She sneers. “I knew making you my Pudin was a bad idea.” And with that, she pulls me up, puts my arm over her shoulders and hers around my waist, and helps me walk.
Everything starts to spin around me. I turn to Zelda. She looks very beautiful and very focused, like she wants to be done with me quickly. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re so pretty?” I mumble dizzily.
“Walk, Earthling! Delirium is a common side effect of Eol-69. And stop staring at me.”
I look away. But I could swear I just made a Vahalalian blush.
“AAAAAAAAH!” I scream. “What happened to my eyes?!”
There are no more pupils, no more white. My eyes have turned into two shiny black balls, rolling around in terror and staring straight back at me in the bathroom mirror. I pull at my tongue. Black, black, black! Just like ink.
“I told you: Eol-69.”
“What’s Eol-69?!”
“It is a common bacteria on Vahalal. It is malignant to certain weaker forms of humanoids.”
“Weaker?”
“Children.”
Okay, now’s the right time to panic. “Zelda! What’s happening to me?!” I feel faint. I sit down on the toilet. Now I really wish she were just crazy. I wish Eol-69 were another of her fantasies. But look at my eyes! “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Drowsiness. Paralysis, coma, and death. It is fast and painless, Pudin.”
“You. Gave. Me. THIS?!”
She nods. “I suppose sampling you was not a good idea after all.”
“I’m…sleepy.”
She helps me to stand and walk into my room. I fall on my new futon. Ouch. Even when you’re busy panicking and dying from an alien bug, it’s impossible to ignore that this damn thing is harder than the floor.
She takes off my T-shirt. I’m so far gone, I don’t even care when she unbuttons and slides off my jeans.
“Zelda?” I manage to whisper.
She hushes me and sets the stones she picked up in the Jardin du Luxembourg on my stomach. “David, I need to tell you. You are probably going to die.”
Indeed. Zoom. I feel like I’m falling down a very large, soft hole, trying to grab something before I slide away forever. I try to reach for her hand, but my arms and legs refuse to move—paralysis! Just like she said. I’ve got coma and death to look forward to, then.
“If you never wake up, thank you for what you did for me,” I hear her say through a billion light-years of wet cotton.
She takes my face in both hands, leans over, and sings to me.
She sings nicely. I really love…
“David?”
“Yes?”
“Are you on drugs?”
“What?”
“If you’re on drugs, I will kill you.”
“I’m not on drugs.” I sit up. The stones fall from the bed and roll onto the floor.
Mom is standing in the middle of my room, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “If it’s not drugs, then why are you sleeping totally naked with stones on your stomach?”
“I’m not—” I look down. Oh shit! I am totally naked. I pull the brand-new white duvet over me and cover my eyes to hide them from her.
“My black coat was on the floor in the middle of your room. Are you dressing up in…my clothes?”
A drug addict and a cross-dresser. That’s what she thinks she’s dealing with.
“No. It’s…my eyes.”
She switches on the light and squats beside the futon to take a good look at her transvestite junkie son’s eyes. “What about them?”
They’ve been contaminated by an intergalactic bug.
“They’re…weird.”
“You have my eyes, my face. They’re not weird. They’re beautiful.” She pushes my face this way and that to examine it better. She likes my face. It reminds her of hers. “You should be thankful you didn’t inherit your father’s droopy features.”
She looks at me intently. A normal mother would probably hug her son now. Mom’s not a hugger. I’m not much of a hugger, either. I guess I got that from her, too.
She sighs, picks up the stones, and stands up. Enough bonding.
“Dinner’s ready. Édouard’s waiting. You know he hates waiting.” She stops on her way out of the room. “Oh. By the way. Touch my coat again, and I’ll give you a solid reason to take drugs.” Then she abandons me, closing the door on her way out.
“Zelda?” I call.
“Here,” she whispers, popping her head out of my walk-in closet. “You live, Pudin. You are stronger than I thought.”
I bet she says that to all the boys.
I wait until Édouard and Mom disappear into their brand-new redecorated boudoir, where they will most likely yell at the TV for the rest of the evening. I gather leftover food on Mom’s breakfast tray and add a carton of milk and a glass. I don’t know what’s with me trying to feed her milk all the time. I just picture her as a big milk lover.
She’s sitting on the futon, watching the night sky through the French doors. “No stars,” she remarks.
She’s right. There are never any stars over Paris, just this mushy brown pollution mash.
“You shouldn’t be out of the closet. And you should put some clothes on.” Just imagine Mom catching her in here wearing nothing but the Speedo. Now, that would be a scene to remember.
“I should be out there looking for him.”
She touches the tattoo she said was the key back to her planet. “There’s so little time left.” She shows me. I don’t know. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it does look like it’s slightly fainter than the last time I saw it.
I set the tray beside her. “Did I really nearly die?”
“Yes, Earthling. You nearly died,” she says, forgetting about her fading tattoo. “I sang for hours, losing precious time.”
I pour her a glass of milk. My theory holds: She drinks it bottom up.
“This thing with my eyes, it really came from…?” I point at the starless night sky.
