Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “No thanks,” Elliot said. “I’m still pretty full from the Nutri Juice I drank during the toast. Ms. Helen was right—it isn’t too bad! Way better than Bruno egg whites anyway!”

  Elliot left after that, and as he did, my grandfather limped through the door.

  “Oh wow,” I said.

  He had been pretty quiet during the game, mostly staying hidden underneath his trench coat. And now I understood why. Over the past couple of hours, his dinosaur parts had grown back almost completely. The back of his shirt was in shreds. His plates, from his neck to his tailbone, were the size of large dinner plates. His tail reached all the way to the ground, and even though the four spikes at the end were still stubs, they were already sharp enough to dig themselves into the carpet behind him.

  “Ouch!” he exclaimed, stopping in the doorway to yank his spikes free.

  “Wow,” I said again.

  He set his tail back down and walked all of the way into the room. I cringed as his spikes dug into the carpet behind him again.

  “Well, I did promise you an adventure, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did,” I remembered. “Hey, have you heard anything about Sunder Labs yet?”

  “I just spoke with the Martian police,” he said. “They blasted into the lab about a half hour ago. Dr. Marsh and Sylvie’s dad have both been arrested. And with their help, the police were able to arrest all of the BURPSers in Mars and confiscate the gene-ing materials that were meant for the water supply.”

  I nodded. I wondered how Sylvie was going to take that news.

  My grandfather squeezed my shoulder.

  “Sylvie will be fine,” he said, reading my thoughts. “She has her mom. And you and Elliot.”

  “And Mrs. Juarez has you,” I said, smiling mischievously up at him.

  “Um, yes. She does,” he mumbled. And I could have sworn his cheeks turned a little bit pink. He cleared his throat.

  “For the record, I was wrong about this not being our problem. I think you knew that all along, and you were right to take it on. Who knows? Maybe the Plutonians just needed to know that not everybody is against them. Maybe now that they know there’s somebody on their side, they’ll get the BURPSers under control themselves. And maybe the Martians will give them more of a chance.”

  “You think?” I asked.

  He motioned to the window.

  “See for yourself.”

  I looked down at the stadium. Most of the seats were still filled with a sea of red- and blue-jerseyed fans. They were all sitting unnaturally still. Everyone was staring up at the Jumbotron where someone had turned on MBC-E.

  “What’s everyone watching?” I asked.

  “The season finale of The Big Bang Theory,” my grandfather replied. “The Martian police were sure there was going to be trouble as soon as the council voted to boot the Plutonians out of the ISF. When that didn’t happen—thanks to you—nobody really knew what to do with themselves. Then Chancellor Fontana remembered the finale was on tonight, so they put it up on the big screen.”

  “Amazing! Sylvie’s dad was right!” I said as the whole stadium erupted into laughter over a shared joke. I saw a Martian doubled over in giggles, holding on to the shoulder of a nearby Plutonian for support. Next to them, I saw a Plutonian split a Nutri Nugget in half and give a chunk to his Martian neighbor. Behind them, two Martians and a Plutonian clinked their bottles of Nutri Juice together in a toast.

  “Right about what?” my grandfather asked.

  I grinned.

  “Nothing has united the galaxy like a shared love of American TV.”

  My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Speaking of home, the Lost Beagle is fully repaired and ready to take us back to Earth,” he said. “Let’s round everybody up and get out of here, shall we?”

  “Yes, let’s!” I said wholeheartedly. Suddenly, home sounded like the best idea ever.

  We turned toward the door and both grimaced.

  There was an enormous gash in the carpet. From the doorway right to the tip of my grandfather’s tail spikes.

  I sighed. “We’ve really got to get you some tennis balls,” I said.

  “Those actually work?”

  “Come on, Grandpa,” I said, putting my arm around him. “Let’s go home.”

