Anton's Odyssey Read online

  “That’s what I hear,” I said. Somehow, another kid putting down my home town was easier to take than criticism from an adult like Mr. Yongscolder, so I let the comment slide.

  “Makes you tough, I guess,” Hammond said.

  Our homeroom teacher’s module beeped, and she dismissed us for first period class. Everyone scrambled to their feet and headed out to the passageway. A short kid in slacks bumped into Hammond. Hammond shoved the kid and said, “Watch yourself!” Fearful, the kid walked away quickly.

  “They all dress alike!” I observed. “They in some sort of club or something?”

  “Naw, officers’ kids. Mostly they are a bunch of pricks. They think they are better than everyone else. Parents make a lot more money so they feel the need to show off with all the high fashion. You won’t have to deal with them much though. They are pretty much all in honors courses, even the dumb ones.”

  As we turned the corner, Hammond asked, “What class you got first?”

  “Math,” I said, suddenly overcome by feelings of foreboding.

  “Yeah me too! Follow me, I’ll show you the way!”

  “Well... er... actually... no.” I cleared my throat. “I don’t think we are in the same class.”

  “You in honors or something?” Hammond asked suspiciously.

  “No, not exactly.”

  “You fail?”

  “Yes, something like that,” I said.

  Hammond punched my lightly on the shoulder, a sign of approval. “Don’t feel too bad! At least it’s only math. I had to repeat the whole year once. Teachers grade really tough here.”

  A gaggle of younger kids scurried past. Someone poked me in the ribs. It was Cotton. He guffawed and ran down the passageway. Hammond pinched his nostrils together and said, “Damn, that kid stinks!”

  “He’s my brother,” I said with sad resignation.

  Hammond tried to back pedal gracefully, taking on a more conciliatory tone. “Oh, I mean he stinks in a good way,” but his voice had a nasal quality because he was still pinching his nostrils.

  “No he stinks,” I said, “and not in a good way.”

  “I got this cousin who’s retarded,” Hammond said. “He can really stink pretty bad sometimes. Good kid though. Really sweet.”

  Why does everybody assume Cotton is retarded, I thought.

  Down the passageway, a figure in a faded red jumpsuit mopped the floors. The suit fit poorly, the sleeves and leggings bunched up around skinny arms and legs. As I got closer, I realized, to my horror, that it was my mother. Her hair was pulled back in her orange cap. The getup made her look like a little boy forced to wear his bigger brother’s oversized hand-me-downs. No doubt she had been called into action after a jano-bots burnt out cleaning up all the IASAS sick. Mother looked up at the ruckus we students caused as we stomped down the corridor. Panic stricken, she dropped the mop and ran off down a minor passageway. She probably thought we were going to trample her to death like a gang of rampaging elephants.

  A prosperous-looking kid bent over and picked up mother’s mop. “Look-ee me!” he said, trying to imitate some sort of hillbilly accent. “I never made it past the third grade, and now I gotsta push this here mop!” Some of the prosperous kids laughed. Those wearing hoodlum garb seemed pretty disinterested.

  My face turned red. I wanted to punch the kid. Sticking up for Cotton was hard enough, I thought, and now I’m going to have to stick up for mother too! The gag growing old, the prosperous kid propped the mop up against the wall and walked away. Had he tried to hide it, I would have had no choice but to deck him. The last thing I needed was Bob the steward harassing us for losing ship property.

  Math class was a complete disaster. The teacher, Mrs. Hallisworth made me sit in the back, right next to the smallest boy in the class. I could tell by the smug look on his face that he had skipped a grade. He was smart and he knew it. He sniggered as I sat down. I plugged my module into my workstation so that I could use the large datapad and vid display. As I feared, the school’s computer system disallowed use of my module’s math processor.

  Mrs. Hallisworth was a plain, humorless lady who made no attempt to make the dry subject of math either interesting or practical. She rambled on about unknown numbers in a monotone. Within five minutes, I was lost, and I spent the rest of the period thinking about girls. I had seen some nice ones in homeroom.

