“Mao.”
“Sure we could. We could live in someone’s house. Or a hotel. And the town’s probably full of canned food.”
“Mao mao?”
“Fine. You’re so smart, give me one reason why it wouldn’t work.”
“Mao.”
“Oh, you say that about everything.”
Pig purred and settled down for a nap. I leaned back against an ATM and shut my eyes against the setting sun. I don’t remember falling asleep, but it was dark outside when I woke with a loaf of bread under my head and heard the jingle of the front door.
I gasped for breath and scampered under a shelf. Too late I remembered Pig, who was nowhere to be seen. Something moved through the vacant store, its footsteps like a drumroll.
Go away, go away, I chanted in my head at what I was sure was a Boov. It skibbered past my row of shelves, and I got a look at its cluster of tiny elephant legs, clad in a light blue rubber suit. Boov. Probably sent to find me.
Then the drumroll stopped. A wet, nasally voice said, “Oh. Hello, kitten.”
Pig.
“How did you come to be inside of the MoPo?”
I heard Pig purr loudly, the skunk. She was probably rubbing up against each one of its eight legs.
“Did someone…let you to inside, hm?”
My heart pounded. As if Pig might say, Yeah, Gratuity did. Aisle five.
“Perhaps you are being hungry,” the Boov told Pig. “Would you enjoy to join me in a jar of cough syrup?”
The drumroll resumed. They were moving again. I poked my neck out of the shelf in time to see them walk through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
I slid out and ran, unthinking, for the door. I pushed through with a shove and a tinkling sound and thought, Oh, yeah. The bell. A quick look behind me and I was off. I sped to the car, retrieved my bag, and made for a row of hedges that lined the parking lot. I was safely behind them and watching through a gap in the leaves just in time to see the Boov peek out of the MoPo. He, it, squeezed through the door and looked from side to side, scanning the lot for whatever had been dumb enough to forget the door jingled. Then he gave a start when he saw my car, and smiled back at Pig. I could see her through the door, her front paws up on the glass.
“Hello, hm?” the Boov shouted. He looked up toward the ruined highway and whistled through his nose.
I tried to make myself as small as possible, tried to stop my heart from pounding, or the blood from thrumming in my ears. The Boov pattered across the asphalt toward something new, something I hadn’t noticed before.
In the corner of the lot was this crazy-looking thing, like a huge spool of thread with antlers. It was all plasticky and blue, and it was hanging in the air, about six inches above the ground.
“I would not to hurt you!” the Boov shouted again. “If you would enjoy to be my guest, there is enough cough syrup and teething biscuits for everyone!”
It, he, whatever, hopped his squat body atop the big spool, clamping down around the edges with his little elephant legs. His tiny frog arms reached up and gripped the antlers, and with a few flicks and twists, the blue plastic thing rose a foot in the air and sailed up the hill of shale and weeds to the highway.
“’Allo!” he shouted as he drifted away. “There is no to fear! The Boov are no longer eating you people!”
The Boov’s weird little scooter disappeared over the ridge, and I darted out toward the store—for what? To get Pig? She probably preferred to stay with the Boov. But she was all I had, and the car wouldn’t drive on a flat tire, and my only thought was to vanish into this little town and hope the Boov didn’t try too hard to find me.
“Time to go, Pig,” I said as I burst into the MoPo, my guts jangling like a nervous doorbell. She tried to slip out the door, after the alien, I guess, but I scooped her up.
“Stupid cat.”
I pushed all the cat food and health bars into my bag and dashed out to the car. One last check to make certain I had everything, then I was gone. At the passenger door I remembered the cell phone, and wondered if I should take it, and it was about that time that I got a wicked idea.
Pig squirmed in my arms.
“Wrooowr’ftt,” she said.
I laughed. “Don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll just march into the store and wait for your friend to come back.”
Pig hissed quietly to herself.
