Buttheads from Outer Space

by Jerry Mahoney

“Buttheads rule!” Lloyd agreed.

  I could barely believe it happened. We won. Quentin couldn’t mock us or look down on us anymore, because I’d beaten him out for the Super Brain. Maybe this was a new beginning for me. Maybe I could be successful like he was, appreciated and adored. Unfortunately, my joy lasted only until we got back to my house. That’s when two things went horribly wrong. First, we saw what the aliens did to the place while I was gone all day. The whole house was a mess. There was toilet paper running up and down the hall. My video games were scattered around the living room. And worst of all, there was a giant puddle of barf on the floor that seemed to be made up mostly of Oreo chunks. The aliens were lying next to it, sound asleep, and there was something else very strange about them.

  They were enormous.

  While we were in school, they got fat. Like, super fat. Twice as big as they were before. As with humans, most of the weight went to their butts, but since their butts were on their heads, that was going to make it nearly impossible for them to stand up.

  “Whoa, what happened here?” I asked, nudging IAmAWeenieBurger with my foot.

  IAmAWeenieBurger rolled over and opened his one remaining eye for a look around the room. “What’s the prob? Everything’s cool.”

  I tossed him my backpack, and he fished his eyeball out of the pocket. As soon as he popped it back in its socket, he cringed at what he could now see. “Oh wait, never mind,” he said. “Yikes.”

  It was then that I noticed an empty bottle a few feet away from them. “No!” I shouted. “That’s not . . .” I tiptoed past the aliens so I wouldn’t get Oreo barf on my sneakers. Then, I picked up the bottle, confirming my worst fear. “You drank the Quokka Kola?”

  Doodoofartmama rolled over, holding his head, one hand on each butt cheek and the third on his forehead. “FRRT!” (The sound was as uncomfortable as the smell, which reminded me of a wet Band-Aid.)

  “Yeah, my head hurts, too,” IAmAWeenieBurger said.

  “Josh,” Lloyd said calmly, “don’t freak out. It’s just a soda.”

  “Just a soda! My dad got this in Australia!”

  “I thought your dad never did anything cool.”

  “It wasn’t cool. It was a work trip when my mom was pregnant with me. He didn’t get to throw a boomerang or wrestle a crocodile or do anything fun. He got sent to a tiny town called Goonscrudger’s Gully. It was known for being the place kangaroos went to die. All day long he’d look out the window and see them hopping slowly down the street. And worst of all, they had no Wi-Fi!”

  “Whoa!” Lloyd was horrified.

  “Then he got bitten by a wallaby and came down with this rare marsupial flu, and the State Department wouldn’t let him come home for a month. He missed my birth because of it. The only thing he enjoyed while he was there was this local drink he discovered. Quokka Kola. So when he finally got to leave, he kept one bottle and promised to save it for the most special of special days.”

  Lloyd shrugged and slurped up what was left in the bottle. “Eh, tastes like Pepsi.”

  “Lloyd!”

  “What? We can just fill the bottle with some other soda. He’ll never know. If I were you, I’d be more worried about these barfed-up Oreos.”

  “Semi-barfed-up,” IAmAWeenieBurger corrected. The two aliens rubbed their eyes and rolled over. “We were totally gonna finish them.”

  Doodoofartmama positioned his mouth over the puddle and started lapping it up with his tongue.

  “Eww!”

  “What do you humans do when you eat something really delish?” IAmAWeenieBurger asked. “Maybe thank the chef and eat some more? Well, we barf it back up! Then we eat it again. Then we barf it, then we eat it. Barf it, eat it. Barf it, eat it. Until all the flavor’s gone. You can tell how much we like something by how many times we blow chunks.”

  Lloyd approached them. “I’m glad you like Oreos, but I think they may have caused you to put on a bit of weight.”

  IAmAWeenieBurger tried to sit up, but his enormous butt kept causing him to fall back over. His head on the ground, he held the bag of Oreos up to his face so he could read it. “I suspect it has something to do with your strange Earth ingredients.” He scanned through the label. “Sugar. High-fructose corn syrup. Mmmm . . . soy lecithin!”

  “Just clean it up, please.” I went to the kitchen, and what I saw there was an even bigger mess. There were food crumbs everywhere, and the inside of the microwave was coated in a weird brown goo. “What did you put in the microwave?”

