This Place Has No Atmosphere (2 page)

While we look at each other, some guy comes up and says with hate, “Why don’t you stick to your own kind?”

I can’t believe it.

He repeats what he’s just said.

Jason turns to him. “We are the same kind—human. You’re the one who isn’t our kind. You’re scum.”

A year later, Paula’s next book,
This Place Has No Atmosphere
, was published and the setting is, of all places, the moon in 2057—a bold departure for Paula, who made the colony on the moon seem real and believable, and who drew us into the life of Aurora Williams on the first page. The book feels futuristic indeed, but Aurora’s story of adjusting to a move and finding a serious boyfriend is timeless.

Paula died in 2004, but her stories have already been passed from one generation of passionate fans to another. Her many best friends miss her, but I like to think of the hope with which she ends her books. She wrote great last lines, too.
If you take the letters in the word DIVORCES and rearrange them, they spell DISCOVER
.

Thank you, Paula, for showing us captivating beginnings, hopeful endings, and in between, how to look at life with laughter.

Harris and Marijo Mallon-Breiman;

Annie, Chris, and Rosie Flanders; June Foley; Pat Giff;

Susie Haven; Nancy Kafka; Holly Morris; Elyse Myller;

Lois Myler; Nicky Nicholson; Francine Pascal;

Buzzy Tischler; Jan Traum

“I
think he likes you,” Juna whispers, as Matthew sits down at the other end of the table and smiles at me.

“Shh.” I look down at the school lunch of mystery meat and lumpy mashed potatoes. “Not so loud. If he hears you, I’ll just die . . . . Anyway, he smiles at everyone. He’s running for ninth-grade president.”

As the rest of the group sits down at the table, the robot lunch monitor goes past our table, checking for litterers. It blinks its lights at Juna, who is blowing a straw wrapper at me from across the table.

“DETENTION.” It makes a clicking sound at her. “This is the third time this week that you have been guilty of an infraction. Student 11481844, Juna Jamison, you will have to stay after school for three days.”

Juna stares at the robot. “I guess that was the last straw for you.”

The gang laughs.

The robot doesn’t.

It hasn’t been programmed to have a sense of humor.

The blinking lights change from red to black and then back again. “RUDENESS. Now you have four days’ detention.”

Juna smiles at the robot. “Thank you. Want to flip a coin and make it double or nothing?”

“GAMBLING IS NOT PERMITTED ON SCHOOL PREMISES.” The robot beeps and leaves as it spots a table of boys who are trying to make a pyramid out of Jell-O.

I look at Juna. “What did you do that for?”

She grins. “Randy Brock got a month’s detention for using his telekinetic powers to put the vice-principal on the flagpole. I’ve been wanting to spend
some time with him for a long while. Maybe now that we’ll be in detention together, he’ll notice me, even though he’s a senior and I’m only a freshman.”

“Couldn’t you have just smiled at him in the hall or something?” Cosmosa Lloyd asks, as she takes the cellophane off a dish of peaches drowned in juice.

“I tried that already. Now it’s time for more drastic measures.” She touches her hair. “I heard that his favorite singer is Rita Retrograde.”

That explains why Juna looks the way she does.

Rita Retrograde has straight one-inch-long hair on the right side of her head and shoulder-length curly hair on the other side. It is dyed purple on the right side and pink on the left. It is tipped with liquid silver and is braided throughout with tiny light bulbs.

So is Juna’s.

Her parents had a fit.

I bet Rita Retrograde’s parents weren’t ecstatic either.

I know that my parents would have a cosmic cow if I did that to myself. Maybe I should do it just to drive them nuts. But actually I liked Juna’s hair better the old way too.

“You should have seen my mother’s face when I walked in the door. Maybe she’ll be so angry that I won’t have to be in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.” The light bulbs in Juna’s hair flash on and off as she talks.

Juna’s a celebrity because she was the first child conceived in space. Her parents were honeymooning astronauts on a space shuttle expedition. When they came back to earth, Mrs. Jamison was pregnant. Ever since then, Juna’s had lots of publicity. But lately she’s become kind of embarrassed that the whole world knew what her parents were doing when the cameras were off. Now there are lots of kids not only started in space but born there. But Juna was the first, so she’s in the news, kind of like back in the old days when the first test tube baby was born.

“Couldn’t you just have told your parents that you didn’t want to ride on the float this year?” I look at her, even though the blinking lights are beginning to drive me nuts.

“They never listen.” She sighs. “My mother’s really getting to me. What does she know about being a teenager? She hasn’t been one for years. It’s 2057 . . . and she was born decades ago.”

Juna rants about her parents for a few more minutes, and then the rest of the gang starts complaining about their parents.

While they do, I think about how I feel about mine. Even though they’re always telling me how much they love me, I really doubt it. They talk about it, but don’t really show me that they mean what they say. Even when I try to please them, it never seems like I can. I hate to think about it because I get so upset.

Instead, I look around at the group that I’m part of, the Turnips.

The Turnips. We’re one of the big groups at school. One of the kid’s parents gave us the nickname and it stuck. That’s because we always “turn up” at places, like to make appearances, hang out. I once heard someone say that we turn up like bad pennies and that we turn up our noses at kids who aren’t cool enough.

The kid who made that comment was someone who tried to get into the group and didn’t make it.

It’s a weird thing, groups. At our school, if you’re not in one, you’re a nobody. It’s kind of gross, actually. Sometimes I think that the only reasons I got
into the Turnips are that my house is in the right neighborhood, a lot of kids think I’m kind of cute, and I’m in a lot of school plays. Secretly, though, I’m not always so sure I fit in. It’s a good thing that I can act, so that no one notices.

