Akiko on the Planet Smoo (2 page)

Later that night,
after Melissa had gone home, my dad sat at the little table in our kitchen reading the newspaper while my mom and I made dinner. Dad was still wearing the necktie he'd worn to the office that day, and every once in a while he'd reach up and loosen it a little.

Mom was telling me about these women she'd had tea with that afternoon. She described in great detail what everyone had been wearing and which stores she thought they'd got the clothes from. Even though I'm not very interested in that kind of stuff, I usually try to pay attention. But that night all I could think about was the letter and what it had said. I looked at the clock on the stove. It was just a little after seven o'clock.

Dinner that night was pretty ordinary. Ordinary for me, I should say. See, my parents were both born in Japan, so we eat a lot of things that most Americans wouldn't go anywhere
near
: seaweed, raw fish, all kinds of weird stuff. Of course, I've been eating Japanese food since I was a baby, so I'm used to it. I don't even bother inviting Melissa to eat with us anymore, though. We tried that once and I don't think there was a single thing on the whole table that she liked. She probably made her mom cook her a whole new meal once she got back down to the sixth floor.

So it was just me and my parents that night, as usual, eating a dinner of baked salmon and white rice. Of course, I didn't know then that it would be the last meal I'd have on Earth for about two weeks. Otherwise I think I'd have eaten more. As it was, I sort of picked at my food and did my best to look like I was eating. The more I thought about the letter the more nervous I got, and it kind of made me lose my appetite. I looked at the clock on the wall to see what time it was. It was already seven-thirty.

I almost got through the whole meal without my mom asking me any questions. Almost.

“So who was that letter from, Akiko?” she asked, heading into the kitchen for more rice.

“Letter?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

I glanced at my dad. He had the sports section of the newspaper folded up small enough to hold with one hand and was reading it while he slowly chewed and swallowed his food.

“Yes,” my mother said, “that letter I gave you today. It looked like something pretty important.”

“Oh,
that
letter. Um, that was from a kid at school named Jimmy Hampton. He was inviting me to his, uh, birthday party or something. . . .” I probably shouldn't have lied about the letter, but I'd already broken the rule about not letting anyone else read it. Somehow it seemed like I was supposed to keep this whole thing a secret. The fact is I still had no idea where that letter came from or what it was all about, and I didn't feel like trying to explain it to my parents.

“That's marvelous!” my mother said, beaming, as she came back from the kitchen. “It's been a long time since you got invited to someone's birthday. We'll have to get you something nice to wear.”

“Actually I . . . I don't really want to go,” I explained. “Jimmy Hampton's kind of a strange kid, and Melissa didn't get invited, so I wouldn't have anyone to talk to anyway.” That's the problem with telling a lie: You have to make up all these other lies just to get people to believe you.

My dad handed his empty rice bowl to my mom, making her get up and go to the kitchen all over again.

“There's nothing wrong with going to a party by yourself, Akiko,” she called back to me. “You need to get out more.” My mom's always trying to get me to make more friends. She knows that Melissa is the only friend I have, and I think she's worried that I'm not very popular at school. Which I'm not. But there are advantages to not being popular. For one thing, you hardly ever have to be in charge of anything.

“Dad, can I be excused?”

I don't think my dad had really been listening to the conversation. He looked at me, then looked at my plate. My mom handed him his newly refilled bowl of rice, and he immediately popped some of it into his mouth with his chopsticks.

“All right,” he mumbled. “But no TV tonight. You've got a geology test tomorrow, right?”

“Geography.”

“Hm. That's too bad. I think a geology test would be a lot more interesting.” My dad's kind of weird. He's pretty quiet most of the time, but when he does talk, he's always making some kind of weird joke. He's a really cool dad, though. He doesn't make me do a lot of things I don't want to do, like play sports or take piano lessons.

