Alien in My Pocket

by Nate Ball

  I was becoming the class goofball, and my bad hair wasn’t the only reason.

  And now I was counting on a yam and a potato to save my bacon.

  Seemed unlikely.

  05

  Spy Games

  When I got home that afternoon, I just wanted to take a nap. I zombie-walked through the kitchen, stumbled up the stairs, and did a soaring swan dive onto my bed.

  “OUCH!” my bed said.

  I sat up and froze. “Amp?”

  “You almost killed me!” my bed said again.

  I gasped. “Amp? Are you hurt?” I cried. I leaped off my bed and started gently shaking my blankets. “Amp?” I called desperately. “Did I flatten you, buddy? You’ve got to be more careful. . . .”

  “Who’s Amp?” my bed asked.

  “What the—,” I yelped. I dropped to my knees and looked under my bed. I came face-to-face with my little brother, Taylor. “WHY, YOU LITTLE SPY!”

  “Mom, help!” he screeched as I yanked him out from under the bed by his leg. “Zack is going to kill me!”

  I sat on his chest and grabbed him roughly by the collar of his T-shirt. “You’re not allowed to be in here!”

  “Who’s Amp?” he asked in a bratty voice.

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “Does he own that spaceship in your closet?”

  “Spaceship?”

  “I’m gonna tell Mom and Dad. You’ve got a UFO.”

  It took me a moment. My brain spun. Then it hit me: Taylor had found Amp’s spaceship under the blanket in my closet. “It’s not what you think it is.”

  “Is it Amp’s?”

  “You know what it is?” I growled.

  “What?” he said, staring up at me with a dumb smirk.

  “None of your business.” I pulled him up, opened my door, pushed him into the hallway, and slammed the door. “STAY OUTTA MY ROOM!”

  “I’m telling Mom,” he shouted from the other side of the door. I could hear him run off.

  “That was close,” Amp said. He appeared standing on my desk, looking worried. “He almost saw me.”

  “We have to hide your spaceship better. Right now,” I stammered. “Can you make it disappear? I need some serious Erdian hocus-pocus, like pronto.”

  “I’m an alien, not a magician, Zack! I can’t make inanimate things disappear.”

  I ran into my closet, lifted up his spaceship, carried it to my hamper, and dumped it in.

  Then I crawled around on my floor, snatched up some dirty clothes, and threw them into the hamper, covering up the spaceship.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” he growled at me. “An advanced space- and time-bending spacecraft covered with your stinky socks and underpants.”

  I heard them coming.

  I raced to my closet and searched my shelves frantically. Then I saw something that was perfect.

  By the time Taylor arrived, pulling Mom by the hand through my room, I was pretending to relax on my bed.

  “He’s got it hidden under this blanket,” I heard Taylor say from inside my closet. There was a moment of silence. “Huh? That wasn’t here before!” he said, confused. “He must have moved it, Mom, I swear.”

  “That’s just Zack’s old hamster cage,” Mom said sternly. “Enough with this nonsense—and stay out of your brother’s room.”

  I watched cheerfully as Mom marched my little brother past my bed and out the door. She was holding him by the earlobe in a pinch that looked like it must have hurt.

  “Have a nice day,” I said gleefully, jumping up and gently closing my door.

  “I need to fix my ship and leave this place as soon as I can,” Amp said from behind me. “If word gets out you’re hiding an alien in your room, I’ll never escape. They’ll take my ship apart. Maybe me, too. They’ll do tests on me. I may not look it, but really I’m very delicate.”

  “I promise, Amp, you’ll get my full attention after Wednesday’s science fair.”

  06

  Slapdash Science

  The next day, Miss Martin was unimpressed with the paperwork for my experiment. “Did you write this on the school bus?” she asked without looking up.

  That was definitely not a compliment. I remained silent.

  After giving it the once-over and a few tsk-tsk sounds, she pulled a tiny lightbulb out of the cabinet behind her desk. “If your potato can make this flashlight bulb glow, it will make for a more interesting experiment.”