Most of the people in our neighborhood have lots of money; not my family, though. My parents work for the government—in the Medical Department. They’ve made lots of important discoveries, so the government has rewarded them with use of the house we live in. It’s a very big-deal bonus. So there we are, and I am part of the group.

“Look at the ugly tunic Miranda Cummings is wearing,” Cosmosa says. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit. It should be used to wipe up birdcage droppings.”

I look.

Miranda’s at the other side of the cafeteria, talking to some kids.

Her outfit is not so bad.

I think Cosmosa just doesn’t like her because Miranda got on the yeardisk staff and Cosmosa didn’t.

It reminds me of the time, years ago, that I wanted to be friends with Tandy Connors and Cosmosa told
me I shouldn’t be seen hanging out with creeps or people would think I was one, too.

Cosmosa can be really mean when she wants to be, and a lot of the kids follow her lead, so I stopped seeing Tandy, even though I hated myself for it.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I wasn’t part of the group, but mostly I’ve learned to just fit in, and I’m happy—I guess. Juna really is a terrific best friend, and a lot of the kids are really nice, when you talk to them one to one.

Thinking of really nice kids, I sneak a look at Matthew.

He’s definitely grown up a lot over the summer.

We’d look good as a couple.

He’s about six inches taller than my 5' 6", with brown curly hair, gray eyes, and long eyelashes.

I’ve got blond straight hair, greenish eyes, and short eyelashes, which would be much longer if my parents would let me have a lash transplant.

I asked them for one but they said that my friends and I are too concerned with appearances instead of important things. They said that if I devoted as much time to my schoolwork as I do to my looks I would be a straight-A student, instead of a B one. I asked them
if I got straight A’s, would they let me have the lash transplant. Their answer was NO, so Matthew has longer lashes than I do and I still have a B average.

Juna blows a straw wrapper at me to get my attention.

She gets three more days of detention.

I look at her.

“It’s time to get ready for class,” she reminds me.

We empty our garbage into the disposal hole in the center of the table.

I watch as it disappears through a tube that leads to the basement, where the automatic trash compactor mushes it into tiny blocks, which are later transformed into a power source.

This process is a fairly new development. Everyone seems to be amazed that garbage is being used to run the school, but I don’t see what’s so unusual about that. The same can be said about Mr. Finsterwald, the principal.

Putting the dirty dishes and the tray on the conveyer belt, I rush to my favorite class, Drama of the Twenty-first Century.

Juna’s taking Building Your Own Synthesizer.

I’ve even found out what Matthew’s schedule is.
He’s got BESP—Beginning Extrasensory Perception. If he’s doing well in it, he should know how much I want to go out with him.

I rush into class and sit down in my seat, careful to put my thumbprint on the attendance-taking square on the desk so that I’m not marked late or absent.

I think about Matthew and how my life would be complete if he asked me out and fell in love with me.

There’s about as much chance of that happening, though, as there is of my living on the moon.

“Y
ou’d think that by the twenty-first century someone would have invented a zit zapper.” Juna stares in the store window and frowns at a pimple-squeeze mark on her chin. “Gross. I’m so gross.”

“No, you’re not.” I look at her. “Just stop touching it.”

“How’s Randy ever going to fall in love with someone who looks like a tube of leaking mayonnaise?” Juna wails.

“That’s so disgusting,” I tell her. “Look, Juna, it’s one pimple. You’re not a living pus bomb.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re my best friend.” She puts her hand across the lower part of her face.

“Let’s go to Vid-Sound,” I suggest, to get her mind on something else. “They have Rita Retrograde’s new holograph, ‘Robot Love.’ ”

We step onto a moving sidewalk.

As it moves toward the store, I look around.

The Monolith Mall is so wonderful.

We’re on the fifteenth floor, the one where most of the junior and senior high kids hang out.

There are one hundred and forty-four floors at the Monolith.

The top twenty are for recreation and are taken care of by the government. They are there to make up for the loss of public land that was sold to private industries by politicians years ago. The space is really great. There are swimming pools, roller- and ice-skating rinks, hiking trails, a zoo, a bird sanctuary. My parents say it used to be better when the wilderness was outside the malls, but how should I know?

Forty floors are filled with stores.

Condominiums and cooperative apartments are on the rest.

There are all these stories about people who spend their whole adult lives in malls . . . living . . . working . . . playing. They never leave. “Mole Minds” is what my parents call them.

I really wouldn’t mind living in the mall, but my parents go nuts whenever I mention it. We live in a real house now, but soon single houses may have to come down to make room for environmental hives. My parents have been very active in a group that’s collected petitions and stuff, but it doesn’t seem to be working. There are just so many people.

Getting off the moving stairs, Juna and I go into Vid-Sound. We’re given a token, which allows us to spend ten minutes listening in a special preview booth. Entering the booth, we put the token in and slip the disk into the machine and watch as Rita holographically appears in the booth with us as the music plays around us. A robot image appears also, doing the latest dance, the vertebration-automation. It’s the ultimate.

After the time’s up, Juna and I look around the store for a while.

“I’m getting these.” Juna picks out four viddisks.

She’s so lucky. Her family is rolling in megabucks. After her parents left the space program, they invested in taxicopters and made a mint. Juna’s allowance is about five times what mine is. Even though she’s always complaining, they give her just about everything she wants.

There are two viddisks that I really crave. “The Quarks in Concert at the Astrodome” is one. It’s this group of really cute guys who play a combination of synthesizers and petri dishes. The other is by the Jackson 127, descendents of a group once called the Jackson Five.