Life on Mars (13 page)

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 ask, 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?

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.

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.

I was bored. Tripp was missing again, and Priya was doing something girly with some of her girlfriends. Mom and Dad were busy filling out house paperwork. I'd rather be bored than hang out with Vega or Cassi. And there was nothing on TV.

But I was curious. I couldn't help myself. Mr. Death hadn't killed me yet. He hadn't even maimed me. And he'd given me the tip about the Perseids shower. Clearly he liked space, and I wasn't sure if many zombies were astrology buffs.