by Shannon Hale
Mom and Dad looked at me. I shrugged.
“Maybe when I got zapped and lost the tokens, the nanites couldn’t return for reassignments, so they just shut down. It wasn’t like when I got the brute token and it overrode my techno nanites. This time some of the changes the nanites made in me remained, at least temporarily. The powers I’d had for the least amount of time—blue shot, thinker, havoc—diminished pretty quickly. But the brute enhancements stayed longer, so when I hit the ground … it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.”
“And your technology intuition?” Dad asked.
I glanced at the notebook by my bed and away again. The moment in the ship when the tokens slid out of me, I’d had a technonanite–inspired idea. It’d hit me like night lightning, so sharp and clear I didn’t forget on that long fall or through my long sleep. As soon as I was able to hold a pencil, I’d jotted it down. But I wasn’t ready to share it.
“It’s mostly gone,” I said. “Though when I watch tech shows, my mind feels more alive.”
Howell didn’t come to see me discharged, but she chartered a plane to take me home, since I wouldn’t be able to sit up for another three months or so. Howell was currently in Sri Lanka with one of her Team Rescue groups, and we talked on the phone. She was surly about not making more money off the aliens. She’d found and collected debris from the crashed ship, but it was just scraps and nothing useful. The one mini-trooper suit I’d liberated had been destroyed with HAL. All she had to show for it were the plans for the inventions I’d made, tucked safely away on off shore servers.
“Go to college,” Howell told me over the phone. “Study something useful, and then come see me about a job. I am applying for patents on your jet pack design. Try to sue me and I will win. No whining. I paid off your parents’ mortgage, had your mother’s identity properly sponged, and created a college fund for you—enough to cover an advanced degree, as well as living expenses, food and rent and books, computers, phones, private lab rental, research supplies, solar paneling … the basics.”
“I didn’t whine—”
“And you won’t, because I’m hanging up.”
And she did, before I could ask her how she was doing, but I already knew. She missed Dragon. I guessed she always would.
I spent a few weeks in a hospital bed in our living room. Mom and Dad got a TV to help ease me through my convalescence. After being starved for TV most of my life, it took me months to finally reach the “enough” moment—the day I turned it off because I was really and truly sick of it.
Soon after that I started walking with crutches and could sit in a car, go to a movie, eat out at the noodle place.
The world was normalizing. There’d been a burst of chaos right after the mother ship broke apart, and I guessed that the remaining pink parasites had been angry and rampaged in their human hosts. But then they got gassed and decompression chambered, and their unwilling hosts woke up with limited amnesia. I had no idea how many out-of-the-way towns were still body-snatched, but Howell would get to them all eventually.
TV off, casts off, weather great, I stopped paying attention to the rest of the world. I was about to get really busy. I was enrolling as a junior in high school.
Chapter 62
First-day jitters are probably normal. Maybe everyone gets that buggy excitement in the belly and an obsessive need to keep looking in the mirror. We converted my hacked-off hair into a pixie cut, and I think I prefer that style after all.
Luther picks me up in his hideous 1989 Ford Fiesta—a two-door hatchback, zero to thirty mph in one minute flat. He loves this car way more than he thought he loved me. Lately his cuticles are black with grease because he’s constantly taking the engine apart and putting it back together. The radio doesn’t work, so we drive to school sans soundtrack.
“Why are you so twitchy?” he asks.
“I’m nervous, I guess,” I say. “Aren’t you?”
“No.”
He’d better be nervous. The high school thing is his obsession all of a sudden. My heart feels fluttery, my hands shake a little. I put on the sunglasses Dragon gave me. They’re my last piece of armor.
We enter the front doors of West High School, and I hold my breath, half expecting a gang of mean girls and football guys to accost us and mock our nerdish ways and handless limbs.
I’m wearing Gidget. It’s a prototype Howell’s crew built based on Fido’s design. Gidget is a far cry from Lady and even farther from Fido. But I love her. I’m rethinking my whole astronaut goal. If I were an engineer, maybe I could develop an affordable, mass-producible robotic arm.
