Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  Truth be told, if my life were a comic book, my brother would probably be the hero. I could even see it. His helmet would be bright red. I could picture the detail of his baseball jersey and the sheen of sweat carefully sketched in and the pencil catching his laser focus while he struck out another player. Imagine that, on the front page of the newspaper, captured in vivid colors. Mom would tack it up on the fridge with her circular magnet clips.

  And, well, maybe it was always gonna be like that. Some people would always be made of bright reds and blues and flashes and those BANG and KAPOW symbols and all that fun stuff. And I would be that sweet sidekick in the background. Or something. With my Red Vines. Barely sketched out and barely shaded in.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ro

  “I’M CONFUSED,” BENJI said as he slowed down so I could catch up. “This whole town is flat as a board. Why do we need to find some special place on your map again?”

  “We can’t just fire off a rocket from any old place,” I said. “Think about it. What if we accidentally launched it into a telephone pole?”

  “You don’t get your calls?”

  “And you could shut down the power on your entire street,” I said. “Or set something on fire.”

  “The power going out is actually pretty scary,” Benji said. “I mean, the fire, too. But my neighbors would really go nuts if they didn’t get to watch Jeopardy! at seven every night.”

  We pulled up to a field, and I double-checked the map.

  This was it. There was a faded soccer goalpost, but it was at the end of the field, near the park. I scanned around. The closest house was hundreds of feet to the left. Nothing. Zip. Zero.

  Just grass.

  “Well,” Benji said. “I don’t think we could set anything on fire here if we tried.”

  We set down our rocket. I turned back. So we’d found a place. Check. “Okay. We can just find a spot to—”

  “Aw, come on.”

  I looked up.

  I instantly recognized Drew Balonik, with his spiky brown hair and his red hoodie. He smiled like he was playing some big joke that we didn’t even know about. Two other kids followed him. One of them was Eddie, Drew’s friend in science class who always laughed at everything Drew said. The other one I’d only seen a few times at lunch.

  Benji tapped on my shoulder. “We should probably go.”

  But Drew had already come up to us. “Hey.”

  I noticed Benji clench his fists. His cheeks were red.

  “Nice seeing you, Burns,” Drew said. He smiled, but it didn’t look friendly at all. “Didn’t expect you here.”

  Observation: Benji and Drew hated each other.

  “What are you doing here?” Benji said. His cheeks were still bright red.

  “I live here, moron,” Eddie said.

  “We were tossing a Frisbee when we saw you biking by,” Drew said. “We just wanted to say hi, that’s all.”

  His friends laughed. Benji looked away. “Come on,” he mumbled to me. “Let’s go.”

  But I didn’t particularly feel like leaving. I wanted to wipe that stupid smirk off Drew’s face. I marched right up to him. “Hey. Leave us alone.”

  Drew looked surprised. “Hey, it’s the new girl.” He looked between us and raised his eyebrows. “Ohhh. Were we interrupting a date?”

  Benji turned three shades redder. “What! I mean—no. That’s not—”

  “Aw, don’t be embarrassed,” Drew said in a mocking voice. “Benji Burns and his—”

  “We’re here to test out our science fair experiment, actually,” I said loudly, stepping right in front of him. “And you’re messing it up.”

  Drew doubled over laughing. “Science fair?” I didn’t really know what was funny. “You’re—doing all this for”—he straightened up—“the science fair?”

  Before I knew it, he’d snatched the rocket. “What is this, a big stick?” He turned. “Andrew, catch!”

  He threw it like it was a football, and Andrew ran down the field, catching it with both hands.

  “Hey!” I ran after his friend Andrew, but he tossed it back, and Drew caught it. Panic rose and then boiled over into anger as Drew tumbled to the ground roughly, rolling over with the rocket. A part of the fin wobbled, nearly snapping off.

  Benji didn’t do a thing. He just stood by his bike, watching the whole thing happen. But I wasn’t going to let Drew ruin this. I’d spent months on that rocket.

