Mothership (4 page)

“Gee, thanks, a pee diary,” I say, grabbing a handful of pickle chips. I forgo the peanut butter, letting the tangy brine tickle my tongue.

Ducky seems to have missed the I-don’t-really-want-to-talk-about-my-pregnancy tone in my voice. “Did you check out those vitamins I told you about? They’re chewy. You like chewy.”

“I can’t get them without a prescription, and I can’t get a prescription without parental consent.” I reach for my milk shake to wash down my snack, but before I can get to it, Ducky puts his hand on top of mine.

“You have to tell him, you know.” He’s giving me that sweet, deeply concerned look—the one that makes me want to punch him right in his sweet, deeply concerned face.

I pull my hand away from Ducky’s and grab my phone, aiming it at the TV. “Wait, this is the best part,” I say, and turn up the volume.

As the woman in the infomercial sprays atomized chili cheese fries onto the tongues of ten kilted Scotsmen, who spontaneously break into the world’s worst bagpipe rendition of the classic tune “Funky Cold Medina,” Ducky pokes me in the knee with his big toe, trying to get me to look at him. But I ignore him so long that he finally gives up.

Ducky’s right, of course. Sooner or later I need to tell my dad about this thing in my uterus. Because he’s a pretty smart guy, and I’m thinking he just might notice when a baby blows out my girl parts six and a half months from now. But—call me crazy—I’m not exactly superstoked to tell my father that his only darling daughter went and got herself fertilized a week before her PSAT.

The infomercial finally comes to an end, only to start all over again. And as I’m double-barreling the straws of my milk shake, giving myself serious brain freeze, that’s when I notice Ducky—pressing his finger into the bottom of the pickle bowl with this total puppy-dog look of concern as he studies the coffee table. It’s obvious that while I’ve been zoning out on junk TV, he’s been busy worrying about me.

I know I shouldn’t think this, but part of me seriously wishes it were Ducky’s baby I was having, instead of Cole’s. Not because I’d want to, ew,
do
it with Ducky (Ducky is ruling the Friend Zone with an iron fist), but because I know he’d actually be cool about it. He definitely wouldn’t bail on me the second I told him he’d knocked me up, for one thing. He’d, like, squeeze me up in a hug and kiss my forehead and tell me we’d figure it out together. All the things Cole Archer was too busy packing up his suitcase to have the time to do. If it were Ducky’s baby, maybe I’d actually want to keep the thing. Because Ducky would make a hell of a dad. He might even be amenable to sticking around, going to PTA meetings while I’m off colonizing planets—assuming this little detour hasn’t nixed that plan. And because I wouldn’t mind having a miniature Ducky around all the time, with the same shaggy black curls, goofy brown eyes, and long pointy elbows (seriously, they could, like, cut paper). But it turns out that the kind of guy you want to raise a baby with isn’t always the kind you want to make one with in the first place.

“Ducky?” I say. He looks up, his pointer finger still covered in brine bits. I give him a soft smile. “Don’t worry about me so much, all right? I’ll be okay, I swear.”

He bites his bottom lip. “But you don’t have a
plan
,” he says.

The guy is starting to sound just a little bit like my dad, which is seriously making me rethink donating my kidney to him. But I fight the urge to sock him with a couch pillow. “A plan?” I say. “I’ve got a plan.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Seriously. Check it out. I’m going to rock the bump for six-and-whatever more months, Lamaze it out in, like, an hour,
and some infertile rich couple will adopt the crap out of it. Then next year I’ll get accepted early admission into the honors program at Penn State and spend all of senior year chillaxing while you’re stressing about your SATs. See? A plan.” I’ve been gunning for an engineering scholarship to the Honors College since the president first proposed the Ares Project as part of his Solar Colonization Initiative when I was still in middle school. How could I not want to be a part of that? An actual colony on Mars—the first ever terraforming attempt on another planet. Sure, there are a few small domed colonies on the moon, like New Houston, but that’s child’s play compared to what they’re planning now. Of course, the program is still in its infancy, at least ten years off—which will give me plenty of time to ace my way through college, get into a top space engineering grad program, and then hopefully qualify for one of the eight NASA postdoc fellowships to prepare engineers for Ares. I’ve had the itch for this forever, and before now there’d never been anything keeping me from scratching it.