“Ooh, look at the lockers!” Luther says as we walk down the hall. “And everything smells just like I imagined.”
“Like bleach and sweat?” I said.
He nods, his eyes shining.
His excitement is catching. Only partly teasing, I chant “high school, high school,” and dance down the hall.
“Stop that. Don’t get me labeled a geek-by-association on my first day. Besides, I don’t want your sorry dance moves burned into my brain.”
“Now, by sorry, do you mean smokin’ hot?”
“I’ve measured your hotness and passed. I kissed you once, remember?”
“Yep.”
“Wait, you were supposed to forget!”
“Forget what?”
“But if I ever had thought I wanted to be your boyfriend, it was just because you were the only girl I knew. Don’t go thinking you’re some kind of dream girl. You’re already in danger of getting conceited, what with being the hero who saved the human race from slavery and extinction.”
I shush him, but still no one is paying us any attention. We are invisible in our inconsequentialness. I like it.
“See you at lunch, best friend!” I shout after him, super cheery.
He squints at me before entering his calculus class.
I’ve decided to be super cheery with Luther all the time. It actually takes less energy than admitting to him that I’m exhausted. That all night, dream after dream assaults me. That I still feel broken up and not sure if I’ll ever heal.
But don’t let me get dramatic. I survived a fall from the stratosphere. I can handle a few nightmares and a little loneliness.
I go down the wrong hall, finally arriving at College Prep Chemistry as the bell rings. The teacher is at the board, squeakily writing, and I scan for an empty chair. There’s one in the back. Next to a guy in a gray T-shirt.
The guy in gray stands up to look at me. He’s still wearing the woven leather wristband his mother gave him. I’m still wearing Dragon’s sunglasses, but I pull them off. I can’t seem to breathe. There’s that sloshy feeling, my head like a bag of water minus the goldfish.
I say, “Jonathan.”
The teacher is looking at us. Everyone in the class is looking at us, two idiots standing there, looking at each other. It’s way too much looking all around, but I can’t seem to do anything else—besides say, “Jonathan,” which seems to surprise him as much as it does me.
His gray T-shirt says FBI in yellow letters, and I wonder if it was a gift after months in hiding. His hair is longer, and a little lighter too, bleached by the sun. And he is looking at me in a way that reminds me the heart is a pump that works very hard.
“Is something the matter?” the teacher asks.
I shake my head and with an effort break eye contact with Wilder. With Jonathan.
“No, sorry, we just … know each other.”
“Congratulations,” says the teacher.
Jonathan watches me cross the room. He waits until I am in the chair beside him before he sits.
And he doesn’t say anything. And I don’t say anything. And we sit through all of chemistry not saying anything.
It has been six months since he donned a jet pack and stuffed me into a parachute before I crunched to the ground. Six months since I lay on the rocks, a heap of broken bones and bleeding organs, Jonathan holding my hand.
The bell rings, and
I still don’t know what to say. Maybe Jonathan doesn’t either. A year ago at astronaut boot camp he was calling me “stone-cold fox.” Now he stands in silence, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched a little.
“Hi,” I say, holding out my left hand. “Maisie Danger Brown.”
“Jonathan Ingalls Wilder,” he says, and shakes my hand.
We hold on, looking at each other. I can’t help smiling, and then he does too, and then we laugh. The classroom is clearing out, but I’m not in a hurry.
The teacher is the only one left. She slips us glances, and I know she’s trying to guess our story. Good luck.
He switches his left hand for his right so he can hold my hand and walk beside me.
He’s holding my hand.
Jonathan Wilder is in Salt Lake City, Utah, walking beside me and holding my hand.
“So, your dad’s trial …,” I say.
“Will go on for years. But it turns out I’m not an ideal witness. My sordid background, my grudge against my mother’s killer. He wasn’t very cautious once he started going after you and the tokens, so they had enough crimes on him without my help.”