  “Let’s fly this like a paper airplane!” Drew said, swinging the rocket around. “Maybe we can get it in—uufff!”

  I’d meant to only grab the rocket, but I accidentally toppled right on top of Drew and we both tumbled to the ground. I wrenched the rocket away from him, scrambling to my feet.

  “Hey!” Drew protested. “You pushed me!”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said. “Anyway, what are you going to do, tell on me?”

  He opened his mouth and shut it.

  “You know what?” I spat out. “You might think you’re funny with those stupid jokes you make in class. Or with all the times you fling Jell-O in someone’s face. But it’s not funny to me. So you can get up and leave now,” I said. “And for your information, my name is Ro. Don’t call me new girl.”

  Drew got up, stunned. He didn’t say anything for a second. “Okay, freako, chill out,” he said, giving me a nasty look. He glanced at his friends. “Come on, leave these nerds to their stupid science experiment.”

  As they headed back, I turned to Benji. His mouth was open.

  “I can’t believe you did that. That was amazing!”

  I was still angry. “I can’t believe he goes around doing that to people.”

  Benji shrugged. “He always gets a laugh out of it.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. “Does he not like you or something?”

  “Our brothers are friends,” Benji said.

  I whirled around. “What?”

  “Yeah. I used to go to his house sometimes. But then he started playing a bunch of pranks on people, and I didn’t really want to be friends with him. He likes that kind of stuff. Jokes and pranks. He also made fun of my old friend Amir a lot. So I don’t really like him.”

  It occurred to me that Drew probably used to make fun of Benji, too. “I just made him hate you more, didn’t I?”

  “Well, Drew hates both our guts now,” Benji said. And then he cracked the biggest smile I’d seen. “But that was totally worth it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Benji

  SO HERE’S THE thing: Drew Balonik and I used to be best friends.

  I know.

  I just repeated that again in my head, because to be honest, I wouldn’t have believed myself in a million years, either. And I wasn’t just friends with him for a week or a month or something; we were best friends ever since kindergarten, when Drew marched up to me in my Little League game with his oversized jersey and his spiky hair, and said, “My brother told me to be friends with you.”

  I mean, why wouldn’t I? Drew’s brother Ellis came over to our house to play with Danny so much that their names kind of blended together, like Dannyellis. So Drew started coming over. I went over to his house a lot, too. His parents were real nice and always bought Drew the newest gadgets. He even got his own Walkman for his twelfth birthday. We started sitting together at lunch. He gave me half of his Fruit Roll-Up. I gave him some Red Vines. When we were finally in the same class together, Drew told me to learn Morse code so he could talk to me during reading hour by just blinking. And on April Fools’ Day of fifth grade, Drew brought a whoopee cushion to class because Ellis had tricked him with it. When Mrs. Farnsworth wasn’t looking, he slipped it onto her seat. And when she finally sat down—

  FFFFT.

  The class roared with laughter. After that everyone wanted to sit with Drew at lunch.

  And then three things happened during sixth grade:

  I quit baseball.

  Drew told me his mom and dad started fig
hting a lot.

  He got brand-new Nikes and a book of practical jokes for his birthday.

  A lot of jokes were kind of dumb. They involved squirting ketchup between your fingers and pretending it was blood, or having someone step in a puddle of shaving cream. But everyone else at school loved it. When we sat together at lunch, they squealed and oohed and aaahed over the fake-ketchup-hot-sauce blood. Once, Drew pulled out a jar of mayonnaise and started eating straight from it with a spoon, and everyone said it was gross until Drew told them it was actually pudding.

  Two weeks into sixth grade, Drew pulled me aside after class. “Hey. I think I just started a prank war with some eighth graders.”

  My heart rate shot up. “What?” The eighth graders were huge. They had tree trunks for legs.

  “Hey, chill,” Drew said. “They pulled a joke on me in the hallway, so I’m gonna get them back. Help me put together a list of good pranks, will you?”

  The next day, the entire school was talking about how Evan Hamm opened his locker and a sea of Styrofoam peanuts spilled out.

