Cheerleaders From Planet X

by Lyssa Chiavari

  I blinked. The conversation had taken a sudden turn in a direction I hadn’t expected before. “Not much. They didn’t seem super surprised by it. I think they got the message pretty early on, when they noticed that all the fairytale books I was drawing in my free time always had two princesses instead of a prince.”

  She smiled almost wistfully. “I bet that was nice, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Shailene, are you okay?”

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  It didn’t seem fine. It seemed the opposite of fine. Her face seemed to be getting sadder every second.

  She pushed Violet off her lap. Together, we led the goats back to their barn, as we did every night before dinner. When we shut the barn door, she looked at me, seeming to steel herself before she spoke. “Laura, I want to tell you. I like girls, too.”

  My heart jumped, beating so quickly I could barely feel the separate beats. “What?”

  “Yeah. I noticed it… a while ago. But I haven’t told anyone else yet.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to sound casual. Truthfully, I didn’t really know what to say. No one had ever come out to me before. Now, to have my best friend and the girl I’d been hopelessly crushing on for the last eight months tell me she was gay, too? I was completely speechless.

  “Um,” she said, her voice shaking a little bit, “so, when you like a girl… how do you tell her?”

  My face was on fire. She had to see it. Even in the pink light of the setting sun, she had to see it. “I don’t know, actually,” I said sheepishly. “I, uh, I never actually have.”

  “Oh,” she said in a small voice. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I usually just… kind of act like an idiot around her until she stops hanging around with me. So far, anyway.” Like what was happening right now. I really, really would have liked the ground to open up right then and there and swallow me whole, in fact.

  She nodded thoughtfully and didn’t say any more. I walked with her back to where we’d left our bikes earlier. She picked hers up, wheeling it down the driveway.

  I watched her for a minute; then, impulsively, I said, “I’ll walk you to the corner.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  The two of us walked in silence down the road. If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that she was walking much slower than usual. It took us almost five minutes to get from my house to the corner. I was too preoccupied with my thoughts. I wanted to ask her. Wanted to tell her. But I was absolutely terrified of things changing between us.

  Finally, I managed to mumble, “So, like… Do you have a girl you like?”

  She didn’t meet my eyes, but she nodded her head in a nervous, jerky motion that made her dark hair bounce against her shoulders.

  “That’s cool,” I said lamely.

  There was a stop sign at the corner, where our drive met the main road into town. She paused there, seeming suddenly shy and unsure of herself.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess?” I said.

  “Yeah. Tomorrow,” she answered. She stood there for a moment, not looking at me. “It’s you,” she said suddenly. I stared at her, taken aback, uncertain how to respond. “You’re the one I like.”

  My mouth fell open. I couldn’t find my breath. “Seriously?”

  She nodded, avoiding my gaze.

  I swallowed, feeling myself break into a grin I couldn’t quite control. “I… Me too.”

  She looked at me hesitantly. “You too?”

  “I mean… I… You’re also the one I like.”

  She stared at me, looking as unbelieving as I felt. Then she propped her bike against the metal pole of the stop sign and came over to me. Before I could react, she’d leaned in, kissing me softly on my lips. I didn’t even close my eyes, I was so surprised.

  Her kiss was gentle, and sweet. She tasted like cherries. It made my heart beat erratically, my face go flush.

  It was everything a first kiss should be.

  She pulled away after just a second, her cheeks and ears beet red. But she was smiling. So was I, uncontrollably.

  “Bye,” she said, getting on her bike and pedaling away.

  * * *

  “I can’t see you anymore, Laura.”

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She kept fiddling with her hair, pulling it forward over her ears, tugging at the ends nervously as if to make sure it stayed in the same place. She was trying to hide that bruise on her cheek. She’d put makeup on it to cover it up, but it hadn’t done any good. Shailene never wore makeup, and whatever she’d used didn’t quite match her skin tone. If anything, it made it stand out more.

  I wanted to ask why, but I already knew the answer. It seemed mean to make her say it when I knew she didn’t want to.

  “Can’t we still hang out?” I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, so I stared down at the janky picnic table we were sitting at. I ran my finger over a name that had been carved roughly into the brown paint. It was getting dark, and the park down the street from Shailene’s house was deserted apart from the two of us. “You’re my best friend, Shai. It’s okay if that’s all we can be.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not supposed to talk to you anymore. At all. Not even at school.”

  “But… that’s not fair!” I protested. “They can’t do this to you, Shailene. Isn’t there anything we can do? Maybe we should talk to my parents—”

  “No!” she cried. Her eyes were wide and scared-looking. “I can’t. I just—I’m sorry, Laura. Please. I’m sorry.”

  “O-Okay,” I stammered.

  She jumped up from the picnic table and hurried away from me. I watched her go, too stunned to feel anything but numb. I should have seen this coming, I supposed, after everything she’d told me about her parents. But I’d never really believed anyone could be that horrible to their own kid. I’d been spoiled, I guess.

  From the picnic table, I could see her turn onto the street and keep running down the sidewalk. Dark shadows filled the space between the trees, but when she ran past a fat oak, I thought I saw a pair of shadows detach themselves and drift after her.

