by Jon Scieszka
Five days ago, when we got back from our vacation in Florida, Mom said to dump all our stuff on the floor right inside the front door. She was carrying the beach bag, with the sandy plastic buckets and shovels, the Kadima paddles, and the fake sunscreen, and she let the whole thing just drop off her shoulder and spill out all over the floor, which was weird because Mom always pretends to be this perfect person with a perfect husband, a perfect son (that’s me), and a perfect house. (Or in our case, a perfect apartment.) I watched the little rubber Kadima ball bounce a couple of times and then roll under the hall table, where my schoolbooks were neatly stacked, ready for school on Monday. She didn’t even notice. I figured she was still thinking about the fish fry that we never made it to.
When we checked into the hotel in Florida, they told us about the Saturday Night Fish Fry Extravaganza, and how it was free for guests who stay the full week. A big dinner with lots of families is just the kind of thing Mom loves more than anything. It proves she’s doing everything right. I knew she was thinking that the other mothers hadn’t even thought twice about our family: That we were—that Mom had made us—that good. And me most of all. I was perfect. Undetectable.
But apparently not perfect enough.
Because when Mom saw what was happening to me on Saturday morning, we had to rush off even before breakfast. We didn’t say goodbye to any of the other families, except for the one in the next-door cabin, and that was only because they saw us packing up our rental car in a hurry and asked if everything was okay.
Mom told them I had a broken arm. Which made them look at us kind of funny because I was carrying two bags to the car at that very moment. When Mom is flustered she sometimes messes up. She really is very good at what she does, most of the time.
The cats came running as soon as we opened the apartment door, except Toto, who always likes to play it cool, like, “Oh, were you guys gone? I’m so darn busy and independent, I didn’t even notice.”
Dad bent down and shook hands with the cats. Alex first, then Aidan.
“Steven!” Mom yelled. “You have got to stop shaking hands with the cats!”
Dad and I stared at each other for a second. Mom isn’t usually a yeller.
“Want to go through the mail?” Dad asked her, holding out a thick pile of catalogs and envelopes. He was trying to cheer her up. Mom loves mail. Dad says that on the Boat, “mail box” was her favorite game.
But Mom shook her head at him. “Shower,” she said. “Now.”
Like all the parents, Mom showers twice a day, every day. Even that day.
Alex and Aidan, who are only half-grown, started playing with the Kadima ball, batting it down the hall and then running after it like it was a live thing trying to escape them.
“Check the cats’ water dish, Nathan,” Dad said, not looking at me. “Please.” I knew he was struggling to be nice, because what happened in Florida wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault at all.
The kitchen was a mess of eggshells and open tuna cans. There was a dirty frying pan on a hot plate on the floor. “And who’s supposed to clean this up?” I said out loud to myself while I stood at the sink and waited for the cats’ water dish to fill up. “Me, I’m guessing?”
Toto padded up behind me and rubbed against my ankle. Since he doesn’t show a lot of affection, I figured he was saying sorry for the mess. Still, sometimes I wished Dad had never taught the cats to cook in the first place.
I put the water dish on the kitchen floor and sat next to it, letting Toto walk across my lap and then lie down on my legs. Toto’s real name is Bartolomej. Mom says I started calling him “Toto” when I was practically still a baby, because I couldn’t even come close to saying “Bartolomej.”
A few minutes later Mom came in wearing the sundress I knew she’d been saving for the fish fry.
“Sigh,” she said.
Uh-oh.
Mom only said “sigh” when she was at rock bottom.
She started saying it when she was just a kid on the Boat, because she had misunderstood the teacher. She didn’t get that a sigh was a thing you DID, not a thing you SAID. So whenever she wanted to express 1) frustration, 2) deep sadness, 3) transcendent happiness, or 4) sarcasm, she said “sigh.”
Mom is a top-of-the-class sort of person, always studying and practicing, so by the time someone noticed she was mixed up and corrected her, it was hard for her to erase the habit. She did, though. Of course she did.