She nods. She has a funny white mustache from the milk.“ Eol-69 is very common past Galaxy zeta-784. It is good that you did not get Eon-77.”
“What does Eon-77 do?”
“You would have exploded instantly.”
I look around my spotless white room. “Mom would have hated that.”
We sit in front of my new iMac. Zelda’s browsing through more and more pictures of Johnny Depp. Young. Older. Pirate. Pirate. Pirate. “I wish I could kiss him now,” she says matter-of-factly.
“I tell you, Zelda, you’re probably not the only girl thinking that right now.”
“Who is that?”
She stops on a picture of him with his partner, Vanessa Paradis.
“He already has a girlfriend. He has children. He might not want to…you know.”
She shrugs. “This is not about what he wants.”
Even with my door closed, we can hear Édouard and Mom going through another major argument. Zelda listens to them. A door slams. They will carry on the fight in their bedroom.
“She’d have less trouble with him if she had him neutered.”
“Zelda! Don’t say that word. Not in this room.”
“What word?” She stands up, stretches, and yawns. It’s been a long day, even for an ET.
I turn off the computer. “Neutered. It’s sort of…freaky.”
“Define freaky.”
“Well, the idea of…” I make a snip-snip motion with my fingers. “There are other ways to settle conflicts, don’t you think?”
We can hear Mom yelling at the top of her lungs and then Édouard yelling back at her.
Zelda nods toward my hand. “If you knew that one of your fingers was turning you into an illogical, primitive mess and that cutting it off would make you a better person, would you hesitate?”
“A finger’s, like”—I close my fist—“totally not the same thing, Zelda,” I say, lying down on the bed. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a guy thing.”
She’s too tired to keep making the case for mutilation. She lies down beside me and closes her eyes.
“You shouldn’t fall asleep here,” I say.
“Where should I sleep, then?”
I nod toward the closet. “Sorry. We’ll make it snug.”
She drags herself in. I push my sneakers aside, add some pillows, drop my sleeping bag from last year’s ski camp right in the middle, and we have the perfect nest for a Spacegirl. I turn off the light.
“Why did you get emotionally disturbed?” The way she asks, it’s almost a whisper. “You saw the face of my chosen one, and you became…strange.”
Images flash through my mind: The kiss on Notre Dame Bridge. The very first time I saw her in Dad’s office. Her face when she sang to me. Plenty of pictures of Johnny Depp.
“I don’t know. I thought…I don’t know.”
“Emotions are bad, David. They are your weakness. You should overcome them.”
I love it when she calls me David instead of dwarf, Pudin, or Earthling. But that’s an emotion, right?
“If any of the symptoms of Eol-69 come back, wake me up.”
I promise I will.
I can’t sleep. The door to the closet is slightly open so Zelda won’t die from the smell of my sneakers. I’m totally focused on the door. Imagine that. A real ET. And to think I was already obsessed with her when I thought she was just a regular loony in a supersexy swimsuit. Now I feel like my spine is connected to a high-voltage wire.
“Are you sleeping?” I call.
“No.”
Silence.
“How would you rate yourself?” she asks suddenly.
“Rate myself?”
“As an Earthling, I mean.”
“I…I never rated myself.”
Silence.
“I’ve never treated a live male hominid before. I’ve done plenty of autopsies on deceased samples, of course. I normally find them utterly disgusting. The deceased ones, I mean. But some have been terribly mangled before they land on my autopsy table. The Valks can be so rough with male subjects.”
Silence.
“I do not find you utterly disgusting,” she says.
“Thank you,” I reply hesitantly.
Silence.
“Do you like ice cream?” I ask.
“I do not know, Earthling.”
“You don’t know ice cream?!”
“I know exactly what ice cream is. It’s a frozen food with very little nutriment and a high level of carbohydrate and fat, used by Earthlings to simulate pleasure.”
I sit up on my bed. She needs to know the truth. “Zelda! Ice cream is not that at all!”
“I have never tried ice cream,” she confesses. “Is it anything like apples?”
“Not even close,” I say, jumping out of bed and slipping discreetly out of my room on a quiet expedition to the freezer.
I come back with a full pint of old-fashioned vanilla ice cream. “This, Zelda, is the greatest gift to mankind.”
I switch on the light and organize an impromptu ice cream picnic on my futon. I hand her a spoon. “Try.”
She brings the ice cream to the tip of her tongue, the way she always samples anything, from food to a potential boyfriend. She makes the happy face. Because this is not just ice cream. Mom buys it from überpâtissier Lenôtre. This is zee best ice cream in Paris and probably in the entire galaxy and beyond. Worth the interstellar trip just in itself.
“Ish cold,” she says around a large spoonful.
“Ish good?”
“Ish good!”
Some things are universal. Lenôtre vanilla ice cream “ish good,” no matter what planet you’re from.
A pint of ice cream later, we lie side by side on my futon.
“Our northern shores are filled with giant life-forms and magnificent plants, most of them carnivorous. Someone ignorant of our ways would be killed, eaten, and digested in less than a second.”
Her hands rest on her stomach, moving up and down as she breathes. She’s staring up at the perfectly white ceiling and telling me all about her planet.