  “I’m not sure what they’re called,” IAmAWeenie-Burger replied, “but we found them oozing around in the garden.”

  I took a closer look and saw tiny eyeballs and antennae floating in the gunk. “You put slugs in the microwave?”

  “Well, you didn’t expect us to eat them raw, did you?”

  As I was wondering whether I wanted to be known as the first human to strangle an alien, Lloyd stepped in and took charge. “OK, we have approximately fifty-three minutes before Josh’s parents get home. We need to clean everything up.”

  This was the great thing about Lloyd. He always kept his cool in a crisis, and he always had a plan. I cleaned the microwave while the aliens licked up the mess on the floor. As for the Australian soda, Lloyd refilled the bottle with some supermarket brand diet cola. Then, all that was left was for the aliens to lap up the last of their barf.

  “Finally,” I sighed. “Now we can relax!”

  I went to sit on the couch, but just as I was plopping down, IAmAWeenieBurger shouted, “Wait! Not there!”

  It was too late. My butt rammed against the hard bottom of the sofa, shooting pain up my back. “Ow!” I looked down, and underneath me was a completely flat couch cushion. “What happened to the stuffing?” I groaned.

  “FRRT!” Doodoofartmama said, and a puffy white cloud shot out of his mouth.

  “It was delicious!” IAmAWeenieBurger agreed. “We barfed that up nine times!”

  Once again, Lloyd swooped in before I did the aliens any bodily harm. “We’re going to need something soft to fill those up again. I’ve got it!”

  I followed him into my parents’ bedroom, but once I saw what he was looking at, I shook my head. “No, Lloyd! We can’t use those!”

  We were standing in front of the Great Undershirt Mountain. My dad had so many undershirts that he hardly ever had to wash them. At the end of every day, he just tossed the dirty one on top of the pile. He only washed them when he ran out of undershirts in his drawer, usually once every six months or so.

  “He’ll never notice a few of them missing,” Lloyd said. He held his nose with one hand and started picking up sweat-stained undershirts with the other.

  The cushions were a little lumpy when we were done refilling them, but as Lloyd pointed out, they were softer than ever, and after a few seconds, you barely noticed the smell.

  “Look at that!” he said proudly. “With ten minutes to spare!”

  Unfortunately, just as I was about to thank Lloyd for fixing everything, that’s when the second horrible thing happened that ruined our day. All of a sudden, Doodoofartmama began running in circles, waving his arms like a maniac and farting his head off. Something was majorly freaking him out.

  I asked IAmAWeenieBurger to translate. “Hmmm . . . ” he said. “You might want to pull the curtains. He says there’s somebody looking at us.”

  “What?”

  I ran up to the window and scanned the backyard. There, sitting in a tree, I saw someone watching us through a pair of binoculars.

  “There really is someone!” I waved Lloyd over to look.

  “Well . . .” IAmAWeenieBurger said. “Who could it be?” He peeked over my shoulder, in full view of the window.

  “Get away!” I screamed. “He’ll see you!” That’s when I realized who the spy was, because as I was frantically trying to shove IAmAWeenieBurger out of sight, the person in the bushes put down his binoculars and took out his phone.

  “Oh, it’s him!” I
AmAWeenieBurger said, as we both got a glimpse of Quentin fumbling to take a picture12. “Hmmm . . . that’s bad.”

  I pulled the curtains, but I knew it was too late. Quentin had seen IAmAWeenieBurger. He may even have snapped a photo of him. “We have to stop him!” I said.

  Lloyd ran for the back door. “Don’t worry. I’ll fix this.”

  It was a relief to hear Lloyd sounding so confident. Lloyd never let me down. By the time I got to the back door, I could see he was already working things out with Quentin.

  “That’s right,” Lloyd told him. “There are aliens in Josh’s house. They saw our website, and they came to meet us, and they have butts in the back of their heads.”

  “Lloyd!” I wailed. I couldn’t believe he was confessing everything.

  “We can’t lie anymore, Josh,” he said. “It’s true, Quentin. They sleep in Josh’s bed, they play video games, and they eat couch stuffing.”

  “I knew it!” Quentin shouted. Then he added, “I mean, not the couch stuffing. That’s kinda weird.”