  “Don’t forget about the yam,” I said.

  “Oh, how could I?” she said flatly. “This bulb will require at least 1.5 volts and roughly 10 milli­amps of current to make it light up,” she said slowly, dropping it into an envelope and handing it to me.

  “That sounds about right,” I said, clearly not knowing what I was saying.

  I slunk back to my desk. Everyone around me was buzzing with excitement about their crummy science experiments. Everyone but me, that is. In fact, it sounded like everybody had already finished building their experiments. I hadn’t even started mine.

  Davey Swope was building a volcano that spit out spaghetti sauce. Nino Sasso was hatching flies in big jars, but nobody was sure why. Max Myers had a machine that could measure the strength of a head-butt on a giant digital scoreboard. Me? I had some vegetables and a light the size of my pinky nail.

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the science really hit the fan. Miss Martin stood up and announced that we needed to demonstrate our experiments in front of the class on Monday, a full two days before the Reed School Science Fair Competition.

  “There goes my weekend,” I groaned.

  So on Friday after school, instead of playing baseball up at the park, riding my bike to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee, or watching a scary movie with Olivia, I had to gather materials to build my lousy experiment.

  And it required a ton of stuff.

  The potato was easy; I took one from our kitchen. The yam I had to borrow from Olivia’s grandfather. For some reason, he made me promise to give it back after I was done with it. And for the rest, my mom had to drive me to the hardware store. She made me pay for it all out of my allowance, too.

  By the time we were done running errands, I just wanted to finish my experiment as fast as possible. Tryouts for this fall’s travel baseball team were Saturday afternoon. I was sure no catcher in the history of baseball had ever effectively blocked wild pitches while they were thinking about yams, potatoes, wires, and flashlight bulbs.

  I decided to build my experiment at my dad’s worktable in the garage. With my science book for guidance, I managed to whip the whole thing together in about twenty minutes. That includes time for labeling for the project, which I wrote directly onto the cardboard with a Sharpie to save paper.

  Done and done.

  I left my science project behind and went inside to beg for pizza. I really didn’t think I’d have to spend another minute on my science project the entire weekend.

  Boy, was I wrong.

  07

  Scientific Train Wreck

  “No offense, Zack, but it looks like you made this while blindfolded and riding a unicycle. And tell me again: what’s the pillowcase for?”

  Olivia had uncovered my experiment, which I’d cloaked in one of Taylor’s Star Wars pillowcases. She’d been staring at it for a good five minutes already.

  “Presentation,” I sighed. “It’s all in the presentation. Besides, it works. Look at the bulb. That’s all that matters.”

  Olivia cupped her hands around the tiny bulb and focused a squinted eye about an inch from it. “Barely,” she said, unimpressed.

  “I never imagined you’d need to tape the potato and yam down with so much duct tape,” Amp said quietly, looking at my project like it was science roadkill.

  “Oh, no,” Olivia mumbled.

  “What?” I said, trying not to care about the feedback I was getting.

  “You spelled potato with an e on the end,” Olivia said, looking at my project’s label. �
�And the word ‘battery’ has two t’s, not one.” She shook her head. “You’ve got two spelling errors, and that’s just in the title.”

  “Are you sure? Those look right to me,” I said. “Besides, it’s a science fair, not a spelling bee, Olivia.”

  “Without a meter, how can you accurately demonstrate that one vegetable is producing more electricity than the other?” Amp asked, stroking his chin with concern.

  “Would you two just stop?” I snapped. “It’s fine. I don’t need to win the Prentice Science Scholarship, I just need an A.”

  “An A?” Olivia yelped. “Zack, you’ll be lucky if you don’t get detention when you bring this in on Monday.”

  “Why me?” I groaned. I flopped onto my bed and covered my face with my baseball glove. “I’m just not scientifically oriented. It’s like a disability. You can’t hold that against me.”

  “On the bright side, you do have a knack for sloppiness,” Amp said, barely holding back a laugh. “So you are indeed gifted in certain ways.”

