Life on Mars (21 page)

“That project we've been working on? That contraption with the mirrors? It's all yours, kid,” he continued. “But do us
both a favor. Take it up to the hill and destroy it. Smash it to bits. It'll be just as useful destroyed as it is now. Destroy it and walk away and live your life.”

I shook my head. “I can't …”

“You hear me, Arty?” Cash said. I bit my lip. This was the first time Cash had ever called me by my real name. “Give up on it while you still have a life. Stop wasting it on a pipe dream. You are never going to contact anyone on Mars or any other planet. You aren't going to prove that there's life out there. You aren't going to do anything that will make any difference as long as you're looking at life through a telescope. Give up. Before you turn into a pathetic, lonely old man dying alone on a plastic-covered mattress.”

He coughed again, loud and long—so long I worried he might never stop.

“You're not alone,” Sarah said softly. “We're here.”

But I didn't want to be there anymore. I was crying like an idiot, and my insides felt hard and burned from his words. Give up? Just give up on everything I'd ever believed in? He was the first person who'd ever believed with me, the first person to ever understand why the sky was so important to me. And now he was telling me to just give up?

Worse, he was telling me to give up because … it was useless.

“Go,” he said, and when Sarah and I didn't move, he barked it out again painfully. “Go! You're always hanging around where you're not wanted, kid! I didn't ask for you to
come to my house. I didn't ask for you to break into my space room. I didn't ask for any of it.”

Sarah and I locked eyes, with a
should we go?
type of look, and he coughed twice, winced like he was in great pain, and bellowed, “Get out of here, I said! Let an old man die in peace! Don't you have the sense to know when you're not wanted?”

My face burned with anger and confusion. It wasn't fair what he was doing. I came here because I … because I loved him. And he was smashing my dreams to bits. “You don't have any sense!” I yelled back, before my brain could catch up with my mouth. “You know that? You're the one with no sense! You have cancer and you keep smoking those nasty things and you don't even care that you're going to die and … and leave people behind!”

I bent to pick up the paper he'd knocked out of my hand. A whole night's worth of work, something I'd been so hopeful about just a few minutes before, now just felt like trash. I leaned over and dropped it into the wastebasket, then hurried to Sarah's side as she made for the door.

“Arty,” Cash said. But I just kept walking.

Sarah didn't say much of anything as she drove me home from the hospital, other than that her brother wasn't himself right now and that she was sorry he'd said such awful things to me.

I wanted to tell her that, as far as I could tell, he was pretty much being exactly how he normally is, that he was so mean I originally thought he might murder me, and that I was used to him saying awful things to me. I wanted to tell her it wasn't her fault I was stupid enough to believe that Cash and I were friends. I wanted to tell her that it didn't matter anymore, because he was dying and I was moving, so what was the point of getting my feelings hurt? But instead I just stared out the window at the passing houses and wiped my snotty nose on the back of my hand and thought about what a dumb jerk I was for thinking Cash had been hanging out with me because he'd wanted to.

“Can I get my things? I left them in Cash's wheelbarrow,”
I said when we pulled into the driveway. Dad was still up on the ladder, flashlight in his mouth, pulling gunk out of the gutter by the old CICM-HQ. I glanced at him, thinking about how secluded and important I felt up there for all those nights. Like I could just reach up and touch the planet I was trying to contact. And there Dad was, pulling old leaves and Blow Pop wrappers out of the gutters just like it was any other part of any other house.

“Sure, honey,” Sarah said as she fumbled around the visor until she located the garage door button. She pushed it and the door rumbled open. Right up front, there he was: Huey. Sitting in the wheelbarrow, just like always. Sarah walked up to it and poked around. “Is this the thing you two were working on together?” she asked. I nodded. “Maybe you should go ahead and take it, then. Just like Cash said. That way you can still work on it without him.”

I gazed at Huey. If Cash hadn't gotten sick tonight, we would have been wheeling him up to the hill right about now. We would have been “Star-Spangled Banner”-ing the heck out of those Martians. And we would have been eating pastrami and pickles while we did it. “I'll be right back,” I said.

I hurried across the yard. Our garage door was still open, since Dad was using the ladder. I went inside and found our wheelbarrow and wheeled it back to Cash's house. One by one, I took the parts and pieces of Huey out of Cash's wheelbarrow and put them in mine.

“Thank you,” I told Sarah as I backed out of the garage.

“Are you going to be okay, Arty?” she asked. “Why don't you come inside? I'll make us a snack. We can talk if you like. I don't know much about space, but I know the stories my brother shared with me over the years.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I'm fine. I'll be fine.” I wasn't sure if that was true, but it felt like the right thing to say.

“Okay,” Sarah said. She pushed a button to close the garage door. It hummed down steadily. “Well, if you change your mind, I'll be here. I plan to stay until … well, you know.”

I guessed I did know.
Until the end
, is what she'd meant to say.

“Okay,” I said, then maneuvered the wheelbarrow in a slow circle until I had it pointed the right direction. I stared at Huey, jiggling inside, clanking against himself, almost as if he were jittery and excited about tonight's adventure.

