The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (26 page)

Even though I had a strained relationship with my hometown, when I first met Cad, I had thought it was odd that he had never gone back to New Jersey. I may have desperately wanted to go to Princeton, but I couldn't imagine never going back home to see my family. Cad didn't have a family, but from the way he was grinning at Skark and Driver before turning back to an audience that was in the middle of really loving him, it seemed like he had made a home right here. Maybe some people could really just totally get away and be happy.

I knew the band had never played Cad's song together before, but it sounded like a permanent part of the encore. When Cad finished, he tossed his guitar pick into the roaring audience, watched them fight over it for a few satisfied seconds, and handed the guitar back to Skark with a
told you so
nod.

“You've made me fear for my job,” said Skark. “Where did
that
come from?”

“Years of frustration about you telling me to shut up,” said Cad.

“You need shut up no longer, friend,” said Skark. “But I'm
going to have to ask you to surrender the stage for a few moments. It's time to end this engagement properly.”

Cad put his bass back on while Skark walked to the microphone and raised his hand. “Perfectly Reasonable, on my signal.”

The band stared at Skark as they waited for him to give them the go-ahead, knowing it wasn't coming anytime soon. Skark was going to milk this. For ten seconds, Skark left his hand hanging in the air, staring at the audience as the volume of their screams increased, wiggling his fingers at the crowd to taunt them.

Finally, he dropped his hand to start the next song…but instead of playing, Cad and Driver simply took off their instruments and left the stage. Cad smiled at me as he walked into the wings.

“This is how we used to end our shows,” he said. “Watch.”

Skark stood alone, the video screens flanking the stage showing him from every angle, pressing in on the makeup melting off his face, the wild tangles in his hair, and the wet plug of paper damming up the hole in his throat. He removed his guitar and turned back to the microphone.

“Ah, at last, private time with the people I love most. Thank you so much for tonight. I can't tell you what it means to the band and me. It's been a long road back.”

With that, Skark closed his eyes and incanted a single haunting note, letting it drift over the audience, making it dip until it was so low that I felt it rumbling in my belly and then rise until
I couldn't hear it at all, though I knew it was still there, hanging in the air. It sounded like the music that plays in movies when a virtuous hero is taken up to heaven—seraphic, soothing, completely his own.

When he had expelled the last of his breath, Skark closed his mouth, bowed to his audience, and walked offstage to complete silence. The audience was so dumbstruck that they couldn't even raise their hands to slap them together.

“That should give us enough time to get away,” Skark said, winking at Sophie and me as he rapidly walked past. “Come on.”

Sophie and I followed, weaving our way around roadies for other bands who were standing in place, holding amps and drums, also entranced by the sound of Skark's voice. We hustled past the stage manager, who was gripping a pen in her canvas tendril, having just put a check mark next to the Perfectly Reasonable's name on her band lineup—gig, finished—before she too heard Skark and froze. We grabbed cookies from the catering station, where a chef had paused in the middle of rotating some sort of oversized amphibian on a spit and was staring in the direction of the stage in astonishment.

We piled onto the bus.

“It's so important to leave before the audience does, both for the mystique and so the bus doesn't get overrun,” said Skark. “Driver, kindly take us out of here.”

Driver piloted the bus upward. Beneath us, we could see the stage. No one in the audience had moved.

“That should be enough time,” said Skark.
“Listen.”

All at once, the crowd snapped out of their collective trance to deliver an eardrum-ripping thunder of applause that caused the bus to vibrate. They were waving up at us, screaming for Skark, stomping their feet, demanding another encore.

“That,”
said Skark, “is the sound of
rebirth.
”

Skark ran through the bus, sweatily embracing everybody. He lifted Cad out of his seat and gave him a bear hug, holding him against his chest a foot off the ground.

“I take back everything I ever said about your lack of song-writing talent,” said Skark, straight into Cad's face. “I'm still shaking from your performance. Please tell me you have other songs. We will record them all.”

“I have a few,” said Cad.

“Fantastic. We'll put your head in a vise and squeeze them out one by one. I can't wait to discover what's in there. I'm disgusted that I never knew I was in the presence of such a master.”

Skark lifted Walter, who immediately struggled to get out of his arms, whacking him with his hooves. Skark didn't even seem to feel it.

“Walter, thank you for all your spiritual advice over the past four years,” said Skark. “Thank you for rescuing us. We're taking you home tonight.”

“I'm still not your spirit guide, but if it gets me back to Nevada, you're
welcome.
”

Skark took my cheeks in his hands and planted a wet kiss on my forehead.

“
If you let me record the songs you played tonight, I'll give you part of the album sales.”

“You'll have to ask Sophie. It's her name that'll be all over the universe.”

The band looked at Sophie. She was thinking.

“You can record the songs if Bennett and I each get twenty-five percent of the total gross,” she said. “Half of the money for us, half the money for you.”

“A
shrewd
businesswoman when it comes to publishing rights,” said Skark. “I'm impressed. If Bennett is happy with the deal, so am I.”

