Life on Mars (3 page)
Authors: Jennifer Brown
PLANET: People Looking At Neptune Every Thursday
Except I had never looked at Neptune a day in my life, mostly because I didn't know where it was, other than next to Uranus, but I dare you to look for something next to Uranus and keep a straight face. It's very distracting.
MARS: Martians Are Real, Steve
I've never known anyone named Steve.
ASTRONOMY: A Secretive Test Run On ⦠uhhh ⦠way too long
And then I had this great oneâPeople Ogling Other Planetsâbut that spelled POOP, and even if I wanted to walk around in a shirt with POOP on it, no way would Mom let me wear it to the dinner table.
So my mission remained CICM.
Tonight the only thing standing between me and CICM was my sister Cassi.
When Cassi was a baby, she was cute. She had little pointy elf ears and a wrinkled forehead and every time I stuck my finger in her hand, she grabbed it and squeezed, and she never got bored, no matter how many times I did it. But
somewhere between birth and fourth grade, Cassi discovered three things: lip gloss, a loud cheerleading voice, and “being cool.”
“Arty, it's your dish night,” Mom said after dinner, before migrating into the living room to watch TV with Dad. I groaned. Mom had made double-layer raisin-fudge mint brownies. There were a thousand bowls in the sink.
I turned my gaze over to Cassi and grinned. Her eyes bugged out. She shook her head.
“No way,” she said. “I've got cheerleading practice tonight.”
“You've got cheerleading practice every night.”
“I'm not doing it. Brielle will be here any minute to pick me up.”
“What was that? Sorry, I blanked for a minute. I was remembering how much fun we used to have at space camp together.”
“No. Stop it! Vega, tell him to stop it.”
Vega's eyes barely flicked up from her cell phone, where she was busy texting the Bacteria. “Whatever.”
“You don't have to do the dishes, Cassi,” I said. “Cassi-ooo ⦔
“No!” she cried! “Stop it! Don't you dare say it, Arty!”
“Cassi-ooo-peee ⦔
“Cut it out! I don't go by that name anymoâ”
“⦠peee-ahhh. Cassiopeia! Is that Brielle's mom's car I hear running outside? Don't you think she would love to hear about the time you won the rocket-building contest,
Cassiopeia? I'll just run outside and tell her real quick.” I acted like I was going to get up.
Cassi stood abruptly, her ponytail swinging forward over the top of her head and lying across her angry eyebrows like an animal. “Fine. I'll do your stupid dishes,” she grumbled.
There was once a time when Cassiopeia had her head in the clouds just as much as I did. We went to space camp together, we memorized the planetarium show together, we named our bikes “Spirit” and “Opportunity” after Mars rovers, and yes, she even helped me get CICM up and running.
But ever since getting on the overly pink and glittery cheer squad (all the members of which, I was sure, were named Brielle), Cassi had been on a mission to swear off anything and everything the Brielle Brigade thought was “uncool.” From what I could tell, the list consisted of:
1) Parents
2) Teachers
3) Parents who are also teachers
4) Getting your hair wet
5) Siblings of any age
6) Cartoons that feature superheroes with overly large leg muscles
7) All other cartoons
8) Going to a restroom alone
9) Miscellaneous nerdiness, which, according to Cassi, included, “Math; science; or anything that had to do with stars, planets, space in general,
space monsters, aliens, astronauts, rockets, or any of those geeky scientists who discovered stuff nobody cares about.”
10) Socks that show
So basically Cassi lived with the constant fear that someone would let it slip in front of the Brielle Brigade that she once believed, like me, that there could be life on Mars. And that she once won an award for creating a cotton-ball-and-plastic-tubing water filtration system as a prototype of what humans might use in a man-made ecosystem when we inhabit Mars. And, worst of all, that someone might discover that she was named after nerdy stars.
And what kind of big brother would I be if I didn't take full advantage of that fear? I hadn't done the dishes, taken out the trash, or picked up one doggy package in the backyard in a year.
Cassi stomped away from the table. “I wonder if Earth makes fun of Mars because Mars has no life,” she spat, taking our dishes and slamming them into the sink.
I guessed that was supposed to be an insult because I was trying to communicate with said nonexistent life, but I actually thought it was a kind of clever joke, so I chuckled.
Vega slapped her phone down on the table. It beeped again almost immediately. She rolled her eyes. “Duh, Cassi, it's supposed to be, âIf you were a planet, Earth would make fun of you because you have no life.' ”
Cassi was in no mood to be corrected. “Shut up, Vega,” she said, turning on the sink and dumping about half the bottle of
dish detergent into the running water. “You know, Dad's looking for a new job, and I heard him talking to Mom about us maybe having to move. How are you gonna make drooly kissy lips at Mitchell all the time if we don't live in Liberty anymore? What if we move clear out of Missouri? What then?”
Vega grunted and snatched up her phone. “Whatever, Cassiopeia,” she said, and in one swift motion shoved her chair back and whipped her body around to leave, her hair swishing behind her. If hair swishing were an Olympic sport, Vega would take home gold. She could swish her hair so hard it felt like a semi just drove past your face.
“Ha-ha, Cassiopeia,” I said, pointing at Cassi. But Vega turned and glared at me. “Shut it, Armpit. If we move, what'll happen to your nerd project?”
“It's a Clandestine Interplanetary Communication Module,” I corrected, my voice weak.
Vega considered me for a moment, as if she were going to say something back. But her phone beeped (inside the Bacteria's mind: No
HearBackGirlPushPhoneText), and she squeezed it in her palm. “Whatever,” she finally said, and walked out of the room.
“I knew you were going to say that,” I called after her, but she ignored me. And it appeared that Cassi was also ignoring me, her back turned on me while she frantically scrubbed the dishes. So I sat at the table and chewed my thumbnail, thinking about ⦠stuff.
With Cassi you never could be sure if she was telling the
truth or if she was just being dramatic. But if she was telling the truth about us possibly moving, it was bad news.
I didn't want to move. Liberty wasn't the biggest town in the world, but it was my town. I loved that you could count cows in the fields if you drove the back way to school, and that you could walk to the square for the fall festival and ride the Octopus with friends you hadn't planned to see there. I loved the college up on the hill and knowing as you drove into town and saw the brick building roosting above the city in the middle of campus, it meant you were almost home. I loved my school, and I loved it when you sometimes saw your teachers at the community pool or the grocery store. It didn't happen often, but when it did, they always said hi, because that was the way Liberty worked.
I was about to start seventh grade, which meant I successfully survived sixth grade. That might not sound like a big deal, but trust meâliving through a week traversing the same hallways as Ben Green and Will Sanchez is such an accomplishment, I was planning to add it to my resume someday:
Arcturus Betelgeuse Chambers,
PhD, MD, JD, SD, PQRSWXYZ
⢠Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Clown College
Summa cum laude, 700.0 GPA
Voted Most Likely to Rule the Solar System
⢠Creator of the Chambers Algorithm
⢠Discoverer of Great Martian Ocean
⢠Didn't die by the sixth-grade lockers
Once, a sixth grader named Bobby McDoon claimed to have spotted Ben and Will on an Animal Planet predator show chowing down on an antelope. His claim was later proven to be false, but for those of us who regularly tried to make it in one piece from the first-floor restrooms to the third-floor science hall, the story didn't seem far-fetched at all.