Mike Stellar Read Online Free Page A

‘t’ is silent,” he said with a big smile.
    “Mr., uh, Shuga Bear? Your name is Sugar Bear?”
    “It’s pronounced ‘Shoo-
gah
-bear,’ actually. I’m your mom’s executive assistant.”
    “My mom’s who?”
    “My assistant,” said Mom cheerily, putting her arm around me. “You’ve heard me talk about Leslie before, honey. He’s going to be accompanying us on our trip. He’ll be making sure our every need is taken care of.”
    “THIS is Leslie?” I asked, shocked. “I always thought Leslie was, you know, not a dude.”
    Mom maneuvered me over to the table and dropped a stack of steaming pancakes in front of me. “Eat up, so we can go.”
    “Where’s your box, cheese face?” I asked Nita as I reached for the syrup.
    “I don’t need a box,” she answered with a smug smile. She pulled the syrup just out of my reach.
    “Why not? You starting over from scratch on Mars?” I leaned over the table and snatched the syrup from her hand.
    “I’m not going to Mars.”
    “Ha. Yeah, right.” I squirted syrup onto my pancakes and shoveled in a gloopy bite.
    “Seriously. I’m not going. I’m gonna live with Gram instead.”
    I sighed, spraying chewed-up pancake back onto my plate. I didn’t know if she made up stories for attention, or what, but Nita was almost nineteen. That was way too old to be a big fat liar.
    “Mom,” I said, “could you please tell Nita to quit being such a pants-on-fire liar, and to go pack her box?”
    Mom briefly looked uncomfortable. Then she squatted down and put on her big ol’ smiley smile. Yuh-oh.
    “Well, the thing is, Michael …,” she started, and it felt like the pancake I had just swallowed was really a ton of firecrackers.
    “Nita isn’t going with us.”
    I was dumbfounded. I could only open and shut my mouth like a floundering fish.
    “She, uh … she didn’t pass the security clearance.”
    Finally I spat out,
“What?!”
    Nita grinned at me from across the table and started humming a cheerful little tune that made me want to smash my pancakes in her face.
    “Because of her association with
those people
, Nita wasn’t approved to come on the trip. She’s going to Gram’s after she drops us off at the Project,” Mom explained.
    Mom was talking about Nita’s membership in Earthlings for Earth. It’s this group of people dedicated to cleaning up the environment and putting an end to off-world colonization. The EFEs don’t believe that it’s right for people on Earth to pollute our planet and then go do the same thing on other planets. They aren’t a very radical group, mostly just a lot of noisy people with colorful hair who chain themselves to rockets. So it wasn’t like Nita was some criminal mastermind. She was just my dumb sister who had dropped out of the Project Academy and was going through this dumb phase where she thought she could save the world with a bunch of other dumb people.
    “Well,” I huffed, standing up so quickly my chair fell over behind me. “If Nita’s not going, I’m not going. I want to live with Gram, too.”
    Just then Dad marched into the room. “All right, everyone, it’s time to go.” He handed me the book fromMrs. H. “Thanks for letting me look at this, Mike. Better put it in your box. You don’t want to forget it!”
    “But—” I said, not knowing what to complain about first. I didn’t need that stupid book on Mars.
    “Oh, here, I’ll do it,” he said, and grabbed the book back. He shoved it into my box.
    Mom whisked my plate off the table as if the preceding five minutes had never occurred. She took Nita’s plate and tossed it into the washer, too.
    “Leslie, would you mind grabbing the boxes? Kids, follow me….” And she headed out the front door without so much as a glance behind her.
    Nita and I looked at each other—she was smiling; I was breathing fire—and then Dad shoved us along. The drivedropper spat out the electri-car and the doors slid open.
    I stammered, “But, I don’t