So now when she’s 1) frustrated, which is sometimes; 2) deeply sad, which is not so much, luckily; 3) transcendently happy, which doesn’t happen so much either as far as I can tell; or 4) sarcastic, which she never is, Mom sighs just like everyone else.
Except every once in a while, when she’s really upset, she slips and says “sigh” instead. When that happens, Dad and I usually start telling her that her skin looks great and volunteering to help with stuff.
“I’ll clean all this up,” I said quickly, waving toward the open tuna cans, the upside-down egg cartons, and the cats’ omelet pan. “How was your shower? Your skin looks good, Mom. Wow. Skin looks great.”
“Oh.” She glanced at her shoulder, then held out one arm and sort of flipped it back and forth. “Yeah. Thanks, honey.”
I looked at my watch. “I guess they’re firing up the fish fry about now, huh?”
Dumb. Why had I said that? Sometimes when something is on my mind, it comes out of my mouth by accident.
Mom slid down next to me on the floor. “Oh, honey. Who cares about a fish fry? I mean, there are more important things than a stupid hotel party. You know?”
I guess I don’t always know what Mom is thinking after all. (And she said “stupid”!)
She started petting Toto, who pretended not to notice, and we just sat there until Toto finally gave up his pride and started purring. And after a little while Mom took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and said, “sigh.”
We were still sitting like that on the floor when Dad came in and said, “I spoke to the doctors. We have an appointment for Wednesday.”
“Wednesday?” Mom said. “But I thought they’d want to see him right away.”
Dad shook his head. “The Boat is on the far side.”
“They’re bringing the Boat? Is that really necessary?” Mom looked at me. “You look sleepy. Are you sleepy? You should go to bed.”
Mom stood next to me while I brushed my teeth, first with regular toothpaste, then with the special kind they send us every month from the Boat. She stared at my reflection in the mirror the whole time, like she thought it might start talking to her.
I didn’t realize until I was getting into bed that it was only about 5 p.m. But I actually was super tired, so I didn’t bother to argue. In fact, I think I slept on and off through the whole next day and didn’t really wake up until Monday.
Monday morning, I opened my eyes to find Toto standing on my chest, just looking at me.
“I’m guessing Mom forgot to feed you?” I said. I picked out a T-shirt and a pair of extra-baggy shorts and we wandered toward the kitchen.
No sandy buckets by the front door, no hot plate on the kitchen floor. The apartment smelled like toast. I shook a bunch of food into the cats’ dish and then sat down to eat breakfast. All the usual cereal boxes were on the table. Mom came out of her room and watched me pour a little from each box into my bowl, but I couldn’t seem to eat much. Not with her staring at me like that.
She reached across the table and felt my forehead.
I shook her off. “What’s going to happen at the appointment on Wednesday?” I asked.
She must not have heard me, though. She just stood up and touched the skin on her face.
“Skin looks great, Mom.”
She smiled. “Thanks, honey.”
I suddenly felt like I might explode. Not literally. But I couldn’t wait to get to school. To Evan.
I still don’t know who you are (obviously) but you know what? I’m already feeling a little better. Like yo
u and I are friends or something, which is weird, because I know I’m still alone in here. It’s hard to explain. It’s just, like, better.
Mr. Barker, my English teacher, would hate that “like” up there. He’d circle it and put a bunch of exclamation points next to it, like—!!!!!!
But this letter is for you, not for Mr. Barker, and I want you to know the real me before it’s too late. And if you are Mr. Barker, um, sorry about that. Please don’t, like, flunk me.
Actually, it probably doesn’t matter if you do.
Mom loves that I say “like,” just like all the real Americans. I sound like a native. And that was the plan. Everything was going great, until last Saturday morning in Florida.
Most people don’t really know how big the Earth is, compared to its moon.
In case you’re one of them, it’s easy:
Pretend you have a big ball of Play-Doh.
