Sixth-Grade Alien Page 3

  He was wearing a long-sleeved white robe decorated with strange designs around the cuffs and the bottom edge. It took another few seconds for me to realize the designs were shifting and changing, almost as if they were telling a story.

  “Jeez,” muttered Jordan. “He’s wearing a dress!”

  “Shhhh!” I hissed as I tried to wrestle my desk back to a standing position.

  Jordan rolled his eyes.

  Ms. Weintraub rushed over to the alien. “Greetings, Pleskit! We are so happy to have you in our room.”

  The purple boy smiled, then held out both hands and made some rapid motions with his fingers. An astonishing variety of cracks and pops came from his knuckles. After that, he burped. Loudly. The knob at the top of his head began to glow, and I caught a faint odor that reminded me of raspberry jam.

  Some of the kids began to laugh.

  “That is the traditional greeting on Hevi-Hevi,” said Pleskit. “I thought you would like to see/hear/smell it.”

  “It was cool!” I said, still struggling with my desk. “Do it again!”

  Pleskit looked puzzled. “That would be silly.”

  I felt as if I had been slapped.

  “Where is my seat, please?” asked Pleskit.

  “Right this way,” said Ms. Weintraub quickly. She escorted Pleskit to an empty desk two rows over from me.

  The tall man who had been standing behind Pleskit entered the room at the same time. He strolled to the back corner farthest from the door and leaned against the wall.

  Ms. Weintraub turned a questioning look toward Mr. Grand.

  “This is Robert McNally,” said the principal, gesturing to the tall man. “Pleskit’s bodyguard.”

  The man nodded to the class. “You can call me McNally,” he said. “Just McNally.”

  “Do you have a gun?” asked Jordan eagerly.

  McNally smiled and spread his hands, but said nothing.

  Jordan rolled his eyes again. “Just a rent-a-cop,” he muttered under his breath.

  Pleskit leaped to his feet. “That is an unseemly comment!” The knob at the top of his head began to glow. A smell like mustard and onions wafted across the classroom.

  “Ewwww!” cried Jordan, waving his hand in front of his face. “Who farted?”

  “I am expressing an opinion,” said Pleskit.

  Ms. Weintraub clapped her hands. “That’s enough! I want you all to take your seats. Later, I hope Pleskit will answer some questions about his homeworld, as I know we are all very curious to learn about it. I’m equally sure that he has many questions about our world.” She turned to the principal and said, “I think we’ll be fine, Mr. Grand.”

  Mr. Grand, obviously relieved to be told he was not needed, said, “Just call if you need me, Ms. Weintraub.” He left quickly, closing the door tight behind him.

  McNally leaned back in the corner.

  Pleskit sat back down. The knob at the top of his head had started to droop. A smell like dying daisies drifted across the room.

  “Are you all right, Pleskit?” asked Ms. Weintraub.

  “I am feeling a bit klimpled,” he said softly. His voice was soft, and he sounded scared.

  I wanted to rush over and pat his shoulder. I would have said, “Don’t worry, Pleskit. I’ll be your friend! I’ll help you with all this.” But I knew Ms. Weintraub wouldn’t have appreciated it. And Jordan would have made fun of me for the next six months. So I just sat there, feeling as helpless as a fish in a sandbox.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ms. Weintraub cheerfully. “You’ll be fine.”

  “It’s not me that I am worried about,” said Pleskit sincerely.

  “What do you mean?” asked Ms. Weintraub.

  “Just what I said. I am not worried about me. It is Earth for which I have great fear!”

  “I knew it,” moaned Melissa. “The aliens are going to destroy us!”

  “Why would we do that?” asked Pleskit. “We have nothing against Earth. My fear is that you will blow yourselves up before we can establish a decent trading relationship. Really, you are such primitive and aggressive beings that it is an amazement you have survived this long.”

  I groaned and put my face down on my desk, listening to the angry murmur that rippled through the classroom. Linnsy was always telling me that, socially speaking, I was a hopeless idiot. But compared to this kid I was a genius.