  “The two of you are giving me a headache,” I moaned.

  The room got quiet. I could practically hear them staring at my project. I knew what they were saying was true. My project was terrible. Everybody would laugh at me. A blanket of doom settled over me. For a moment, I considered running away from home and joining the Navy.

  I felt Olivia sit heavily on the corner of my bed. She sighed. “Zacky, you know me. I’m a fixer. I’m here to help,” Olivia said quietly.

  I sat up and the glove fell from my face. “Really? Then let’s fix it pronto, so we can go watch a zombie movie.”

  “I’m afraid I think it needs more than a quick fix. I think we should start over,” Amp declared.

  I groaned in protest. “Start over? Completely?”

  “Oh, yes,” Amp said. He cleared his throat. “This electric yam experiment is really beneath someone as clever as you, Zack.”

  “But Zack already turned in his paperwork,” Olivia said.

  “I saw that paperwork. It was terrible. Your teacher will be thrilled if you redo it.”

  “Redo it?” I protested. “Seriously, guys, I don’t have time for this,” I complained.

  “Yes, that’s why we’re going to save you from yourself,” Olivia said.

  “So,” Amp declared with a wave of his arm, “let’s show everyone at Reed School that Zack McGee has an enthusiasm for science that burns a whole lot brighter than a tiny light attached to a sad-looking potato.”

  “Let’s do it,” Olivia said, jumping up and shaking me by the shoulders. “Let’s rock that science fair with some wickedly cool science, Zacky Boy!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, my head wobbling from Olivia’s shaking. I looked over at Amp. “So what are we going to build?”

  “I have no idea,” Amp said.

  “Oh, brother,” I said and flopped back onto my bed.

  “Don’t you worry, Dr. Frankenstein,” Olivia said, patting me on the knee. “We’ll think of something.”

  08

  The Big Idea

  Olivia and I didn’t say much as Amp carefully studied each of the experiments in the glossary at the back of my science textbook.

  “Interesting,” Amp said in his peculiar high-pitched voice.

  “What?” I said. “Is it something we can build fast?”

  “Maybe not as fast as you’d like, but it certainly could be spectacular.”

  “Really?” Olivia said, looking up from the doodle she’d been making on a piece of binder paper. “Spectacular sounds like just what we’re looking for.”

  “We’re going to build an electromagnet,” Amp announced.

  My shoulders slumped. “That’s it? Sounds boring.”

  Amp was whispering into his recorder:

  “Council Note concerning the Earthlings—”

  “Who is he talking to?” Olivia asked me.

  “See? He does that all the time! It’s like his tape recorder. It makes me nuts.”

  “Earthlings have discovered they can create a magnetic field with coiled wire and electricity. But they seem not to know that the amount of magnetism they create this way is tiny. They don’t appear to realize that magnetism is one of the most useful forces in all of nature. More later.”

  “Hey, blue boy,” Olivia said, snapping her fingers in exasperation. “I agree with Zack. Sounds kinda ho-hum.”

  Amp remained calm. “I’m not suggesting we build this exact experiment. Why would we? I’m saying we do it the right way.”

  “You’re saying we supersize it?” Olivia said, clapping with excitement.

  “Exactly,” Amp said. “By building a large enough coil and sending extremely high levels of current through the wire in repeated, short bursts, we’ll tear the belt buckle right off of Mr. Luntz!”

  Olivia laughed and got up and whooped around the room.

  I was not convinced. “What about all my work on the potato thing?”

  Olivia laughed. “You have to ace this, Zack! And what better way than with a little spaceman hocus-pocus?”

  “BUT I’VE GOT BASEBALL TRYOUTS THIS AFTERNOON!” I shouted, and then fell onto my bed like a guy falling backward into a swimming pool.

  The room got quiet. My secret was out. The truth was I just wanted to focus on baseball, not science or yams or wires or electromagnets.

