace.”

  Wow. Just—wow.

  Principal Lochner glances from me to Becka to Ari and back again. I’m not sure he bought it, but Ms. Needle is nodding like Becka’s story makes perfect sense and is the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard. “Well, I’m just glad we’re all together now . . . Oh, Ming! How is your arm?”

  She rushes over to check on Ming, who’s still holding their arm like it’s broken. I whisper to Becka, “Was that necklace really your grandma’s?”


  She shakes her head. “Nah. Fished it out of the trash in the teachers’ lounge.”

  “Gross.”

  Becka just grins, which means that she’s now either lying to me for no reason or proudly wearing someone’s garbage jewelry.

  But before I can ask any more questions, another opening appears at one end of the hallway.

  “Next!” a voice says from all around us. The same voice from a minute ago. No one moves a muscle and it thunders again. “I said, ‘next’!”

  Principal Lochner takes a deep breath. “You want to know what’s happening?” he says to Ari in a low voice. “I think we’re about to find out.”

  He squeezes his way through the crowd to stand protectively at the front of the group, right in front of the opening. I see him adjust his tie and even try to button his jacket. But it won’t close and he gives up.

  9

  Okay, picture a football stadium. Now double the size. Actually, scratch that. Picture a space ten times the size of a football stadium. Replace the seats with a million overlapping pieces of dark glass like the stands are made of mountains of truck-sized black diamonds. Replace the green turf of the playing field with—just go with me here—a bottomless pit. And replace the cheerleaders and the hot dogs and the foam fingers with an uncomfortable tingling on the back of your neck.

  Fine, so maybe the nightmare bowl we’re now standing at the edge of isn’t exactly like a football stadium. But I don’t know how else to describe it. There is a smooth glass dome high above us, stretching over the whole place. Two years ago, over winter break, my mom took me to a game at the new Patriots stadium they built on Mars. This kind of reminds me of that. Except, you know, more terrifying.

  Far out ahead of us, sticking up from the center of the pit, is a giant pillar topped with a flat surface. We’re still too far away to see anything clearly. But it looks like there are two people up there, one sitting in a chair behind a desk and the other standing to the side, like a guard on duty.

  “Move along,” the disembodied voice tells us as we all shuffle in from the hallway. The sound echoes around this giant chamber, bouncing across the pit—back and forth, back and forth—until it dies out. Move along. Move along. Move along. Move along.

  “What is this place?” Becka asks.

  I shrug and look over at Ari, his jaw wide open, his eyes huge. I know that look. He’s not scared or confused. Ari’s excited.

  “Like, maybe we’re on some secret government base or something?” Becka continues. “Or maybe—is this Peru? It could be, I guess. I did okay in Spanish last year.”

  Ari rolls his eyes. “This is definitely not Peru,” he says.

  And I don’t know whether to give him a high five for talking back to Becka or laugh in his face because of what he’s about to say.

  “Look around.” Ari gazes up at the dome and down into the pit. “None of this is, well, human.”

  I snort. There it is.

  Don’t get me wrong—I’m usually willing to tolerate Ari’s fantasies. But this just doesn’t seem like the time. How many years have people lived on Mars now? Literally hundreds? Humans have dug up every inch of that dusty planet—and all the others in our solar system too—without finding any evidence of intelligent life that isn’t us. And still, every fall, Ari comes back to school believing in another Martian conspiracy theory. He’s a sucker for that kind of stuff. The Martians are invisible. The Martians live in the sewers. The Vice President is a secret Martian. Once, I came back from summer vacation with a really short haircut and Ari quizzed me on “things only the real Jack would know.”

  “What’re you saying?” I ask him. “That the lady making announcements over the loudspeaker is an alien? That we’re on some—some alien planet?”

  In the span of two seconds, Ari’s face rides an emotional rollercoaster: First, he half-smirks—because, yeah, that’s exactly what he thinks. But then he looks over at Becka and wipes the smile off his face—because, you know, maybe she’s not totally into his supreme dorkiness. And then he does another 180, crosses his arms, and glares at me.

  “Come on,” he says. “What else could this place be?”

  The voice booms all around us in its bored monotone. Weirdly, it sounds British.

  “You have been charged with violating criminal ordinance number 7634, section three, part one, sub-paragraph eleven. On the record before us, you have been found guilty. Please come forward to pay your fine or receive your sentence.” Sentence. Sentence. Sentence. Sentence.

  A platform materializes in front of Principal Lochner, where the edge of the floor drops off like a cliff. It’s wide enough that all of us could easily stand on it, but it’s barely a centimeter thick and completely see-through, like a large pane of glass turned on its side.

  “Please come forward to pay your fine or receive your sentence,” the lady says again. Sentence. Sentence. Sentence. Sentence.

