The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (18 page)

“
What do you mean, no way it had real lobster in it? You calling me a liar?”

“I'm saying what you're saying don't make any sense.”

“So you ARE saying I'm a liar.”

There were the
umph
s and
smack
s of a brief fistfight, followed by calls of
knock it off
from a chorus of male and female voices. I heard the door to the McDonald's open and shut and then another group approaching.

The greater the number of pursuers who gathered at the McDonald's, the more silent the group became as a whole. From the
hmmm
ing and the cop-show exhalations of
now that's interesting
, it seemed like they were investigating something.

“Why are there balls scattered outside the ball pit?”

“Ask Catfish. He thinks he's the manager and all.”

Catfish must have been the hippie.

“Hey, before I came to help you guys look for her, there
weren't
any balls outside of the pit, man,”
said Catfish.
“I would have remembered something like that.”

“You sure?”

“I take
pride
in keeping that ball pit nice. That is the centerpiece of my establishment. I'm the manager.”

“You're not the manager. And is that a fry in the pit?”

“Crap,” whispered Sophie. “They're going to figure out we're here. We'll have to run. Wait for me to say when….”

“If there's a fry in the ball pit, it means the new guy must be around here somewhere. Two of you start digging. Everybody
else, help me check the rest of the playground. Make sure you look inside the slides.”

“Keep your eyes on me and wait for my signal,” whispered Sophie, looking back and forth between my eyes and the ball pit. “I want them to space themselves out a little more before we go. They always separate in stupid ways.”

“Fan out toward Starbucks Number Eight. I want us covering as much ground as possible.”

“Told you they'd separate,” whispered Sophie.

We heard a gaggle of idiots hustle away. Sophie looked at me.

“Three…two…one…
go
,” said Sophie, throwing open the tower door before the remaining stalkers could trap us inside. Before I'd even moved, I watched her jump the rope ladder entirely, land on a plastic bridge, and make
another
leap, to a bench where a statue of Ronald McDonald was sitting with a frozen grin on his face.

She was already down from the tower, once again running too fast for me to keep up. It was a repeat of that awesome/awful night in the Roswell desert.

“Bennett, go,”
she said over her shoulder.

I bolted out of the tower and free-fell down the rope ladder, threads of twine puncturing my palms. On the bridge, I tripped and scrambled over the planks to keep my momentum going forward, and barely managed to escape the outstretched hands of my pursuers as I shot past the Ronald McDonald statue and out of the PlayPlace.

Up ahead, I could see Sophie make a hard turn away from
the mob into the outdoor courtyard of the mall. While the fastest of the louts had taken off in pursuit of her the moment she had emerged from the PlayPlace, the slowest of the bunch were now after me, wheezing so hard I could hear them as I ran. I looked back and saw nothing but twisted faces—women wiping sweat off their cheeks as they pushed themselves onward, men foaming at the corners of their mouths, triple chins bouncing on everyone. If I ever got back to Earth, I resolved to start a regular fitness routine.

By the time I reached the courtyard, my pursuers were spots in the distance, with their hands on their knees, sucking wind.

I looked around the corner into the courtyard. It was packed shoulder to shoulder with flannel-wearing lumberjacks, mental patients in hospital scrubs, loonies huddled in dirty blankets. It seemed that everyone in the enclosure had gathered for the excitement. I couldn't actually
see
Sophie, but I knew she was in danger from the kinds of things her pursuers were yelling:
Reach up and grab her…. Kill her…. I want to go home….

The fountain in the center of the courtyard appeared to be the focus of their attention, but if Sophie was there, I couldn't see her through the thicket of degenerates, some of whom—suddenly finding themselves pressed up against their rivals in such close quarters—were taking the opportunity to fight each other as gangs, violently acting out whatever intra-enclosure rivalries had been building among them. I saw eyes being
gouged and limbs being broken and bits of hair with the scalp still attached flying through the air, in addition to the mists of spit and sprays of blood normally associated with a melee. If the Jyfos were getting this on camera, their ratings would be going through the roof.

I probably could have figured out a more strategic course of action than the one I took, but when I realized that Sophie was somewhere in that mass of kinetic flesh, I snapped. I pushed my way to the center of the horde, taking elbows in my chest and getting my clothing ripped as the members of the mob clawed at me with their fingertips, trying to position themselves closer to the fountain. They waved bats and field hockey sticks and meat pounders from Williams-Sonoma above their heads. As focused as they were on the fountain and on beating each other up, they didn't appear to even notice that their other target was moving among them.

In the pandemonium of swinging arms and stabbing scissors and people stomping on each other with Foot Locker soccer cleats, I managed to see Sophie climb to the top of the fountain. The men and women clogging the basin of the structure were climbing toward the faux Venus de Milo statue at the top, reaching for Sophie's legs as she kicked at them and trying to pull her down.

“Get
away
from me,” she said, stomping on the hands of a thick-armed, dirty-overalled hayseed, causing him to tumble backward into the sweating, shouting multitude, where he was stepped upon and beaten as the others tried to get closer to Sophie.

“Leave her
alone
!” I yelled, charging into the fountain and pulling her pursuers off the statue. If they had lost track of the fact that I was among them before, the sight of the two of us together ignited them into a frenzy:
There he is…. They're both mine…. Stop pushing and let me do this…. It's time for me to go home….

“Bennett,”
said Sophie.

Before I could reply, the mob was upon me, yanking my legs out from under my body, knocking me into the fountain basin, and forcing my head under the inch or so of water that hadn't been splashed away. I flailed and thrashed to get them off, but they were all too large, there were too many of them, and they had the leverage.

They smashed my nose against the concrete foundation. I saw rivulets of my blood float through the water in front of me, and I heard Sophie screaming above as the mob finally managed to pull her down. More hooligans stepped on my back, pushing out the last of my breath. My vision distorted. I felt time slow down and my heart beginning to beat erratically.