“There wouldn't be any songs without Sophie,” I said. “I'm happy with the deal.”

Hovering far above the stage, we could still hear the shouts and demands for another encore from our audience.

“You'll get your encore when we're
headlining
next year!” yelled Cad, looking out the window at the crowd.

“Always leave them wanting more,” said Skark, winking at me. “We're
back.
”

I spent the ride back to Earth holding hands with Sophie and staring out the window. We knew we'd never get to see All of Everything from this angle again. She put her head on my shoulder as we passed a nebula that looked like clouds of white cotton, and she squeezed my fingers as we watched a group of stellar jets spitting out neon blue bubbles like great cosmic snorkels. We were trying to remember everything, so we didn't talk much. There was time for that later.

Driver and Cad were stripped to the skin, having donated their own ragged clothing to the cause of making me a tuxedo by the time we got back to Earth. Driver had needles in his mouth as he put the finishing touches on the garment. He had made the tuxedo pants out of my scrubs. For the shirt, he'd
cut around the sweat stains of one of his enormous tank tops to create a simple white button-down, fashioning the buttons from porcelain chunks of the toilet, which Walter had chipped off the rim of the bowl using his hooves. For the coat, Skark just let me keep his jacket.

“The jacket will do whatever you tell it to do,” said Skark. “If you want it to look like fireflies, it will. If you want it to look like it's made of ice, it will. The controls are here.” He pointed to a series of buttons inside the sleeve.

“I'm probably just going to need it to match these white pants,” I said.

“It can do that,” said Skark, tapping a couple of buttons. The coat grew warm, and in one movement the panels from which it was built flipped over, revealing their lustrous white undersides.

“Sophie, what color is your evening dress?” said Driver.

“Yellow.”

“Spectacular,” said Skark. “You two will stop
time
in your outfits.”

Driver took a brief break from stitching the tuxedo to get behind the wheel and guide the Interstellar Libertine through the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, weaving the bus between celestial icebergs and clusters of comets that came at us like shotgun pellets.

Familiar planets soon came into view—Saturn, with its annular disks, and Jupiter, with its Great Red Spot. Mars wasn't particularly captivating—after what Sophie and I had seen, it
was hard to care about whether NASA ever put a human on such a dead rock, considering there were so many other interesting places to visit. No reason to be there.

Finally, we saw the blues and greens of Earth, which—even more than the thought of
we're finally home
—gave me the feeling of staring at a quaint country house. I was perfectly okay with the fact that the rest of the universe regarded us as unsophisticated and potentially doomed. It was nice being tucked away in our own secluded, comfortably climated sliver of the universe, far from everybody else. We popped through the atmosphere and descended toward the snuff-colored landscape of the American Southwest.

I didn't know what was going to happen next, but I was feeling pretty good about myself in that moment, I have to say. I had gone after Sophie, and one way or another, I'd finished the task. I'd brought her back.

When we arrived in Gordo, I had Driver land the bus near the town dump so we wouldn't be seen falling directly from the sky onto Sophie's front lawn, and from there we drove the roads to her house. It was night, and the bus's headlights kept shining on
Sophie Come Home Soon
signs in people's yards and on ribbons imploring her return tied around tree trunks. For a while, I wondered why there weren't any signs supporting
me
, and then I realized,
Oh, it's because people think
I
kidnapped her.

Although my parents were vacationing in Vietnam and presumably had no idea that I had been gone, this was
not
the
case with the Gilkeys. They not only were
home
but had spent almost a week in a state of catatonic worry about their missing daughter, who had last been seen fixing her motorcycle in her driveway…a motorcycle later found in the back of my truck in the drive-through of the In-N-Out, which meant there were news trucks parked outside
both
our houses.

The reporters assigned to the kidnapping beat nearly passed out when they saw the platypus-shaped bus roll up in front of the Gilkeys' house, park, throw open its doors, and eject Sophie. They yelled questions, but she was inside before they could get her to answer anything. We heard them pounding on the side of the bus, shouting questions about where we'd taken her, but Driver refused to open the door while he was making the final adjustments to my tux.

They were probably having a field day with the story—“Loner Teen Kidnaps Beautiful Neighbor”—but despite photographers snapping pictures of the Interstellar Libertine and the throng of journalists amassing outside the Gilkeys' front door, trying to get at Sophie inside, I hadn't been spotted yet. The bus had tinted windows for a reason.

A police car pulled up outside, and I heard a cop's voice through the speakers.

“Please exit the vehicle.”

“No way,” said Driver, thread in his mouth, making a few last stitches to my tie, which he'd made from the leather shell of the bus's steering wheel.

We heard more police sirens.

“
Get out of the vehicle now.”

“Hurry up, Sophie,” I muttered. “We're already late….”

I knew that Sophie's parents had been waiting almost a week for information about where their daughter had gone, only to have her suddenly come bursting through the front door. No doubt they were currently all over her, hugging and crying and asking questions and phoning relatives with the good news and checking to make sure she wasn't hurt and generally making it difficult for her to get ready for the dance.