Ducky does not look convinced. “But what if you decide you want to—”

“Dude, Duck.” I give him a look, one usually reserved for sitcom actors dealing with
serious moments
. “I have an entire book full of stuff my mom didn’t get to experience because she had me.” I point upstairs to my room, where he knows very well my mother’s book of maps is propped up on my bookshelf. “I’m not gonna let some boneheaded mistake ruin my chances of actually doing something myself.”

“I get it,” Ducky says. “But don’t you want to
think
about other—”

My death glare silences him. “I’m going to the library next week to look up adoption agencies,” I say.

Ducky is silent for a while, scratching his mop of messy black curls. “What about Britta?” he asks at last.

“You think she wants it? ’Cause she doesn’t really seem like the maternal type.”

Ducky rolls his eyes at me. “If you think she’s bad now, how brutal do you think she’ll be when she finds out the father of your baby is—”

I sock him in the arm. “Not worth mentioning?”

“Obviously,” he says as he rubs the bruise. “But still . . .”

“No one has to know,” I tell Ducky, and now it’s his turn to give me a look. “I’ll wear muumuus. Or, like, a neon fruit hat. You know, draw the eye away from my problem areas.”

“
El
-vie. You—”

Suddenly Ducky’s eyes snap to the TV. I follow his gaze to the screen, where an ad has popped up featuring a muscular caveman in a hairy loincloth, carrying an axe hoisted over his shoulder. The man lumbers toward us, snarling, and just as he looks like he’s going to reach through the screen and grab me, a lithe little dude with a jetpack zooms in and punches the barbarian in his baby-making area.

“Jetman: Time Wars! Upgrade your game client today!”

Ducky’s face is glazed over with little-boy glee as he watches the images of martians and mastodons flashing across the screen. “Dude, how did
this
come on?” I say, jumping at the chance to change the subject. “I
told
you, you gotta stop using your phone to change channels at my house. It effs with my profile settings, and I get stuck with all these nerdy ads.”

“How do you know it wasn’t your dad?” Ducky asks weakly, wrenching his eyes away from the TV as the commercial ends.

“Dad doesn’t MMO, nerdlinger.”

“Then leave your phone out here next time,” he says with a laugh. “You were in the bathroom for, like, an hour. Watching soap operas without female company shrivels my man parts. PS, I can see your midriffass.”

Instinctively I tug down the back of my shirt to cover the exposed skin just above the top of my jeans, then reach over and grab his phone off the coffee table. “At least clear your memory first,” I say, and I toss the phone clear across the room, where it wedges itself behind a wilted fern.

The door to the kitchen creaks open then, and Ducky cranes his head around the top of the couch. “Hey, Mr. Nara!” he calls out. “What’s crackin’?”

“Hello, Donald,” my dad replies, walking over to peer into the living room. “Elvie. How was school?”

I don’t even bother to look up. “Endlessly diverting,” I tell him, flipping through the TV channels again. “I’m thinking of writing a musical about it.”

Ducky kicks me in the leg. He hates when I’m sarcastic to my dad. Probably because my dad is way cooler than his stepfather, Zeke. Zeke is some bigwig stuffed suit over at OmniNews, and his idea of a good time is collecting porcelain hippos. Ducky practically lives at our house, which is fine by me. I’ll take as much Ducky as I can get, and my dad doesn’t seem to mind either. Sometimes when Ducky’s over—scarfing down multiple helpings of tuna casserole, or working on his lit homework, or even futilely arguing the merits of 3-D films
versus flat pics—my dad gets this look on his face, a sort of wrinkled wistfulness, and I can just tell he’s thinking that if my mom hadn’t passed away, maybe they could have ended up with a son like Ducky.

“What’ve you got there, Mr. Nara?” Ducky asks. “More plans?”

