Ned burst out laughing. “Loopies! Slue is hanging out with Loopies!”
“Ned, leave the kitchen!” Dertorphi demanded.
“Hieronymus,” Geoffken interjected. “You never told us this before. This is a very serious matter. Why have you kept this a secret from us?”
Hieronymus was annoyed with Slue’s parents, whom he had known for years, as they suddenly began to look at him like some kind of a stranger.
“Well, Geoffken,” he said. “I don’t see what the problem is. I’m terrible in math and I’m terrible in science. I do very well in the remedial classes, but in any other class, in those subjects, I would fail, and I would still be two years behind. And the problem is not really the remedial classes—the problem is our society itself, where a large number of kids from underprivileged families or families with social problems always end up in the…”
“But they are criminals!” Dertorphi interrupted. “Those kids are rotten hoodlums! Everyone knows that! How can you stand to be around them? Aren’t you afraid of them?”
“Actually,” Hieronymous began in an icy neutral voice. “they are more afraid of me than I am of them…”
“It’s an outrage!” Geoffken bellowed. “A boy like you, a star, the number one student of the Advanced Honors section in history, philosophy, and literature, should be thrown in with that human detritus! Your father allows this?”
“My father has no control over this.”
“What about your mother? Your parents are divorced, right? Can’t you go live with your mother—maybe she lives in a school district where they can bend the rules a little…”
“Actually, sir, my mother lives at home with me and my da.”
Behind her goggles, Slue rolled her eyeballs at her father’s lack of tact.
“Your mother lives with you? I’ve never seen her. At school, it’s always just you and your da. A lot of people think your parents are separated. We used to think that your mother was dead, but I remember Ringo mentioning her, so I assumed that they had divorced.”
“No. She lives at home. But my mother is not well.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Before Hieronymus could answer, Slue interrupted, glaring at her father.
“Enough, Da! This is none of your business!”
Ned returned to the kitchen, laughing.
“You’re not going to believe this, but that Loopie out there not only finished the second bowl of chips, but he got up and went to the bathroom to grab a big wad of toilet paper to wipe his hands with!”
“Ugh!” Dertorphi sighed. “Slue, kindly ask your friends to leave.”
“Yeah, Ma, they just came by to pick me up, so we’re leaving…”
Both of Slue’s parents stared at her in shock.
“You are not planning to go out with these thugs, are you?” her father yelled.
“Da! I have known Hieronymus since the third grade! I have been friends with him since the third grade! You have known him this entire time! He has been here a countless number of times and you have always liked him! He is one of my best friends! How can you suddenly call him a thug!? How dare you? You know him so well, Da!”
“In fact, Slue,” her father yelled back. “It appears that I don’t know him at all! He takes half his classes with Loopies? How could we not know that? He brings big, strange, psychotic-looking men, like that guy in the living room, into our home?”
Ned remained at the kitchen door, laughing. “Hey, Slue,” he taunted his older sister. “So is that your date tonight? You going out with the giant screwball who just finished all the chips—and uses toilet paper like it’s a napkin?”
Dertorphi was quick to remedy the entire situation.
“Slue, shouldn’t you be getting ready for your date with Pete tonight?”
Hieronymus could not help but grin from ear to ear, and the humiliated look of complete and utter resignation over Slue’s face was a priceless moment that more than made up for the embarrassing exchange with her parents.
“No, Ma. I’m not going out with Pete tonight. He called about an hour ago. He canceled.”
“Pete? Your new boyfriend? Weren’t you two supposed to go to—”
“No, Ma. Pete had to cancel. He said there was an emergency.”
Hieronymus continued smiling.
“That Pete is a fine boy,” Dertorphi continued. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”
Hieronymus tried desperately not to laugh. “Yes, Slue. I’m sure whatever Pete is doing can’t be very serious. I mean, it could be serious.”
“Hieronymus! Don’t even start.”