But then…

BRRRANNNG!

A
deafening
guitar chord rang out over the courtyard. The men and women drowning me threw their hands up over their ears, allowing me to sit up and suck in the longest gasp of air I'd ever inhaled.

BRRRANNNG!

I looked at the sky, where, epically slowly, the Interstellar
Libertine was lowering itself over the mall courtyard. Cad was standing on top of the bus with a new guitar hooked up to an amplifier, grinning proudly.

“Stay
away
from those teenagers,” he yelled. “
Look
at you fat asses. This is a
sea
of losers as far as the eye can see. You should be
ashamed
of yourselves. You
know
that this isn't what Earth is like.”

BRRRANNNG!

Cad hit another chord, and everybody in the courtyard covered their ears again, giving me a split second to force my way to my feet and climb the fountain. Sophie grabbed my arm and pulled me up.

“What
is
that?” said Sophie.

“That,” I said, “is the Interstellar Libertine.”

“You were right, Bennett,” said Cad, looking over the side of the bus. “She
is
hot. I thought maybe it was just a trick of the television, but in person—even better.”

BRRRANNNG!

“You told that guy I was
hot
?”

“You talk about a lot of things when you're trapped on a bus with a band.”

“You all right down there?” yelled Driver out the window.

“We won't be unless you hurry,” I said.

BRRRANNNG!

The Interstellar Libertine hovered in front of the fountain, and Driver threw open the door.

“What
took
you so long?” I said.

“
We found this secondhand music store that was having a massive sale and lets you shop on credit,” said Cad. “We weren't going to stay long, but I got wrapped up playing around with this old Moog synthesizer—”

“Tell me about it later,” I said.

Driver grabbed Sophie and me and pulled us into the bus. The residents of the enclosure who had survived the melee were staring up at us, button eyes looking out of their doughy faces, covered in scratches and bits of gristle and streaks of snot from ripping each other apart. I could see fallen bodies in between the survivors, some of whom were waving their arms at the Interstellar Libertine, as if they thought that after everything we had been through,
maybe
we would still give them a ride. Others were starting to creep away, putting some distance between themselves and their rivals while they still had a chance, like animals slinking off to lick their wounds.

Cad gave his new guitar a final strum.

BRRRANNNG!

“You've been a terrible audience and I hope to never play for you again,” said Cad. “Do some sit-ups.
Good night.
”

Sophie was ravenous after days of subsisting on French fries scavenged from the Dumpster, so Driver stopped at a Chinese food place we found sitting on a floating platform that was zipping past Jyfo. A reasonably priced restaurant that visited you instead of the other way around—what an idea. The entrance
to its dome quickly opened as we approached and snapped shut behind us just as fast.

Instead of ordering takeout, we decided to have a sit-down meal and regroup. We left Skark on the bus, still passed out, crumpled in his sleeping pod.

At the table, Driver shoveled buckets of fried rice into his face, while Cad ripped at his spareribs. Sophie choked down a glass of Spine Wine so she could understand what Driver was saying, after which I watched her gobble a heap of chow mein and pot stickers.

“This food is pretty great,” said Sophie.

“It's not bad, right?” I said.

“A little salty.”

“That's the only issue.”

After the noodles, she finished a huge portion of Szechuan pork. Color came back to Sophie's complexion, and her body started to relax.

“You should at least chew a couple of times before you swallow,” said Cad. “Nobody in the band knows the Heimlich maneuver.”

“I know the Heimlich maneuver,” I said. “I took first aid to earn extra credit in gym class.”

“I think you've saved me enough times for the day, Bennett,” said Sophie, smiling. “All I want is to go home and shower.”

Cad and Driver looked at each other. Sophie picked the last few grains of rice off her plate.

“When are we leaving to go back home?” she said, licking her fingers.

“Bennett?” said Cad. “Would you like to explain our itinerary to your girlfriend?”

“Wait—have you been telling them I'm your girlfriend?” said Sophie.

“I made it clear you were my prom date, not my girlfriend.”

“I'm
pretty
sure you said
girlfriend
,” said Cad. “Kinda strange you would lie about that, if it wasn't true.”

I stared at Cad.

“I didn't lie about it, because I didn't
say
it.”

“Huh,” said Cad. “I guess I remember things differently.”

Though I was new to the dating world, even I could recognize what he was doing. From the moment we'd saved Sophie, I'd seen Cad checking her out—looking at her legs, putting a comforting hand on her back as he showed her the bus, offering his personal toiletries so she could clean some of the dirt off her skin. Now he was trying to make her feel uncomfortable around me by suggesting that I'd been calling her my girlfriend when I hadn't.

There wasn't a doubt in my mind—Cad was trying to move in on Sophie.

Which—if you'll allow me to step back from the story and try to be objective about that moment and the journey as a whole—was within Cad's rights, if not a little brazen and untimely. Yes, Sophie was my prom date, but it wasn't like a date to a single dance was some sort of binding lifetime commitment that would
warrant
the type of sinister jealousy bubbling up in my gut as I watched Cad eyeing her from across the table, turning oh so slightly to the side each time he took a drink to make
sure that she saw the ropy muscles in his arms. Just because you saved someone didn't mean you just
got
that someone—if that was the case, every lifeguard in the world would have fifty spouses—and Sophie was her own girl, single and free as the wind, with the exception of those couple of hours on Friday when she was supposed to dance with me.

But sitting at that Chinese restaurant, having endured Skark's bullheadedness and survived the Jyfos' misguided environmentalism, I was finding it impossible to be objective about the extra attention Cad was paying Sophie. I could save her from the dangers of the universe, but keeping a handsome bassist away from her was another matter entirely.