Life at my house.
Chapter 14
* * *
Izzy and I recorded more than twenty episodes of our show.
That’s a weird thing to say. Our show.
And we were hits, too. We hit the number one slot with episode seven.
We were five minutes into episode twenty, where Izzy and I were at the Madison High Reach for the Stars Fall Carnival. Mindy told us the show would be about nostalgia. She wanted Izzy and me to walk around the carnival and go on some rides so they could get B-roll of us having fun. She said they’d edit it into a montage. Corny, but we understood what they wanted. Since they couldn’t get footage of us during the last couple of years of our relationship, they wanted to see us having fun and being “normal kids.” Herc was there with that week’s girlfriend, Spice, a black girl who’d moved out here from Philadelphia. She played field lacrosse and had the most infectious laugh I’d ever heard. And, yes, Spice was her real name, which I thought was incredibly cool.
There were some protestors outside, because there were always freaking protestors. But there were a lot of cops and a lot of security provided by Mindy’s producers. I saw one guy with a red Neo-Luddite scarf and a MARS IS DEATH placard, but a minute later I saw that a cop with a big German shepherd was following the guy to keep an eye on him. Nothing happened.
Actually, for the first, like, ninety minutes of the carnival the producers let us have some fun. There were rides, including a Tilt-A-Whirl, which I dug and Izzy did not, and a great haunted house, which Izzy loved but which made me jump halfway out of my skin. We dropped some cash to play the game where you pop balloons with darts and I won a stupid-looking stuffed penguin for Izzy, but she gave it to a little girl whose dad couldn’t hit the board let alone the balloons.
Because Mindy’s people were using those ultracompact digital cameras, they were able to put a dozen camera people in the crowd and caught everything: us, our friends, the goofy space decorations all around the place. The carnival was set up in the sports field and spilled over into the parking lot. It was a dollar to get in and the money was for a food bank, so the organizers were happy with the enormous crowd that showed up.
The trouble started when the handlers brought us over to where Mindy was waiting. There was a crowd of people around her and five of the production team’s camera techs.
“Uh-oh,” said Izzy when we were still twenty feet away.
I said, “Yikes.”
“Make a diversion so I can escape.”
“Nice try, but if I have to do this, so do you.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
She squeezed my hand and we walked over to Mindy, who met us with open arms, like she hadn’t seen us in years.
“Tristan and Izzy,” she cried, and from her tone it was clear her mic was on and this was all part of the show. “I hope you’ve been having a wonderful time here at the Madison High Reach for the Stars Fall Carnival.”
The crowd clapped and yelled and whistled. I saw that Herc and Spice were front and center. He had a funny look in his eyes. Almost a warning, but there was no time to give me any real message. It was too late for that.
“We have a special surprise for you both,” said Mindy brightly, which caused Izzy to squeeze the bones in my hand hard enough to hurt. Mindy shifted her focus to me. “Tristan, since this is your last carnival on Earth, and your last week of school before you begin final training for the Mars One colony mission . . . I thought you’d like to have the chance to say good-bye to some of the special people in your life.”
I was totally unable to say anything. I think there was a grin on my face, but it was probably a wince. My heart started hammering.
“Tristan, perhaps you will remember Tommy Callahan?” said Mindy triumphantly, and she yanked a skinny kid out of the crowd with all the flourish of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.
“Hey, Tris,” said Tommy.
“Tommy—?”
He grinned shyly and offered his hand. I shook it, then before either of us knew it we were hugging and slapping each other on the back.
I heard Mindy telling the crowd and the TV audience that Tommy Callahan was my first friend back in pre-K and all the way through second grade, but that his family had moved away. I never heard from Tommy again, and now here he was.
Maybe if it was just Tommy we could have had some fun talking about the trouble we got into in first grade. But it wasn’t just Tommy.
