Mike Stellar Read Online Free

side of a hill behind our neighborhood. It was close but hidden, like an easy-access private clubhouse.
    Stinky looked rumply in his baggy jeans and “Elvis Is Alive” T-shirt. I told him to sit down and then I just let the whole story spill out of me.
    He blinked five times in a row and said, “Are you kidding me?”
    “Do I look like I’m kidding you?” I held up my hands so that he could see they were shaking. I didn’t know if it was from fear or excitement, but they were jittering a mile a minute.
    “Man, that is heavy news.” He picked at an old candy wrapper on the ground. “You’re leaving today?”
    “Yeah,” I said, breathless. “At two p.m.”
    We sat silently for a few minutes; then I looked at my watch. “I have to go, man. If I’m not back soon, my dad’s going to vaporize me.”
    “Well,” Stinky said, standing up and fidgeting with his pants, “at least you don’t have to worry about your speech anymore.”
    “Ha.” I kicked a rock over and watched two little bugs scurry out from under it. “I might not have to write it, but now I have to live it.”
    “Shoulda picked a project on creating your own teacher-eating Preditator.”
    “No doubt.”
    We stood there for a few seconds, not knowing what else to say.
    “Well, hey,” I said finally, “at least we still have these.” I held up my small green peapod.
    “Will that work in space?”
    “It’s supposed to,” I said, then deepened my voice like the commercial. “This amazing device works up to one million miles away.”
    He looked skeptical.
    “The moon is only 239,000 miles away, right? And we’ll be there for at least a few weeks. Then we fly back a little closer to Earth so that we can launch from Lagrange point L1. We’ll be there another week or so, I guess, and that’s, what, only 200,000 miles away?”
    “Dude, how do you know all this stuff?”
    “I don’t
always
watch
MonsterMetalMachines
on the vis. And, you know, I can read, too.” I slugged him in the arm. “Anyway These things should work until I actually take off for Mars. And the mission’s gonna be in preparation mode for four weeks. I mean, I guess it is. The last mission took four weeks to …” I trailed off. Ididn’t really want to get into the whole hundreds-of-people-lost-in-space-who-are-probably-dead thing.
    Stinky shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “So that’s four weeks we can talk until you take off on the … long trip.”
    “You make it sound like I’m going to die or something. ‘The long trip.’”
    Stinky just looked at me.
    I rolled my peapod between my fingers. “We’ll keep in touch, okay, Stink?”
    “Cool,” he said, looking at the ground.
    We stood awkwardly until Stinky one-arm hugged me and trotted off. I hightailed it back to the house.
    I ran in through the back door and flew up the stairs to finish packing. I hadn’t been in my room ten seconds when Mom burst in.
    “You better get downstairs and eat breakfast, Michael. We have a long day ahead of us.”
    I took one last look around my room. It wasn’t a huge room, or even spectacular in any way, but I’d miss it. I sighed and jammed my hands into my pockets. My fingers brushed the peapod and some grasshrinkers I must’ve left in there the other day.
That’s one chore I won’t have to do on Mars
, I thought. But that didn’t make me feel better.
How can you live in a place with no grass?
    My breath caught funny in my throat.
    “C’mon, Mike,” Mom said softly “Let’s go eat.”
    Nita sat gobbling up pancakes at the kitchen table downstairs. I set my box by the front door, next to two other boxes, and then nearly had a heart attack when a humongous man in what looked like a deep red waiter’s jacket tapped me on the shoulder.
    “Better start eating, son. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
    I looked the stranger up and down. There was a gold name tag shimmering on his breast pocket. “‘Mr. Shugah-bert’?” I read out loud.
    “The