  “Isn’t it?” Lloyd agreed.

  Quentin stepped forward accusingly. “And they helped Josh cheat at the Smart-Off tryouts, didn’t they?”

  “That’s right,” Lloyd said. “They mentally beamed him every answer through an eyeball in Josh’s backpack.”

  “Lloyd, stop!” I begged. Lloyd turned toward me and winked. I wasn’t sure what he was up to, but I could see it was all part of his plan.

  “Where are they?” Quentin demanded. “I want to see them.”

  “Just look through the window.” Lloyd pointed toward the house. “And stay still so they can get a good shot at you.”

  “Shot?” Quentin repeated.

  “Well, I’m sure they have their Ultra BrainSuck 3000 pointed at you right now.”

  “They’re going to k-k-kill me?” Quentin shuddered.

  “Kill you? No, that would be ridiculous, to destroy a perfectly developed human brain like yours.”

  “Oh,” Quentin sighed in relief.

  “They’re just going to steal your mental function.”

  “Wh-wh-what?” Quentin stumbled backward nervously.

  “Not all of it, of course. Just the genius parts. You’ll still be able to live a perfectly normal life as someone with average intelligence.”

  “No!” Quentin wailed. I’d never seen him so terrified.

  I had to smile. Seeing Lloyd manipulate people was like watching a master at work. I just still wasn’t sure exactly what his plan was.

  “Average people lead wonderful lives,” Lloyd assured him with false sincerity. “Think of the possibilities. You could go on to be a cashier . . . or a sewage treatment technician . . . or maybe even a teacher!”

  “NOOOOOOOOOO!” Quentin took off running, covering his head in case an alien ray beam came shooting at him.

  Lloyd laughed hysterically. “Lloyd, you let him get away!” I shouted.

  “So what? He’s terrified they’ll steal his brain. And even if he does tell people, they’ll never believe him.”

  “But, Lloyd,” I said. “They might believe him if he has a picture.”

  “Wait.” Lloyd froze. “He took a picture?”

  I nodded. “I’m pretty sure he did. Now the whole world is going to know about the buttheads! They’ll wrap our houses in plastic and hook us up to machines that never stop beeping. You saw E.T.!”

  “Yeah, that was a good movie.”

  “Lloyd, we invited them to our planet to have fun, and now they’re just going be guinea pigs. We’d better hope there’s no Yelp in outer space, because they will not say nice things about us.”

  “You’re right,” Lloyd said. “Let me think.”

  In all the years I had known Lloyd, I had never seen him think before.

  It wasn’t pretty. But a minute later, he had the answer. “It’s time, Josh,” he said, taking a deep breath. “The buttheads need to go home.”

  12 See page 264 for our blog on taking pictures, humanity’s number one most worthless pastime.

  CHAPTER 12

  “I’m really sorry, dude,” Lloyd told me as we walked inside to tell the buttheads to beat it. “I know you’ve loved having aliens stay in your house.”

  “Are you mental?” I said. “They got my iPhone taken away. They sat on my waffles. They overwrote my save files. They barfed all over the living room.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty cool,” Lloyd said, not getting it at all.

  I checked my laptop and saw that Quentin had already posted his picture on Instagram. It was blurry and taken from far away, but in it, you could see a buttheaded weirdo through the window of my parents’ living room.

  “Come on, Josh,” Lloyd told me. “Let’s break the news to them.”

  I folded up my laptop and tucked it under my arm. Of course, when we got to the living room, IAmAWeenieBurger and Doodoofartmama were on their best behavior. The floor was spotless. The only traces of Oreo barf left were around the corners of their mouths. “Look, guys!” IAmAWeenieBurger called out. “We cleaned!”

  “That’s great, guys,” Lloyd said. “But I’m afraid Josh has some bad news. Go ahead, Josh.”

  I couldn’t believe Lloyd was making me lower the boom. I decided the easiest thing to do was just to show them the picture. “Quentin just posted this online,” I said. I opened my laptop and let them see.

  IAmAWeenieBurger gasped. “That’s Doodoofar-tmama!”

  “I know,” Lloyd said. “And it’s not even a very flattering angle of him.”

  “Now everyone will know about us! All of Earth will learn we are here!”