It was eight other kids from grade school, the twins who used to live next door to me, several of my teachers from grade and middle school, the entire soccer team from our old neighborhood, and the old lady whose grass I used to mow. The girl who I liked in sixth grade, and the girl I liked after that, and the girl who introduced Izzy and me.
With Tommy it was a real surprise. Fun and heartbreaking, but mostly great.
Then the fun went away. Izzy kept trying to get between me and those people, and Herc did too. But Mindy owned this moment and we were under contract and the reunion went on and on.
The version you probably saw on TV was cut down to an hour. Less if you count commercials and the carnival montage. But the whole thing lasted for two or three thousand years. They call it ambush journalism. I call it mean. Mindy knew it embarrassed me too.
I remember once in English class, when the teacher was talking about the different kinds of journalism, she said there was an old expression news reporters used. It explained how they picked the kinds of stories that would get the best ratings:
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
And Mindy came at me with a knife.
Chapter 15
* * *
Herc, Spice, Izzy, and I sat on Herc’s porch.
Him and Spice, Izzy and me. It was late and the crickets were out again. More of them now. No stars, though—there were too many clouds. Herc had his GoTunes set to random and our background music shifted from Latin acoustic to dance pop to classical.
“Well,” he said after a long silence, “that sucked ass.”
“Yes, it did,” I agreed.
Izzy’s fists were still clenched and I could see small muscles at the corners of her jaw flex. She was so freaking mad.
“I should never have agreed to let that psycho . . .” She tried to find a word bad enough to describe Mindy, and even though Spice and Herc offered plenty of suggestions, Izzy finally shook her head and made a wordless sound of total disgust.
“It was mean,” said Herc.
Spice shook her head. “It was cheap.”
We all nodded.
“It’ll kill in the ratings,” she added.
We sighed and nodded again.
Aside from the parade of old friends, teachers, neighbors, and other random people, Mindy also hit me with a list of “lasts.” Last carnival was the start of it, but there was last cotton candy, last hot dog, last group photo with my entire first-grade class, last trip on a carnival ride, last handshake by the mayor of Madison—which, actually, was also the first handshake with him. And a lot of other lasts, most of them really cheesy. And some of them weren’t actually going to be “lasts.” Even though I was leaving Madison High this week, I’d still be home for another few days. I intended to have more pizza, more Cheetos, more time with Herc and some of my friends. More time with Izzy. This was staged as last, and because it was staged it felt wrong. Like Spice said, it was cheap.
“Was any of it fun?” asked Spice.
“Not much.”
“I’m sorry,” Izzy said again. “This is all my fault.”
“How is it your fault?” asked Spice, and Herc explained about the agreement with the reality show people. She freaked when Izzy chimed in and told her how much money they were paying. Most of it was going into a trust account that she’d get half of at eighteen and the rest at twenty-one.
Herc laughed and kissed Spice on the cheek. “Would you sign me up for something like this if they offered you that kind of money?”
>
“Boy,” she said, “if they gave me half that much money I’d perform surgery on you without anesthesia.”
“You’re not even a doctor,” he protested.
“How does that matter?”
We all laughed at that. Herc’s laugh sounded a little uncertain. Then he raised his bottle of iced tea. “Here’s to ratings.”
That episode did kill it in the ratings. Number one show on TV that night, both in shows watched live and recorded to watch later. That would mean a big bonus check for Izzy. For me, too, and for Mars One.
We sat there for a while, talking about it some, not talking about anything a lot. We were up past curfew, but Spice called her mom and cleared it for her to come back late. Her older brother would pick her up.
“I hate that this is how people are going to remember you,” said Izzy, still fuming.
“Pretty sure they’re going to remember him taking off on a rocket,” said Herc.
“Oh, sure, of course . . . but they’ll remember this, too. Tristan looking like a deer in the headlights and trying to remember everyone’s names, even people he barely met when he was little.”
“That’s great,” I muttered. “My legacy is me looking like future roadkill.”
“Could be worse,” said Herc, and then he grunted. “Well, no . . . not really.”
