One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (10 page)

Slue froze as she sat looking up at this unfolding spectacle. Hieronymus knew these Loopies. He knew them! They knew him! They had an affectionate nickname for him! Mus! They called him Mus! He had a Loopie nickname! An ugly-sounding Loopie nickname! Mus! So vulgar, like they couldn’t even bother to attempt to pronounce his whole name.

And what was all this business about cutting class? Hieronymus is not in any Loopie classes! That would be impossible. He’s a Topper.

Slue shook her head. It was like she was in a horrific dream all of a sudden.

When she looked up, the noisy spectacle had only gotten worse.

Clellen put her arm around Hieronymus and touched the end of his nose with her pointer finger.

“So,” she continued in her coquettish voice. “When am I going to get to see what you look like without those goggles — I heard you have the most gorgeous eyes…”

Hieronymus touched the end of her nose. Slue was amazed at how
familiar
he was toward this girl.

“Now who told you that, Clellenie-clel…”

“Oh, word gets out. Some girls…have seen…your…eyes…”

Was this really Hieronymus?
Slue wondered.
Talking and flirting with...Loopies?

She quietly and quickly put away her research. She felt numb. Three of her classmates from another table several meters away, stared wideeyed at her, terrified. They were also Toppers, and they were behaving as if they were about to get pummeled by these criminal types who hadn’t even noticed them yet.

One scared Topper boy, Poole, silently mouthed,
Let’s go!
repeatedly. But she was frozen.

The counter where the librarian normally sat attracted the attention of three Loopies, who quickly took out screwdrivers and magic markers. With a loud blunt cackle of laughs and obscenities, they proceeded to carve and mark up and vandalize the main desk with a destructive abandon Slue never thought possible.

One boy punched another directly in the mouth.

A tall boy in a trenchcoat went up to Tseehop and they started kissing, first standing, then passionately crashing upon a table where another group of terrified students got up and fled.

Slue looked back at Hieronymus.

“Clellen, my naughty she-cat,” he said to the strange girl in the rollers. “You know that if these goggles ever come off for any girl, it would be you…”

“Mus,” she laughed, "You are suuuuuuch a liar…”

Clellen began to stroke his face with wide, affectionate sweeps of her hand, which had the number "10" tattooed on it in dark green ink. She was obviously trying to kiss him, and Hieronymus glanced at Slue as he made a slight effort to resist.

Another table crashed. The boy with the traction shoes jumped off his second wreck.

The two wrestling kids shifted gears and hurled the crudest and most vicious insults at one another, making Slue wince. And then, out of the blue, from another corner, two extremely tall Loopie girls in raggedy velvet tuxedos began punching the Hell out of each other, and within seconds there was blood flowing from one of the girl’s noses. Nobody cared, including Hieronymus.

“Show me!” Clellen laughed.

“No!” He laughed back.

“Show me!”

He covered his eyes with both palms, and Clellen wrapped herself around him tighter, as if she were an octopus trying to open a cartoon treasure chest. They immediately fell to the floor, and Hieronymus’ attempts to get her off him were clearly lackadaisical. He seemed to love this little game she was playing with him, and they rolled around as if they were lovers on a haystack, Clellen laughing and Hieronymus mildly protesting between giggles.

Slue got up from her seat and walked toward the Toppers who were slowly walking backward out of the room, taking long silent steps to avoid getting the attention of these hoodlums. She joined them, and as they all left, Slue was suddenly overwhelmed by an emotion she could not fully comprehend. She stopped. She walked back into the rotunda by herself and went up to the rolling forms Hieronymus and Clellen on the floor.

“Hieronymus,” she called out to her changeling friend. “Hieronymus, I’m going.”

She immediately regretted bringing attention to herself. Silence swept through the room as every Loopie stopped their destructive, noisy behavior and looked at Slue.

Only teachers called him Hieronymus. And Bruegel, but he was not there.

Then Clellen and Tseehop exploded in excitement.

“Ohmygod! Ohmygod! This is SSSSOOOOOO CUTE!”