We find Luther by his locker.
“Maisie, did you see—” Luther stops, his gaze frozen on Jonathan. “Craptastic.”
“Hey, I know you thought I was a jackass,” says Jonathan.
“Thought?”
“And you want to protect Maisie from my jackassiness. I respect that. And I’m sorry.” Jonathan holds out his hand as if to shake. “Truce?”
Luther squints at Jonathan.
“You know I think you are a ridiculous entity.”
“Understandable.”
“And I think she’s worth ten to the tenth power of you.”
“Aww, that’s sweet,” I say.
Luther’s glance switches from Jonathan to me, and a miserly smile takes his lips.
“I know how these things work. You take some sports team to state and run for student body office and freshmen girls swoon as you walk by. So follow through on that, publicly claim me as a friend so your star power rubs off on the nerd boy, and it’s a truce.”
Jonathan nods.
Luther shakes his hand. “Okay. But I’d better have a girlfriend before winter break. And if you two ever, ever kiss in front of me, the truce is off.”
I slug Luther in the shoulder with my Gidget hand. He fakes like it hurt, and Jonathan moves in as if to protect Luther from me. Luther cowers behind Jonathan, I say some old-timey gangster lines like “Why I oughta …” and it’s all stilted as if we’re following a movie script. But Luther’s laugh sounds real.
Jonathan walks me to world history class. After, he’s waiting for me in the hall, and my heart startles, as if I hadn’t been sure yet that he was real. I think of the Keats quote, “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.” I think it hard, taste its truth like a peppermint on my tongue.
He’s wearing basketball shorts that hang past his knees. I can see pink scars on the backs of his calves. Jet pack burns.
On the way to English, he asks me on a date for Friday, but I’m busy all weekend. It turns out I have an uncle and a couple cousins. Now that Mom isn’t in hiding, I’m going to meet my dad’s fam.
“Then … tonight?” he asks. “We could—what do normal people do? Go to dinner and a movie?”
There was a time when, if someone had told me one day I’d go on a date with Wilder, I would have flat-pellet-shot them in the face. Generally speaking, if a guy breaks your jaw and leg and cuts off your robotic arm, you file charges and get a restraining order. The only exception is when subtle machinations are needed to save the world from a massive, catastrophic alien takeover. But in no other circumstance.
I think it’ll be my first real date.
After school Luther and Laelaps come over. We do homework. I love that the highest expectation I’m currently facing is to write an essay.
Mom has office hours at the university all afternoon. Dad hasn’t found work yet. He’s gone grocery shopping and brought home five different kinds of cheese. When I insist my love of the stuff was mysteriously knocked out of me somewhere between the stratosphere and the troposphere, he makes endless puns. (“Cheddar is as gouda cheese as you can hope to try. But it’s nacho cheese, so leave my provolone.”) I laugh because I want to.
Mom and Dad nix the dinner—they want to eat as a family and hear about my first day—but they okay the movie, so I text Jonathan, and he responds immediately. I don’t think he gets many calls. He’s lost his family, his old friends, his home. He’s legally emancipated and living alone in a tiny apartment I plan to call his lair.
Later, Jonathan pulls up in a powder-blue Camaro that’s seen some hard living. It’s not a convertible. Mom and Dad watch me go from the front stoop.
“Nice wheels,” I say as he opens the passenger door for me.
Jonathan shrugs. “It was the right price.”
“So, I take it you’re no longer burdened with your daddy’s obscene fortune?”
“All seized by the FBI. A judge allowed me a trust fund to get me through college. After that … well, Howell offered me CEO.”
I laugh. “Oh man, you and Howell are way too close to evil genius to make that pairing comfortable.”
We’ve been driving in silence for a few minutes when he asks, “Nightmares?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You?”
He nods. “Mi-sun mostly. Killing Ruth. Almost dying.”
“Usually Jacques,” I say. “But also Ruth. Pink ghosts sticking to me till I suffocate. Lots of falling. Dragon waving to me from a window when HAL vaporizes.”