  “Surely you must have some good things to say about the planet,” suggested Ms. Weintraub. She was smiling, but I could hear a hint of desperation in her voice.

  “Good things?” said Pleskit. “Not that I can think of. No, wait! There is one thing. I do admire your commitment to absolute honesty. Other than that, I think this is a miserable excuse for a planet, and I desperately wish—”

  “Good grief!” cried McNally. “Look at the time! Sorry to cut this short, Ms. Weintraub, but Pleskit has to be somewhere in twenty minutes. Official business, you know. Sorry.”

  Then he grabbed Pleskit and hustled him out of the room.

  CHAPTER 8 [PLESKIT]

  THE FATHERLY ONE

  “Where do we have to be?” I asked McNally as we hurried down the hall.

  “Anywhere but here,” he muttered.

  That was when I understood that I had messed up again. My insides felt the coldness of pizumpta.

  “You all right?” asked McNally. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m not sure. I feel like I’m about to go into kleptra.”

  McNally looked worried. “What the heck is kleptra?”

  I searched my brain, then said, “I can find no matching word in English. The closest thing the training module gave me is something about possums. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Can you hold on long enough to get out of here?”

  “I believe so.”

  We stopped at the office. “Anything wrong, Mr. McNally?” asked Mr. Grand.

  “Nah, we’re fine. But I have to get Pleskit here off to another appointment. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “That wasn’t exactly true, was it?” I asked as we left the building.

  “Close enough for government work,” muttered McNally.

  If I had not been so upset, I might have asked him what he meant. I wish I had. It might have saved a lot of trouble.

  Ralph the Driver was waiting with the limousine in front of the school. The crowd was mostly gone, so we drove away with no problem. The only ones left were a few protestors, still carrying signs saying they wanted me to go home.

  I felt exactly the same way.

  * * *

  When we entered the embassy—which, for the time being, was home, but didn’t really feel like it yet—we went to the kitchen. Shhh-foop was sliding around the floor, singing to herself. “Erna bernna blimblag, leezle skeezig!” she crooned when she saw me.

  According to McNally, Shhh-foop looks something like a six-foot-tall stalk of orange celery with an octopus growing on its head. It took me a while to figure out why he seemed to think this was strange. I keep forgetting how little Earthlings have seen of the world outside.

  I sniffed the air. “You’ve been busy!”

  “Busy?” sang Shhh-foop. “Oh, busy! Yes, happily busy, cooking for Mr. Pleskit. Here, try one of these.”

  She opened the heat machine with one of her tentacles, then reached in with another and pulled out a glowing blue ring. “Peezle gleezit,” she warbled proudly. Turning to McNally, she added, “Would you like one, too, Just McNally?”

  “No thanks, Shhh-foop.”

  “I’ve been working on my coffee,” she sang. “Would you like to try some of that?”

  McNally sighed. “Sure, I’ll try it.”

  “Coming right up!”

  “Thanks,” he said when she placed the cup in front of him a moment later.

  Shhh-foop watched anxiously as McNally took a sip.

  His face twisted in a horrible expression. “That’s not quite it,” he gasped.

  “Oh, pity, o
h, woe,” sang Shhh-foop, so mournfully I almost wept. “Ah, well. Better luck next time, eh, Just McNally?”

  * * *

  Once I was safe in my room, I invited the Veeblax to play on my desk. It scampered about, changing itself into various shapes, which made me laugh. After a while I pulled out my download box. This is a black cube, slightly smaller than my head. I placed it on my desk, then adjusted a dial on the side. Leaning forward, I inserted my sphen-gnut-ksher into the box. When it was in place, I pushed the Start button.

  The box hummed and grew warm. Memories of the day’s events began to pour from the sphen-gnut-ksher into the box’s holding tank. When the memories had been downloaded back to the beginning of the day, the box beeped twice.

  I inserted the box into the playback device, then put on my view goggles to watch everything that had happened. I used speed play on the less important parts. But the parts where things had gone wrong I played over and over.

