Mothership Read Online Free Page B

with an iron fist), but because I know he’d actually be cool about it. He definitely wouldn’t bail on me the second I told him he’d knocked me up, for one thing. He’d, like, squeeze me up in a hug and kiss my forehead and tell me we’d figure it out together. All the things Cole Archer was too busy packing up his suitcase to have the time to do. If it were Ducky’s baby, maybe I’d actually want to keep the thing. Because Ducky would make a hell of a dad. He might even be amenable to sticking around, going to PTA meetings while I’m off colonizing planets—assuming this little detour hasn’t nixed that plan. And because I wouldn’t mind having a miniature Ducky around all the time, with the same shaggy black curls, goofy brown eyes, and long pointy elbows (seriously, they could, like, cut paper). But it turns out that the kind of guy you want to raise a baby with isn’t always the kind you want to make one with in the first place.
    “Ducky?” I say. He looks up, his pointer finger still covered in brine bits. I give him a soft smile. “Don’t worry about me so much, all right? I’ll be okay, I swear.”
    He bites his bottom lip. “But you don’t have a plan ,” he says.
    The guy is starting to sound just a little bit like my dad, which is seriously making me rethink donating my kidney to him. But I fight the urge to sock him with a couch pillow. “A plan?” I say. “I’ve got a plan.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Seriously. Check it out. I’m going to rock the bump for six-and-whatever more months, Lamaze it out in, like, an hour,and some infertile rich couple will adopt the crap out of it. Then next year I’ll get accepted early admission into the honors program at Penn State and spend all of senior year chillaxing while you’re stressing about your SATs. See? A plan.” I’ve been gunning for an engineering scholarship to the Honors College since the president first proposed the Ares Project as part of his Solar Colonization Initiative when I was still in middle school. How could I not want to be a part of that? An actual colony on Mars—the first ever terraforming attempt on another planet. Sure, there are a few small domed colonies on the moon, like New Houston, but that’s child’s play compared to what they’re planning now. Of course, the program is still in its infancy, at least ten years off—which will give me plenty of time to ace my way through college, get into a top space engineering grad program, and then hopefully qualify for one of the eight NASA postdoc fellowships to prepare engineers for Ares. I’ve had the itch for this forever, and before now there’d never been anything keeping me from scratching it.
    Ducky does not look convinced. “But what if you decide you want to—”
    “Dude, Duck.” I give him a look, one usually reserved for sitcom actors dealing with serious moments . “I have an entire book full of stuff my mom didn’t get to experience because she had me.” I point upstairs to my room, where he knows very well my mother’s book of maps is propped up on my bookshelf. “I’m not gonna let some boneheaded mistake ruin my chances of actually doing something myself.”
    “I get it,” Ducky says. “But don’t you want to think about other—”
    My death glare silences him. “I’m going to the library next week to look up adoption agencies,” I say.
    Ducky is silent for a while, scratching his mop of messy black curls. “What about Britta?” he asks at last.
    “You think she wants it? ’Cause she doesn’t really seem like the maternal type.”
    Ducky rolls his eyes at me. “If you think she’s bad now, how brutal do you think she’ll be when she finds out the father of your baby is—”
    I sock him in the arm. “Not worth mentioning?”
    “Obviously,” he says as he rubs the bruise. “But still . . .”
    “No one has to know,” I tell Ducky, and now it’s his turn to give me a look. “I’ll wear muumuus. Or, like, a neon