Now, in your head, divide that big ball into fifty small Play-Doh balls, all the same size.
Pick up one of those fifty balls, and set it aside.
Now take the other forty-nine balls and smush them back together into one big ball.
Hold the big ball in one hand and the small ball in the other. That’s pretty much the Earth and the moon.
Now take the moon ball and divide it into a ten million smaller balls. Pick up one of those and you’re holding the Mothership. Also known as the Boat. That’s where my parents grew up, mostly, on the way to your planet.
What happened in Florida is something we never even worried about. It’s dawning on me that right behind all the things I actively worry about is a whole universe of things I didn’t even know I should be worrying about. And once you know there’s a universe of stuff you don’t know, you begin to wonder how big it is and how many bad things are in it.
Warning: bad transition number two.
Here’s the thing that happened last Saturday in Florida:
Early in the morning, I reached for my blue swimsuit. I swam in the pool every morning with Dad, who is still trying to get over his natural-born hatred of water. Mom also got me an orange one with sharks on it, but it’s a little young for a twelve-year-old.
What happened was I couldn’t get the swimsuit on. I know that sounds weird. I mean, I stepped into it, one leg, then the other, but I couldn’t pull it up all the way. It just wouldn’t go. So, okay, I figured maybe Mom had accidentally shrunk it in one of the power dryers in the laundry room down the pebble path from our cabin. She liked to hang out there and chat with the other moms. She said it kept her skills sharp.
I tried the orange suit with the sharks on it, but it wouldn’t pull up all the way either. It was like there was something sticking out of my, um, lower back—I felt around a little. And started shouting.
When she rushed in and saw why I was yelling, Mom pretty much turned white. That’s what happens when she stops regulating her blood—it all falls straight down to her feet. She gets pale and has about a minute to get it moving again before she faints. Because I’m a first-gen, I’ve been regulating since I was born, and I don’t even have to think about it, but Mom lived a long time before she ever came here, and sometimes when she’s startled (or horrified, I guess) she forgets.
Anyway, Dad walked in, took one look at her, and barked “Rachel! Blood!” And Mom nodded and her color came back.
“What is it?” I said, twisting around and trying to see whatever it was on my back. “Am I dying?”
“No! Of course not,” Dad said. “It’s just . . . well . . .” He looked at Mom. “It’s your tail, son. Your tail is growing back.”
At school on Monday, Evan was really nice about it. “Dude, my tonsils grew back, did I ever tell you that? I had them out when I was five, and three years later—Boom! They’re back, and I’m snoring like a trucker again.”
I looked at him. “Did they grow out of your butt?” This was after two cups of coffee. Lately I have to drink coffee in the morning or I fall asleep in school.
“I was a total mouth-breather,” Evan said, shaking his head. “I had to get them cut out all over again.”
Which I really did not want to think about.
One doctor was tall and one was short, and when they showed up today (a.k.a. Wednesday, a.k.a. Foods of Spain Day) they were both fresh from their morning showers—I could smell the special soap on them. I thought they might be mad at me, because tails were definitely not part of the plan. They had not spent twelve years crossing the galaxy, training my parents and all the others, and figuring out how to make themselves look less like cats and more like humans just to have me ruin everything by growing my tail back.
But they didn’t seem mad at all. In fact, they were smiling. They asked to see my tail. Then for a long time they measured and looked and pointed out things to each other that I hadn’t even noticed, about the slight angle my eyes were taking toward the back, and that I had some orange fuzz on my arms and legs.
“It’s working,” the tall one said finally. “It’s working!”
“We can stay!” the short one said. And they hugged, which was weird, because cats, even cats that look like humans, are not naturally huggy.
Mom looked confused. Dad cleared his throat and said he didn’t see how my tail could be good news.
One of the doctors clomped him on the back. “This means that we can do it, we can transform the human race. Earth will be ours!”
“But—we’re trying to become human!” Mom burst out. “Not the other way around!”