“Don't worry, Dad. I'm going straight to my room.” It was around seven-forty-five. I didn't see how anyone was actually going to come to my window at eight, but I didn't want to take any chances. Just before I closed my bedroom door, though, I overheard my parents talking in the kitchen.

“When I was her age I practically
lived
with my friends.” That's something my mom says a lot.

“Your daughter's just not a socialite, dear. We can't force her to have a big circle of friends. Besides, she seems pretty happy to me.”

“I know. I just think she'd be a lot happier if she got out of her room once in a while.”

Pacing back and forth
in my bedroom, I had one more look at the letter. It was a little scary that there weren't any stamps on the envelope. That meant that the person who wrote it knew exactly where I lived and had actually been here earlier in the day to deliver the letter in person.

“ ‘Outside your bedroom window . . .' ” I kept repeating the words to myself. “ ‘At eight o'clock.' ” It just didn't make any sense.

I sat down on my bed and looked at the clock on my nightstand. It said 7:59. I found myself watching the second hand slowly go around until it reached the top. When it did, and kept moving past without anything strange or miraculous happening, I felt a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. Mainly because it meant I'd finally have to start studying for that stupid geography test.

I couldn't help it, though. I got up and went over to the window and looked outside. The sun had already gone down, and the streetlights were just coming on. There was nothing but the same old building across from me and the slightly scary view down to the alleyway seventeen floors below. A flock of birds flew slowly overhead and a car horn beeped somewhere off in the distance. I looked up into the dark blue sky and saw one or two stars just beginning to appear.

Finally I gave up and pulled out my books. I had just turned to the chapter I was supposed to be studying, something about the world's most important rivers, when something happened that nearly made me fall out of my chair.

TAK TAK TAK

There were three loud taps on the window, the sound of someone knocking on the glass. That in itself was bizarre, since I'd never in my life heard the sound of someone knocking on my window from the outside. What was much stranger was that two lights were suddenly shining through my window, bright yellow lights that lit up the curtains and made big crazy shadows all over my bedroom. They were
headlights
.

“Akiko! We're here!” came a voice from just outside the window. It was a funny voice, high-pitched and squeaky like a voice you might hear on a cartoon show. It was a man's voice, though, that was for sure.

I was pretty scared. For a second I considered ducking down and waiting for them to go away.

“Come on, Akiko. Open the window,” came a second voice, even squeakier than the first. “We're already behind schedule as it is.”

I was on the verge of running out to get my parents when I suddenly had this feeling, one that I'd have over and over again in the coming weeks. It was the feeling that it was too late to run away from all this, and that if I'd just go along and try to make the best of it, everything would be okay.

I swallowed hard and went over to the window. Even before I opened it, I could see past the glare of the headlights to the vehicle they were attached to. It was gently bobbing up and down in midair without anything to hold it up. It was bright blue with red and yellow trim, the kind of thing you'd put a quarter in for a three-year-old to ride outside a supermarket. The whole ship was round and smooth, with fins in the back that could have come from a big, fancy car about fifty years ago. And the weirdest thing was that it had no roof. It was a
convertible
, I swear!

There in the front seat were the two people who belonged to those voices. They were small guys with big, pudgy noses, and they were exactly alike in every way, including what they were wearing. They had round yellow helmets that covered the tops and sides of their heads, and oversized yellow gloves on their hands. They were covered from head to toe in bright yellow space suits that matched their helmets, with shiny metallic bands all along their arms. In fact, the only thing about them that wasn't metallic or yellow was their cheeks, which were round and pink as peaches.

“Um . . .” I struggled for the right thing to say and settled on the obvious. “Who
are
you guys?”

“I'm Bip,” squeaked one.

“And I'm Bop,” squeaked the other. “We're here to take you to the planet Smoo.” This last thing he said as naturally as if they were a couple of taxi drivers and
I'd
been the one who'd asked them to meet me here.

“Th-The planet Smoo?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to hear the answer.

“It's pretty far from here, Akiko . . . ,” began one.