From the doorway, a new voice entered the conversation. “Are you talking about Pete?” Bruegel asked, his voice a little less shy than before, but not yet at its characteristic loud volume. Then he continued, a huge smile on his face, oblivious to the awkwardness his total honesty was about to conjure.
“I know where Pete is tonight! He’s with Clellen.”
“Clellen?” asked Ned, his face lighting up. “Is that that really hotlooking babe who dresses really weird and is in the Loop—I mean—in the same class as you?”
“Yeah.” Bruegel smiled. “She’s taking him over to Telstar so they can check into her favorite motel. They are definitely going to be swimming in each others sweat all night long, that lucky stinker in a bell pot. Pete, man, she has him tongue-tied around love’s icicle with a hot-jamming tug on the plexinister go-round jelly-bed.”
Nobody really understood the last part of Bruegel’s report on Pete and Clellen, but it was clear that Pete had dumped Slue for the notorious Clellen, and any contempt her parents may have had for the two boys somehow shifted towards the absent Pete instead. When the evening’s plans were explained—that they were driving out to see the Ginger Kang Kangs—Slue’s father was moderately impressed, as he had heard they really were an excellent band. It did not really matter what they told Geoffken and Dertorphi—the two elders were completely distraught that their daughter’s proper and athletic and handsome and gentlemanly boyfriend, whom she had been dating for the past few weeks, was in fact as fendish as they had imagined. Clellen! thought her mother. That infamous little slattern! A Loopie slut! He discards our lovely daughter so he can have a cheap rendezvous with that queen of cheapness and strange clothes and bizarre hairstyles?!
The thought of Pete’s surprise transgression distracted them so much, they hardly noticed their daughter leaving with the big Loopie and the half-Loopie, not saying goodbye, not even closing the door behind them, the clanking sound of the elevator up the hall echoing and entering their living room.
Ned, deep in thought as he sat on the sofa, wished that he himself could once, just once, be as lucky as Pete in getting a girl like Clellen to go with him to a sleazy motel in Telstar. Some guys got all the luck, he thought, staring out at the red sky filled with Mega Cruisers landing and floating and going away.
On the slow-moving elevator down, Hieronymus finally introduced his two friends to each other. It was an embarrassing non-event. Bruegel was sweating like a pig on a frying pan, and Slue could not have been more uninterested in meeting him.
“Slue, this is Bruegel,” he said, very formally. “Bruegel, this is Slue.”
They shook hands. Slue appeared to be a million craters away as she said, “Nice to meet you.”
Bruegel simply grunted in reply.
Hieronymus thought to himself, This is swell. The evening is starting of as a smashing success…
Bruegel remained frighteningly quiet as the elevator continued downward.
Slue stood, completely dressed in black velvet for the evening, except for her stockings, which were the exact same blue as her hair. She wore black suede boots. She wore a large black velvet poncho over everything. Both of the boys in the elevator with her thought she was, as usual, supremely excellent-looking in every way.
Hieronymus grinned. “This elevator is always so slow!” he said to Slue, but she didn’t even look at him. He then g
lanced over at Bruegel, who stood as still as a statue, his eyes darting from Slue, to Hieronymus, back to Slue, to Hieronymus, as if watching a tennis match.
Then Bruegel attempted to break the ice. “So, uh, Slue. Do you like Pacers?”
“What?” she asked in a completely neutral, almost rude voice.
“Pacers. You know.”
“No, Bruegel. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice trailing of with renewed cowardice.
A few seconds of total embarrassing silence passed by until Hieronymus added his own thoughts on the evening’s transportation.
“Don’t worry, Slue—Bruegel always gets nervous on long elevator rides. He’ll be a regular bag of laughs later on when we’re driving in his Pacer on the way to see the Ginger Kang Kangs—”
“Yes,” Bruegel then added in a halting, dry voice. “The Pacer. It’s a good car. You’ll see.”
Slue said nothing and stared at Hieronymus for a good three or four seconds with a look of extreme annoyance on her face.
“What time do we have to meet your friend?” she asked. “The girl from Earth.”
