laughed, patting Alison’s hand. She took another bite of her cookie. “Yep, that was some night. You couldn’t get away from the TV. Even if you didn’t have yours on, you could hear everyone else’s blaring. They kept broadcasting the same clip over and over again, of the mushroom cloud over that missile silo in Kansas being sucked back down into the ground like God was drinking it through a straw.
“From that moment, everybody knew that the High Ones could do whatever they wanted to us. If they wanted us to have world peace, by God, we were going to have world peace. Or our world would be in pieces.” Grandma chuckled at her own pun. “More Oreos, dear? You haven’t even touched yours.”
Cookies were the last thing on Alison’s mind. She was too excited. This is so different from what the history textbook says! But it’ll show how primitive humans were when the High Ones arrived. My paper is sure to get an A!
CHAPTER 9
Arnold was so excited about getting back to school so he could meet with Gloria and formally join the Resistance that he completely forgot not to cut across the parking lot of the Value-Mart in case Matt, Jared, and a bigger boy whose name Arnold couldn’t remember were hanging out there. Which they were.
Matt got Arnold in a headlock. Then he snorted loudly. “Something smells like rotten eggs here… Well, if it isn’t Gross-fart! Where do you think you’re going, Gross-fart?”
“I was just on my way to school,” Arnold said, wriggling in Matt’s iron grasp. Jared and the other boy crowded in. Even if he could break free of Matt, there would be no escape.
“I was just on my way to school,” Matt mimicked. “Thought they expelled you, Gross-fart, for flipping off Bubba.”
“I didn’t flip—ow, stop, that really hurts!” Arnold hated the whining, pleading tone of his own voice, but his neck was killing him.
“Thanks to you, you little kike, we all get our bags searched every morning now!” Matt snarled in his ear. “It was gonna be just for show for a day or two after those little kids got blown up, but they made it permanent!”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen! I just didn’t want Bubba going through my stuff!”
“Why, what you got in there? Something you haven’t been sharing with the rest of us?” Arnold thought he could hear his vertebrae popping as Jared grabbed his book-bag off the tarmac and began to unzip it. But he didn’t care about the pain. He was sunk now for sure, even though he’d carefully hidden the adventures of Sir Arnold and Princess Hailee in a plain manila envelope. That would have been enough to keep Bubba from seeing it, but it was sure to draw the bullies’ attention.
Wait just a second. “You better not do that,” Arnold said, his voice ringing unfamiliar in his own ears, as if he was some tri-vee tough guy—Captain Adams of the Spacefarers, maybe.
“What did you say, Aaaaarnold?” Jared sneered, tapping his face lightly with an open palm. Getting ready for the real beat-down.
“I said, you better not do that, or the Resistance will take care of you.”
Jared recoiled as if Arnold had struck him, and Matt suddenly let go of Arnold’s neck, took a step back and stared at Arnold through narrowed eyes.
But then Jared shook his head and shoved his face up close to Arnold’s. His breath stank of cigarettes. “What’s that you said, you little yid? I must’ve heard you wrong. Everybody knows you people and the Slugs are best friends.”
“Sure, that’s what we want you to think,” Arnold said, amazed at the words falling out of his own mouth. “But anybody who really knows anything knows that we’re tops in the Resistance.”
Matt grabbed Arnold’s arm and shook it. “That ain’t so! The Patriotic Front says to get rid of the Jews and all the other carburetors!”
That’s collaborators, you moron. Aloud, Arnold said, “Who said I’m with the Front?”
Matt’s eyes narrowed still further. “You’re with the Human Defense League? You?”
Arnold raised his chin and scowled at the bully. “Not them either, dummy! The name of the group I’m in is a secret! I do what I have to, to protect confidential information,” he said, trying to deepen his voice so it wouldn’t crack. “You’ll do the same, if you’re not traitors to the Earth!” And he grabbed his book-bag and marched off to school, his head held high and his heartbeat thundering in his ears.
The encounter with the bullies had delayed him so he just barely made it to school on time. As before, Mr. Ramsey and Bubba were the guards on duty, and again the tall, bobble-headed Bubba was the one who searched Arnold and his bag.
“We ain’t gonna have no trouble today, are we, chief?” Bubba said.
“Of course not, sir. I understand now that the bag search is for my own safety,” Arnold said, so straight-faced that Bubba narrowed his watery brown eyes and stared at him for a long moment. Then he shrugged and ran his rubber glove-clad hands over Arnold, a little more closely than he had two weeks ago. But it didn’t take him any longer now than it had then, and while Arnold dressed Bubba unzipped his backpack and rummaged through it quickly before giving him a thumbs-up.
If I’d have known there was no way he would ever have found the adventures of Sir Arnold, I would never have made a fuss and I wouldn’t have been suspended for two weeks, Arnold thought as he shouldered his backpack and slouched off to his locker. As he turned the corner into the hallway where the bank of lockers stood, he saw the double doors to the staircase at the far end closing and heard running footsteps. His stomach lurched as he thought about what they might have done to his stuff this time. They had broken in three times since the beginning of the year, and the last time all the notes for his science project had been ripped to shreds, and the door had been defaced with a blue-eyed swastika.
But when he came to good old number 407 all he saw on its gray metal front was a faint black smudge. He touched it and found it was still damp and smelled like Sis’s nail polish remover. The few textbooks he’d left inside were undamaged. Strange. But he had no more time to think about it for the rest of the morning, he was too busy catching up on all the work he’d missed.
Lunchtime was weird, though. He shuffled with his tray to the rejects’ table as usual, keeping his eyes fixed on the floor, both to avoid provoking anyone and so that he could see any feet casually stretched out to trip him. None were, this time, and once he made it to his usual spot he knew he was safe.
It wasn’t that he was actually friends with any of the other rejects—not Jason Trumbull, who had curly red hair, a massive overbite, and thick glasses, and was rumored to be retarded although he was in all normal track classes; not fat Greg Chandler, who picked his nose unselfconsciously as he ate; and not even skinny, intense James Park, who was never called Jim and who was destined, everyone knew, for a High Fellowship on the aliens’ Homeworld, Gliese 581d itself, which meant in three or four years he would be boarding one of their faster-than-light Bubble Drive starships and might never return to Earth.
Usually Arnold would grunt a greeting at James, who would grunt back, not lifting his gaze from his High Astrophysics textbook. This time, though, when Arnold mumbled hello to the future space traveler, James turned his broad, round brown face up, looked at him wide-eyed through his round glasses and edged away.
What the hell? We Jews and Koreans, we have to stick together, don’t we? He almost blurted that aloud, when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. The bottom dropped out of his stomach as he twisted his neck and turned around, slowly as in a nightmare, to look up. It was Matt’s sidekick from this morning whose name he couldn’t remember. I knew it was too good to be true.
Up close, the unknown bully didn’t look like anybody’s sidekick—he was simply too big for that, in every dimension: arms, legs, muscular torso, bulging neck, hard-edged face and squinting eyes. The alligator-sized mouth moved and made noises, but they were impossible noises and Arnold’s brain refused to take them in. Anyway they were irrelevant since the hand