  They stopped messing with Drew pretty quick after that. But he still continued with his Prank Wars, even though it was no longer a war.

  And I admit, almost all the pranks that Drew came up with were pretty funny. Like when he taped a harmonica to the back of the principal’s car so that when he started his car after school, the harmonica screeched loud enough for the sheriff to hear. Or when he snuck into homeroom early, when all the chairs were put up, and duct-taped them to the desks so people couldn’t sit down for class. Or when he used the pay phone near the principal’s office and kept prank calling our math teacher (which was my idea) until the entire class was roaring with laughter.

  But when Drew offered me one of his mom’s caramel apples and I took a huge bite of a caramel-covered onion instead, it wasn’t all that funny. He and our other friends cracked up at my horrified reaction. I choked down the caramel onion and tried to smile, too. But mostly, their laughter just made me feel kind of awful. Or maybe it was the raw onion.

  “I should put Mrs. Lewis’s paper clips in Jell-O on the last day before winter break!” Drew said, lying on my floor and staring at the ceiling while I concentrated on drawing Superman. We hung out only at my house now. He had the bigger house, with its shiny new countertops and its matching drapes. But his parents fought so much Drew didn’t like being home. “But maybe that’s not big enough. I gotta pull out all the stops.”

  I put down my drawing. “Haven’t you done enough pranks?”

  “Are you kidding?” Drew said. If I had to draw him, I would pencil in sparks and angry cyclones around him. That was Drew: he was always causing some sort of trouble. “I’m just getting started. People love these things. Eddie told me that my pranks make him actually want to go to school. Come on, put down those stupid comics and gimme some ideas.”

  It was true. People always laughed along with his pranks. Until the middle of sixth grade, when a small, skinny kid named Amir showed up in science class. His green checkered shirt seemed to swallow him up. His hair was perfectly combed. It was the day of the Pepsi prank. The teacher, Mr. Martin, always drank a bottle of Pepsi without fail, and so we thought that one day, we’d wait until he wasn’t looking and put a bunch of Pop Rocks in it.

  Mr. Martin was busy passing around the beakers when Drew snuck up to his desk.

  And then he paused for a moment, as if thinking about it. Silently, he moved the Pepsi bottle just slightly to the right and placed it behind Amir, who was standing closest to the desk, his back turned to the Pepsi.

  My stomach did a cartwheel. “Wait—”

  Too late. When Amir wasn’t looking, Drew slipped a bunch of Pop Rocks in the bottle. Instantly, the soda exploded all over the new kid.

  I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t smile, not even a tiny bit. I remembered Drew and our other friends laughing when Drew played pranks on me and knew it must have been ten times more awful for the new kid.

  During lunch, when I saw Amir sitting alone with Pepsi stains on his collared shirt, picking at his lunch, I felt like I was going to throw up.

  I didn’t even know him then, really. But the thing was, I’d always read all about these characters in my comics. Bruce Wayne snuck out as Batman at night and protected innocent strangers from crime. Superman went around saving people.

  And I couldn’t even stop a new kid from getting pranked on his first day of school. It finally hit me: I didn’t want to do pranks anymore.

  “I got it!” Drew said to me after school that day. “I finally got an idea for the Big Prank. I’m going to put all the fish from the principal’s fish tank into the science beakers just in time for our class experiment! They’ll go nuts over this.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. He was going to mess with the goldfish?

  “They’re live creatures,” I protested.

  “So? Come on, man, they’re just goldfish. I’ll put in some water from the fish tank, too. You think it’ll be funny?”

  I stood up.

  What I wanted to say was: “I’m out.”

  What I said instead was: “Yeah, course.”

  But the next day, all I kept thinking about was Amir and his Pepsi-stained shirt. I felt more and more awful, until it was like I had the worst flu ever.

  Was it possible to throw up by just thinking about something?

  Which was how I ended up in the principal’s office the first time.

  After I told them all about how Drew was going to fill the beakers with the goldfish from the tank during the lunch break, Mr. Murphy stormed into the science room and found Drew reaching into the fish tank.

