American Girl On Saturn (9 page)

“You two are so much alike,” she tells them. “Such explosive personalities. Can we just try to get along – or avoid each other – until the end of this lockdown?”

Aralie gives Jules a death glare and storms out of the room. Benji clears his throat to draw Mom’s and Jules’
s attention.

“I think I’m
gonna go for a swim,” Benji says. “To cool off. Jules should come with me.”

Mom says it’s a wonderful idea, and the
bromance of Jenji exits the room. Emery jumps up to follow, but Mom stops her. She says that the guys need some “boy time.”

Emery disappears upstairs, leaving me with Tate, Milo, and Noah…and the pixilated cougar on the screen. How has no one mentioned this crazy old woman who wants in Tate’s pants?

“We should probably go with Benji and Jules,” Tate suggests.

Noah agrees, something about showing Jule
s that they’re all here for him. Noah and Tate head outside, leaving me alone with Milo and the screenshot.

“I should probably go with them,” Milo says. “Jules is having a harder time with this lockdown bit than any of us.”

Obviously. He picks fights with my sister any chance he can. Laundry. Twitter followers. Now her favorite band. It’s like he makes it a priority to piss Aralie off. He knows he’s going to provoke her and get under her skin, and he thrives off of it. How dare he play the victim card in front of Mom like that. That untalented
jerkoff.

“You’re right,” I say. I have to get rid of Milo before I take my anger toward Jules out on him. “Go give him one of those mature Milo Grayson lectures. Offer him some Oreos.”

“Are you kidding? I only share Oreos with you.” He smiles a perfect smile and heads toward the pool. But he stops and looks back. “I’ll see you later?”

“Definitely.” I say the word too fast.

Luckily he disappears around the corner. The patio door squeaks when he pulls it open. I wait to hear it click shut before I grab the remote. I stop Emery’s DVD. That old chick can date and mate with Tate some other time. I rush upstairs to my bedroom – away from arguing sisters, untalented bad boys, and cougars after Saturn.

And there he is on my door. Tate’s head. Again. I peel it off, stick him back on Aralie’s door, and shut myself away in my bedroom. I don’t know what’s so damn funny about Tate’s head
on our bedroom doors, but I don’t even feel like arguing.

I crawl onto my bed, flip open my laptop, and browse the gossip columns to see what new theories have been posted about Spaceships Around Saturn and where they may be. I’ve read everything from a deserted tropical island near Cuba to an underground cave in the depths of the Rocky Mountains. It’s amazing what people come up with on the internet.

I head over to Twitter to see what’s being said, but I pull up Milo’s account instead. His last tweet was the night of the shooting.

It reads
:
About to play NYC! Get pumpedddd! I have the best life everrrr!

His extra letters make me smile. Below his tweet is a retweet of Noah.

NYC is about to get Saturnized! Bring it loud! We wanna hear you scream!

My heart actually sinks like a mutilated artery. I feel so terribly sad for them. There they were, in their hotel rooms or maybe backstage warming up, tweeting to their millions of fans. All of those Saturnites were in the audience, waiting for this big NYC show, with their posters and their Spaceships Around Saturn T-Shirts.

Milo thought he had the best life everrrr, and Noah was excited about the loud fans. God, this sucks for them. There’s even a twinge of pity in my faltering heart for Jules. I shouldn’t have said he was untalented, even if I never verbalized it. He’s obviously got something that appeals to 6.9 million followers. This is what he meant, though. He should be living that DVD, not watching it on lockdown with us while arguing with Aralie.

I don’t know how long I stare at Milo’s Twitter feed before there’s a knock at my door. I slam the laptop shut, so no one will know what I was doing, and announce that the door’s open. Emery peeks her head inside.

“Hey,” she says. “Can you do me a favor and get on the Twitter and see what’s going on?”

She slides in between the door and the frame like a little snake slithering into my bedroom. Then she bounces over to my bed and hops up with a big smile.

“The guys haven’t been on Twitter,” I remind her. “They don’t have access, remember?”

She nods. “I know. I just
wanna see what all those stupid girls are saying about our boys.”

She says ‘our boys’ in that same insinuating voice that Tate used when he said ‘ooh la
la.’ Part of me knows that she only chose my room to come into because I follow them on Twitter. But another part of me wants to believe that she knows I’m secretly becoming a Saturnite.

I laugh and open up my laptop. I click the ‘home’ button on Twitter before she can see Milo’s feed plastered on my screen. The screen refreshes in record nanoseconds.

“What I am looking for first?” I ask.

“Look up that Zoe girl who is always talking about Benji,” she says.

Sadly, I know exactly who she’s talking about. Zoe is maybe fifteen, a huge Benji fan, and has pink streaks in her blonde hair. Her profile picture is one of her with Benji when she met SAS in January. She also tweets fifty to one hundred times a day, mostly to Benji, and she has two million followers herself. People retweet her religiously. She’s like a Saturnite cult leader.

I type the Z into the search bar. Zayn Malik from One Direction pops up instantly. Without thinking, I click on him, and Emery sees that blue
button that says I’m following Zayn all lit up before I can hit the back button in the browser.

She gasps. “You follow a One Direction guy?”

I should lie. I should say it was an accident.
I don’t know how I clicked to follow him. It must be a mistake.
But she’ll see right through me.

