white with green trim. With the money he made at the fusion plant, he could have afforded instead to tear it down and replace it with a new house and a swimming pool in the backyard. But he wanted to keep it, because it was “historic,” meaning it was over a hundred years old, with a living room ceiling that bulged downward in the middle as if it was about to collapse, though Dad’s engineer buddy Bruce Nomura claimed there was no danger. This would have been more reassuring if Mr. Nomura had been a structural engineer instead of an expert on the High Ones’ nuclear fusion technology. If it was so safe, Alison wondered why it was so noisy. Sometimes she’d lie awake at night wondering if there were ghosts making all those creaks and groans, even though at seventeen she was much too old to believe in such things. Would I be happier if it was a burglar? she sometimes wondered, by daylight.
Alison let herself in with her key. Dad wouldn’t be home for another two hours at least, and it would be dark by then. She set a snack out for Arnold, who was doubtless daydreaming on his way home. Her little brother liked peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat with sliced banana instead of jelly. She thought that was gross, but it reminded him of when Mom used to make them for him, back before she started spending the whole day in bed with her migraines. Then she tiptoed upstairs to peek into the master bedroom. Sure enough, Mom was lying in bed with the shades pulled and a damp washcloth over her eyes. Good, she’s asleep, Alison thought, but as she turned to go that familiar cranky voice started up.
“You’re not going to watch tri-vee before getting your homework done, are you, Allie?”
“Of course not, Mom.”
The graying head turned from side to side but the eyes never opened. Since they’d moved to Chincoteague Mom hadn’t found a hairdresser who could get her color right, or so she said, but Alison thought that since she’d gotten so much sicker over the past year she just didn’t care what she looked like anymore. And she looked like hell, with her face wrinkling up and her hair going wild as weeds in an untended garden. The darkness she craved could only hide so much, and then there was her B.O. Allie didn’t know how Dad could stand it. Basically it sucked having a mother with NINA—Network-Induced Neuronal Atrophy, a disease that struck fewer than one in a million n-net users. It was getting hard to remember what Mom had been like before, when she used to play her guitar and make Dad go out dancing with her. She’d taught Alison to play a little, but the guitar had sat untouched in a corner of the master bedroom ever since they’d moved to Chincoteague. Even if she’d been any good at it, Alison wouldn’t have felt right playing it when Mom couldn’t.
Since Mom was lying still, the rumpled bedsheets barely rising and falling over her chest, Alison thought she must have fallen back asleep. So she tiptoed out of the room, shutting the door behind her, and back downstairs to the kitchen, where she took some string cheese and diet soda out of the fridge. She ate her snack in front of the tri-vee stage, with the sound turned most of the way down. It wasn’t as if she made a mess or anything. She’d get her homework done; she always did even though it was so much harder for her than for everyone else since she couldn’t use the n-readers. So she hardly felt guilty at all about disobeying Mom. Anyway, it was practically a social commandment to keep up with “The Spacefarers.” Even if the plots were sort of dumb, Donny Schmitz as the captain’s son Brad was cute.
The show assembled itself in crisp 3-D above the half-meter-square, slightly raised black panel of the stage. Today’s episode involved a water mining run the UNSS Intrepid was making out to Ganymede, the biggest of Jupiter’s moons. It should’ve been an easy, two-week cruise, but the saboteur Izzy Goldstein, Captain Adams’ nemesis, was plotting to sprinkle arsenic on the pure ice, and Brad and his girlfriend Janey were going to have to stop him. No one in Alison’s class of seniors had honey-blond hair and perfect skin like Janey, played by Taylor Fields, though Sydney Birch came close. Alison couldn’t claim to be the homecoming queen’s friend, or even in an outer orbit, like Jupiter around the sun. Though she felt as big and fat as Jupiter, lately. Dad liked to say she was zaftig, an old Yiddish word that meant plump and cuddly. Thanks a lot, Dad.
The station logo came on just as the camera was zooming in for a close-up of Donny and Taylor smooching, their life-size faces floating a couple centimeters above the tri-vee stage. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an urgent news update.” Alison groaned and reached for the remote, but was distracted by Arnold’s thumping arrival. He threw his book-bag in the corner and slouched toward the kitchen for his snack. With his face turned away, Alison couldn’t tell whether he’d been beaten up again.
“How was school?” she asked. He grunted something. She got up to follow him, did a double-take. “Where’d you get that plant?”
“It’s a spider plant.”
“Who gave it to you?” The noise of the tri-vee covered his mumbled response. They were saying something about a “terrorist bomb outrage” at the Capitol Building in Washington. Same old junk, but Alison made a mental note to set the clock ten minutes early in the morning, for the extra hassle they were bound to have getting to school.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said, the new librarian gave it to me!”
“Keep your voice down, idiot, Mom’s sleeping. What new librarian?”
“Her name is Gloria. She said you should come see her. Can I go now?”
“Well, you don’t have to be all sarcastic,” Alison said to his back as he plodded upstairs. It was no use. Why can’t I just have a normal kid brother? It’s not enough that we’re “come-heres” and Jews, he has to be the little weird kid!
Alison sighed and went back to the living room, turning off the tri-vee just as they were saying how many people had been killed and that the Patriotic Front and the Human Defense League were “issuing competing claims of responsibility.” Tri-vee time might be ruined, but she really should use the extra time to get a start on her history term project. Being in the All-Planetary class wasn’t as much fun as it had been back in Pikesville, not with the teacher, Miss Burbage, just expecting everyone to spout back at her whatever she told them.
Maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Alison gnawed on the eraser end of her pencil as she thought this, a bad habit she’d had as long as she could remember. The pencil had been new that morning, but the metal collar that held the eraser already looked like a shiny wad of used chewing gum. What possessed me to write about “How the High Ones ended the Cold War”? It’ll take me forever.
Alison wondered if she could trust Arnold to put the tilapia fillets in the oven for dinner if she went to the town library to do some research. He slouched past where she sat at the dining room table with her books and her notes, and grunted when she asked him to get dinner started.
“Can’t you keep it down? Mom has a really bad migraine,” she said as he started banging around in the kitchen cabinets. “What are you doing up there anyway? The baking pans are down below.”
“I need a plate to catch the water.”
“The water?”
“For my plant. I have to water it or it’ll shrivel up and die. Like I wish you would do.”
“So witty. Listen, turd-breath, you think your friendly librarian would still be at the school?” The high school was two blocks closer than the town library. Alison figured she could run there in five minutes, spend a quarter hour or so talking to the librarian and checking out books, and still be back in time to make sure Arnold didn’t completely wreck supper.
“Search me. She was still there when I left. That’s when she gave me the plant.”
“You