  Lloyd and I shared nervous glances. “Yeah, so it’s really not safe here for you anymore.”

  “You are right,” IAmAWeenieBurger agreed. “There is only one thing we can do.” He turned to Doodoofartmama and had a short exchange in fart talk, after which Doodoofartmama nodded. Then Doodoofartmama made himself into a blob and started bubbling up.

  He was sending another text.

  We watched the bubble separate from the rest of the filthy ooze heap and float upward out the window. “I’m sorry,” Lloyd said to them. “We wish you guys could stay longer.”

  “Stay?” IAmAWeenieBurger smiled. “Well, of course we’re going to stay!”

  “I thought he was texting them that you’re coming back early,” I said.

  IAmAWeenieBurger laughed. “No, he’s texting them to come!”

  “What?”

  Before he could explain, I heard a sound that stopped me cold. It was actually two sounds mixed together, that of a tiny car engine chugging down the street and of a middle-aged man and woman shout-singing, “We built this city on rock and roll!”

  “My parents are home!”

  I said it thinking the buttheads would take the hint to run upstairs and hide, but instead IAmAWeenieBurger started wobbling his way toward the front door. “Great!” he said. “I’ll be delighted to finally meet them!”

  “Lloyd, help!” I begged as the Mini Cooper idled in the driveway.

  “Don’t worry, Josh,” Lloyd assured me. “The four of us need to talk this out. Until then, everyone who wasn’t born on Earth needs to just hang out in Josh’s room for a few minutes. Okay?”

  IAmAWeenieBurger turned around. “Well, I’ll need some help getting up the stairs.” He looked down at the ground, where Doodoofartmama was still nothing but a pile of slime. “And he’ll need a lot of help.”

  My parents got out of the car. We only had a few seconds left. “Josh, you help him, and I’ll take care of Doodoofartmama.”

  For a second, I thought I got the easier job, until I realized how hard it is for an alien with an enormous butt to make it up a staircase. Grabbing an alien’s butt was probably the second to last thing on Earth I wanted to do at that moment. But since getting caught by my parents was the absolute last thing I wanted to do, I reached down and wedged my hands under IAmAWeenieBurger’s flabby cheeks, lifting with all my might. Ugh!

>   I could hear my dad turning his key in the front door, so I pushed the alien to the stairs as fast as I could. “Hurry!” I whispered in his ear. “We’re almost there.”

  Meanwhile, Lloyd struggled behind us with his hands full of Doodoofartmama goo. Thankfully, the bubble transmission alien gunk wasn’t as sticky as the number four gunk, so the living room stayed pretty clean. It was very gooey, though, like rotten brownie batter or lumpy spoiled milk. Lloyd had to keep shifting his arms around to keep dribbles of Doodoofartmama from plopping to the floor. “Hurry, Josh!” he commanded.

  My heart was racing. The front door began to open, and I shoved IAmAWeenieBurger with all my might down the hallway. “Ow!” he whimpered as he stumbled into my bedroom.

  Downstairs, my parents began looking around for me. “Josh?” my dad said.

  “Lloyd, hurry!” I whispered. He just had to get that massive glob of alien life into my bedroom before my parents saw it. “Throw him!”

  Lloyd took a deep breath and did just that, heaving the mound of extraterrestrial slop toward my doorway. It seemed to fly in slow motion through the air. My eyes darted back and forth between it and my clueless parents, wondering if it would sail out of sight before they happened to look its way.

  I ran to my bedroom door and waited. As soon as Doodoofartmama flew past, I slammed it shut, but not before I noticed the sludge landing right on top of IAmAWeenieBurger. “Ohhhhhh!” he groaned. Then, as I turned away and breathed a sigh of relief, I heard him from behind the closed door utter a soft, satisfied, “Yummy!”

  “Josh?” my parents said, looking up at me and Lloyd.

  We had made it, with literally a second to spare. We turned around and tried to play it cool. “Oh, hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Well, hello, Don and Debbie!” Lloyd chimed in, giving a feeble wave.

  My parents shared a concerned look. “What’s that all over you?” my mom asked.

  It was only then that I realized that Lloyd was drenched in whatever Doodoofartmama turned into when he sent text messages.

  “We were doing a science experiment,” Lloyd said. “Extra credit, for school. Right, Josh?”