  English class was much better. The teacher was named Ms. Gross, a name that would normally result in non-stop harassment from students, but she was saved by the fact that she was not gross at all. She was young and hip and kind of hot even though she had a big rear end. She was even capable of making teenage boys want to behave and pay attention. It was the only class I had ever attended where the boys were more engaged than the girls.

  We spent the period writing short paragraphs about simple things such as what we did during summer vacation or what our family was like. Ms. Gross would pull up one of our paragraphs and ask the class to make corrections. She wouldn’t say who wrote the paragraph though, which was good because no one would get embarrassed, unless of course the writer was dumb enough to get defensive.

  On the big vid screen against the far wall, Ms. Gross eventually pulled up my paragraph, highlighted a sentence, and read it aloud: “Although poorly behaved at times, my brother is fundamentally a good person.”

  “Awe, how sweet!” some out called out sarcastically from the rear of the class.

  “I think it is sweet,” Ms. Gross said sincerely. “I wish my older brother looked out for me when I was a kid.” She was looking right at me, as if she knew I wrote the paragraph. I blushed.

  “Corrections anyone?” No one said anything. “Anyone?” she repeated. Silence.

  “Yes, this is actually a well-written complex sentence,” she said. My heart fluttered.

  Ms. Gross pulled up the next paragraph and highlighted a sentence at random: “At the beech I dint go into the water cuz I dint wanna catch no krabs cuz I herd they itch yor jock reel bad.”

  “Oh dear!” Ms. Gross exclaimed, realizing she should have read the sentence more closely before selecting it for review.

  In an attempt to spare Hammond from utter humiliation, I tried to divert attention away from his rather obvious lack of clinical insight. “There’s a double negative,” I called out. “It could confuse the reader. Also it’s a bit of a run on sentence.”

  “Crab is spelled with a ‘c’ and not a ‘k’!” said a willowy brunette with high cheekbones. Either she, too, was trying to save Hammond from embarrassment or was very naïve. She had an innocent quality about her, so I guessed the latter.

  “Uh Uh!” Hammond said, “I’d seen it with a ‘k’ at sea food restaurants.”

  “That means it’s fake crab and not real,” the girl scolded.

  If only he remained silent, I thought. I buried my face in my hands. I couldn’t bear to watch what was sure to happen next.

  “You can’t catch pubic lice at the beach, you moron!” a skinny boy called out.

  “You can if Hammond’s momma’s there!” said another boy. Everyone started laughing. Hammond face turned deep red. He was having a rough start to the new school year.

  “Settle down class!” Ms. Gross said, trying to silence the uproar, but the raucous continued. “Settle down!” she said loudly, and by some miracle, the class actually forgot about Hammond’s itchy jock, settled down, and focused on the next paragraph: “The Dim Sum at Andy Guo’s Mandarin Palace is exquisite.”

  “Oh I would definitely agree,” Ms. Gross said. “I’ve had it before, and it is exquisite.”

  “Explains the junk in the trunk,” the boy to my right whispered softly. I ignored him. Junk or no junk, I rather liked Ms. Gross’s trunk.

  Ms Gross was looking right at the willowy brunette when she said, “Have you ever been to the Andy Guo’s in Hollywood?” Apparently the two knew one another from a prior voyage.

  “I was there last week,” the brunette replied.


  “Is it near the Walk of Fame?” Ms. Gross asked.

  “It’s right on the Walk of Fame.”

  “Oh that is so rad!” Ms. Gross said, “I am so going there the first day we return to Earth.”

  Social studies was a total bore. My teacher was some fit looking guy named Mr. Fox who had a really weird hairdo. Science was even more boring than social studies but not nearly as bad as math class because at least I could understand what was going on.