They nodded. “Oh, yes,” the tall one said. “We tried that. And it might have been all right. Only it didn’t work.” He looked Mom and Dad over. “You two still look pretty good. Excellent, even. But some of the others are in bad shape. They’re looking distinctly—feline. We’ve had to take them back on board.”
“Back on the Boat?” Mom gasped. Her gasp is excellent. “Who?”
The short one ticked them off on his fingers: “New Mexico, Georgia, Utah . . .”
“Trust me,” the tall one said, “this is going to be much better. All cats, just like at home. The humans will probably enjoy being cats!”
I felt for my tail and found it considerably longer than when I’d checked that morning.
“This is crazy!” Mom said. “Nathan is one of us. How does his tail prove anything?”
“That’s right,” Dad said. “He’s simply reverting to his natural state. Maybe he just needs to take more showers.”
Both of the doctors broke into big smiles. “What you don’t know,” the tall one said, “is that Nathan is a human. All of the children are human!”
The short one nodded. “Little human laboratories, incubating different strains of the virus for us.”
“Virus?” Dad said.
Mom reached out and pulled me to her.
“Oh, yes. We’ve created many different strains over the years. But none of them has worked. Until now.”
“But—when did you give it to him? How?” Mom was squeezing me really hard.
“It was in the toothpaste. But I think when it comes to the general population, infecting the water supply will be much more efficient. We’ll take little Nathan here back to the Boat, do a full exam, and watch him complete his transformation. And when—”
“Nathan has school!” Mom interrupted.
The doctors stared at her. “School! Don’t you understand? That’s all irrelevant now! He can’t stay here, obviously. We need to confirm our results with some of the other children, and then all that remains is the dissemination of the virus. It’s perfect, really—New York City is a great place to start. Eight million people!”
I don’t know exactly when during this conversation Mom forgot to keep her blood moving, but this is when she fainted. And then Dad freaked and started throwing punches.
But with Mom out cold on the floor, it was two against one. I tried to help, but the doctors wrestled Dad into a chair and tied him to it. And then they locked me in my room. To wait for the Boat.
They must have woken Mom up, because right after that I heard her voice through my bedroom door. She sounded a little crazy, shouting “Toto, Plan B! Toto, Plan B!”
Toto, in case you don’t remember, is OUR CAT. It must have been the oxygen deprivation.
It’s funny to think of Evan, and how much I wanted to be like him. And it turns out that we’re more alike than I thought. We were both adopted, for one thing. Except I was more, like, stolen.
I think someone is trying to open the door.
Debriefing of Undercover Agent Bartolomej after termination of “Operation Earth.”
Supervisor: What the heck happened here yesterday? You’re supposed to be one of our top guys.
Agent B: You have my report.
Supervisor: There are a few holes.
Agent B: It was complicated. Have an empanada.
Supervisor: It’s always complicated, Agent B.
Agent B: This was different.
Supervisor: I’m listening.
Agent B: It’s Agent R. She was . . . a challenge.
Supervisor: No kidding. That’s what you were supposed to be here for. To notice if anyone was slipping. To report it.
Agent B: She wasn’t slipping. She never slipped.
Supervisor: What are you telling me?
Agent B: She was perfect. But there was something going on that I couldn’t see.
Supervisor: Because you weren’t looking hard enough.
Agent B: Because it was impossible to detect.
Supervisor: What was it?
Agent B: It was love.
Supervisor: Love?
Agent B: Agent R loved the boy. Her boy.
Supervisor: The kid was human, Agent. He was a means to an end.
Agent B: Are you going to try an empanada or not?
Supervisor: Maybe just one. But I still don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me about Agent R.
Agent B: I’m telling you that she was Nathan’s mother.
Supervisor: And?
Agent B: And she cared about him more than she cared about the mission.
Supervisor: Nobody cared about the mission more than Agent R. This is delicious. What did you say it’s called?