One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (14 page)

The transport continued on its way once the traffic had cleared. For its passengers, it was a fairly tight fit, as most of the seats had been constructed close together. There was an aisle the students sat on either side of, and the windows provided excellent views of the outside world.

Hieronymus turned to Bruegel.

“
You’re
quiet today,” he said.

Bruegel grinned defensively as his eyes scanned the passing country- side.

“I’m quiet on the outside today, Hieronymus, just quiet on the outside. But here,” he knocked his knuckle against his shaggy-haired skull, "there is a storm brewing…right here…”

“I see.” Hieronymus laughed. “So your mouth and your brain decided to trade places?”

“His mouth and his brain,” added Clellen, "are two sides of the same hollow blow-horn we have to keep listening to over and over no matter which one he crates on the plumb side…”

“Clellen, if I wanted to hear your opinion I would not have flushed the toilet this morning.”

Hieronymus could see these two were about to start spinning at each other with the usual avalanche of infantile jokes turning into insults turning into violence when, suddenly, an outsider intruded on their little bubble of Loopie-World.

“Hey!” someone shouted in their direction. “Hey! Goggle guy!”

Hieronymus looked up into the mass of students sitting in their transport seats, only to see a moderately familiar face poke itself up — a large fellow, athletic, bigger than the rest of those around him. He stood up and, with an ear-to-ear smile on his face, began to walk toward the back where Hieronymus and his two comrades were sitting.

“Hey! My man! Goggle guy! Remember me?”

At first Hieronymus drew a complete blank — and then it returned. Of course. Pete. A Barrelhead. One of Slue’s friends, whom he met in the media-viewing rotunda just three weeks earlier. The one who wanted him to tap Slue on the shoulder. The one who had threatened to take his nose off. Hieronymus waved.

“Hi,” he said with zero enthusiasm.

As Pete got closer, Bruegel shrank a little, and Clellen instantly took an interest in the newcomer, instinctively adjusting her gel-clogged hair.

“Hey!” Pete smiled widely as he reached the rear of the transport where the three were sitting. “Mind if I sit with you guys?”

“Sure,” Hieronymus mumbled, moving over slightly so as to make more room for Pete, who was wearing a tellball jersey with the words Sputnik Spiders emblazoned across the top, a tarantula-like creature with bloody fangs printed in fiery colors just under it.

“I like your shirt!” Clellen said with extraordinary over-enthusiasm.

“Thanks!” Pete took his place next to Hieronymus. “I think the Spiders are going to really clamp down on the Jackson Craters next week. Don’t you think so?”

Hieronymus and Bruegel each gave an afirmative shrug, not knowing what Pete was talking about. Clellen commented with a gigantic and vivacious "OHHH YESSSSS!” while waving both her arms in a strange show of celebration. Clellen knew less about the tellball tournaments than anyone there, but she didn’t want Pete to know that. The newcomer smiled quite genuinely at her, and then he introduced himself, his eyes mostly on the bubbly Clellen, who was relieved the big bruise on her face had faded a long time ago.

“I’m Pete, by the way.”

“Very pleased to meet you, Pete.” Clellen giggled as she shook his hand. “I’m Clellen.”

“Clellen is a lovely name,” he replied.

“And this is Bruegel, and that guy over there with the goggles is Mus.”

“Mus?” Pete looked perplexed for a second. “I thought your name was Hiker-a-mous, or something like that. Slue always mentions your name, but I can never get it right…”

A burning, sad thought entered Hieronymus’ mind.
Slue always mentions…
said with such matter-of-fact familiarity. Slue wouldn’t speak to him now. And with that one single casual sentence, Hieronymus understood indeed, she was now spending time with this fellow right next to him.

“Hieronymus is actually how it’s pronounced.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, man. I’m not really good with names that have more than one syllable.”

“Don’t worry about it — it’s not exactly common, so a lot of people mispronounce it.”

“That’s why we call him Mus,” Clellen added.

“Yes,” Hieronymus grinned a half smile. “A lot of people call me Mus. You can call me Mus if you’d like.”

“I don’t know.” Pete laughed in a friendly way. “I think I need the challenge — everyone I know has names like mine — Pete or Bud or Ken or even Slue, you know Slue, with only one syllable. You have a really cool name. I should just make the effort to remember it.”

Hieronymus was struck by how sincerely friendly this Pete was toward him — and toward the other two as well. They had only met once before, and the encounter had been less than sociable.

“Anyway,” Pete continued, looking down at his triple-sized V-RR100 shoes. “I Just wanted to come by and tell you I’m sorry I was such a rectumexit a few weeks back at the rotunda.”

This was out of the blue. It completely shocked Hieronymus.

“What are you talking about?” he replied. “You weren’t being a rectumexit at all,” he lied.

“Well, I was pretty rude to you, ordering you around like that to tap Slue on the shoulder. I didn’t even say please, and then I even suggested I was going to break your nose, or something like that.”

Hieronymus couldn’t remember the last time he had ever felt so embarrassed — and at the same time, redeemed — considering the minuscule amount of time he had even spent thinking of this guy since the last time they met. And in fact, the more he looked at him, the more he could not help but sort of like him. After all, if Slue hung out with this Pete fellow, he couldn’t have been all that bad. Modesty suggested he be gracious toward the apologizing oaf.

“Look, I was the one being a wise guy — I could have just as easily tapped her on the shoulder when you first asked me, but I was being a schluck. And you were in a hurry.”

“Yeah, but in retrospect, I forgot that Slue is a really serious student, and she doesn’t like to be interrupted when she’s deep into her intellectual stuff. I was intruding.”

“No you weren’t,” insisted Hieronymus, who found it strange that he was engaged in a bizarre apology contest with Pete. “What kind of an intellectual is one who can’t be tapped on her shoulder, Pete?”