  My elective, art, was pretty fun. We had to draw a partner with these old-school charcoal pencils. As a partner, I was assigned the willowy brunette from English class. Her name was Ellen. My drawing came out pretty well. Ellen wasn’t the type to extend compliments. She said it was just “okay,” but I could tell she was really impressed because she asked if she could keep it. I said “sure” in a manner that feigned indifference. I had no idea how to act around girls. Billy once told me that the best way to get a girl to like you was to act like you don’t like her. The advice didn’t seem very logical to me, but Billy seemed to do pretty well with girls and even felt a boob once.

  The picture Ellen drew of me wasn’t very flattering. My teeth and nose were really big, and I wasn’t sure if she thought I was ugly or if she was just a bad artist. She asked me if I wanted to keep it and I said ‘no,’ which might have been a mistake because she pouted afterwards and wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the class.

  When the teacher dismissed us, the school day was over. On the way home, I ran into Hammond holding a skinny boy by the wrists, the kid from English class who had loudly declared that Hammond’s mother had pubic lice. The unfortunate boy was completely over powered. Hammond completely controlled his movements. Hammond shoved the kid’s hand back into his face. “Quit slapping yourself!” Hammond said, repeating with the other side, “Quit slapping yourself!” Utterly humiliated, the boy’s face remained expressionless and pale. To his credit though, the kid didn’t burst out into tears.

  “It was good meeting you,” I said to Hammond.

  Hammond let the kid go, clearly more interested in me. The kid ran off down the passageway, passing up the perfect opportunity for a sucker punch.

  “Yeah, you seem cool,” he said. “If you’ve got nothing to do later, it’s open rec at the gym at seventeen hundred.”

  “Okay,” I said, “maybe I’ll see you there.”

  I arrived home to find our living quarters empty. Mother was probably still scrubbing vomit. I worried that Cotton got lost on the way home from school. To kill time, I flipped though the channels on the vid screen only to discover that the entertainment programming and video gaming options had been deactivated. Bob the Steward had found yet another way to stick it to my family. All I could access on the vid were ship announcements such the mess hall menu and washateria closings due to IASAS contamination. Cotton would have to walk an extra three hundred meters next time he wanted to pinch a loaf. He was not going to be happy.

  Cotton finally arrived and I asked him crossly where he had been.

  “Detention,” he said indifferently.

  “You serious, it’s the first day of school!”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “How many days?” I asked.

  “Every day for two weeks.” Cotton hadn’t just pissed off a single teacher. Somehow, he had offended the entire system.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Cuttin’ class.”

  “Why did you cut class?”

  “Dunno.” Cotton said, shrugging his shoulders again. No doubt he had acted out on some hare-brained impulse.

  “Come on!” I cried. “I told you a thousand times before. You should only cut class if it’s really nice out, which is never going to be the case out here in deep space or if some goon in school wants to beat your ass and you have no chance at winning.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, unapologetically.

  “Then why did you cut class?”

  “I guess I was hungry.” On cue he burped. Ever since he had recovered from IASAS, Cotton had spent almost all his free time at the mess hall, pushing the expression “all you could eat” to new limits. He was careful only to eat those foods that Dr. Zanders would describe as having a high caloric density and low nutrient value. He completely avoided vegetables, unless they were deep fried. My brother had gained quite a bit of weight in a short period of time. His shirt was way too tight. His gut pushed the fabric upward, exposing his unwashed midriff and filthy belly button. His stomach always full, he burped and belched constantly, even while asleep.

  “How did you get caught?” I asked.

  “The fat security guy,” he said.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “He’s the only person who spends more time at the mess hall than you.”

  “Yeah but he just seemed to ignore me most of the day. He didn’t do nothing for hours until we were both in line to get a refill of deep fried corn nibblets. He was all like, ‘These corn nibblets are good, and I don’t even really like corn.’ And I said, ‘Yes, they are tasty,’ although they tasted a bit like fish because I guess they never change out the oil in the deep fat fryer. Then the server guy put down a dish and said, ‘This here is the last of the nibblets,’ so I grabbed them before the security guy did, and he got really mad because he was ahead of me in line. His face turned all red and he was like, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I gave him the reason we always told the cops back home. I told him it was an administrative teacher work day.”