  I was trying out for catcher, but I hadn’t caught a pitch with my catcher’s mitt since Amp arrived. This was my chance to make the fall travel team, and I really didn’t want something stupid like homework to mess it up.

  Amp shook his tiny head. “Are you telling me baseball is more important to you than science?”

  “Of course!” I shouted, staring at the ceiling. “I know Erdians don’t do anything but invade other planets, but on Earth, we have, like, games. And they’re, like, fun.”

  “Well, all I know is that if you turn that in,” Olivia said, poking my sad-looking potato- and yam-battery experiment, “you can kiss baseball good-bye.”

  “Uuuuugh,” I groaned. I wanted to cry. I wanted to toss my stupid experiment out the window. I felt trapped. I felt cornered. I felt like eating a giant plate of nachos, for some reason.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “We can build this electric magnet thingy, but this is the only weekend of tryouts for new players. And I am so not missing it.”

  “How about we work on the experiment while you’re out playing baseball?” Olivia offered.

  “You’d do that for me?” I said, feeling genuinely touched.

  “We know how important this is to you,” Olivia said, reaching out to put an arm around Amp but settling instead for just a finger.

  “Actually, Olivia, the baseball thing is a mystery to me,” Amp said. “Seems like a colossal waste of time hitting a ball with a stick and running around in circles.”

  “Shush,” Olivia said, dropping one of my baseball hats over Amp.

  “Hey!” he shouted from inside the hat.

  “I can’t believe I have to make two experiments in one weekend,” I said, burying my face in my pillow. “It’s like science prison.”

  “Once you see this experiment,” Amp said, crawling out from under my hat, “you won’t even remember that yam of yours. Now, first things first. I’ll need some SweeTarts and Ritz crackers.”

  “Oh, good grief,” I croaked. “What have I gotten myself into?”

  09

  Bolts and Zucchinis

  Watching Amp eat a Ritz cracker was maddening.

  He held each cracker—which was probably twice the size of his head—with both hands and turned it in a quick circle, nibbling the edge as it went around. Cracker crumbs went everywhere, until it vanished. Then Amp licked each of his six fingers.

  It was like watching a squirrel who’d had too much coffee.

  Watching him eat SweetTarts was even worse. He flicked each one into the air, caught it in his mouth, and swallowed it whole.

  “So let’s get to it,” I said. I went to my cl
oset, grabbed my catcher’s mitt off the shelf, and pulled it on. “I gotta leave in two hours. What’s first?”

  Amp scratched his head and nodded, thinking. “We need a huge nail or metal rod. Thick. Preferably iron.”

  “Why iron?” Olivia asked.

  Amp looked at us in disbelief. He turned his back and spoke into the recorder on his wrist.

  “Council Note: Earth’s plentiful supply of iron is something to consider. Iron is an element whose atoms form magnetic domains that are aligned extremely easily by an outside magnetic field. The huge amplification of the field that results means it’s a perfect material for building an electromagnet. This element would be useful back on Erde. Further study required.”

  “Amp, it’s kinda creepy when you do that, you know?” Olivia said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You realize we can totally hear you, right?”

  “Consider it a lovable quirk of mine,” he said.

  Olivia picked up my textbook and stared closely at the photo of our experiment. “Looks like they just use a regular old steel nail in the book, Amp.”

  “Hey, my dad has a huge bolt,” I said, remembering a gift the school board gave him for getting the city to install a streetlight at the corner near my school. “It’s one of those big fat ones that hold up those streetlight poles. It’s bigger than a zucchini.”

  “Great!” Amp exclaimed. “Quick, go get it. Pure iron would be best, but even if it’s steel, it might do what we need if it’s big enough. We’re not just going to build any old electromagnet.”

  I paused. “Oh, I can’t,” I said. “Not now.”

  “Why not?” Olivia said, throwing up her arms.

  “It’s in his office, and he’s in there. It’s sort of mounted on this trophy thing.”

  “Then we can’t use it,” Olivia said.

  “I just need to swipe it when he’s not around. He won’t miss it. Plus, we can return it when we’re done, right?”