“Eight. Eight o’clock. At the Ferris wheel in the amusement park at LEM Zone One.”
Slue looked at her own watch on her wrist and sighed out loud.
“We don’t have much time,” she uttered. Then she turned to Bruegel. “You—how fast is your car?”
“M-m-m-my Pacer?” he asked in a frightened little-boy voice.
“Yes. Your Pacer.”
“It’s…it’s a good car…”
“I didn’t ask if your Pacer was a good car—I asked if it was fast.”
“Fast? Yes, the Pacer can go very fast.”
“Can you take it of road?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I think so.”
The elevator finally reached the bottom of Pelikanhopper Tower, and the three of them walked through the lobby.
As they left the building, Bruegel interjected once more with something completely unrelated.
“Uh, Slue, uh, do you like the Ginger Kang Kangs?”
She ignored him and kept her gaze at Hieronymus as she continued.
“We’ll have to take a shortcut I know—it cuts through a deserted part of the Sea of Tranquility—if we want to get there on time.”
“You think we’ll be late?”
“It’s Saturday night. Have you any idea of how packed that highway is going to be?”
“You know a shortcut?”
“Yeah. If the highway is too crowded, it will definitely get us there on time, but it does go through the middle of nowhere, so I hope your friend’s car is in good shape…”
But Slue nearly bit her own tongue as the three of them came upon the vehicle in question.
The Pacer.
“Jesus Pixie,” she said.
Late or not, Slue refused to get into the vehicle unless the boys got rid of at least half the crap and junk, mostly bottles and cans and old bags of food. Luckily, there were a couple of empty large plastic bags in the glove compartment to expedite this task. Still, Slue was completely disgusted. Bruegel’s Pacer was an old car. It was a standard gyroscopically balanced sphere hanging within a five-meter-high rubber wheel, and even Pete’s Prokong-90, the last car she had ridden in, looked like this. But Pete kept his car clean and sharp and inviting for passengers, unlike this piece of klud she was about to enter. What a disaster! To imagine, at this moment, Pete was with Clellen! That clown! Clellen! Not that she was so taken with Pete—she would smack him if he even suggested going to one of those motels in Telstar—but what a thought! Indeed, the idea of sitting through Trapezoids Crunchdown was not truly appealing, but still, to be passed over, lied to, to have your date broken so he could go out with her, that… lunatic Loopie! And now here she was, with two losers, one of whom she’d known since third grade, whom she had always secretly liked, and this weird guy from the Loopie class. A weird guy with a crummy car full of junk. A weird guy who somehow had it in his weird mind that this was some kind of date!
Several hairline cracks in the vehicle’s large vulgar windows. Maroon paint flaking off. Dents. One of the headlights slightly dimmer than the other. Spots of rust. The exhaust pipe hanging at an awkward angle. On the back of the spherical body sphere, several utterly embarrassing bumper stickers that referred to bars or tourist attractions. The large single tire itself, almost bald. She could not believe that she was about to take a journey in such an outlandish pile of junk.
Hieronymus and Bruegel filled the two plastic bags with as many beer cans and bottles and as they could gather and tossed them out the door where the trash landed with a glass-breaking thud upon the concrete sidewalk next to the run-down vehicle.
“Come on, Slue!” Hieronymus shouted from the Pacer. “We’re late!”
Slue was seated on the edge of the curb.
“Yeah…Slue,” echoed Bruegel with a forced tone of familiarity. “We have to go.”
“I can’t believe you boys have just dumped all that skuk on the sidewalk like that without putting it into a garbage can.”
Bruegel turned the key and the mediocre engine began its infected coughing, almost drowning out Hieronymus as he called to her again.
“Come on, Slue. I don’t want the Earth girl to think we’re not coming.”
