Dinosaur Boy

by Cory Putman Oakes

  He took his hand off my shoulder and raised both hands above his head.

  “I come in peace, OK?” he said.

  I bit back a smile at his oddly appropriate choice of words. I think Allan realized what he had said too; the corners of his mouth went up a fraction of an inch as he lowered his arms back down.

  “You look like you’re thinking about something,” he prompted me.

  I nodded.

  “Before she left, Mathis told me that Parker didn’t accept her invitation to Camp Remorse,” I told him. “Which is why Parker isn’t here. But he’s not at his house. And you said you couldn’t find him either. So…where is he?”

  “Oh.” Allan shifted his weight a bit uncomfortably. “Parker’s at military school in Maryland.”

  “What?” I asked, incredulous.

  Allan looked a tad embarrassed. “His mom told my mom a couple of days ago.”

  “Military school,” I said thoughtfully. “Where they have to wear uniforms, right?”

  Allan shrugged. “I guess so.”

  At least that explained why Parker’s mom would throw out his clothes.

  “Well, I guess I didn’t eat him then,” I said pointedly.

  “I guess not,” Allan said sheepishly.

  There was a moment of awkward silence before Allan spoke again. “I’ve been thinking too,” he announced.

  “Really?” That must be new and different for him.

  “Last night at the science fair,” he began. “You tried to stop Mathis from taking me and Cici. And now you’re here, even though the…the, Jupiter people don’t want dinosaur pets.”

  He frowned and trailed off, apparently having lost the thought that had been about to occur to him.

  “Yeah…” I encouraged him.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why are you helping us? After everything that we—I—have done to you?”

  I bit my lip and thought about it. I examined Allan’s face while I did. He wasn’t being smart, or mean, or jerkish. He really wanted to know the answer. He truly could not understand what I was doing here. Was that because it would never have occurred to him to go out on a limb to help someone else? Or maybe because no one had ever done something like that for him?

  It was food for thought. Some other time when Jupiterians weren’t about to descend on us and try to kidnap my best friend.

  “I don’t know, Allan,” I said finally. “Maybe the brain in my butt has finally taken over the brain in my head.”

  Allan smiled. It was kind of a frightening thing, to see his face squint up like that beneath his oversized forehead. It looked especially weird with his insane, spiky hair. And at the same time, it was the least scary he had ever looked to me.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly, as his grin widened. “That must be it.”

  Suddenly, the ground started shaking beneath us and there was a loud sound from outside, like a jet engine coming in for a landing.

  “They’re coming!” Sylvie yelled suddenly, backing away from the crack in the board that was nailed against the front window. “Places!”

  Allan nodded at me, then fell back to stand beside Cici.

  I took my place in the front of the room, just as Sylvie used the wooden handle of a broomstick to kill the lights.

  Take me to your leader.

  Any minute now, a Jupiterian was going to ask that. And when they did, he—she? it?—would be brought straight to me.

  Why the heck hadn’t I come up with a better plan?

  • • •

  A little bit of light came into the portable when Principal Mathis opened the door, but not much. It was barely enough for me to see the outline of our principal’s hand, holding a can of Good Boy (or maybe it was Good Girl? It was too dark to see the color of the can) at the ready. And there was also enough light to see the slim outline of a broomstick knock the can out of her hand.

  “Oh!” Principal Mathis exclaimed.

  The lights flicked back on, just in time to catch Mathis on her hands and knees, fumbling around for the spray.

  “Good afternoon, Principal Mathis,” Sylvie said, nudging the can out of the way with one foot and bowing deeply. She purposefully made her voice sound toneless and distant, as though she were under the influence of the spray. “We are all ready to go, just like you asked.”

  Principal Mathis gaped at her. Forgetting about the can, which had rolled back behind my feet, she stood up slowly. She took off her thick glasses, quickly cleaned both lenses, then put them back on to gape at Sylvie some more.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  Sylvie smiled and patted the construction paper cape of plates she had taped to her back. She turned around slowly, making a full circle, to show off her long paper tail.

  “Oh, nothing. Just a bit of grooming. I wanted to fit in with everybody else.”

  Principal Mathis glanced up and got a good look at the rest of us. Her mouth fell open.

  There was an impatient sound from behind her. Like someone clearing their throat.

  Principal Mathis’s expression changed from confused to furious in approximately two seconds flat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began. “I’m not sure we need to—”

  “Let us see them already!” an excited voice squealed. A tall, slim shape shoved Principal Mathis out of the way and walked eagerly into the room. A half dozen even taller figures followed the first, until the doorway was crowded with Jupiterians, and Principal Mathis was shoved, protesting, into the corner.

  The Jupiterians were all about two feet taller than Principal Mathis. Their long robes were the same shiny silver as their skin, and their long arms and legs looked even skinnier than Elliot’s. They all had tiny facial features that were squished into the middle of their faces, slits for eyes, tiny bumps for noses, and mouths that were even smaller than the thin line behind Mathis’s human mask.

  I heard someone behind me, probably Cici, gasp. But other than that, we all just stared silently at the Jupiterians while they stared back at us.