  My jaw dropped, and I buried my face in the palm of my hand. “That trick’s not going to work up here!”

  “Yeah, I was wondering why he knew I was lying.”

  “Cotton, back home there are dozens of schools, and it’s a real pain in the ass for the cops to look up your school and call the principal. Also, back home the cops have real crimes to deal with, people getting knifed and hoodlums jacking cars!”

  “So?” he asked defiantly, urging me to get to the point.

  “So, here, do you see people getting knifed?”

  “No.”

  “You see any cars to steal?”

  “I guess not.”

  “And how many schools do you think there are?”

  Cotton’s eyes darted back and forth as he thought. “Oh crap!” he said, finally reaching the obvious conclusion.

  “How many?” I asked. I wanted to hear him say it out loud so that he would have no other choice but to admit he was an idiot.

  “Just one,” he said sheepishly.

  “Yes,” I said, “just the one, and the guards here don’t seem to have anything to do except hang out in the mess hall, the very place you chose to cut class. Hell, you might have even gotten away with it if you hadn’t stole Mr. Boldergat’s french-fries.”

  “Fried corn nibblets,” Cotton corrected, “and he said we’re supposed to call him Sergeant Boldergat, not ‘mister.’”

  “Whatever!” I snapped, pretending to be angrier that I actually was.

  Cotton looked at his feet and said he was sorry. He skulked into our bedroom to either sulk or read comic books, but within five minutes he got bored and came back out to the living room.

  “Did you go to any of your classes today?” I asked out of curiosity.

  “Yeah the last one.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “Social studies.”

  “Who’s your teacher?”

  “Some strong-looking dude with a really funky hairdo.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Fox. I have him too,” I said. “Learn anything?”

  “Naw, it was mostly pretty boring, but the teacher did talk about this president guy who hanged himself in the oval office.”

  “Present Jimenez,” I said.

  “Yeah that’s the guy,” Cotton said, disinterested.

  “Anything worth watching on the vid?” Cotton asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, “just some stupid public health anno
uncement. Bob the steward cut off our access to all the good channels.”

  “Man, I wish someone would hang that guy like President Jimenez.”

  “Careful what you wish for,” I said dispassionately with neither belief nor conviction, “because it just might happen.”

  Cotton sighed with boredom. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  It was 17:15, and I remembered what Hammond had said about open rec. “You wanna go mess around in the gym?” I suggested. “There will be other kids there.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Still having problems finding our way around the ship, we took a side door to the recreation center by mistake and not the main entrance. We found ourselves in a physical training room that overlooked the gaming gymnasium below. A rather poorly planned layout, every now and then a stray basketball would find its way among the dumbbells and treadmills, and someone would have to chase it down and toss it over the banister down to the players below. Most of the people in the training room were adults. I spotted Hammond in the corner bench pressing a huge amount of weight without a spotter.

  “That’s gotta be like 100 kilos!” I said, impressed. I never really lifted weights myself, but I wasn’t bad at doing push-ups and pull-ups.

  Hammond looked up and smiled. “This is just my warm up,” he said. “I can lift a lot more.”

  “Wow, you’re pretty strong!” Cotton said.

  “Naw it’s the gravity. Point seven eight G’s means I can lift twice as much as I can on Earth.” Hammond’s math didn’t seem right to me, but I wasn’t one to pass judgment. Hammond stood up and gestured to the bench. “You wanna grab a set? I can spot you.”

  “Naw,” I said, nodding towards Cotton. “We’re here to play around with a ball.”

  “Okay,” he said, “maybe I’ll come find you later.”

  We retreated down the steps to the gymnasium. Center stage was a full court scrimmage. Mr. Fox, my boring social studies teacher, wore a stripy shirt. He ran up and down the court blowing a whistle as referee. The bright light from the flood lamps above allowed me to study his funky hairdo more closely. His red hair had a rather unnatural quality. There wasn’t a single patch of grey. As he ran up and down the court, not a single strand of hair ever seemed to move out of place. It almost seemed like he was wearing some sort of hair-shaped helmet.