Seventh Grade vs. the Galaxy Read online

  “Of course.” Principal Lochner nods. “Sorry. Maybe if we can get back to our ship, I could try to give you some of the information you’re looking for.”

  “Nice try,” she says, poking different spots on her rock desk. “Make this more complicated. Fine, I can scan you myself.”

  A beam of pink light shines down from the glass dome, washing over us. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  “That’s odd,” she says, pressing down again and scanning us for a second time, then a third.

  Slowly, something dawns on her.

  “Wait. Is this an awakening?” she asks, looking up from the rock. Before anyone can figure out how to respond, she shouts, “Of course! An awakening! Can you believe it?”

  She poses that last question to the guard standing stiffly to her left, slapping one of the armored legs. Her nails clank against the metal and he sways back and forth like a bowling pin hit by a slow ball.

  “He can’t believe it,” she tells us, lowering her voice to a whisper for a moment. “Lois is a little shy.” Lois? “Anyway, there hasn’t been an awakening around here in a long time. This is so exiting. To be honest, I assumed that the galaxy was entirely awakened by now. Didn’t think there was anyone left out there still stuck in their own star systems. I wonder if I’ll get a raise.” She looks at the guard again. “Do you think I’ll get a raise?”

  Again, Lois says nothing, but the alien lady doesn’t seem to care. “Of course not,” she laughs, rolling her eyes (a gesture that’s somehow TERRIFYING when she does it). “You’re right as always.”

  She turns back to face us. “Well,” she says. “What now? Think, think.” She’s swiping and smacking and scrolling all over the rock in front of her. “Just elephant with me for a moment.”

  I think she means “bear with me.” Which means that Ari’s theory about a (less than perfect) translation device is probably right.

  “I’ve never presided over an awakening before. Ceremony, you understand. It’s in the manual and all government employees get a short training when we’re hired. But no one expects . . . Come on . . . Where is it? Ah, yes! Found it! Okay, okay.”

  Flattening her robe with her branchy fingers, she stands up straight for the first time. She’s at least seven feet tall and towers over the much shorter guard.

  “Ahem,” she begins, staring down at the “desk” and awkwardly reading from some script. “New arrivals! It has come to my/our—er, no, sorry, just my—it has come to my attention that this is the first time members of your species have encountered an alien race. It is a great milestone in your history and you, as representatives of your civilization, will no doubt be remembered for years to come. I/we—ah, no—I hereby welcome you, the insert name of species here into—er . . . ” She looks at Principal Lochner. “Sorry. What are you called?”

  In a dazed voice, he says, “Um, Jerry Lochner.”

  “Good, good.” She goes back to reading. “I hereby welcome you, the umjerrylochners, into the galaxy. It is diverse and peaceful, bound together by the League of Independent Systems. This is the Great and Wonderful Elvid System, which is presided over by our Benevolent and Perfect Minister. We trust that you will be productive and respectful members of the larger community.” She looks up, like she’s waiting for something.

  “So . . . are we free to go?” Principal Lochner asks.

  “Oh no,” she chuckles, looking over at the guard like he’s in on the joke. “No special treatment, even for the newly arrived umjerrylochners. Rules are rules. Your ship was found in restricted Elvidian space in violation of Criminal Ordinance Number 7634, section three, part one, sub-paragraph eleven. You tripped the alarm when your ship dropped out of light speed into an area off-limits to civilian vehicles.”

  Light speed?

  Ari, Becka, and I look at each other.

  What did we do?

  “But how are we supposed to get home?” Principal Lochner asks. A desperate note has crept into his voice.

  “Not my responsibility. You are welcome to pay the parking ticket and be on your way.”

  Principal Lochner scrunches up his face in confusion. “Parking ticket.”

  “That’s right. The sentencing guidelines call for a fine ranging from 75 to 150 Elvidian credits. But given the special circumstances”—she smiles a jagged, toothy smile that makes me wish she’d just frown—“I’m willing to impose the minimum.”