Clellen jumped up from the floor and in two seconds was uncomfortably close to Slue’s face. “You are so cute!” she exclaimed, as if she were a little girl in a toy shop picking up a stuffed doll she wanted. “A One Hundred Percent Lunar GIRRRRRL! And you know Mus! You even call him Here-on-uh-mus!”

The boy in the trenchcoat sat on the desk just next to where Slue stood. He reached up and poked her elbow.

“I didn’t know Mus had a sister. Are you his sister?”

Tseehop was more direct.

“Hey, you must be Mus’ girlfriend! I’ll bet you both take your goggles off when you’re sliding in each other’s sweat!”

Slue froze. She was surrounded by these criminals.
Why do they even allow people like this in school?
She glanced at the students destroying the counter. A loud crash thundered out from the lounging area as more furniture was destroyed.
Where are the teachers?
she wondered.

Hieronymus slowly got up and sauntered over to the gathering around Slue. Even the way he walked was drastically different when he was among this riffraff.

The trenchoat boy shouted unnecessarily loudly over to Hieronymus.

“Mus! How can this girl be your hop-on if she’s also a goggle-freak like you? I thought all you goggle-freaks hated each other.”

Hieronymus pushed himself through the crowd and placed himself between Slue and Clellen.

“Everyone,” he announced to the Loopies. “This is Slue.”

“Slue!” Clellen exclaimed. “That’s a sexy name. I love your hair!”

Slue nodded. The big bruise under Clellen’s face was extremely difficult to look at.

“How do you know Mus?” a boy in the back shouted.

“Uhhh,” began Slue, obviously scared. “I’ve known Hieronymus since the third grade.”

“How come you’re not in our class?” demanded another.

Slue had no answer for that, so she just looked away.

Two or three other Loopies came over. One of them, Jessker, clutched the silver box around his neck. As soon as he saw Slue, he did what he always did when he met someone for the first time. He opened up the lid of the tiny box and held it up to Slue’s face.

“Smell!” he demanded in a sharp, nasal voice. “Smell! Smell!”

“What?” Slue gasped, terrified.

“Smell!”

“What am I supposed to smell?”

“Oh, go ahead!” Tseehop interjected. “Jessker here wants to be a perfume maker when he grows up. He’s always trying out his new creations on everyone.”

Slue was about to take a sniff, then stopped herself.

“Wait. This isn’t some kind of ‘drug thing,’ is it?”

Within the eruption of laughter that followed, she heard several voices assuring her
no, no, this is not a drug thing, no, no, don’t worry...

She looked over at Hieronymus. He had a broad smile on his face.

“It’s totally safe, Slue. Jessker is a true artist of odor.”

She leaned forward. The small silver box was very pretty, but Jessker’s fingernails upon it were horribly dirty, with purple gunk under each finger nail. She parked her nose over the open top.

She sniffed.

And then she nearly vomited. It was an odor of rot she never even knew existed — of soiled fermentation, musky, dead, and sour and intense. It was by far, for that quick half second, the worst moment in her entire life. Whatever that odor was, it made her see death and the rotten oblivion it left in its wake.

“Ugh!” she cried out loud, humiliated. “Ugh! Ugh!”

The Loopie crowd burst into hysterical laughter once more. All of them, laughing at her, including Hieronymus, who had his arms around Clellen, both of them balancing each other to keep from toppling over.

The offending Loopie with the beard, Jessker, had already disappeared.

Slue’s eyes were all watery behind her goggles. “You are sick!” she screamed at them all. “Sick! Sick in the head!”

“Let’s see your eyes!” someone in the crowd yelled out.

“Yeah,” another Loopie added. “Mus won’t show us his eyes, you show us yours!”

This only inspired a counter reaction from some other Loopies.

“No! Don’t tell her to do that!”

“Let’s see them!”

“Don’t! She takes those goggles off, we’re all dead!”

“That’s not true, you know. I heard that the eye color makes you high.”

“It makes you dead. That’s what it makes you!”

“Remember what happened to Lester two years ago!”

“Lester died of an overdose of Buzz!”

“He died of exposure to the devil color!”

Four of them began swinging at each other with fists.