Let me tell you how I thought this next part happened. I figured the Boov hovered around the old highway for a bit, dum de dum, thinking, I sure for to am hoping I find Gratuity or whoever it am being, I eat her or I am to be turning her in or beaming her to Florida or something, then the Boov maybe checked around the MoPo and probably in my car, and then he thought, Ho hum, it am probably being just my imagination, there am no girl or whatever, me sure am stupid, sheep noise bubble wrap bubble wrap.
Then the Boov parked his antler spool and went back inside the MoPo, and wondered where Pig was, and when the door stopped jingling, he heard something. So he thought, What am that? and went to investigate. And as he neared the frozen food section, he could maybe tell it was the voices of other Boov, even though he was so stupid. And he saw there was a freezer door standing open that hadn’t been open before, so he went right over to it and peeked in and made a sheep noise. Maybe at that moment he noticed all the freezer shelves on the floor next to my cell phone, but it didn’t matter, because that was right when I kicked his alien butt inside and barred the door shut with a broom handle.
The Boov hopped up and down and turned to face me. I was happy to see he looked pretty startled, or frightened, and he pressed his thick face against the glass to get a good look at his captor. I did a little dance.
“What for are you did this?” he said. I think that’s what he said. It was hard to hear through the glass. I wondered, suddenly, if he’d run out of air after a while. The thought made me uneasy, and I had to remind myself of the situation I was in.
“Good,” I whispered. “I hope he does run out of air.” I wished he could have been really cold in there, too, but there wasn’t any electricity.
“What?” said the Boov faintly. “What said you?” His eyes darted from side to side like little fish. His frog fingers pawed at the glass.
“I said, you’re getting what you deserve! You stole my mom, so I get to steal one of you!”
“What?”
“You stole my mom!”
“Mimom?”
“MY…MOM!”
The Boov seemed to think about this for a second, then his eyes lit.
“Ahh. ‘My mom’!” he said happily. “What is it about her, now?”
I shouted and kicked the glass.
“Aha.” The Boov nodded as if I’d said something important. “Ah. So…can I come into the out now?”
“No!” I yelled. “You cannot come into the out. You can never come into the out ever again!”
At this, the Boov looked genuinely surprised, and panicked.
“Then…then…I will have onto shoot with my gun!”
I jumped back, palms up. In all the excitement, I hadn’t thought of that. My eyes darted to where his hips would be, if he’d had any. I frowned.
“You don’t even have a gun!”
“Yes! YES!” he shouted, nodding furiously, as though I’d somehow proven his point. “NO GUN! So I will have to…have to…”
His whole body trembled.
“…SHOOT FORTH THE LASERS FROM MY EYEBALLS!”
I fell into a row of shelves. That one was new to me.
“Shoot forth the lasers?”
“SHOOT FORTH THE LASERS!”
“You can do that?”
The Boov hesitated. His eyes quivered. After a few seconds he replied, “Yes.”
I squinted. “Well, if you shoot your eye lasers, then I’ll have no choice but to…EXPLODE YOUR HEAD!”
“You humans can not to ex—”
“We can! We can too! We just don’t much. It’s considered rude.”<
br />
The Boov thought about this for a moment.
“Then…we are needing a…truce. You are not to exploding heads, and I will to not do my DEVASTATING EYE LASERS.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Truce.”
“Truce.”
A few moments passed in the utter quiet of the store.
“Soo…can I come into the out n—”
“No!”
The Boov pointed over my head, tapping his fingertip against the glass.
“I can to fixing your car. I seen it is the broken.”
I folded my arms. “What would a Boov know about fixing cars?”
He huffed. “I am Chief Maintenance Officer Boov. I can to fix everything! I can surely to fix primitive humanscar.”
I didn’t like that crack about my car, but it did need fixing.
“How do I know you’ll do anything? You’ll probably just call your friends and cart me off to Florida.”
The Boov furrowed what might have been his forehead. “Do not you want to go to Florida? Is where your people is to be. All humans decide to move on to Florida.”
“Hey! I don’t think we got to decide anything,” I said.
“Yes!” the Boov answered. “Florida!”