  The Confession

  We had missed three days of school, but since my grandfather had told Principal Kline that we’d spent the time volunteering in his research lab, our absences were excused. And as for the wild stories about polar bears and the three of us disappearing in a UFO… Well, according to Principal Kline, the company the school had hired to take care of the cricket problem had sprayed the wrong chemical into the classroom ceilings.

  Judging from the continued chirps, not a single cricket had died. But dozens of students and a few teachers had reported symptoms ranging from headaches to memory loss to full-blown hallucinations. Luckily, there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage. Except for three basketball hoops mysteriously falling over…

  Elliot adjusted fairly easily to his new reality as part Plutonian. Ms. Helen took him to Sephora and taught him how to apply makeup on his face, arms, and legs.

  “I wasn’t really sure how I felt about that,” Elliot admitted.

  “The makeup?” I asked.

  “No, the makeup is actually sort of fun,” he admitted. “But it feels weird to hide the blueness. Like I’m ashamed of it or something. I’m not—I’m proud to be part Plutonian! But Ms. Helen says we have to play it cool for a while, at least until Earthlings are officially told about aliens. Until then, I guess it’ll be like I have a secret identity or something! And that’s pretty cool, right?”

  “Pretty cool,” I agreed.

  Sylvie presented Elliot with a handmade cold suit modeled after Venetio’s. (He’d promised to bring Elliot a real one when he came to visit next month.) It was basically a vest made out of wet suit material that fit underneath clothes and had special compartments to hold ice packs.

  Sylvie’s mom helped her with the project. They seemed to be getting along a lot better. And now that Sylvie’s dad was in a Martian prison, he no longer had an excuse not to answer her emails. They talked more in the first few days after we got home than they had in months. Sylvie said he was very sorry for what he and Sunder Labs had almost done and was determined to make amends.

  I was reserving judgment on Mr. Juarez, but Sylvie seemed happy. And that’s what mattered most.

  Unfortunately, our time away had not had any effect on the stalemate between Orlando and Ms. Filch. When the lunch bell rang on our first day back at school, no one even looked toward the door. Everybody just remained in their chairs and took out their lunches without Ms. Filch having to say anything. And judging by the determined looks on both of their faces, neither Orlando nor Ms. Filch were close to budging.

  This went on for four more days. Finally, when the lunch bell rang on our fifth day back home, I stood up.

  “Ms. Filch? I’d like to confess.”

  “Sawyer,” she said gently, “I know you weren’t the one who put glue on my chair. Please sit down.”

  “But you said that a confession is about more than just who did it. It’s about taking responsibility. And I’d like to do that. I’ll accept whatever punishment you think is fair.”

  Ms. Filch gave me a very long look.

  “Are you sure, Sawyer?” she asked finally.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “And no one else has anything to say about this?” she prodded, staring straight at Orlando.

  Nobody, including Orlando, said anything.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Then I accept your confession, Sawyer. We’ll discuss your punishment later. For now, you and the rest of the class are excused to go outside for the rest of the lunch period.”

>   Most of the class needed no prompting to jump out of their seats and head for the door. I took my time and packed up my salad slowly. When I was done, the only people left in the room were me and Ms. Filch.

  “I’m a bit confused, Sawyer,” she said, looking genuinely puzzled as she leaned against the desk in front of mine. “Why would you do that?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t exactly tell Ms. Filch that a pair of polar bears and a Plutonian soccer enthusiast had made me feel differently about people who sat by themselves at lunch every day. So I just said: “Someone has to do something. Why shouldn’t it be me?”

  Ms. Filch nodded thoughtfully and crossed her arms.

  “From what I hear, this isn’t the first time you’ve fought for someone who may or may not have deserved your help,” she said.

  I drew in a quick breath. For a second, I thought she somehow knew all about what had happened in Mars. I wondered how she had found out. And whether she thought it was the Martians or the Plutonians (or both) that didn’t deserve to be helped.