  I stiffened, watching them. It was two men.

  Without thinking, I ran after them. That was exactly what my parents had always told me not to do in a situation like this—I was to pull out the clunky old cell phone they’d gotten me for emergencies and call 9-1-1—but I didn’t want to let Shailene out of my sight. I just went into autopilot.

  By the time I’d reached the park’s entrance, they’d already caught up with her. I burst through the trees just in time to see the bigger man grab her.

  “Stop!” I screamed, sprinting after them with the heightened speed I’d spent my whole life trying to conceal.

  Shailene struggled, trying to fight the man off, but he was too strong for her. I was about to launch myself at him when a bright blue light flashed in my eyes, and then I saw just what this man was.

  He was Anesidoran.

  There was a noise like an explosion, and Shailene slumped limply forward. “No!” I shouted in Anesidoran, launching myself at the man and grabbing his arm. “What are you doing? She’s my friend.”

  “Stay out of this, little girl,” the other man said, pulling me away from them and clamping a hand over my mouth. “Unless you want to join her.” He seemed to be a normal human—what was he doing here with this other man? And what did they want with Shailene?

  “Wait!” the Anesidoran shouted. “Don’t touch her. She’s under Anesidoran protection.”

  The human man laughed. “Do you really think I give a damn about that?”

  “I know you don’t. But there will be trouble for us if you interfere with her. Just leave her.”

  I managed to jerk my jaw open enough to bite down on the pad of the man’s hand. He cursed and shoved me away from him. “That does it,” he said, reaching for his gun. I screamed and hunkered down.

  “I said, leave her!” the Anesidoran man boomed. There w
as a bright flash and an explosion like thunder. For a horrified instant, I thought it was a gunshot—that I was done for.

  But then the smoke cleared, and the two men and Shailene were gone.

  * * *

  I’d run all the way home, bursting through the door hollering at the top of my lungs. My mom had called Uncle Andre as soon as I’d told her what had happened, demanding an explanation. But he didn’t have one. Whoever these men were, the Nibiru high council knew nothing about them.

  “It’s the I.G.A.,” my dad said, his voice dark.

  “You have to do something!” I screamed. I screamed it over and over, my heart pounding like a drum, my brain a panicked, hysterical mess. There had to be something they could do. If anyone could stop this, it would be my parents, or Lola, or Uncle Andre. I hadn’t spent a lot of time on Nibiru as a kid, but I’d been there enough to know that no one could mess around with my family. We could stop this. We could save her.

  But there was nothing we could do.

  * * *

  “We can’t cross them,” my dad said firmly, for what had to be the hundredth time. “They’re too dangerous.”

  I sat in the dark at the foot of my bed, my eyes bloodshot, my face stained with tears. “What’s going to happen to her? Is she ever going to come back?”

  Dad shook his head. “She’ll come back. But when she does, she won’t be her anymore. She’ll belong to the I.G.A. She probably won’t even remember you. You’re going to have to let her go, Lee.”

  I wanted to laugh in his face at that. She was my best friend. She was more than that. She was the most important person in my whole life. How was I supposed to just let her go?

  * * *

  Memories blurred and rushed, whirling together in a tidal wave, slamming into me. Screaming. So much screaming. Fighting and yelling and desperation and anguish and grief, because no matter how I tried, there was nothing I could do.

  And then it all went blank.

  The pain evaporated, and I slowly became aware of warm lips on mine, fingers tangled in my hair, pulling me closer, holding me desperately. Then we broke apart, and my eyes snapped open. I gasped for air.

  Shailene was holding me, as much confusion on her face as there was on mine. The bright light of the lab had gone dim again, punctuated with flashes and pops, and around us erupted the crackling sound of electricity. I turned to look around the lab. Sparks and smoke were pouring from the large computer hub in front of the stasis tubes. Andronicus cursed violently.

  “You’ve destroyed our network,” he shouted, waving smoke away from himself.

  As I realized what his words meant, a grin broke across my face. “Oh, sorry, did I fry your little brain inhibitors?”

  He looked at me with cold fury. “I need to isolate this quadrant before the rest of the ship is damaged.” His nostrils flared. “You’ve made your choice, Laura. Now you’re going to have to live with the consequences.”

  He stormed out of the lab.

  My grin broadened. “Seriously? We won? He’s just letting us go?”

  Shailene was looking at me oddly. She took a deep breath and said, “I remember now. I remember you. Eighth grade. Everything.”

  “Me too,” I said, my cheeks burning. “We can talk about it later. For now, we need to get the other Strikers out, right?”

  She nodded, still seeming shaken. I couldn’t tell from her reaction whether getting her memories back was a good thing or not.

  One by one, we moved down the line of glass tubes, opening each and helping the Strikers emerge. I watched as Shailene stopped in front of Janice’s pod, shaking with relief and throwing her arms around her when Janice opened her eyes. Janice seemed taken aback at first, but as she got her bearings, she returned the hug, and I heard her murmuring reassurances quietly into Shailene’s hair the way my own mom had earlier.