  As mesmerized as we all were by them, I can only imagine how fascinating we must have looked to them. And how confusing.

  Fifteen kids with dinosaur plates from their necks all the way down their backs. Right to the tips of their long tails.

  Well, actually, we hadn’t been able to find enough construction paper to make tails for everybody. But we directed Gary, Gabrielle, and Jeremy (the three kids without tails) to stand in the back. After all, Sylvie had said that the only people who have worse eyesight than Martians are the Jupiterians. Hopefully, she was right about that.

  “Oh no,” the first Jupiterian, the one who had pushed Principal Mathis out of the way, exclaimed. “Oh, Mathilda. This is quite wrong. This is absolutely not what we ordered.”

  The Jupiterian’s voice was sort of singsongy. It sounded like a girl’s voice, but all the Jupiterians had shiny bald heads and were dressed exactly the same, so I wasn’t sure what gender any of them were. Or if the Jupiterians even had genders…

  “I assure you, this is not what it appears to be,” Principal Mathis rushed to explain. “These little rascals are just playing a prank on us. The thirteen I selected for you are all purebred human. These are just costumes.”

  “Costumes?” said a second Jupiterian. This one was the tallest of the group. His voice sounded male. And very ticked off.

  “Yes, costumes. Construction paper and whatnot.” Principal Mathis waved her hand carelessly in the air and let out the fakest laugh I have ever heard. “They’re a spirited bunch, aren’t they?”

  The two Jupiterians who had spoken exchanged uneasy looks.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” Principal Mathis offered. She raised a hand and stepped forward toward Sylvie.

  I leaped forward and ducked underneath her hand, putting myself between her an
d Sylvie. Instead of hitting construction paper, her fingers fell onto my all-too-real plates. And they did not come off when she pulled.

  “Purrrrrrr,” I said, smirking at her. “Purrrrrr!”

  She grabbed my topmost plate and shoved me away in disgust.

  The Jupiterians let out a collective gasp of shock.

  “Well, this one is real,” Mathis admitted, looking embarrassed. “But I swear to you that the others are all—”

  “Our order was quite specific,” the first Jupiterian informed Mathis angrily. “Purebred humans. No hybrids. Particularly not dinosaur-human hybrids. That breed simply does not sell on our planet.”

  “I think we’ve seen enough,” the tallest Jupiterian said. He turned to leave, and the others turned to follow him.

  “Wait!” Principal Mathis exclaimed. She wrung her hands desperately. “I can explain!”

  “Stop wasting our time,” the tall Jupiterian hissed. When he turned to stare down at Principal Mathis, there were spots of red pulsating at both of his temples, just above where his ears should have been.

  I had never seen a furious Jupiterian before. But I was pretty sure I was looking at one now.

  “I am shocked that you would try to put one over on us, Mathilda,” he said angrily. “I can promise you right here and now that we will never do business with you again. And we will be spreading the word that you took advantage of our diminished sight on this planet. You of all people should know how shameful it is to exploit someone’s handicap!”

  He strode purposefully out the door. The other Jupiterians followed him, all except for the first Jupiterian, the one I was pretty sure was a girl. She lingered at the door and looked sadly over her shoulder at us.

  “You poor things,” she said. “I do hope you all find happy homes.”

  Then the door slammed behind her, and the fifteen of us were left alone in the portable, facing a very, very angry Martian.

  “You!” Principal Mathis pointed at me. “This was all your doing! Fine thanks I get for protecting you! I could have made a fortune with you on Mercury!”

  Mercury?

  Suddenly, I had really had enough of Principal Mathis.

  I took a step backward and nearly tripped over the can of spray that Sylvie had kicked earlier. Now that the lights were on, I could see that it was labeled Good Girl in bold, pink letters.

  Principal Mathis gave an angry growl and advanced on me.

  I leaned down, picked up the can, and let loose four quick bursts of spray directly into her face.

  Our principal fell to the ground like a stone. She hit the floor face-first, and half of her human mask stuck to the carpet and got scraped away as she rolled onto her side.

  I reached down and patted her on the head.

  “Good girl, Mathilda. Good girl.”

  Sylvie and Cici both giggled.

  Before anyone could say anything else, there was the same jet-enginey sound from outside and a sudden, giant whoosh of wind. The door flew open, and six people in bright yellow jumpsuits charged in.

  The Worst Kept Secret On Earth

  “Do you know what is going to happen to Principal Mathis?” I asked.

  My grandfather set down his salad fork and wiped a smear of dressing off his upper lip.

  He nodded meaningfully toward the door of the kitchen, where my parents had just disappeared. He put a finger to his lips and waited a long minute, probably to make sure they really were, in fact, leaving us alone with our salads to talk, like they had said.

  It had been over six hours since the Jupiterians left and the team from Amalgam Labs, led by my grandfather, had arrived. But it had been a crazy six hours.

  First, half of the team from the lab interviewed us, while the other half ran an enormous thing that looked like a vacuum all around the portable. Then, all of the scientists exchanged their jumpsuits for civilian clothing and returned the twelve would-be pets to their parents. Each parent was presented with a (fake) certificate of completion from Camp Remorse and assured that their child would be welcomed back at school the following Monday by Principal Kline.