  “So,” Principal Lochner clarifies, “you said that’s seventy-five, um, what did you call them?”

  She leers down at us. “Do you not have any Elvidian credits?” she asks.

  “Well, no. I don’t think so. But I’m sure we can get you money. Our kind of money. Or, whatever kind of money you want. If we can just go back to our ship for even a few—”

  She leans forward all the way over, staring straight down into Principal Lochner’s eyes. “Do you or do you not have an Elvidian currency wallet from which you can immediately deposit seventy-five credits into the ministry account?”

  His shoulders droop. He closes his eyes. “No.”

  She takes a fresh stick of gum out of the folds of her robe.

  “Shame. I wish I had time to sort this out. But I don’t. They keep us on a tight schedule here. Quotas and such. You understand. In any event, having refused monetary punishment—”

  “We didn’t refuse!” Principal Lochner cries. “We just can’t! We don’t know how!”

  She glares down at him and pops the gum into her mouth. “Having refused monetary punishment, you are hereby indefinitely sentenced to prison until such time as your penalty can be paid.” She blows a giant bubble. “Next!”

  10

  I’ll catch you up quick. It’s been two days. Two days of garlic sand, our black crystal jail cell (which isn’t getting any bigger, by the way), and—worst of all—alien school.

  Yeah. You heard me. Alien school.

  Because the brilliant minds who run this place realized that most of us are kids and not just tiny umjerrylochners. And kids go to school, I guess, even when they’re prisoners.

  Somehow, alien school is even more boring than normal school. Guards wake us up at the crack of dawn, separate us, and individually place us inside these tiny orb pods that are even worse for my claustronervousness than our cell. We put on these digital contacts that automatically translate the written Elvidian language for us. And then we have the pleasure of spending endless hours doing impossible math problems, trying to answer interstellar geography questions about places we’ve never heard of, and all around feeling like total dummies.

  Ari loves it.

  But there is some good news. Toward the end of each session we get a chance to ask questions, and the pod computers answer them (sort of). Here are some of mine from Day One:

  Question: “What planet are we on?”

  Answer: “Elvid IV. Long live the Minister.”

  Question: “Who’s the Minister?”

  Answer: “She is the Benevolent and Perfect Minister. Long live the Minister.” (Super informative.)

  Question: “How can you speak English?”

  Answer: “All Elvidians wear translator bracelets that automatically blah blah blah.” (I tuned out there.)

  Question: “Why do Elvidians have chewing gum?”

  Answer: “Chewing gum is the sole invention separately created by every sentient race in the galaxy. Long live the Minister.”

  Question: “How far away are we from Earth?”

  Answer: “Unable to respond.”

  Question: “Do you know anything about a quarantine?”

  Answer: “Unable to respond.”

  Question: “Are you ever going to let us go?”

  Answer: “Unable to respond.”

  But even if we’re not getting straight answers, the school sessions are still an opportunity to gather intelligence. And figure out how we can escape.

  By “we,” I mean the three of us. We haven’t seen anyone else from the 118 since our sentencing.
I assume our classmates have spent the last couple of days in their own pods, and who knows what the adults are up to. But since we have no way of communicating with them, we’ve decided it’s up to us to get out of here, find a way home, and bring back help for the others.

  Now we’re just back from our second day of alien school, and Ari is pumped. “Today was amazing!” he reports. “The pod taught me a whole new kind of math. And I think I might be able to terraform my backyard when we get home. And—”

  I interrupt Ari’s speech. “Speaking of getting home, what did you find out in your pod today, Becka?”

  She’s leaning against a corner, tossing our empty water bucket up and down. “Nothing,” she answers.

  “Helpful,” I say.

  She just glares at me, which I try not to take personally. We’re all trapped and scared and restless—not to mention hungry. (In a few minutes, a guard will be in with more water and garlic dirt, which is literally the only thing they give us to eat.) Becka spent most of yesterday insisting that she’s not leaving this system without Diana. We’ve convinced her that a full-scale jailbreak isn’t something we can pull off, but now she’s in a foul mood.