  “I’m talking about the situation last semester,” she said, interrupting my thoughts. “I’m still not totally clear on what happened—none of us are, it’s all kind of hazy—but from what I understand, you went out of your way to help Allan, Cici, and a bunch of other classmates who hadn’t exactly been kind to you.”

  I spread my hands.

  “They needed help,” I said. It sounded like a pretty lame explanation for why I had done it, but that was all I could come up with.

  “And now Orlando…” Ms. Filch prompted me.

  I shrugged and spread my hands.

  “Maybe he just needs to know there’s somebody on his side.”

  “Perhaps,” Ms. Filch said. She sounded doubtful. I guess she must have really liked those jeans. “I’m not sure about Orlando, Sawyer. But it sounds to me like you might have found your passion.”

  “My passion?” I echoed, as a wave of panic washed over me. I was pretty sure I had left my Possible Passions list somewhere in the Juarezes’ apartment in Mars.

  Ms. Filch winked at me.

  “Just in time too. Your paper is due tomorrow.”

  • • •

  Orlando was waiting for me right outside the classroom door.

  “No one believes you did it,” he told me flatly. “I already posted that picture on Instagram, and all of the details are up on my blog.”

  “I know that,” I said. “It wasn’t about taking credit. And it was just a one-time thing, by the way. The next time you do something that gets everybody in trouble, you’re on your own. And we’ll all be back having to eat lunch at our desks.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me as though I might be pranking him.

  “Or,” I continued, “maybe tomorrow you could skip the pranks and sit at our table for lunch.”

  “Your table?” he asked, and he stared at me for so long that his glasses slipped down the length of his nose.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “You can’t miss it—it’s right by the bathroom. See you there.”

  • • •

  The next day at lunch, Elliot, Sylvie, and I all arrived at our table together.

  When I opened my backpack to take out my salad, my paper, “Sticking Up for People Who Need It,” peeked out. Elliot reached down and swiped it before I could stop him.

  “You finished it!” he exclaimed, then pointed excitedly to the large A Ms. Filch had written in the upper right-hand corner. “And you beat Sylvie!”

  I grinned. Even without the help of my brainstorming list, it had been surprisingly easy to write the paper last night. I had turned it in that morning and been shocked when Ms. Filch graded it before lunch.

  “Actually, we tied,” Sylvie said, pulling a paper out of her bag and slapping it down on the table. Right beside the title, “Getting Through It When a Parent Lets You Down,” was a large A. “Given recent events, I thought my initial topic needed some revision. I turned in a new paper this morning.”

  “Maybe I should rewrite mine too,” Elliot said, then made a face. “But if Ms. Filch doesn’t think basketball is a good enough passion, I doubt she’d feel any differently about soccer. She just doesn’t understand sports!”

  I nodded sympathetically, but my eyes kept drifting over toward Orlando’s usual lunch table. It was empty.

  “Do you think he’ll come?” I asked.

  “I didn’t hear about any shenanigans happening this morning,” Sylvie said, pulling a Ziploc bag out of her front pocket. “Maybe that means that he—”

  “What is that?” Elliot exclaimed, pointing at Sylvie’s bag. I don’t think he could have looked more surprised if she had pulled out a large snake.

  “It’s a sandwich,” Sylvie said pleasantly, taking an enormous bite of the object in question. Then, when we both continued to stare at her, she added, her mouth still full, “You know, two pieces of bread with stuff in between? I thought you guys would know about it. It’s sort of an Earth thing.”

  “We know what it is,” Elliot sputtered. “I just didn’t think you—holy cow, are those sprouts? What happened to all the candy?”

  Sylvie swallowed.

  “I’m in training,” she informed him. “I may only be a part-time Razer now because of school and stuff, but if we’re going to make it to the finals this year, I need to be on top of my game. Eating too much sugar is really bad for you, you know.”

  Elliot’s mouth dropped open in shock. I stifled a laugh. And someone else nearby cleared his throat.

  “Um, hi,” said Orlando, holding a blue zippered lunch sack out in front of him like a shield.