  In any of our normal lives, we probably wouldn’t have stepped onto a paper-thin rectangle floating over a bottomless pit in the center of a rocky diamond canyon because a strange angry voice was telling us to. But nothing about this says “normal lives.” So—after Principal Lochner tests it with a tiptoe, and then his full weight—on we step. And as soon as the last of us leaves the ledge behind, the platform begins to inch across the chasm, floating toward the center of the stadium.

  Ari is giving me an “I told you so!” stare and Becka is nodding over at Ari with newfound respect. But I still don’t buy it. I may not understand what’s going on, but aliens? Come on.

  “So,” Becka says to Ari, with an absolutely straight face, “you think this lady is, like, the alien queen?”

  Ari’s eyes brighten up. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think so.”

  Ugh. Maybe she’s perfect for him after all.

  “But why would the alien queen speak English, Ari?” I ask. “And why would she speak it like that? Is the alien queen British?”

  “She could be using some kind of translator,” Ari says, digging in.

  “Shhh,” Principal Lochner snaps at us.

  And now I notice that the teachers and crew have formed a protective circle all around the kids, Principal Lochner up front. And every five or ten feet, someone else: Mr. Cardegna; Harriet, the ship captain; even Mrs. Watts (although she doesn’t look all that enthusiastic about the job). The sight of them makes me feel a little better—until I remember that the biggest problems these adults usually face are broken dorm toilets and plagiarism. I’m not sure they’re any match for this place, whatever it is.

  The floating platform moves slowly across the canyon and, as we approach, the two people on the center column come into focus. The one in the middle is wearing a long, grey cloak with a hood draped over her face. Snow-white hair falls past her knees. She is sitting at a desk, like I thought. Only the “chair” is more like an angled wall that she’s leaning against, and the “desk” is just one of those dark diamonds from the edges of the stadium, sawed off and turned on its side. The one standing next to her is armored and masked, holding a gun. Maybe one of the soldiers Ms. Needle saw onboard the 118. Maybe the same one who shot at me, Ari, and Becka. The soldier’s outfit is silver plated from head to toe, but splotched with dozens of randomly placed copper circles, like a medieval knight rolled around in glue and ancient pennies.

  The platform stops right in front of them, about two feet lower than the top of the column. Immediately, the one sitting down raises her hands. Hands that don’t look normal. Don’t look human. Her skin is milky white. And her fingers are pointy, almost claw-like. She pulls back her hood and—there isn’t any question now. My chin drops so far down that it practically hits the bottom of the bottomless pit. Ari was right.

  Aliens.

  Is it weird that my first thought is Dad would have loved this?

  Her skin and fingers are the most non-human things about her, aside from her deep red eyes, which don’t just look like they’re covered by red contact lens
es. The eyes are entirely red. There’s no white part. Just two ovals the color of blood dotting a powder-white alien face. She’s terrifying. And also she’s chewing gum.

  “Okay,” she says, smacking her lips and blowing a bubble. Yep. The alien queen is chewing gum. Obviously. “We’re just going to need a little preliminary information first. So, where are you all from?”

  No response from the crowd. We’re too busy looking at an alien.

  “Well?” she asks, our faces blank and mouths wide open. “Come on. There’s a long line behind you and I’m off the clock in an hour.” We crane our necks to glance backward. But there’s no one else here. “Don’t make this worse for yourselves,” she adds. “Where are you from?”

  The idea that this could somehow get “worse” is enough to jolt Principal Lochner out of his daze. “Um.” He clears his throat. “We’re from the PSS 118. A school in orbit around Ganymede.”

  She blows another bubble. “Is Gannermeep supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Ganymede.”

  “Right,” she says impatiently, fidgeting with a bracelet on one of her wrists. “That’s what I said. I’m going to need a bit more to go on than that.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Okay. Well, Ganymede is one of Jupiter’s moons?”

  She taps a bunch of her fingers against the surface of her “desk,” as if the giant rock—with no screens, no buttons, no holograms—is some kind of computer.

  “No record of it. I need coordinates. Quadrants. Numerical planetary designations. Something.”

  “Um,” Principal Lochner stutters. “I . . . I don’t know any of that information. We’re near Jupiter? Orbiting at about six million miles, I think.”

  “The Milky Way,” Ari offers.

  “The Milky Way,” Principal Lochner repeats.

  “Milk?” She leans forward and squints at us, confused. “No thank you. I’m not thirsty.”

  Principal Lochner shakes his head. “Never mind,” he tells her. “Earth. We’re from Earth.”

  “Hun,” the alien queen says, plucking the chewed-up gum out of her mouth and flicking it into the abyss. “I’ve never heard of it.”