  “What?” she says back, lying down and staring up at the black ceiling. “What could I possibly ask that would help us get out of here? The stupid school pods are never going to answer any real questions. They’re never going to let us go. I’m never going to see my parents again. I might never even see Diana again. And she’s probably just down the hall.”

  I shake my head. “You’re wrong,” I say. “I learned something useful today. The pod had a system update, I think. With new information from scans of the 118. It told me that we’re four hundred light years away from Earth. And that our ship got here with a newly built light speed engine.”

  Becka laughs—a cold, angry laugh. “Oh, how useful!” she says sarcastically. “We’re only four hundred light years away from home, huh? That’s great. Good thing it wasn’t five hundred or we’d have no hope of getting back.”

  “But the ship has a light speed engine,” Ari whispers. “Awesome. Einstein, Shmeinstein. Your dad is the greatest physicist of all time.”

  So okay, my dad apparently built a light speed engine, in secret, in facilities that were far from state-of-the-art. And okay, that makes him the first human to figure out how to travel fast enough to move around the galaxy. But—unless I’m even worse at history than I thought—I’m pretty sure Einstein never accidentally got a bunch of kids arrested by aliens.

  And no matter how “awesome” Ari thinks this is, I would have preferred a different version of the story: Once upon a time, Allentown Graham invented some cool technology and sold it to the government or a multiplanetary corporation or something and he got super rich and bought a tropical island on Earth and then all of us—my dad, my mom, and me—chilled in hammocks and drank out of coconuts with twirly straws and lived happily ever after.

  “It’s perfect!” Ari whoops. “The light speed engine can get us home! All we have to do is get back to the 118, fly to Ganymede, tell everyone there what happened, and come back here with help for the others.”

  “Suuuuure,” says Becka, rolling her eyes. “Simple. Except we can’t actually get back to the 118. We don’t even know where the 118 is.”

  Ari breaks into a grin. “Actually,” he says, “that’s the other thing learned today.”

  Becka slowly sits up, listening.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I asked the pod to show me a map of this building and the surrounding area. I know where the ship is.

  “Why wasn’t that literally the first thing you said after we got back here?” Becka asks, shooting to her feet.

  Ari shrugs again, and tilts his head at her. “Because I thought you’d think the terraforming thing was cool?”

  “Unbelievable.” She shakes her head at him. Ari looks back at her, disappointed.

  “So where’s the ship?!” Becka demands.

  “Shhh,” Ari hisses. “What if there’s a guard in the hallway?” He lowers his voice again. “What if they’re listening to us right now?”

  “Well,” she says, yelling up at the ceiling, “then it’s too late! We’ve misbehaved! Broken the rules! Suspend us from school, please! Expel us!”

  Ari shushes her again. “The ship is on the roof of this building,” he whispers. “Down the hallway and up.”

  Becka beams. “Awesome! I was afraid we’d have to trek to the other side of the planet or something.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s awesome,” Ari cautions. “That map was pretty intense. Even if we manage to get out of the cell, we’ll still have to get past guard stations and laser alarms and secure access points and cameras. I have no idea how we can possibly sneak out of here without being caught.”

  I slouch down, deflated. We’re so far out of our league. The three of us against the galaxy? It’s hopeless.

  The guard walks in with his daily garlic and water delivery. He’s wearing the same metal armor as the silent guard from the stadium—just with fewer pennies glued to his chest. He grunts at us like he’s annoyed that we’re in here and drops the two buckets. Then he steps back out, closing the doorway behind him. We wait a few seconds before resuming our conversation.

  “If only we could communicate with everyone else,” I say as Ari scoops up some powder for his dinner.

  “Whoa,” he says, because I guess he likes the stuff even more today than usual.

  “If only we had a weapon,” Becka chimes in.

  “If only—” I pause when I hear a click.

  The little cell lights up with the same two flashlight stickers Ari made when this all started.