She stood up, went over to the two garbage bags, picked them up, and with one in each hand, began walking with long determined steps up the avenue toward a large trash receptacle. The Pacer slowly followed and waited as she shoved both bags into the already crowded bin that in of itself was big enough to hold fifty such bags. Three or four filth-covered hummingbirds flew up in a panic from the pile of trash, then hovered, waiting for the girl to leave. Bottles fell, and one of them shattered. The smell of old beer wafted up. She was beyond disgust, but back to the Pacer she went, climbing aboard to sit next to Bruegel in the passenger’s seat while Hieronymus stayed in the back.
—
Bruegel’s driving was as careful as his personality was random—he drove with an attentiveness that was borderline annoying as the Pacer swerved through the streets and then into tubes and tunnels that led away from the enormous housing complex of Sun King Towers. His eyes were constantly on the lookout for something.
“Hey, Bruegel!” Hieronymus called from the back seat, where he had stretched himself out now that the junk had been removed. “You do have your driver’s license, right?”
Bruegel, lost in his own careful driving, did not acknowledged his friend’s question.
“Uh, let’s see…” he mumbled. “Three traffic lights, make a left, Boulevard Queen Maria direction north three kilometers to exit 43, then onto Highway 16-61, straight on through to LEM Zone One…”
Slue glared over at Bruegel.
“Hey,” she could not bear to even mention his name at this point. “Hey—didn’t you hear Hieronymus? He asked you if you really have a driver’s license. Do you?”
Bruegel stared straight ahead, both of his sweaty hands on the large, skinny steering wheel.
“Yeah. Don’t worry. I got my license. I just don’t want to get stopped by cops.”
Slue stared at him with utter disbelief.
“If your license is okay, why are you so afraid of the cops? Are they looking for you?”
“No. If the cops were looking for me, all they’d have to do is pick me up at school.”
“Then what’s the problem? Why are you driving like such an old lady?”
“I’m driving like an old lady?”
Hieronymus was getting very bored by this exchange between Bruegel and Slue—the big fellow’s driving was bad enough, but every time she distracted him, he only slowed down to about half the speed he was already moving at. The night was young, and they were having a miserable time already.
Plodding along the Boulevard Queen Maria, the traffic clustered up around them. They hit every single red light. Saturday night and all the cities in the Sea of
Tranquility were abuzz, a massive party on the near side of the Moon—horns honking, neon flashing, crowds gathering along the sidewalks.
“What the Hell is going on!” Hieronymus gasped. “I’ve never seen the Queen Maria this crowded before! Is there a holiday or something I’m unaware of?”
Slue turned around from the front seat to face him. She had that annoyed expression. She was so lovely. The purple tint of her lenses. Her blue hair. Her cheekbones. Her poncho. I love you, he said to her in his mind. I love you, and yet here we are, on our way trying to meet up with another girl. I love her also, at least I think I do, but I don’t even believe that she is really going to be there, but I desperately want her to be there, despite what I saw with my uncovered eyes. If she is there, then it is proof that our eyes cannot read into the projections of the future. You and I will have proof that we are more normal than we realize. But if she is gone, then it is true—and I am doomed, as you are, Slue, we are doomed. Sooner or later, they will snatch us away and force us to pilot ships from one end of the solar system to the next, we will be separated by the vastness, imprisoned by what we can see, we will spend our lives as lost specks in the endless vacuum, our fates are the same, we will be caught, separated, exiled, and still, I am incapable of telling you the simple truth of how much you are to me, how you are the only reason I can continue living in this nightmarish world of neon and goggles and Loopies and Toppers and loser fathers and crying mothers and crowded places full of artificial people breathing the artificial air while the forbidden Earth above laughs down upon us with all its radiated, smoke-filled mess and mud and madness…
Slue continued to look at him from the front seat. Outside, the crowds of people lining Boulevard Queen Maria gathered in massive groups as the traffic ground to a depressing halt. Someone was blowing a tin horn just outside, and the thousands of conversations created a low timbered hum in the twilight that nearly drowned out the sound of the car engine.
Why is she looking at me?
“So,” began Slue, deliberately. “This girl from Earth.”
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Page 20