I sighed and paced the aisle. When I looked back at the freezer case, I saw the Boov had picked up my cell phone.
“I could talk to them,” he said gravely. “I could call to them right now.”
It was true. He could.
I slid the broom handle free of the door and opened it. The Boov lunged forward, and I instantly regretted everything, except then I realized he wasn’t attacking me. It must have been a hug, because I can’t think of any better word for it.
“See?” he said. “Boov and humanskind can be friend. I always say!”
I patted him gingerly.
It sounds crazy, I know that, but suddenly I was searching the little town for supplies while the Boov worked on my car. I don’t think I have to say at this point that Pig stayed with him.
I hit five abandoned stores and found crackers, diet milk shakes, bottled water, really hard bagels, Honey Frosted Snox, tomato paste, dry pasta, a bucket of something called TUB! that came with its own spoon, and Lite Choconilla Froot Bites, which broke my usual rule against eating anything that was misspelled. The Boov had told me some things he liked, so I also carried a basket of breath mints, cornstarch, yeast, bouillon cubes, mint dental floss, and typing paper.
“Hey, Boov!” I shouted on my return. I could see him under the car, banging away. The car, I should mention, now sported three extra antennas. The holes in the windows were somehow not there anymore. There were tubes and hoses connecting certain parts of the car to certain other parts of the car, and a few of what I can only describe as fins. These appeared to be made from metal the Boov had salvaged from the convenience store. One of them showed a picture of a frozen drink and the word “Slushious.”
There was an open toolbox, and the tools were everywhere, all of them strange.
“This seems like an awful lot of trouble for one flat tire,” I said.
The Boov stuck out his head.
“Flat tire?”
I stared back blankly for a second, then walked around to the other side. The tire was still flat.
“The car, it should to hover much better now!” he called happily.
“Hover?” I answered. “Hover better? It didn’t hover at all before!”
“Hm,” the Boov said, looking down. “So this is why the wheels are so dirty.”
“Probably.”
“Sooo, it did to roll?”
“Yes,” I said crisply. “It rolled. On the ground.”
The Boov thought about this for a long few seconds.
“But…how did it to roll with this flat tire?”
I dropped the basket and sat down. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Well,” the Boov replied. “It will to hover wicked good now. I used parts fromto my own vehicle.”
He startled me at this point, the way he said “wicked.” It was slang. Something I didn’t expect him to use. And it wasn’t even popular slang. Nobody said it anymore. Nobody but my mom, and sometimes me. I guess it made me think of Mom, and I guess it made me a little angry.
“Eat your dental floss, Boov,” I said, and kicked him the basket. He seemed to think nothing of it, and did as I said, sucking up strings of floss like spaghetti.
“You do not to say it right,” he said finally.
“Say what?”
“‘Boov.’ The way you says it, it is too short. You must to draw it out, like as a long breath. ‘Bo-o-ov.’”
After a moment I swallowed my anger and gave it a try.
“Booov.”
“No. Bo-o-ov.”
“Bo-o-o-o-ov.”
The Boov frowned. “Now you sound like sheep.”
I shook my head. “Fine. So what’s your name? I’ll call you that.”
“Ah, no,” the Boov replied. “For humansgirl to correctly be pronouncing my name, you would need two heads. But, as a human name, I have to chosen ‘J.Lo.’”
I stifled a laugh. “J.Lo? Your Earth name is J.Lo?”
“Ah-ah,” J.Lo corrected. “Not ‘Earth.’ ‘Smekland.’”
“What do you mean, ‘Smekland’?”
“That is the thing what we have named this planet. Smekland. As to tribute to our glorious leader, Captain Smek.”
“Wait.” I shook my head. “Whoa. You can’t just rename the planet.”
“Peoples who discover places gets to name it.”
“But it’s called Earth. It’s always been called Earth.”
J.Lo smiled condescendingly. I wanted to hit him.
“You humans live too much in the pasttime. We did land onto Smekland a long time ago.”