  “I don’t understand,” I muttered to myself. “I spoke pure truth, just as the training modules suggested. Yet the more truth I spoke, the more upset my classmates became. What could I have been doing wrong?” I decided to speak to the Fatherly One.

  * * *

  To get to the Fatherly One, I first had to get past his secretary. She was sitting at her green desk, stuffing her furry cheeks with mook-pods when I entered the room. When she saw me, she pushed the pods to the backs of her cheeks, which bulged out to make her face almost twice its usual size.

  “Greetings, Pleskit,” she said. Despite her full cheeks, her words were perfectly clear. I noticed that she was getting comfortable with the new language faster than any of us.

  “Greetings, Mikta-makta-mookta,” I replied, bending my sphen-gnut-ksher toward her in a sign of respect. “Is the Fatherly One available?”

  “He’s with Barvgis. But perhaps he will see you anyway. Let me check.”

  She touched a button on her desk.

  A light flashed in response.

  “He’s available,” she said.

  The door to his office swung open.

  * * *

  I had to look up to speak to the Fatherly One, since he was sitting in his command pod, which raised him about five feet above the floor. The deeply padded chair had a clear blue shell curving around and over it, leaving a two-foot-wide opening in the front. Both armrests held keypads where he could enter commands and queries. On the wall facing the command pod was a large screen covered with numbers and figures. Before I could read them, the Fatherly One pressed a button. The numbers rippled and a landscape from Hevi-Hevi took their place. The purple sky, the waving trees with their drooping branches covered by thick pads of orange fur, the roving herd of pinglies—it all gave me a painful surge of homesickness.

  Barvgis, the Fatherly One’s slimeball assistant, was standing in front of the command pod. (I understand from Tim that slimeball has a bad meaning to Earthlings, but in this case it is just a description. Barvgis is basically round and basically slimy.)

  “Greetings, Pleskit,” he said when he saw me. “How did your first day go?”

  “Not well.”

  “So I have heard,” said the Fatherly One. “Principal Grand called to speak to me. Barvgis, will you give us a brief time alone?”

  “Certainly, Elevated One,” said Barvgis. He farted respectfully and left the room.

  Despite the Fatherly One’s welcoming tone, I couldn’t help but notice he was keeping one eye on a screen in the lower corner of his command pod.

  “I fear I have disgraced us again,” I said. My sphen-gnut-ksher was drooping in shame.

  “I am sure you will do better tomorrow,” said the Fatherly One. His voice was more gentle than I had expected.

  “How can I do better tomorrow, when I do not know what I did wrong today? I spoke the absolute truth, just as—”

  Before I could finish, a light began to flash in the command pod. The Fatherly One raised his hand and cracked several knuckles in front of the light. Then, when he realized I was standing there, he remembered his own order about speaking the native language, and repeated his words in English. “What is it?”

  “I need to speak to you right away!” said Mikta-makta-mookta urgently. “It has to do with Senator Hargis.”

  The Fatherly One sighed. “I apologize, Beloved Childling, but I must deal with this.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  This was a lie, of course. But the rule about telling the absolute truth only applied to my dealings with Earthlings.

  CHAPTER 9 [TIM]

  ZAP!

  “So what do you think?” said Linnsy as we were driving to school the next morning. “Should we start a petition to see if we can get the alien kid sent back to where he came from?”

  “Linnsy Vanderhof!” cried her mother. “Shame on you!”

  “You should meet this kid, Mom,” protested Linnsy. “He’s the most stuck-up brat I ever saw.”

  Mrs. Vanderhof glanced over her shoulder, to where I was slumped in the backseat. “And what do you think of that, Mr. Timothy?” (She always called me “Mr. Timothy.”)

  “Well, he did kind of offend people yesterday, Mrs. V. But I’m hoping it was just because he was nervous.”

  “There, Linnsy,” said Mrs. Vanderhof, swerving to get back on the road as she focused her eyes forward again. “Why don’t you try to be as open-minded about this as your friend?”

  I sighed. Linnsy was sure to give me a punchie-wunchie for that before the day was over.