  “Your Pencil?” Becka asks, awestruck.

  Ari nods, holding the little nanoprinter up over his head, like a videogame character who just fished a jewel out of a treasure box.

  “It was buried in the garlic,” he says. “Magic garlic.” He closes his eyes tight like he’s making a wish. Then he opens them again and rakes the sand pile with his fingers, as if there might be more to find. (There isn’t.) I can’t imagine how the Pencil found its way into our rations, but I’m guessing magic wasn’t involved.

  Becka plucks both light stickers out of the air and turns them over and over in her hands like she’s doing a card trick. Her grim expression fades, replaced by the trademark mischievous glint in her eyes.

  “I think,” she says, “we’ve just found our way out of here.”

  11

  “You ready?” Becka asks Ari.

  “Almost,” he says, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He’s busy writing out his thousandth line of computer code. He’s been at it so long that his finger-bunches might fall off. “I want them to be realistic.”

  “Just do the best you can,” she says.

  I cross my arms. “For the record,” I say, “I still think this is a bad plan. A bad, stupid, bad plan.”

  “Not like you’ve come up with anything better.”

  She has a point. Last night I shot down about a dozen other ideas before we landed on this one. This is the best of the worst ideas, but that doesn’t mean I have to feel optimistic about it. “I just don’t think anyone will fall for it.”

  “If we were back home,” Becka replies, “this definitely wouldn’t work. But we’re not back home. The Elvidians don’t know anything about us. So how are they supposed to know when we’re lying and when we’re not?”

  I still don’t totally buy it. But I appreciate that she’s making an effort to convince me. I’ve seen how arguments with Becka usually play out. She tends to bulldoze her way forward without caring what other people think.

  I open my mouth to list all the ways the Elvidians could definitely know we’re lying, but Ari announces—

  “I’m done.”

  So I keep quiet. Trying + failing to escape ampgreaterthan not trying.

  Right?

  “Let’s get started,” Becka says.


  Ari takes a long breath, clicks twice, and dispenses what he’s been designing with his Pencil: Blisters. Or bad zits. Or nasty bug bites. Whatever they are, he made them look really icky. There are tiny bead ones, long scar ones, thick lumpy ones. Plastic stickers, basically. But very realistic plastic stickers. Hundreds of them, floating in front of our eyes.

  “Ewwwww,” Becka says with admiration.

  “Gross,” I agree, touching one of the stickers. It plops to the ground, oozing a bit as it hits the floor.

  Ari’s beaming. “You think they’re good?”

  “They’re awesome,” Becka assures him. “And they’re gonna be really useful when school—human school, I mean—starts back up again.”

  I almost say, “You’re so sure this is going to work that you’re already planning for next year?” But I decide to let it go. Maybe sometimes her overconfidence is a good thing. Maybe.

  “Shall we?” Ari asks.

  And the three of us put the stickers on our skin one by one. On our faces, our necks, our arms, and our hands.

  “You look . . . sick,” I say, once we’re done. And they do. Like they have the measles or something. On purpose, Becka pops a fake boil here and there on her cheeks and along her left arm, making her look like she has a particularly bad strain of whatever we’ve come down with. And we wait until the wall opens and our guard walks in. Like we rehearsed, we slump down to the floor and worm around in pretend pain.

  “What’s happening in here?” he asks.

  When the three of us were deciding on our escape plan, Becka wanted Ari to make a gun with his Pencil and shoot the guard when he walked in. I protested that we shouldn’t hurt anyone, so she suggested a stun gun. But what good would that do? There are still all the other guards and cameras and locked doors between here and the ship.

  Becka’s Plan C involved us making a fake gun. (Noticing a pattern here?) Threaten the guard. Tell him that we’d shoot “or else!” Then use him as a hostage to wind our way up toward the top level. But I vetoed that plan too. What if the other guards in the corridor don’t care that we’ve taken a hostage? What if it just makes them madder? More likely to use their own giant weapons?