Tseehop shook her head back and forth, staring up at Slue.

“You, fungelina, are in a lot of trouble. You call us sick. Then you get four of us to fight over you. You really must be some kind of demon.”

Slue was petrified. Hieronymus stopped laughing and started to walk forward, slightly worried.

“I think she’s a demon, too,” an extra-loud voice from the destroyed counter announced. “Just like Mus. He’s a demon. A demon from the far side of the Moon.”

“Wait, you’re a Topper,” Plennim piped up with his scratchy voice.

“And how do you know that Slue is a Topper?” Clellen interrupted, fists on her hips, turning to face the scratchy-voiced boy with the oil stain on his shirt. “Mus would never be friends with any snobs like that!”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Plennim said. “All I heard was that there was this hot-looking One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl who had blue hair who was in the Topper classes.”

Clellen shook her head. “You’re on Buzz, that’s what’s up your face, scratchy.”

Plennim was quick with a retort.

“I’m not on Buzz, you kazzer-bat!”

“Who are you calling a kazzer-bat, you little lice baiter!”

“You, ping-slud, go wrap yourself in a big fat kank!”

The ensuing fight between Plennim and Clellen diffused the uncomfortable attention Slue was getting from the assembled Loopies. She was amazed at the chaotic way they all communicated with one another. One sentence, followed by a retort, followed by overwhelming physical action in the form of violence or wrestling. Everything was extreme. Strange insults she had never heard before. She had no idea what they were talking about. She watched the fight between the boy and the girl — it was horrendous, loud and brutal, and the other students barely paid attention to it after the first twenty seconds. Hieronymus finally went up to her, a slightly embarrassed look on his face.

“I’ll bet, I’m sure, this is probably a little strange…”

“Loopies?”

“I…you see, I am really bad in math. And science.”

“Loopies.”

“They’re not really that bad.”

Slue looked beyond his shoulder and watched Clellen poke Plennim in the face with the end of a chair leg.

“I am obliged by the school to take remedial math and remedial science. And remedial shop, and home preparation. I spend half my day in the Loopie section.”

Slue stared at him, and her breathing quickened. She quickly turned her back on him and left, at first walking, then running.

The next day, Slue spoke to the teacher, requesting that she be assigned another partner to work with on a completely different book. The teacher paired her up with the boy named Poole, who was absolutely pleased to collaborate with the beautiful blue-haired girl.

She refused to even look at Hieronymus, never mind speak to him. She was determined to never speak to him again.

Two weeks later she sat in the back of the classroom and watched as Hieronymus gave his dissertation on the two versions of
The Random Treewolf
all by himself. Her throat felt heavy with a slight choking sensation. She disliked him now. She even wondered if she hated him. He spoke to the class with such a marvelous exactitude. It was both wonderful and brilliant, and for the first time in her life she was glad to have those goggles covering her eyes, preventing the others from seeing how incredibly moved she was.

Windows Falling On Sparrows could not wait to get away from her suffocating mother and her doltish, dimwitted father. Managing to last the entire fourteen-hour journey from the Earth to the Moon, confined to a small family cabin, stuck with them, was a genuine miracle.

True, what a fantastic thrill to ascend into the sky like that. To keep going and to look out the window and watch her city shrink into a glimmering puddle of lights till it just meshed with all the other puddles of lights on the surface of the worn-out continent she came from. It was a profound experience, entirely ruined by her mother asking dumb, nosy questions about school exams, homework, and that boy in her class named Cornelius.
He’s a really nice boy, you should go out with him instead of some of the riffraff you seem to be interested in. Endless questions that were so utterly boring. If you haven’t noticed, Mom, we are in space, for the first time in our lives, can we please NOT talk about my school or who you think I should date?
It was a tall order. Her mother, Exonarella, had such ambitions for her youngest daughter that she often slipped into the very tiresome mode of living vicariously through her sixteen-year-old. She was a nervous woman. She wanted her daughter to be successful and independent, and, as a result, just like Windows Falling On Sparrows’ two older siblings, all she managed to do was to drive her away with her constant micromanaging of every detail of the poor girl’s life.