Pete had no answer for that, but he looked of into the passing countryside with an expression of contemplation.

“Well, anyway, Slue explained the whole thing to me, and I realized that I was not very nice to you — or her — that day.”

“Don’t worry about it, Pete.”

“You’re a really good friend of Slue’s, aren’t you?”

Hieronymus shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve known her since the third grade.”

“She talks about you a lot.”

“Have you seen much of her lately?” Hieronymus asked, slightly nervously.

“Yeah, a bunch. I took her to the tellball previews between Lovettown and Gagarin last Saturday. She loved it.”

“Really? I had no idea that Slue was even interested in tellball — or any sport.”

“Oh, she gets into it if the game is good. We have a deal going — she comes with me to see games and sports and stuff like that, and I go with her to museums and films and poetry readings. I’ve opened up her world to athletics, and she’s opened up my world to…you know, old films, novels, even paintings, and all this music I never heard of before. And you know what we totally agree on? My car. I have a three-year-old Prokong-90. It’s in great condition! Slue loves my car, and I think our favorite thing to do together is go for long drives under the Earthlight during the wee hours when the highways are empty.”

Hieronymus forced himself to smile and paused before he spoke.

“That’s great, Pete.”

“I even read that book you just did the presentation on in your class last week. Slue made a copy of the one your uncle translated — it was really great. Very bizarre, but great.”

“I’m very pleased to hear that, Pete. You know, Slue was supposed to work with me on that one but she just quit, out of the blue, and worked on another book with another student instead.”

“Yeah, she told me that.”

“She just stopped speaking to me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. In fact, it started right after we saw you at the rotunda. How long ago was that — three weeks, right? She’s ignored me since. Until two seconds ago when you told me that she made a copy of
The Random Treewolf
for you, I had no idea she even listened to my dissertation on it.”

Pete shook his head, laughing.

“Man, she wouldn’t shut up about it. She thought it was the most brilliant thing she had ever heard.”

Hieronymus said nothing. He only stared ahead, then out through the window at the passing neon-covered apartment complexes in the distance.

Pete leaned in a little closer.

“Look, man, I really have to ask you something.”

“Sure, Pete. Anything.”

“I know that Slue is in the Topper classes. I know that you have to be really, really smart to get into those classes. Usually, it seems that if someone is in one Topper class, they tend to be in
all
of them. Like Slue. Now the other day, she told me something totally unbelievable about
you
.” Pete lowered his voice to a whisper so that neither Bruegel nor Clellen could hear him. “Slue said that you are only in three Topper classes, and that the other half of your subjects you take with the… Loopies?”

Hieronymus smiled, then raised his eyebrows in such a way that jiggled the goggles on his face. He was expecting a weird question on lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, or on the fourth primary color, or on the goggles, but of course, it was the old Toppers and Loopies thing once again.

“This is true. I am a Topper, and I am a Loopie.”

Pete was impressed and astonished.

“I’ve seen you running through the hallways, sprinting through the crowds of kids just walking to their classes. Everyone talks about the goggle-guy — sorry, I mean One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy who’s in both the best and the worst classes and who has to run the entire length of the school just to get to his classes on time. It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Pete, that’s me.”

“You know, you’re incredibly fast. That’s why you are both a mystery and a legend among the bulk of the students. We just see you zip right past. I’ll be walking to class with five or six others, the hallway will be really crowded, we’ll be talking about normal stuff, like last night’s game or something, and then all of a sudden,
whoosh!
This
phantom
darts right past us, a tablet and a stylo-point in his hand, and in the blink of an eye, he’s gone. It happens every day. Nobody knows who you are because you are in no one’s class and you don’t seem to associate with anyone who is not a Topper or a Loopie. When I met you three weeks ago in the rotunda, I had no idea that you were
The Phantom
. You’re that fast.”

Hieronymus was not sure where Pete was going with this story — but the big fellow appeared to be genuinely impressed with his running abilities, which, till this moment, he’d never considered in any kind of way.

“Listen,” Pete continued. “Try-outs for the track team start in three weeks.”

“Oh…” Hieronymus suddenly understood what this was about.

“Me and some of the other guys, after making fun of
The Phantom
— that is, making fun of you — realized that you were a lot faster than any of us. You would be such an excellent sprinter for our team.”

“I thought you were already on the tellball team?” Hieronymus asked, surprised and fattered by this unforeseen appreciation for a talent he did not even know he had had.

“I am. But the season is almost over. And we were knocked out of the semi-finals by Lunar Public 64, so we’re not even playing anymore. However…” He paused. “With
The Phantom
on our track team, I think we can have an unbelievable next season.”

“
The Phantom…
” Hieronymus considered it. “I like that. And it sure beats goggle-guy.”

Pete laughed, gently slapping himself on the forehead.

“Sorry about that.”

For the rest of the transport ride to LEM Zone One, Pete stayed with the three representatives of the Loopie world, talking to Hieronymus and especially Clellen. Bruegel was uncharacteristically shy. Clellen had her flirt siren on, blazing and blaring, and Pete was happy to accommodate her.

“Do you like being on the tellball team?” she asked

“Sure,” he answered. “Do you like being on the Beautiful Girl Team?”

Clellen laughed and slapped him on one of his biceps.

“Stop it! There is no Beautiful Girl Team!”

“Really? You should start one. You’d be captain…”

“You!” She laughed as she slapped him again, this time on the shoulder, before changing the subject only slightly.

“Do you think I’d make a good cheerleader?”

“Cheerleader?” Pete asked.

“Yeah, you know, all those ring-top girls really getting their frazzles on, doing shake-shake on the ring-side while the boys just get the innacaws-drive going on the other teams’ ace ball!”