“Thanks.”
Spice sipped her tea and asked, “What legacy do you want?”
“First, I’m not dying. I’d kind of like to clear that up first.”
“We know,” said Herc. “You keep telling us that.”
“No,” Izzy said, jumping in, “you know what he means. The show . . . the way Mindy did it . . . it was like Tristan is dying. It’s like he got to attend his own wake.”
“Tristan Hart’s Make-A-Wish Family Special,” suggested Herc. “Download a coupon for a free box of tissues.”
“This isn’t getting better,” I said glumly.
“Then make it better,” said Spice. We all looked at her. “That’s what I meant when I asked what kind of legacy you want. Just because Mindy ambushed you doesn’t mean that she gets the last word. You’re not dead, Tris, and you still have some time before you leave for pre-mission training. So . . . you’re famous, you have all that sponsor money and your cut of Tristan and Izzy, and you want to change how people remember you, right? What kind of footprint do you want to leave?”
I stared at her. The others did too.
“My girlfriend,” declared Herc, puffing up his chest with pride, but Spice elbowed him hard enough to deflate him.
“Not your girlfriend yet, Romeo.”
“Almost,” he said.
Her grin was sly. “Almost.”
Izzy took my hand and studied my face. “Why are you smiling like that?”
“Am I smiling?” I asked distractedly.
Chapter 16
* * *
It’s a really interesting question, the whole legacy thing. I’m good with tools and I can fix almost anything, but my “legacy” wasn’t going to get fixed with a socket driver or welding torch. No. There had to be another way to make a difference, and there was something that I’d been bouncing around in my head for a while now.
Here’s the thing—all of us with reality shows or speaking engagement contracts already forked over big chunks of cash to the Mars One program, but not every cent. Because of the sponsorship deals and the growing income from Tristan and Izzy I had a boatload of money left over after my contributions to the mission. It was a ridiculous amount and that’s what I wanted to use to create a legacy that would actually matter.
Before I told Izzy and Herc, I wanted to clear it with my folks. Not sure what reaction I expected, but my dad gave me a hug. Then he held me at arm’s length and studied me with wet, glistening eyes.
“And I had such high hopes that you’d grow up to be a thieving, coldhearted, money-grubbing captain of industry,” he said. “Your uncle Scrooge will be so disappointed.”
“I’ll try to be crueler, sir,” I said in a sniveling little voice. “It’s just that I’m a soft touch for the widows and orphans.”
“Bah,” he said. “Humbug.”
Mom pulled me away, shaking her head at the two of us, and gave me a quick, firm hug. She was a little misty-eyed too, but she was all business. She set up a videoconference call with our lawyer and the branch manager of our bank. The lawyer asked me if I wanted to go public with this, and he actually brought up the legacy thing too. He suggested that the reality show people might even make me an offer built just on this.
I said no.
Mom asked the lawyer and the banker if I could still manage my “legacy” during the mission. At first they both said yes, but then they got quiet and looked at me. We all thought about the realities. Once we were on Mars everyone on the mission was going to be seriously busy at ten thousand different jobs just to make sure we could survive. I might be too far away, too busy, and—let’s face it—too out of touch to manage it myself.
Dad asked, “What about a proxy?”
“A what?” I asked.
“That could work,” said the lawyer. He explained that a proxy would be someone appointed via a legal document called a power of attorney. Once this was set up, our lawyer would oversee the trust of what I wanted to call the Hart Foundation. And I asked if Izzy and Herc could be officers of this new corporation.
“Not at first,” said the lawyer, “but if you desire it, I can act as temporary officer until they come of age, and thereafter serve as adviser. Would that work?”
Yeah, it would. We set it up so Izzy would become an official officer of the trust when she turned eighteen and would be paid a salary of one dollar a year. When I told her about it, she agreed without hesitation and didn’t even have to ask why she was only paid a dollar. She was already rich and didn’t need any cash from the trust beyond what was legally necessary.
