Finally she stopped, and was appalled. Impulsively she strode forward and held out her hand. “I’m so sorry… we’re all sorry. I guess it’s the… the strain. Please forgive us. We weren’t laughing at you, and we’re all glad to be here. Really!”
Pam smiled uncertainly. Up close, Lillie could see that her eyes were subtly different. Beautiful, but not… just somehow different. What did they see?
“Yes, forgive us,” Jon said. “God, we must seem… We are glad to meet you guys. It’s nice to communicate two ways instead of one.
Murmurs of assent from the others, straggling belatedly toward manners.
“And we’re glad you’re here,” Pete said. “Are you tired? I know we took you from the middle of your sleep cycle.”
Emily, the scholarship girl at a brainy private school, said, “The middle of ‘our’ sleep cycle? Do you have a different cycle?”
“We don’t sleep,” Pam said, and it came to Lillie with a jolt that no matter how Pete and Pam looked, no matter how similar the DNA their race had started with, these people were not human in the same way Lillie was human. Once, maybe. Not any more. They were alien.
The thought didn’t scare her. In fact, the jolt was more pleasant than not. Alien was new, was interesting. There were great adventures ahead.
Her excitement or their chemical messages affecting her brain?
Shut up, Uncle Keith, she said to her memory. Aloud she added, “I don’t think any of us are really tired. At least, I’m not. I’m too excited!”
“God, yes,” Rafe said. “What kind of drive does this ship use?”
Pete laughed. It sounded vaguely rehearsed. Poor man, he needed to find more things funny.
“We will answer all your questions,” he said, “over time. Maybe you would like to start with a tour of the ship? To see some of the right way?”
“God, yes,” Rafe said.
“Then come on!”
It wasn’t a tour of the whole ship, and it was going to take a very long time to answer everybody’s questions.
Lillie reached these conclusions after just a week aboard the ship. Madison had asked what it was named, and Pam said it didn’t have a name. It was just “the ship.” She’d lived on it her whole life. Madison thought that was dorky and she and Emily had christened the ship High Flyer. Sajelle said that was just as dorky; it sounded like a cheerleading squad. Madison, who’d been a cheerleader, was offended, but gradually everyone began referring to the ship as the Flyer simply out of convenience.
It was evident they were being restricted to a small part of it. There were doors Pam and Pete went through that no one else could open. Lillie didn’t really mind; what they were given was fascinating.
“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever sat on,” Madison said, bouncing on it.
“I think it’s creepy,” Sophie said, without rancor.
Lillie stood with them in Madison’s room. Each person had their own room, but they were all exactly the same, branching off a corridor so featureless that people walked into the wrong room all the time, backing out only when they saw another person’s meager possessions. Each room had a plain metal box that opened like a footlocker, a small metal table, two chairs, and a bed that was just a platform jutting out from the wall. The bed and the chairs were made of the same stuff as the seats on the bus; they molded themselves to whoever lay or sat in them. The pillow did the same. Each room had a blanket. Bed, squishy chairs, pillow, and blanket were all the same shade of light tan.
Immediately everyone had tried to personalize the rooms, spreading out whatever stuff they’d brought. Since some people brought more than others, the results differed wildly. Rafe had brought only his handheld, which sat on top of his footlocker. Madison had lugged a big suitcase full of stuff, including clothes, make-up, mirror, a holo poster of her favorite rock band, and a teddy bear dressed in a cheerleading outfit. Lillie hadn’t brought much, but she asked Pam for scissors and tacks and cut up her bright blue sweater to make a wall hanging. She didn’t need a sweater aboard the Flyer. It was never cold, never hot, always comfortable.
At the end of the hall were two bathrooms, boys and girls, and a sealed machine that you stuffed dirty clothes into. A few minutes later they came out a slot, perfectly clean and ironed. Rafe, fascinated, tried to take this apart to see how it worked, but the metal box, as featureless and strong as everything else, wouldn’t give.
There was a big common room with more of the tables and chairs. Three times a day the wall disgorged a trolley piled with food and dishes. When they gingerly tasted the food, the kids gazed at each other in astonishment.
“God, this is good!” Susan said, helping herself to more mashed potatoes.
“Pass that salad.”
“Give me some first, Jon.”
“Greedy box!”
“Like you should talk. How much of that casserole did you eat?”
Lillie had eaten a lot of the pasta casserole, which tasted as wonderful as everything else. Her belly felt full, and warm, and contented. She resented it when Sam began to complain.
“Yeah, it’s good, but there’s no meat. Future meals better have some meat. I hope Pam and Pete aren’t fucking vegetarians.”
“If the food stays this good, I won’t even miss meat,” Susan said.
“You don’t need it, Lardball. I want protein.”
Madison whispered to Susan, who was overweight and sensitive about it, “Don’t mind Sam. He’s just a stupid bully.”
True, Lillie thought. Although Susan could stand to lose thirty pounds. Madison, despite the perky cheerleader beauty that made some girls distrust her, was a kind person.
Lillie considered the kids. She herself was the tallest girl and, after Madison and Hannah and Sajelle, probably the prettiest. Sajelle was pretty in that way black girls sometimes had, sort of sassy, with her dreads bobbing on her shoulders and her ass all curvy. Rebecca, whose parents came from China or Vietnam or someplace, had gorgeous hair, long and black and shining, but her skin was bad. The other girls looked average except for poor Elizabeth, with her huge chin and squinty eyes and skin as bad as Rebecca’s. Of the boys, Jason, who wanted to be an actor, was really hot. Mike and Jon were cute. Sam looked like a thug, but he had a good body. Alex was too skinny, Rafe only about five foot three. Derek, the other African American, was all right but not as cute as DeWayne, the black guy who had stayed behind.
Her mind seized on DeWayne.
That was why she was judging everybody’s looks. She could picture DeWayne Freeman. Also the others who stayed behind: Robin Perry and Scott Wilkins and, of course, Theresa. But she couldn’t picture the kids who had died in the explosion at the Youth Center. She knew their names. She’d lived with them at Andrews for months. But she couldn’t remember what any of them looked like.
In fact, she hardly thought about them at all.
Lillie frowned. That didn’t seem right. Some of those kids— Tara, for instance-she’d hung around with a lot. When Lillie’s mom died, she couldn’t think of anything else for so long, and it hurt so much that sometimes she’d had trouble keeping it from showing. Of course, a mom was different than friends, but still it—
“If you’re all done eating, come with me,” Pam said. Lillie hadn’t even heard her come in. “I have more of the ship to show you. Parts you’ll like.”
“She always so sure what we going to like,” Sajelle grumbled, but she rose along with everybody else.
And they did like it. Pam led them through a door into a huge park. So big… how could a park be so big aboard a ship! How large was this spaceship, anyway?
“Wow!” Madison said.