Squishy Taylor in Zero Gravity
Contents
About the author and illustrator
‘
Bzzzt!
’ I say. ‘This is Squishy Taylor, exiting the space station. Over.’
I swing myself out the airlock door towards the meteor damage. The space station is broken, and my legs float away from me as I grip tight. I’m hanging here in zero gravity. My life is in danger. If I let go now, I’ll go drifting into deep space, just a spinning white dot in a dark universe.
‘Bzzzt. Roger that, Squishy. Ground control on standby. Over,’ Vee says, because she’s ground control.
‘Bzzzt,’ I say. ‘Meteor damage is worse than we thought. I’ll need to be here for ages.’ I look closely at the red paint, my legs dangling into space.
Vee’s voice changes. ‘Squishy, that’s not fair. It’s meant to be
my
turn doing space-station repairs.’ She’s stopped pretending to speak into the microphone. She’s standing on the tanbark,
frowning
at me, while I swing across the monkey bars.
We’re at the playground just near our apartment. Our playground is extra cool because it has an actual pretend space station at one end of the monkey bars. Some people in orange vests with a truck came a few weeks ago and attached it. Just off the tanbark, they also put in a whole solar system you can turn with a handle. The sun is taller than my dad.
‘You’re breaking up, ground control,’ I say. ‘I can’t hear you.’
‘
Squishy
.’ Vee sounds a bit cranky.
‘I’m not getting any sound,’ I say, pretending to fiddle with my earpiece. ‘Maybe the moon has come in between us.’
Vee’s twin Jessie laughs out loud. She’s been turning the solar system really slowly, watching the orbit patterns, but now she looks at us. ‘The moon can’t get between the earth and a space station, you
duffer
,’ she says.
Jessie and Vee are my bonus sisters. They are the bonus I got when I moved in with my dad and their mum. Except sometimes Jessie and Vee
aren’t
a bonus, like now. They’re annoying.
‘Squishy, it’s
my
turn,’ Vee says.
I swing myself up to sit on top of the monkey bars. I kick my feet, not wanting to come down.
‘Do you
know
how far away the moon is?’ Jessie says, coming to stand under me. ‘It’s three hundred and eighty-four
thousand
, four hundred kilometres away.’
Jessie likes astronomy and she likes facts. So of course she knows this.
‘And do you know how far away the space station is?’ Jessie doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Four hundred kilometres away,’ she says, looking super pleased with herself. ‘So there’s no way the moon comes between the earth and the space station.’
I do a
roll-back-flip
to the ground and stand in front of them. There’s something seriously dodgy about Jessie’s facts.
‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘The space station
can’t
be only four hundred kilometres away.’
‘Fine, we’ll google it when we get home.’ Jessie loves googling things to prove she’s right. But this time I know she’s wrong.
‘Jessie, Sydney’s
nine
hundred kilometres away from Melbourne. How can the space station be closer than Sydney?’
We stare at each other.
‘Squishy,’ Jessie says, her eyes widening, ‘the space station
is actually
closer than Sydney. That is the
coolest thing ever
.’
She’s so surprised that I almost believe her. We all laugh and it makes us forget to argue anymore.
Vee has an idea. ‘Let’s do astronaut training,’ she says. ‘Then no-one has to be ground control.’
Astronauts need to be really fit, so we’ve made up our own astronaut training routine. It’s mostly chin-ups, jumps, and special flips off the monkey bars. They’re things we already know, but the rule is you have to do them all in the right order really fast.
‘Ah. I reckon I’ll just …’ Jessie says, and heads back to the solar system.
Vee and I jump to the monkey bars together. We do chin-ups. One. Two. Then we swing our legs up and under. Hang from our knees. Swing our bodies. One. Two. Aaaand flip off.
We land on our feet and laugh.
‘Now, jumps,’ we say together, because we both know the astronaut training order. We run to the steps and jump them. Jump up, up, up. Jump down, down, down. We’re puffing and laughing and racing each other. Chin-ups again. My arms hurt. Hang from knees. Swing.
But my knees aren’t gripping the bar as usual. I’m slipping. I’m falling! I’m going to land on my head.
I twist myself around in the air. Get my head up and my arms out and land –
thump!
On my tummy. On the tanbark.
Ow
. I can’t breathe. It’s like my lungs are broken.
I feel that thump crashing through my body, even though it’s over. I can’t breathe.
Maybe I’m dead.
Then I gasp, so hard it hurts the back of my throat. My hands start stinging. My knees start hurting. My eyes are three centimetres away from the tanbark.
‘Squishy, are you OK?’ I can feel Vee leaning over me. Jessie’s footsteps run over from the bench and the toes of her sneakers arrive at the tanbark where I’m staring.
‘I want to go home,’ I whisper.
Usually I don’t care when I hurt myself. I’m not one of those kids who cries and needs a treat after every tiny,
ouchy
thing. But that thump was
hard
. My knees and hands hurt and I feel kind of shaky. I walk between Jessie and Vee along the footpath to our apartment.
I can feel Jessie and Vee looking at me, like they’re really worried, but I don’t look at them. I’m biting my lip and I’ve got a big lump in my throat. I don’t cry in front of my bonus sisters.
Jessie puts her hand on my back, like she’s trying to comfort me. But her hand feels shy.
What I really want is a big warm hug from my mum or dad.
We finally reach our building and catch the lift up to the eleventh floor, where we live.
Vee pushes into the kitchen first. ‘Squishy fell off the space station,’ she announces.
Dad isn’t home.
My whole stomach drops. I forgot. It’s too early for Dad to be home on Tuesday. Alice, Jessie and Vee’s mum, is sitting at the table with a pile of paper and a laptop.
I don’t hug Alice. I only just started living with her a few months ago.
Alice keeps typing and doesn’t look up.
‘It was massive,’ Vee says. ‘Like,
bang!
’ She smashes her hands together, as though one hand is me and the other is the ground.
‘Shhh,’ Alice says. ‘Baby’s asleep.’ Baby belongs to Alice and Dad, so he’s all of our brother equally.
‘But Mum,’ Jessie says, ‘Squishy’s bleeding.’
Alice pushes her laptop away. ‘All right,
Sq
uisho
, let’s have a look at you.’
I don’t want her to look at me. I want Dad to be here hugging me.
‘Can I skype Mum?’ I ask. I’m trying not to cry.
Mum moved to Geneva for nine months to work for the United Nations. That’s why I live with Dad. I skype Mum every day, but it’s not the same as living in the same house as her.
Alice takes my hand, turning it over to look at the grazes. ‘Let’s clean this up before you skype Devika.’
Alice pulls out tea-tree oil and cotton buds and a bowl of warm water.
‘Her knees are grazed too,’ Jessie says.
I want to tell them I don’t care about the grazes. They’re nothing really. I just care about the feeling of the big thump when I landed. But if I talk, I’ll cry.
I feel strange. Alice is nice, but I don’t know her enough. I watch her dab the blood off my knee and miss my mum’s soft cheek right next to mine.
When Alice is finished, she smiles at me and says, ‘Well done, sweetie. Do you need a hug?’ She’s never called me
sweetie
before. I look at her open arms and shake my head. She’s only being nice because she’s supposed to. I want my mum.