  I was just opening the girl I remembered as Leslie’s tube when there was a hard jolt. Leslie staggered forward into me, and we fought to regain our bearings.

  “What was that?” Erikka asked, looking around in alarm.

  “I don’t know,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the smoking remains of the computer bank behind me. Andronicus had been pissed about the state of their system. What if we’d damaged the ship worse than I’d realized?

  As Leslie moved to help another girl out of her stasis tube, the ship jolted again, and I saw movement out of the lab’s large window. I turned and sucked in my breath just as a mechanical-sounding voice filled the air, coming from an intercom system. “Lab One: disengage,” it said in Anesidoran. Through the window, the main body of the Okeanos was twisting, seeming to move farther away from us. I remembered the impression I’d gotten that the second level of the ship seemed to be comprised of several different pieces, attached haphazardly. I realized, with sudden horror, that maybe I hadn’t been wrong.

  I blanched, and Shailene caught my eye. “What is it?”

  “The lab is disengaging.”

  “What?”

  Joanie rushed to the lab door, trying to turn the handle. “It’s locked.”

  “Let me try,” I said, hurrying over and pressing my hand to the digital pad beside the handle. The screen turned red and a loud, shrill beep sounded.

  “Disengagement in process,” the voice on the intercom snipped over my head.

  I cursed and kicked the door hard. “It won’t let me open the door.”

  “Then we can’t get back to the main part of the ship,” Janice said, snapping into business mode. “We’ll have to find another way out. There must be escape pods. Strikers, fan out.”

  The other girls spread out across the lab. After a minute, Leah said, “Coach, over here. They’ve been launched already.”

  “What?” I came up behind Janice, peering over her shoulders to see. There was a small airlock where you could see clearly some kind of intergalactic lifeboat should be attached, but it was gone.

  “Life support system override activated. Three minutes remaining.”

  “Andronicus,” I said bitterly. He didn’t want us to escape. My knees started to shake, and Shailene watched me with concern. Hesitantly, she reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. I winced, expecting the familiar stabbing behind my eyes, but no pain came. We could touch.

  For all the good it would do us now.

  “So what, are we trapped?” Erikka asked, her brows knitted across her dark eyes.

  “Keep looking. There must be another way. Maybe this segment of the ship can be piloted independently,” said Janice.

  “I don’t see how, with that computer destroyed like that.”

  “We’re dead,” I whispered. I couldn’t believe Andronicus could be this spiteful. When my memories returned, fleeting glimpses of the man I’d known as Uncle Andre had returned as well. He’d never been a warm man, or particularly close with our family; but he wasn’t bad. He’d tried to help when Shailene had first been captured. I couldn’t believe that he was really the sort of person to leave his own flesh and blood to die out in the vacuum of space. Even after all the trouble I’d caused him.

  But I had caused him a lot of trouble.

  “Two minutes remaining.”

  “This is all my fault,” I said, hot tears stinging my already painfully-swollen eyes.

  “No,” Shailene said firmly, taking my hand in hers and squeezing it tightly.

  “It is,” I said, turning to face her, our fingers still interlaced. “I ruined everything, blundering in like this. And now you’re going to die.”

  “Laura, it’s okay,” she murmured.

  “How is it okay?” I cried.

  “Because we have each other,” she said, in a voice only I could hear. And I knew then—we had our memories back, and it was a good thing.

  We had each other, in the end.

  “One minute remaining.”

  The other cheerleaders were standing at the window, watching as the Okeanos moved farther and farther away from us. The airlock that had con
nected the lab to the ship was drifting away between us, spiraling slowly into the blackness. I tried not to focus on my fear. There was no point in panicking. It wouldn’t help, not with so little time remaining. I placed my left hand on the glass of the window, my right still tightly clasping Shailene’s, and looked at our translucent reflections staring back at us.

  Over my reflected shoulder, a shadow glimmered into existence. One second he wasn’t there, and then, abruptly, he was. I gasped, turning around.

  It was Damien.

  And now I knew what Ana had meant when she said she’d seen it. This was Damien’s power.

  “Strikers,” he said breathlessly. “You need to come with me—now.”

  “Damien,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “There’s no time. Just come on. I’ll probably end up court-martialed for this, but… not every Anesidoran is without morals, Laura.”

  I blinked in surprise. The Strikers all looked at me, and then to Janice. I could tell they weren’t sure whether they should believe him. But you know what? I did. Against all odds, I really did. And regardless, we were staring death in the face. Whatever Damien wanted to try, it had to be better than suffocating in the vacuum of space.

  I nodded at Janice, and she nodded at me. I glanced at Shailene, still clutching my hand tightly in hers. She nodded, too.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Damien held his hand out to me. “There’s no time to take you all individually,” he said. “We’re going to have to try to go all at once.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked.

  “I’ve never tried,” he said. “But I know it’s been done. It’s how we got to Nibiru, after all. So I’ll just have to give it my best shot.”

  I nodded, taking his hand with my free one. “I trust you, Damien.”

  He beamed, as if my approval was the most important thing in the world to him. I realized in that moment that he sort of reminded me of a puppy. No wonder Ana liked him so much.