  Who, as it turned out, had not won the lottery after all, but had instead been the victim of a vicious prank by Principal Mathis. He had been campaigning for his job back ever since. The school board had been only too happy to reinstate him, given the vacancy created by Principal Mathis’s abrupt departure.

  Just hours after the incident, the school board had released a statement, praising the Portland FBI for capturing one Mathilda Mathis, a criminal wanted in twelve states for child abduction. The statement went on to say that Mathis would be taken to California, where she would stand trial for her crimes.

  But I knew that wasn’t really what was going to happen.

  “Is it her?” my grandfather had asked one of the other scientists, as they both stood over Principal Mathis’s unconscious body.

  The other scientist, who actually looked a lot like Dr. Dana (from the movie), bent down and unfastened a clip from Principal Mathis’s poofy hair.

  One pink antennae sprang up from the top of her head.

  The Dr. Dana look-alike felt around on the top of Mathis’s head, searching for another clip. When she didn’t find one, she sat back on her heels and nodded up at my grandfather.

  “She has the birth defect, all right. The rarest on Mars. Yeah, this must be her.”

  Principal Mathis had only one antenna?

  Maybe she did know a little something about being teased for looking different after all.

  When the only sound from the kitchen was the washing of dishes and my parents talking, my grandfather finally sat forward in his chair to answer my question.

  “Amalgam Labs will turn Principal Mathis over to the Martian authorities,” he told me. “They’ll have to decide what planet will put her on trial. It’ll be a tough decision. She is wanted on at least seven of them, for one crime or another. Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged and speared a forkful of lettuce sprinkled with my favorite vinaigrette.

  “Just curious, I guess,” I said, stuffing the lettuce into my mouth. With my mouth full, I had a moment to think before my next question.

  Thanks to the Good Boy/Girl spray, most of the kids who had been in the portable had only hazy memories of any alien involvement in their kidnapping. And any wild stories they might tell later about Martian principals or Jupiterian pet dealers would be chalked up to post-traumatic stress disorder, overactive imaginations, or (as Principal Mathis had been counting on) simply being a kid.

  This, according to my grandfather, was the way things had always been done.

  Over dinner, he had explained things to my parents. He hadn’t told them everything, of course. Just enough so I wouldn’t be grounded for skipping out on school that day.

  But now that it was just me and my grandfather, sitting alone in my living room, I could finally get real answers to my questions. And I had a lot of them.

  “I thought Amalgam Labs was closed in the United States,” I began. “They said so in the movie we watched on the first day of school.”

  My grandfather rolled his eyes. He was still pretty young looking, as far as grandfathers go. And he didn’t look anything like Dr. Cook, the only other scientist I knew. My grandfather looked like more of an Indiana Jones type of scientist, kind of rugged and windswept. He still had almost all his hair, and there were large patches of gray above his ears.

  But not a single plate. Or even a hint of a tail.

  “Oh, that movie,” he said, shaking his head. “The lawyers made us put that together. You’re right that we no longer have a facility in the U.S. But the United States government is actually one of our biggest supporters. A lot of the work we do involves alien technology. We employ more extraterrestrials than any other company on Earth.”

  “And are there, um, a l
ot of aliens on Earth?”

  My grandfather gave me a secretive smile.

  “The existence of extraterrestrials is the worst kept secret on Earth,” he explained. “The United States, like every other country, officially denies that they have proof of alien life, even though they now have treaties with every planet in our solar system. A large number of aliens immigrate to Earth, even though they must live here in secret. Most of them work in places like Amalgam Labs, to improve human technology.”

  “Is that how they created the dinosaur gene?” I asked.

  My grandfather nodded.

  “Actually, it takes more than one gene for a human to develop dinosaur traits. Several thousand, in fact. We got them from the Saturians.”

  “Saturians?” I repeated. “You mean, like, from Saturn?”

  “Yes. Dinosaurs still exist in the wild there,” he said with a totally straight face. I marveled at this for a moment, but then I realized that he probably talked about this kind of stuff every day. It was no big deal to him.

  “If there are so many aliens here, why do they stay a secret?”

  “Almost every human has met an alien at one time or another,” he informed me. “Most aliens don’t try very hard to hide what they are. But most humans don’t even notice. They’re too busy, or they pretend that it didn’t happen so that other people don’t think they’re crazy. Most humans are not ready to admit, even to themselves, that aliens exist.”

  “I can see why, if the aliens are all like Mathis,” I said with a shiver.

  My grandfather shook his head.

  “No, most of them are like your friend Sylvie,” he explained. “Very much like us, just trying to get by.”

  Sylvie.

  A half hour after the Jupiterians left, while Elliot and I were watching the Amalgam Labs folks vacuum up every speck of dirt around the portable, we had found Sylvie sitting by herself. She had her knees pulled up to her chest and her hooded head buried in her arms.

  “He didn’t come,” she said, rocking back and forth slightly.

  “Who?” I asked. Even though I was pretty sure I knew.