  “Hi,” I said, nudging an empty chair toward him with my foot. “You know Sylvie and Elliot, right?”

  “I remember Elliot,” Orlando said, sitting gingerly and setting his sack on the table. He turned to Sylvie. “But you’re new this year, right?”

  “Yup,” she answered, swallowing. “I read your blog. It’s pretty good. But remind us to tell you about the time we broke into the administration building in the middle of the night.”

  Orlando’s eyes bulged.

  “Seriously? The three of you did that?”

  “What? Don’t we look like the types?” Elliot asked, grinning. Then he absentmindedly scratched a spot on his arm, leaving a slightly blue streak of skin peeking through his makeup.

  Orlando didn’t seem to notice. He just opened his lunch sack and pulled out a large plastic container.

  My tail twitched at the smell of fresh greens.

  “Is that a salad?” I asked.

  He nodded, looking slightly embarrassed. “Yeah. Salad’s my favorite. It’s kind of weird, I know…”

  “Orlando,” I said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that weird is pretty relative.”

  I tipped my Tupperware bowl toward him so he could see the contents. Then I raised my fork.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he raised his own fork and clinked it against mine.

  “Glad you could join us, Orlando,” I said.

  “Me too. Call me Lando.”

  Author’s Note

  First off, in the Author’s Note to Dinosaur Boy, I said there were some hints in that book about where the series would be headed next, but that I would save my explanations for the second Dinosaur Boy book. Now I can tell you there were three clues:

  1. Sawyer’s school is called Jack James Elementary School. Jack James was the project manager of the Mariner 4 mission, which took the first pictures of Mars.

  2. The security guard who almost busts Sawyer, Elliot, and Sylvie when they are breaking into the school is from Viking Security. That was a reference to the Viking landers, which went to Mars in the 1970s.

  3. In Chapter 8, when Dr. Cook is talking about the science fair, he tells the kids that it’s “the perfect
opportunity for you to really get into the spirit of the scientific method” and also to “[l]et your curiosity run wild!” That wasn’t just good advice: Spirit and Opportunity are both the names of rovers that landed on Mars in 2004, and Curiosity is a mobile science lab that arrived in 2012.

  The research for the Dinosaur Boy books is always ridiculously fun, and this one was no exception. The history of space exploration is full of amazing stories, extremely smart and interesting people, and exciting visions about our future as a species. I had a blast sneaking in references to some of the fun stuff I found whenever I could.

  Venetio Lowell was named for Venetia Burney, the eleven-year-old girl who named Pluto. In 1930, when Venetia’s grandfather (an Oxford University librarian) told her that a new planet had been discovered, she told him they should name it “Pluto” after the Roman god of the underworld. Her suggestion eventually made it all the way to the astronomers at Lowell Observatory, who chose it as the planet’s official name.

  Sawyer’s grandfather, Dr. Franklin, was named in honor of Rosalind Franklin, a pioneering woman of science whose part in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA went largely unacknowledged during her lifetime. (Three men were awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1962, four years after Franklin’s death).

  Ms. Helen’s last name, “Tombaugh,” is a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 while working at the Lowell Observatory. The New Horizons spacecraft reportedly carried some of Tombaugh’s ashes as it cruised by Pluto and sent back photos in July 2015.

  The various chancellors on Mars are all named for individuals who made some of the earliest telescope observations of Mars:

  Chancellor Fontana was named for Francesco Fontana, an amateur astronomer who used a handmade telescope to make observations (and woodcut drawings) of Mars in the 1630s.

  Chancellor Gio was named after Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer whose discovery of crisscrossing canali (“channels” in Italian) on the surface of Mars in the 1870s was incorrectly translated into English as “canals.” This led to a hugely popular theory that there were intelligent, canal-building life-forms on Mars. Although ultimately disproved (unless Sylvie’s right and the Martians are just messing with us), the theory continues to spark people’s imaginations today.