“You landed last Christmas!”
“Ah-ah. Not ‘Christmas.’ ‘Smekday.’”
“Smekday?”
“Smekday.”
So anyway, that was how I learned the true meaning of Smekday. This Boov named J.Lo told me. The Boov didn’t like us celebrating our holidays, so they replaced them all with new ones. Christmas was renamed after Captain Smek, their leader, who had discovered a New World for the Boov, which was Earth. I mean Smekland.
Whatever. The End.
Gratuity—
Interesting style overall, but I’m afraid you didn’t really fulfill the assignment. When the judges from the National Time Capsule Committee read our stories, they’ll be looking for what Smekday means to us, not to the aliens. Remember: the capsule will be dug up a hundred years from now, and the people of the future won’t know what it was like to live during the invasion. If your essay wins the contest, they’ll be reading it to find that out.
Perhaps if you began before the Boov came? There is still some time to rework your composition before the contest entries need to be sent. If you’d like to try again, I’ll consider it for extra credit.
Grade: C+
Gratuity Tucci
Daniel Landry Middle School
8th Grade
THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY
PART 2:
-or-
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Boov
Okay. Starting before the Boov came.
I guess I really need to begin almost two years ago. This was when my mom got the mole on her neck. This was when she was abducted.
I didn’t see it happen, naturally. That’s how it is with these things. Nobody ever gets abducted at a football game, or at church, or right after Kevin Frompky knocks all your books out of your hands between classes and everybody’s looking and laughing and you have no choice but to sock him in the eye.
Or whatever.
No, people always get abducted while they’re driving on empty highways late at night, or from their bedrooms while they’re sleeping, and they’re returned before anyone knows they’re gone. I know this; I’ve checked.
That’s how it was for Mom.
She burst into my room one morning, wild-eyed, hair a fright, and told me to look at her neck.
I blinked away sleep and stared where she pointed. I did this without question, because it had only been days since she’d woken me to say that Tom Jones was on the morning show, or that the paper had a “wicked good coupon” for dress shields.
“What am I looking at?” I said blearily.
“The mole,” Mom said. “The mole!”
I looked. There was certainly a mole, brown and wrinkly, like a bubble on a pizza. It was right in the middle of the neck, on her backbone.
“’Sfantastic,” I said, yawning. “Good mole.”
“You don’t understand,” Mom said, turning; and the look in her eye made me wake up a little. “It was put there! Last night!”
I blinked a couple of times.
“By the aliens!” she finished frantically.
I was so awake now. I looked closer. I poked it with my finger.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to touch it,” Mom said quickly, and jerked away. “I feel really veryvery strongly that you shouldn’t touch it.”
There was something strange about Mom’s voice just then. Something kind of flat and dull. “Okay,” I said. “Sorry.
“So…what do you mean ‘aliens’?”
Mom got up and walked around the room. Her voice sounded normal now, if not a little overwrought. She explained that they woke her up last night, two of them, and gave her a shot of something in the arm. She showed me, and there was definitely some kind of red dot on the inside of her right elbow. She knew they’d taken her outside, but she’d drifted off to sleep for a minute, and woke up in a large, shimmering room.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You fell asleep? How could you fall asleep in the middle of this?”
“I don’t know,” Mom answered, shaking her head. “I wasn’t afraid, Turtlebear. I just wasn’t. I was full of calm.”
I had my own ideas about what she was full of, but I kept them to myself.
Mom went on to explain that the aliens, a lot of them now, had brought her aboard their ship to fold some laundry. They related, not with words but with complicated hand gestures, that they were really impressed with her laundry folding skills. She was guided to a table piled with bright, rubbery suits with tiny sleeves and too many legs. So she got to work. As she folded, she happened to notice another human, a Hispanic man, she said, far off at the other end of the room. They had him opening pickle jars. She thought she ought to say something, say hello, but there was so much folding to do, and then suddenly she felt a hot pain on the back of her neck, and she blacked out. When she woke it was morning.