“Winter lasts for about two of your Earth years. There is no daylight, and electrical storms kill Vahalalians by the thousands.”
I’m staring at her incredibly beautiful face while I listen.
“But spring on Vahalal is glorious,” she continues. “There are more than a thousand shades of orange in our skies, and Zook is everywhere. It lasts for a very short while, then summer comes and we must hide from the sun and sulfuric storms. Sun in summer will melt you.”
I’m not sure someone like Johnny Depp is going to enjoy that kind of climate.
“I wonder where he is,” she says. “And how to find him.”
“I was just thinking about him. All in all, you’re lucky.”
She stops staring at the ceiling and turns to me. She has a spot of vanilla ice cream on the side of her mouth.
“He’s a celebrity,” I explain. “He can run, but he cannot hide.”
Her eyes! When you’re this close to her, they truly look out of this world.
“What will you do if he refuses to follow you?”
She doesn’t even need to think about it: “I will have to use violence.”
They have a pretty peculiar definition of romance on Vahalal.
“Zelda?”
“Yes?”
“If you were to kiss me again—not that you will—but if you did, by accident or something, would I risk dying again?”
“As long as you are a child.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Eol-69 disagrees with you.”
Damn bacteria!
“I need to sing to you a bit more.” She flips around so she’s sitting on top of me, and then presses down on my shoulders. “How do you feel?”
“I feel…” I shrug. I don’t think there’s a human word for what I feel with her pressed against me.
“You don’t look well.” She puts her hand over my heart. “Your heart beats too fast.” She leans over and presses the tip of her tongue against my forehead. “I can’t detect any trace of Eol-69, but your temperature is rising again.”
And if she keeps licking my face like this, my blood is going to boil and my heart is going to pop.
“I’m good, I swear.”
“You’re not good. You’re not even breathing normally.” She stares at me with her amazing green eyes, her face just an inch from mine. “Are you having some kind of attack? You look all twisted.”
I never thought I’d end up like this, trapped between the legs of the most fascinating girl in the world. And the most dangerous, too. Not in my wildest dreams! “I’m more than okay. I promise. I’m actually great!” And I mean it, too.
She shakes her head. She recognizes emotional disturbance when she sees it. “I’m going to make you sleep.”
“No, wait! I don’t want to sleep right now!”
Too late. She sings. I close my eyes and—whiiiiish—it’s the end of that dream.
8
EXPIRATION: 37 HOURS
Daylight. Mom bursts into my room. She looks a mess. She’s only vaguely wearing her bathrobe. Her eyes aren’t all the way open yet, but her bad mood is already in full swing. She drops the phone on my bed. “Your father,” she barks, and she’s off.
She’s so busy hating Dad that she doesn’t even notice Zelda sleeping beside me under the duvet. She slams my door, mumbling something about idiots (her son, her ex-husband, probably Édouard, too) ruining her Saturday sleep-in.
Dad says, “I’m coming to Paris today.”
“Because of Zelda?” I ask, rubbing my eyes.
“I want to be around when they catch her.”
“Who’s they?”
“I just spoke with the prosecutor in charge of her case. He talks like she’s a menace to society. He’s a zealous idiot who wants to make the headlines.”
I’ve never heard Dad call anyone an idiot before—the prosecutor must be a real spec
ial breed.
“I just wish I knew where she was,” Dad says.
Actually, she’s getting out of my bed, yawning, stretching, adjusting the Speedo, and disappearing into my bathroom. That’s where she is.
Mom and Édouard are heading to their Saturday morning brunch. I’m not invited. It’s not like they’re going to let me ruin their very first weekend of July plans.
“Daaaaavid! My ice cream!” Mom screams from the kitchen. I hear her slamming the freezer door. When she comes out of the kitchen, her lips are so tight they’ve turned blue.
“What did I tell you about my ice cream?!”
“Not to eat it,” I answer carefully.
“And?”
“I ate it.”
“It’s not such a big deal,” Édouard says, trying to appease her, the fool!
She pinches my cheek hard and shakes it. “You’re going to get fat. Is that what you want?”
Mom hates fat on anyone. You should see the portions she gives Édouard. The poor guy’s always starving.
“I’d rather have you dead than fat!” She actually laughs. Yak yak yak! That’s her idea of humor. Then she slams the door, leaving me alone in the corridor.
“Zelda!” I call, going back into my room.
Where is she?
“Zellldaaa!”
“Here.” She hops out of Mom’s room. She’s swapped the Speedo for a silver, white, and metal vintage Paco Rabanne swimsuit that Mom bought for mucho, mucho monedo at an auction.
She browses from one page to the next on my iMac like she can read a full tabloid article in a nanosecond.
“This is useless, Earthling! I’m losing precious time!”
She’s right. It’s incredible, but it’s very hard to find a Web page that will help you whisk Johnny Depp away to another solar system.
“Enough!” She pushes away the mouse, stands up, and roars. She’s not a big fan of the Web.
“How would you search for him on your planet?” I ask, taking control of the mouse.
“I would ask Zook,” she says, sliding the Starck vase back on her arm like it’s time for less computer, more action.
“Like, you would pray?”
How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend Page 5