“. . . In a different galaxy, in fact,” the other continued. “This will all be explained to you later, Akiko. Right now we've really got to go. We're late as it is.”

Now, it may be hard to believe, but when something like this happens to you, you don't have time to make sense of it. I mean, I'm sure if I'd had an hour or two to sit down and think it all out, I could have come up with all sorts of questions to ask them. As it was, I had to say the first thing that popped into my head.

“Look, guys. I can't go to another planet. I've got a geography test tomorrow!”

“We thought of that, Akiko,” said Bop, “so we brought a robot with us to replace you while you're out of town.”

And he wasn't kidding. There behind them in the backseat of the ship was a robot girl who looked exactly like me in every way. She had my eyes, my nose, even my pigtails! And she was dressed exactly the same as I was that evening: in blue jeans and a light blue T-shirt. There was no doubt about it: She was plenty realistic enough to fool people. I have to admit, it was pretty cool seeing an identical robot version of myself, but also a little creepy. I couldn't help wondering if she actually
thought
the way I did.

“Pleased to meet you, Akiko,” the robot said. She even had a voice like mine! Well, maybe just a
little
higher pitched.

“Nice to meet you, uh, Akiko,” I answered.

“With this robot here to take your place, no one will ever know you're gone,” Bop promised.

“This is just way too weird,” I said, backing away from the window.

“Really now, Akiko,” protested Bip, “we're going to get into a lot of trouble if you don't come back to Smoo with us.”

“Just think of the expense that's gone into creating this robot,” Bop continued. “You wouldn't want it to go to waste, now, would you?”

I stood there with one hand on my forehead, staring first at Bip, then at Bop, and finally at the robot behind them waiting patiently to take my place on Earth. I could tell they weren't going to leave unless I was in that ship with them.

Now, I know that the really sensible thing would have been to stay right where I was. Flying off to a planet you've never even heard of before is a pretty crazy thing to do. But believe me, when two guys from another galaxy hop in their spaceship and fly all the way to your bedroom window with orders to take you somewhere, you
listen
to them. And you think good and hard before saying anything that might disappoint them.

I cleared my throat and asked the one question that really seemed to matter to me at the moment.

“Will she do well on my geography test?”

“But of course she will!” Bop chuckled. “Straight A's every time, I guarantee it!”

“Come now,” Bip chimed in, “run and get your toothbrush. We've got quite a distance to cover before the night is through.”

And that was all there was to it. Half a minute later I was carefully climbing out of my bedroom window into the back of that little round ship. Bip helped me in while Bop helped the Akiko robot out.

As soon as the robot was safely inside my bedroom, Bip pushed a few buttons on the dashboard and made the ship float slowly up to the top of the apartment building. The cool evening air blew across my face as we rose over the rooftop and continued high up into the air. Bop pushed a few more buttons, and within seconds there was a rumbling burst of fire from the engines. I took one last look over my shoulder at Middleton and caught a brief glimpse of its streets and rooftops before we blasted off into the sky.

Lucky for me I'm not afraid of heights, because we were as high as an airplane in no time. But as we shot up over the clouds, I suddenly remembered something that I wished I'd thought of earlier. You see, this ship wasn't really a convertible. It just didn't have a roof.
Permanently
.

“Hey, guys, shouldn't I put on a
helmet
or something?” I asked, leaning forward from the backseat. “I mean, there's no
air
in outer space.”

“What are you talking about?” Bip asked, laughing. “There's
plenty
of air out here.”

And there
was
, that's the funny thing. No matter how high we flew, there was still lots of fresh, clean air. Pretty soon we were surrounded by stars, and Earth fell away and got smaller and smaller until finally it was nothing more than a tiny blue ball in the distance behind us. But still there was plenty of air. I took a deep breath and leaned back into the soft red cushions of the backseat.

“Wow,” I said to myself. “Wait till my science teacher hears about
this
.”