“Yep,” Dad replies. “This new solar deck should reduce our heating and cooling costs by four percent.”

I turn around and see that, sure enough, my dad is holding a stack of blue-tinted transparent LED readouts, all flashing with various schematics for yet
another
remodel on the house. “Dad,” I say, rolling my eyes, “haven’t you Winchestered the place enough?”

Our house was built in 2042, when fusion tech was still a little wonky, so unlike at Ducky’s place, where everything runs smoothly all the time, our house is full of gremlins. You never know when there’s going to be a brownout, or a surge that’ll send the washing machine spurting suds into your face. And just try taking a shower that doesn’t either freeze your hair into a shampoo-cicle or steam you like a dumpling.

To tell the truth, I think Dad likes the challenge. He’s always renovating
something
—drafting new plans, getting estimates, designing, gutting, hammering, welding—and I’m constantly enlisted to help. School vacations are especially bad. While Ducky spent his eighth-grade winter vacation skiing with his mom and Zeke, I helped my dad jackhammer up the uneven floor in the basement and lay new concrete foam. While Ducky sent me letters from summer camp about solar gliding, I was running new wiring through the walls for
a state-of-the-art alarm system. And any sunny afternoon has the danger of turning into gutter cleaning day. Not to get all Psych 101 or anything, but I have a sinking suspicion that Dad’s constant need to refurbish our home might have something to do with missing my mom. It’s sort of an unwritten rule in the Nara household that we don’t talk about her, ever. I learned at a very early age that any mention of Olivia Nara would lead to hours of stony silent distracted Dad. There are very few pictures of her, and Dad can’t even bring himself to display them. Even her book of maps is something we don’t discuss. He just walked into my room one day when I was six, handed it to me with a “Your mother would have wanted you to have this,” and walked out without another word. So I think that, in some way, Dad keeps himself busy so he won’t have time to think too much.

“For your information, young lady,” my dad informs me, walking over to the couch, “this new addition is essential.” He plops the plans onto the coffee table, nearly knocking over the peanut butter jar. I rescue my snack and take a gander at the schematics.

“Dad!” I cry. “This deck is attached to my room!”

“Yes, and?” He has, as usual, totally missed the point.

“You’re going to tear out my whole wall!” I jab a finger at the plans, in which a fourth of my bedroom has been replaced by an enormous window that looks out onto the semi-wraparound deck. “That pervy little Richie Phillips next door will be able to see straight into my business.”

Ducky starts poking me in the ribs. “Elvie, can I see your phone for a second?” he whispers, but I ignore him.

“Honey,” Dad says, “we need to reduce our energy output. It’s just smart thinking. And this way we can stockpile more of our own energy in the well in case of brownouts. You remember last summer?”

“Elvie . . .”
Ducky’s whispering is more insistent, as is the prodding I’m getting, but I’m still too annoyed to pay him any mind.

“Where am I supposed to sleep while the construction’s going on?” Ducky’s prodding is becoming too much to ignore. I round on him. “Dude, Ducky, what’s your problem?”

Ducky is trying to grab my phone from under my leg, which is, hello,
so
not cool. I’m about to give him a good wallop, when I notice that my dad has this, like, utterly perplexed look on his face. And he’s not looking at us.

He’s looking at the TV.

I turn to the screen and immediately suck in my breath.

“From the makers of Bumpy Roads cocoa butter, Face Your Baby acne cream is strong enough to attack even the fiercest of pimples but also pH-balanced to nurture your growing baby.”
On the screen a round-as-a-globe thirtysomething chick is smoothing goop onto her smiling face.
“Now with your recommended daily dose of folic acid!”

Adorable, lovable nitwit Ducky’s been using his phone to look up baby things for me . . . and to change channels. All without bothering to clear his search history first. Guess who’s
not
getting a spare kidney for his birthday.

“Elvie?” my dad says. He’s staring at me, forehead wrinkled.

I try to play it innocent. “Uh, yeah?” I reply.

My father smoothes the front of his pants. “Is there a reason
that our television seems to think you might be interested in advertisements for”—he clears his throat—“maternity products?”