She wasn’t the CEO, though. I wanted that title for Herc.
But . . . when I told Herc that he was going to be the CEO of the Hart Foundation, and that he’d be paid one hundred thousand dollars per year beginning at age eighteen, he freaked out. Not a happy freak-out, though. He was absolutely furious.
We were in my living room and he said, “I’m not doing it for the money, you total . . .”
Well, there was more, but I’d be embarrassed even writing it down. You get the point. It took me all day—with Izzy and Spice helping—to get him to calm down and listen to reason.
“With the contracts I have right now,” I said, “and all those stupid product endorsements, by the time I get to Mars I’m going to have forty million dollars in the bank. A third of it’s already going to be given to the Mars mission, but the rest is mine to do with as I please. And I want to know that something good’s going to come out of it. It was your girlfriend who asked me what I wanted to have as my legacy. Well . . . this is what I want.”
“But why me?” he bellowed. “I’m just a kid.”
“You’re my best friend.”
“I’m sixteen! How do you know I won’t blow it all on crap? Mansion in the Hills, solid gold skateboard, lots of drugs . . . ?”
“Oh, please . . .”
“Money is the root of all evil, Tris. You could be turning me into a supervillain right here.”
“Then use some of it to buy a hollowed-out volcano.”
We were in my living room. Spice and Izzy were sitting on the couch. I was in the lounge chair and Herc was standing in the middle of the floor like a prosecutor trying to tell a jury to put a criminal in jail. His brown face had turned beet red.
“This is so . . . nuts!” he protested.
“No it’s not,” said Izzy.
When he turned to glare at her the lamplight caught the glitter of tears in his eyes. “And what am I supposed to do with that kind of money?”
I grinned at him. “We can work that out.”
“There are a lot of food banks in Madison,” said Spice.
“There are four shelters in town for abused women and children,” said Izzy.
“We all know some kids who could use some help paying for college,” I said.
“But why pay me? That hundred g’s should go to that kind of stuff,” insisted Herc.
“Because,” I said, “there are ten zillion charities out there, man. You know how much of a pain in the ass it’s going to be to figure out which ones need the cash?”
“And which ones are scams,” said Spice.
“And who knows what might come up,” said Izzy. “Hurricanes and tsunamis and all sorts of disasters. Somebody has to take the time to figure it all out.”
“Read my damn lips,” he roared, “I’m sixteen.”
“Yeah, so what?” I asked. “You’re almost done with junior year. Go to college, take some business courses. Figure it out.”
Herc stood there, looking at me, looking at the girls, looking at his own hands. Looking up at the ceiling as if there were answers painted there.
Then he sat down in the middle of the living room floor, put his face in his hands, and burst into tears. A heartbeat later we were all in a pile around him. Crying.
Laughing too.
And that was the last thing it took to give me what I needed in order to truly accept that I was never coming home.
To be okay with it.
To be happy with it.
Chapter 17
* * *
I spent the last few days in Madison going to a lot of parties.
A.
Lot.
Of.
Parties.
If I laughed too loud, danced too crazy, talked too much, or made a fool of myself . . . so what?
Only two days really mattered.
The next-to-last day was when Herc and I went around and did all the “lasts.” Not for the cameras. For us. We threw a lot of balls at Thunderbird Lanes. Neither of us set any records and neither of us cared. We rode our bikes along the newspaper route we used to share and even stopped to say good-bye to a couple of our old customers who’d been cool to us. The ones who gave us tips or boxes of cookies at Christmas. We bought bottles of water and fish tacos and ate them on the seesaw at the elementary school. Then we played b-ball at the park to burn off some of the calories. I beat him twice and he creamed me four times. We sat on swings in the public playground and named every girl we ever thought was cute when we were little and talked about the ones who’d turned out really hot. Herc’s a gentleman and he didn’t comment on Izzy, which is why we didn’t have a last fistfight.