  Which is how I ended up in the principal’s office the second time, while Drew’s face got all red and he burst into tears.

  That was how the Prank Wars ended.

  And how Drew stopped talking to me.

  Because I got him in trouble.

  And worse, the school called his mom.

  And worse, he got detention for two weeks.

  But worst of all, I was a big, fat, lying snitch.

  Because the first rule of friendship was: no matter what, friends don’t tell on each other.

  I felt awful being a snitch. But the thing was, I’d felt worse and worse every time Drew pulled a prank, and if I hadn’t stopped it, I genuinely think I would have puked my guts out. Drew still pulled some harmless jokes after detention, because after all, people still laughed at his pranks. But he never pulled a prank on me again.

  Still, after what Ro had done to Drew in the park, I wasn’t sure how safe Ro was. I didn’t hear anything from her the next day. But I did hear about how someone had planted spiders—fake spiders—all over Mrs. Campbell’s desk.

  I leaned over the counter. “But I thought the new issue was coming today?”

  Mr. Voltz peered at me from over his glasses. “Back-ordered. It’ll come the next two weeks, maybe. I’ll let you know.”

  I sighed. I’d biked all the way to school for this instead of hitching a ride with Danny, just so I could bike here after. Danny wasn’t working today.

  So, it was just me and Caterpillar Eyebrows.

  As I was about to go back to the comics aisle, he said, “Patience, young man. You know, I wait to stock those space comics until you’ve come so others won’t get to them first.”

  I looked up. “Really?” He saved those comics so I could get to them first? It was practically the nicest thing I’d ever heard. “I feel bad now,” I said. “I don’t even end up buying them sometimes.”

  I could see him almost smiling. Almost. He nodded. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t mind you reading them, as long as you don’t mess them up. Anyway, kids usually come in for Batman. Or for those Marvel issues. Seems like that’s what everyone likes these days.” He peered at me. “What is it about these Spacebound books that do it for you, anyway?”

  I shrugged, trying to think of some excuse. Then, without thinking, I blurted out, “My dad writes
those comics, actually. That’s why.”

  Mr. Voltz’s expression didn’t change. Not even a tiny smidge. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I found drawings around the house that he did. Before he left, probably. These comics came out years after he left. But the stuff he drew matched up to those comics exactly. I don’t think Mom knows. Or Danny. They don’t read Spacehound. But I do.”

  I paused. Why was I blabbing on about this? But now that I’d started, I couldn’t really stop. Plus, I actually felt okay about trusting Mr. Voltz. It wasn’t like he would tell anyone, anyway. “The thing is, everyone loves Star Wars. But Spacebound feels like my own comic because my dad wrote it, you know? I don’t remember what he sounds like. Mom won’t talk about him, ever. She doesn’t even keep pictures of him around the house, so I don’t even know what he really looks like. But when I read Spacebound, it’s like I can figure it out a little. I can see what jokes he likes to make. Almost like I can hear him talking.” I looked up, suddenly feeling self-conscious. I’d probably told him too much. “Sorry, this probably sounds all super weird.”

  But Mr. Voltz shook his head. “Not at all.”

  I said, “I want to find him, though.” There. I’d said it. And somehow, this mission to look for my dad felt more real, because I was telling all this to an adult. Who, before today, was practically a stranger. “I want to know what he’s really like. So my friend Ro and I are looking for him.”

  I expected him to raise an eyebrow or scoff at the idea or shake his head, but he simply nodded. He reached for his pillbox on the counter and shook it out.

  I glanced over. “You take vitamins, too?”

  Mr. Voltz paused. “You think these are vitamins?”

  “Aren’t they? I mean, they kinda look like the vitamins that Mom makes me take. ’Cause she’s always flipping out about whether I get enough vitamin D or B or something.” I peered at them. “If they aren’t vitamins, what are they?”

  Mr. Voltz tipped up the pills and swallowed them all at once. He took a sip from his glass of water. “Medicine.”