Jonathan is looking forward, his voice a little shy. “At least I’m not in your nightmares.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot you! I’m hiding in the dark up in the rafters, and you’re shooting at me.”
He winces.
I rub his hair as if he were Laelaps. “It makes me feel a little more chipper knowing you have nightmares too.”
“Schadenfreudist.”
“Neologist.”
“Gesundheit,” he says. “So, you have some left?”
I know what he means. I nod.
We’re at a stoplight. He picks up a coin and shoots it from his fingers. I catch it in my palm. The impact is so light, it wouldn’t have hurt even if I wasn’t still a little bit tougher. I’m surprised he can do that without the shooter token acting as a battery. Maybe his whole body is a battery of sorts now.
“The effects will probably fade with time, maybe disappear entirely when our brains mature,” he says.
I’m not brute strong, but I can do a lot of push-ups. And in the notebook by my bed are plans of how to make an external token. Most of the nanites must still be inside me, and remnants inside Jonathan too, all in standby mode since losing their tokens. I think I could reactivate the nanites. If I needed to.
“You know what’s amazing?” he asks.
I nod. I know lots of things that are amazing. But he specifies.
“I’ve never gotten bored with you.”
“Thanks,” I say, the word a flat thud.
“Aren’t I a charmer? I mean, I get bored with everything. But I’m not bored with you. And I don’t think I ever will be.”
“As far as compliments go, I give it a three.”
“I used to be better at this, didn’t I?” he says. “You know me better than anyone in the world, and somehow you still like me.”
“Who says I like you?”
“You do. You say it with your eyes.” Stopped at a red light, he looks at me, all mock-mystery, and presses his forehead to mine. We stare at each other super close till I laugh first. The light turns green.
I remind myself that teen brains haven’t developed the areas that are capable of lasting emotional commitment. But if I don’t start forming all the connections I can now, didn’t Howell say it’d be too late? I’m alive. I don’t want to wait to start living.
We park across the s
treet from the theater. He opens the car door for me, and we stand on the curb. The traffic stirs up wind.
“Ooh, you know what sounds good?” I say. “Licorice.”
“I pledge to search the world over and bring you back licorice.”
“It’ll probably be at the snack bar.”
“We can try there first, before scouring the world over.”
“That’s thinker logic hard at work.”
“I prefer black licorice myself,” he says. “They’re wrong somehow, an anomaly—”
“Like edible dark energy.”
“Exactly.”
Without thinking about it first, I put my arms around his neck. His arms go around my waist, as if they belong there, and he sighs a little. He is warm from the car ride, his skin and clothes all summer and noon in the fall evening. He feels new.
“I do like you,” I say.
“I’m so glad you do.”
There were times when I thought I loved him. But I see now that I didn’t really. Attraction, infatuation, and consternation do not love make. I don’t know if I love him now, but I like him so much the joy is exquisitely painful. And this, too, is new.
I put both my hands up in his hair, my arms lifted. The posture makes me feel vulnerable, exposed, but inviting too. I stand on my toes, and I kiss him. He leans in, grateful, and kisses me. I do not count the kisses. We are not spinning, not flying or floating. Our feet are firmly on the Earth. My fingers curl. His hand rises to my neck, exploring the ends of my short hair. His other hand presses against my back. I am a part of something good.
There’s a break in traffic. He holds my Gidget hand. We are running across the street toward the theater, headlights pointing at us, white against black like the sun in space. And I think this is my favorite part. Not the part where I saw Earth from above, or the weeks blissfully ignorant in the lair. Not the part where I swam through the guts of a ghostman ship, or when rocketeer Jonathan Wilder caught me.
This part. Jonathan and I holding hands and running with nothing chasing us, the after-rain street shiny as Christmas ornaments, the night behind us, the theater ahead. My right hand is in his left, and Jonathan turns to look at me. Looks at me for no other reason than he wants to.