The True Meaning of Smekday (Smek 1)

“There must be something you want,” I said.

“Nope.”

Should I just tell him? I thought. Should I tell him my brother’s a Boov and he can figure out how to use it? Or would that make things worse?

J.Lo pantomimed a steering wheel under his sheet. I sighed when I realized what he meant, and that he was right.

“Our car,” I said. “I’ll give you our car. A Boov helped us build it. It floats.”

The Chief eyed me suspiciously.

“Your car has Boov parts? For real?”

Suddenly the air was cut by what sounded like a huge, shrill bird.

“Grace! JayJay! Grace! Are you in there?”

Vicki Lightbody was stalking the outside of the junkyard fence, looking for the way in.

The Chief groaned. “Friend of yours?”

I shrugged. “She’s been feeding us.”

Vicki stuck her round, moony face through the gate, and Kat followed behind.

“There you two are!” she called out. “I just knew I needed to check up on you. Here, take these water bottles.”

I resented anyone suggesting we needed to be “checked up on.” On the other hand, I noticed for the first time that it was getting dark, and that my throat was cracked from thirst. I drank, and J.Lo poured half of his bottle over his head and slipped the rest under his sheet to drink.

“Mm. Um, this is Vicki and Kat,” I said. “I guess you both know the Chief?”

“DON’T STEAL MY LAND, JERKS!” shouted the Chief, and I must have jumped three feet. “YOU PALEFACED DEVILS!”

I looked at him, wide-eyed. Where had that come from?

“Well, I just think everyone in our little community knows Chief Shouting Bear by now,” Vicki said. Her voice had changed from birdsong to something more like the sound of windshield wipers on dry glass. Otherwise, neither she nor Kat seemed too surprised.

“Ma’am,” the Chief replied.

“We should all be heading home,” said Vicki. “Doncha think?”

“Why don’t you bring that car of yours back tomorrow,” the Chief said to me. “I’d like to have a look at it.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s kind of broken. But we could push it. Yeah. We’ll come.”

“Actually, I think you kids were going to stay with me all day tomorrow,” said Vicki.

“We were? Since when?”

“LET ’EM COME, INDIAN GIVER! I WON’T KEEP ’EM ALL DAY.”

“It’s dangerous for young children to be playing around all this rusty junk,” chirped Vicki. “They’ll get lockjaw.”

“It’ll do ’em good,” said Chief. “Rusty junk is all that’s gonna be left of this planet soon. HAWOOOO WOO WOO WOO!”

Lincoln sat down at the Chief’s feet and howled with him.

“JERKS.”

Vicki Lightbody clucked her tongue.

“You could do with a more positive outlook,” she said with an angelic smile. “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade is what I say.”

Chief Shouting Bear told Mrs. Lightbody what he thought life had given him. There was a tiny break in her otherwise shining face, like a crack in an Easter egg.

“Well, I don’t know what to make with that,” she said.

“Look, it’s no problem. We’ll come back for a few hours in the morning,” I told the Chief. “See you.”

Chief Shouting Bear nodded.

Once we were outside the gate, Kat let out a whistle.

“Man, I don’t know how you kids can stand him. Doesn’t all the yelling get on your nerves after a while?”

“He’s a poor man,” said Vicki. “A poor, sick man.”

“Actually,” I said, “he didn’t yell at all until you guys showed up. Not really. Maybe he only yells at grown-ups.”

Vicki sniffed.

“Well, you are not going back there tomorrow. We cannot have two children spending time alone with a crazy man, and Trey never should have told you the way.”

I looked at J.Lo. He leaned over and whispered an escape plan that ended with Vicki Lightbody inside a ball of superyarn and cold foam. I hoped it wouldn’t have to come to that, but it was a good plan.

We went home with Vicki that evening and ate her food, and slept in her living room, and politely declined her invitation to build a fort out of the sofa cushions. Actually, to be totally accurate, J.Lo was all over the sofa cushion–fort idea and was drawing up plans and talking about this kind of insulation versus that kind of insulation and asking if New Mexico had a history of earthquakes before I shot him the look that’d come to mean I can’t explain right now, but you need to stop discussing central heating and start talking about Power Ninjas or something before everyone realizes there couldn’t possibly be a ten-year-old kid under that sheet, you dumb alien.

Luckily, it was just us plus Vicki and Andromeda in the apartment, and Vicki was way too excited about finally getting what she wanted, to notice what she actually had: not two grateful and happy children, but a space alien and a suffocating eleven-year-old girl who was beginning to feel she could run the rest of the way to Arizona if she had a good breakfast first.

“Wakey wakey!” sang Vicki the next morning. “Eggs and bakey!” She giggled at her rhyme, then frowned.

“What is that noise? Is that the smoke detector?” she asked, and hustled off to check. J.Lo leaned toward me and listened.

“Hm. It is you,” he said.

I took a breath and the sound stopped.

“Sorry,” I said, and rubbed my palms against my eyes. “I guess I was accidentally screaming a little bit with my mouth closed. I just want to get on the road again. And I’m worried about Pig.”

Then I told J.Lo about the big group of Boov the previous day, and the Gorg’s cat fancy. J.Lo gasped and clapped his hands over his mouth, then looked thoughtful.

“I have never hearded of the Gorg liking animals which are not superlarge and dangerful with teeth or kicking strong feet or sitting upon you BAM! with heavy bottoms.”

“Maybe they like how cats taste. Maybe they just think they’re cute, I dunno.”

“Maybies. It is often spoken that the Gorg are fussy eaters.”

By the end of breakfast I thought I had Vicki figured, so I told her I had to go feed my cat and play with her and change her litter, because having a pet was a Big Responsibility and I wanted to be a Good Cat Owner.

If Vicki had smiled any wider, the top of her head would have fallen off. She said what good kids we were, and promised we’d leave as soon as she changed clothes and fixed her hair. I gotta admit, I ate up the praise as much as the breakfast. I hadn’t been anybody’s good kid in a while.