But—and I know this is going to sound insensitive—I was getting impatient. We had prom. In due time, I was sure she and I were going to have to explain everything, but right now…I wanted to put all that off and get to where we were supposed to be. We were going to be late.

I saw the door opening and Sophie sprinting for the bus, and in that short, glorious run, all the strange situations I had endured over the past week ceased to matter.

She was wearing a floor-length yellow gown with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline. When she turned to look at the reporters chasing her, I saw that her back was bare down to her waist, and the sheer fabric outlined her long legs from the curves of her hips to just below her knees. She had somehow managed to pull her hair away from her shoulders and twist it into a stylish bun, which showed off the length of her neck.

“Wow,” said Cad.

“Makes me wish I was human,” said Walter.

“
Me too,” said Skark.

“Perfect match for the tux,” said Driver proudly.

Sophie's parents trailed her down the footpath leading from the house to the road while reporters snapping pictures swarmed. A cop stepped in front of her, only to be faked out by a quick two-step shake and bake.

“How does she run like that in heels?” said Walter.

“You get used to it,” said Skark.

Driver smacked the button to open the door of the bus, and Sophie barreled inside.

“Get us
out
of here,” she said.

“On it,” said Driver, turning the ignition. I heard the
whoop
of the police siren.

“How do I look?” said Sophie.

“Like every star we've seen in the past week, amplified,” I said.

She smiled. “You do clean up well, by the way. And Driver, the tux is a masterpiece.”

Driver grinned back at us from the front seat. “I was inspired,” he said. “Maybe I'll start my menswear line after all.”

Sophie turned to me and spread her arms, showing all of her dress. Her body.

“Incredible,” I said.

“Do you mean that? I didn't have a chance to do my makeup because my mom kept crying and hugging me and my dad was searching for a baseball bat.”

“Why a bat?” said Skark.

BOOM BOOM BOOM.
There was a pounding near the wheels of the bus, followed by shouts from Mr. and Mrs. Gilkey.

“Give me
back
my daughter. You're
not
taking her again.”

“We'll need to leave the bus in the shop for a month after this trip,” mumbled Skark.

“I'm sorry about the damage. Let me handle this,” said Sophie, rolling down the window and poking her head out. “
Dad.
Everything is
fine.
This is my ride. I'll be back after prom.
Relax.
”

Mr. Gilkey lowered his bat.

“Who's in there with you?” he said.

I opened a window and looked out.

“Hi, Mr. Gilkey.”

“Bennett.”

“I promise everything is okay. There's nothing else to worry about—we got Sophie back in one piece.”

“Who's
we
?” said Mrs. Gilkey.

Cad, Skark, Driver, and Walter poked their heads out of the window around me, which may have been a tactical error. The sight of their daughter on a bus with two aliens—who were essentially naked, though I don't know if her parents could tell that from their vantage point—a thirty-year-old bassist, and a ram couldn't have been comforting.

“Gotta go.
Love you.
” Sophie closed the window.

“Driver, get us to the high school as fast as you can,” I said. “They're going to be coming for us, but we can get in at least one dance….”

“
Do you want to drive or fly?” said Driver.

“I'd say drive,” I said. “But
fast.
If you fly, we'll have even more questions to answer.”

“Actually, we have one more stop first,” said Sophie. “I know we're cutting things close, but it's necessary.”

Driver gunned the bus down the road before the news trucks could even start their engines. We were late, but I knew what Sophie required to complete her outfit. I had been thinking about it too.

Though my tuxedo matched her dress terrifically, Sophie still needed a corsage. Cad—perhaps momentarily forgetting the romance of prom—suggested grabbing a carnation from a graveyard to save some time, but when Sophie protested at the thought of having ghosts inhabiting her dress, we decided to pull into a supermarket instead.

The flower shop was closing as Sophie and I walked inside, but the woman working the counter took one look, saw our outfits, and knew why we were there. Fortunately, she didn't seem to recognize us from the press coverage. I guess flower-shop ladies live in their own worlds.

“I think your dance has already started, darlings,” said the flower lady. “I know making an entrance is important, but you might have mistimed matters.”

“Do you have any corsages left?” I said.

“If you're in yellow, that means you need something pink or white. Come over here.”

We went with the pink, because Sophie said it was more promlike. I thought I'd be able to slip the corsage over her wrist, but she wanted it fastened next to her neckline. The flower lady gave me the long pin.

“Keep your hands still, now,” she said. “You don't want to pop that bosom before you get to use it.”

I froze.

“I can't really pop it, can I?”

“You're an idiot,” said Sophie.

“I don't have much experience with this sort of thing,” I said.

Despite my brushes with death—despite actually
dying
at one point—this was the most stressful moment of the past five days. I was sweating. I took a breath, reached back carefully with the pin…and stabbed Sophie.

“Are you
serious
?” she said, recoiling. “I
cannot
believe you did that.”

After my repeated apologies, the flower lady gave Sophie a tissue to dab up the small spots of blood on her chest, and she handled the rest of the pinning herself.

“You found the
one
spot on my body that wasn't hurt, and you injured it,” she said.