“Do us both a favor … destroy it … smash it to bits.…”

Tears collected in my eyes again as I thought about all our hard work putting Huey together. I'd been blind enough to think we were having fun, when to Cash all I was doing was invading his space—unwanted—and making him keep pursuing a dream he'd wanted to let die.

“Do us both a favor …”

Instead of heading straight over to our garage, I turned left and started through the backyard, my feet seeming to move without my willing them to. I pushed on straight for the woods.

Dad looked up when I passed him and turned the flashlight
on me. “Arty?” he asked. “What do you have there? Where are you going? Arty?”

He kept calling after me as I plunged into the woods, but I didn't answer him. I couldn't. I was too busy hearing Cash's horrible words in my mind, too busy seeing his papery grayish-white skin, too busy feeling his bellowing cough thunder through the room.

I practically ran down the path through the woods, not even worrying about bugs or bears or any of the other things I'd bothered Cash about that first night up the hill. All I could think of was getting to the top.

By the time I popped out into the clearing, I was sweating and crying and breathing really raggedly, like someone running from a monster in a horror movie. My whole body was shaking with rage and anger and fear and sadness and what felt like every emotion in the world rolled up into one. What I wouldn't have given to be the Bacteria at that moment, the only thought in my mind one syllable long, rather than the tangle of syllables tripping over each other. My head felt cluttered, full of stuffing.

I pushed Huey all the way to the zenith, where the moon shone down, and bent over with my hands on my knees, pulling in gaspy painful breaths.

“How could you?”
I screamed, first to the ground, and then I looked up into the sky and repeated it, only louder, yelling at the moon.
“How could you?”
But I couldn't go any further, because the question was locked and loaded with so many endings:

How could you give up on Huey?

How could you give up on us?

How could you kill my dreams?

But worst of all, how could you die without telling me? Didn't I have a right to know? Isn't that what friends do—warn each other that the worst is about to happen?

Sarah was right. Cash had said a lot of awful things to me at the hospital. He'd said awful, unforgivable, unforgettable things. She probably thought the worst was telling me I was always hanging around where I didn't belong or something like that. But she was wrong. The meanest thing he'd said to me came at the very end:
“Give up on space.”
Because he might as well have been telling me to give up on … us.

With a growl, I grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and pulled up with all my might. A disassembled Huey tumbled out onto the ground with a horrifying crunch. Or maybe it was a gratifying crunch. Somehow it was both at the same time.

Two of the mirrors broke on the initial fall. This was the beginning of the end. I raced toward the edge of the woods again. I searched around until I found a big stick, which I carried back to the heap of parts and started wailing on them. The spotlight cracked, the mirrors burst, the metal dented. I pounded and kicked and grunted and cried and said words that made no sense. I pummeled Huey with all my might, doing just as Cash had told me to do—destroying him, smashing him to bits. Smashing our friendship to bits.

“Arty!” I heard in the distance, but I kept going. “Arty!”
I heard again, only closer. Then I felt a pair of arms wrap around my waist and pick me up. “Arty, what's going on? What are you doing? What's wrong?” A torrent of questions into my twisting, contorted, angry face.

I opened my eyes to see that it was my dad holding me, and just like that I was totally spent. I dropped the stick and went limp, letting my face fall onto my dad's chest, not even caring that if anyone from Liberty Middle caught me being held by my dad while crying my eyes out it would mean a lifetime of torment and finding my underwear yanked up between my eyebrows on a daily basis.

“Arty, Arty, what's the matter?” Dad asked, lowering both of us to the ground next to the smashed bits of Huey.

“Let's just move,” I bellowed into my dad's shirt. “Let's just finish packing and move.”

For the next two weeks, we packed nonstop. Our closets were emptied, our cabinets bare. What was left was placed into suitcases to take on our long road trip to Nevada. I even helped this time, diligently wrapping things in brown paper and laying them out in boxes, taping the boxes shut and labeling them in magic marker:

KITCHEN

ARTY'S ROOM

VEGA'S BATHROOM: WARNING!
THIS BOX IS FULL OF SCARY GIRL STUFF!

A For Sale sign appeared in our front yard, and some guy in a pickup truck came and pulled Cassi's swing set out of our backyard and hauled it away. Comet stood at the front door and watched and I could swear I saw a doggy tear in his eye. A moving van pulled up to our curb and we spent a whole day
filling it with furniture and boxes—everything that belonged to the Chambers family, stuffed into the sweltering inner corners of the giant metal rectangle of cargo space. I thought it was weird how everything in the lives of five people could be put into one van. How our lives seemed so much bigger before we had to move them away to somewhere else.

Well, not all our things were there.

Huey was still torn to smithereens on the hilltop. And as far as I was concerned, he was going to stay there forever. Or at least until the next person found him and harvested his scrap for something useful.

I tried not to think about Huey, because thinking about Huey made me think about Cash, which made me think about all kinds of terrible stuff, not the least of which was what might have happened to him over the two weeks since I'd visited him.