  * * *

  The classroom was very subdued that morning. Pleskit was wearing another robe, a lot like the first one, only light green. McNally took his place in back, so quiet and unmoving you might have thought he was someone’s project or something.

  I was hoping we’d have another question-and-answer session, but I guess Ms. Weintraub wasn’t taking any chances on Pleskit making himself more disliked than he already was.

  We worked quietly through the morning, making our way through reading and spelling with no real problems. No one was outright rude to Pleskit; mostly they just pretended he wasn’t there. I couldn’t tell how he was taking it. I mean, even if he had been frowning or smiling, which he wasn’t, how could you be sure what that meant on an alien face?

  I noticed that he went to his Personal Needs Chamber fairly often. It was sort of weird, since his bodyguard always went out with him.

  I was still dying to get a chance to talk to the alien, of course. But we were sitting two rows away from each other, so I didn’t have much of a chance. The one time I thought I could manage it, he got up to go to the bathroom again. I couldn’t wait for recess. I figured that’s when I would make my move.

  * * *

  The clock was doing its usual trick of getting slower and slower the closer we got to lunchtime. I got approximately no work done, since my brain was totally focused on figuring out what I was going to say to Pleskit when I caught up with him on the playground. This was something I had been thinking about for years—what the first words I would say to an alien if I ever met one should be. I had finally settled on, “Let there be peace between our planets.”

  I couldn’t wait to say it.

  Lunch starts at 11:40. At 11:39 Mr. Grand opened the door. Standing behind him were two people: a very pretty woman with red hair, and a muscular Asian guy carrying a big video camera marked CNN.

  “We need to see Pleskit for a little while,” said Mr. Grand.

  I sighed. It looked like I still wouldn’t be able to talk to Pleskit. I wondered if I would ever make contact with him.

  “Our own little TV star,” muttered Jordan as Pleskit and McNally left the room.

  I knew the tone in his voice. It was not a good sign.

  * * *

  We were on the playground when McNally and Pleskit came out of the building. The reporter and the video camera guy were still with them.

  McNally said something to Pleskit, who listened carefully, then st
arted walking toward a group of kids standing near the swing set. Figuring this was my chance, I started in Pleskit’s direction.

  I noticed the reporter asking McNally a question.

  I had almost made it to Pleskit when Jordan appeared as if from nowhere and elbowed me aside. “Out of the way, Nerdbutt. I wanna have a little talk with the purple kid.”

  He had his friend Brad Kent with him, which was another bad sign. Jordan liked to show off for Brad.

  “Jordan!” I said. “I was here first.”

  “Forget it, Dootbrain,” he said, giving me another shove. Then he yelled, “Hey, Plastic! You have a good time talking to the reporter?”

  Except for the stupid nickname, the words were perfectly fine. It was only his tone of voice that was insulting, and that just barely. That was Jordan’s way. He started slow, and sometimes you didn’t even realize he’d been making fun of you until he’d gotten in two or three really good digs. But once he had you hooked, he could really do a mental slice and dice.

  Pleskit turned to Jordan. “It was acceptable.”

  I noticed a lot of other kids moving in, the way they do when something is going to happen.

  “Acceptable?” asked Jordan, sounding fake-surprised. “Well, I suppose you’re used to it. You a big star back on Planet Purple?”

  Pleskit looked puzzled, and a little uncomfortable. “My home is called Hevi-Hevi.”

  “And is everyone there a fatty-fatty?” asked Jordan. This earned him a cackle from Brad.

  The knob on Pleskit’s head was starting to twitch. “Obesity is not a problem among our people,” he said. He spoke calmly, but it sounded like it was an effort.

  “You calling Earthlings fat?” asked Jordan, stepping closer to Pleskit. He was about six inches taller than Pleskit, if you didn’t count the knob.

  Pleskit looked really distressed now, as if he simply couldn’t understand what was happening. I wanted to step in and stop Jordan, but didn’t know how. Heck, I couldn’t even protect myself from the creep.