“He can sing, like, amazingly well,” I say in my own defense. “And he draws. He tweets pictures of his drawings, and I like to look at them. He’s their best singer. Give me a break.”

She studies my face for a second, glances at Zayn’s rarely-updated Twitter feed, and squints her eyes at me.

“Who is the best singer in Spaceships Around Saturn?” she asks, all serious and businesslike.

I fake hesitation to make her think that I’m having to debate my answer.

“Milo,” I finally say, holding back all of my eagerness.

She stares at me even harder now. “Who is a better singer – Milo or Zayn from One Direction?”

This time, I don’t hesitate.

“Milo,” I say. “Definitely Milo.”

She smiles a pageant-winning smile, slowly and happily.

“Good!” she says. “You can follow Zayn.”

Nice to know I have the permission of a
five-year-old to follow a boyband guy outside of Spaceships Around Saturn. I didn’t think she’d be so kind to an Earthling like that.

We browse Zoe’s Twitter feed, which is nothing but wishes of return for ‘our b
oys.’ I dig through a few other feeds that Emery suggests, but there’s nothing out there that we don’t already know. Actually, we know more – we know exactly where they are. They’re in our swimming pool at the moment.

“I can’t believe someone shot at them,” Emery says quietly. “That’s sad. What if they got shot or hurt or something? Then I
would
cry like a crybaby.”

Her face goes all sad, like a hound dog puppy with big eyes and droopy ears. She stares at my screen, and her eyes glaze over. I’m not sure if she’s goin
g to cry, so I unleash the last bit of hope for gossip that I have.

“Have you ever watched Darby’s Daily Dose of Drama?” I ask her. “She’s a YouTube girl.”

Emery shakes her head while I type in the URL for Darby’s channel. I just discovered Darby days ago, when the Saturn guys first showed up at our house, but I’ve watched most of her videos and fallen in love with her wit and silly gossip.

Her photo pops up on the screen. She’s a fellow brunette with blonde highlights, maybe sixteen years old. She sort of looks like a dolphin with wide eyes and a silly mouth-shut grin. At least she doesn’t pose with that stupid duck face.

Emery and I stretch out on my bed, and I position the laptop on my pillow. Darby’s segments are only about a minute or two long, but she posts daily. Most days, it’s about Spaceships Around Saturn. She’s a self-proclaimed Saturnite, and she’s Team Tate, so I figure Emery will like her. I admit, it helps me like her knowing she doesn’t want Milo.

I click on today’s post, which I haven’t watched yet. The headline pops up, and I burst into laughter. I
face-plant into my blankets.

Emery pauses the video and says, “What!? What!?” nonstop in a total fangirl panic.

I pull away from the blankets, inhale, and glance up at the screen. The words are frozen in aqua blue.
Was SAS’s Shooting Faked For Jules to Have Cosmetic Surgery?

As soon as I see the words, I fall back into my blankets. Emery pulls the computer screen down so I can’t see it and waits for me to regain some composure. Finally, I push myself up into a sitting position.

“She wants to know if the shooting was faked for Jules to have plastic surgery,” I say.

Emery stares at me like it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard. Maybe she doesn’t understand. Okay, maybe it’s not that funny. I push the screen back and hit play. A picture of Jules making a pained face while scratching his eyebrow piercing pops up next.

“So guys,” Darby says through my speakers. “We all know Jules has had that eyebrow piercing for quite some time now. Some of you love it and find it super sexy. And some of you, like me, think it’s an atrocious piece of metal sprouting from his face.”

She curls her nose up, and the screen flashes to a picture of Jules. I admit, it’s a better picture of him. He’s wearing a tight black shirt and doing that badass smirk that he usually can’t pull off. The piercing doesn’t look so bad. It really fits his look.

The photo fizzles out, and a new one takes its place. He looks like he was mid-sneeze when some paparazzi stalker snapped this one. Half of his face is crinkled up, with his mouth in a creepy snarl and his eye half shut. The picture slowly enlarges, zooming in on his eye and piercing.

Emery doubles over in giggles. I pause the video – Jules’s half-eye plastered on the screen – and I laugh along with her. It’s like his piercing has sunken into his face and fish-hooked his eyeball from the inside. Eww, gross. I really hope he was mid-sneeze.

I hit play because I can’t take that face any longer. Emery and I focus our attention back on Darby, who has thankfully reappeared after those screenshots.

“So here’s the latest scoop,” she says. “Word on the street has it that there was never a shooting at the NYC show. A speaker blew. But the guys had to fall off the earth for now because Jules needed some…cosmetic work done…to fix his face.”

I exchange glances with my baby sister. I shrug. I have no idea what Darby is talking about, but she quickly informs us.

“I’m sure all of you earring-wearing girls know about infections,” she says. “Imagine how gross of an infection you’d have if your eyebrow piercing got infected.” She cringes and sticks her tongue out.

“Gross,” Emery whispers. “He has an infected face? He’s in our house! I don’t want to catch his eyebrow germs.”

I pause Darby’s video for the millionth time it
seems. I never have to pause during her segments, even when they’re amusing. Watching with Emery takes this to a whole new level of hilarious. I watched two hours of these things last night after I came in from catching fireflies with Milo. However, aside from his lifesaving tactics, there isn’t much on Darby’s channel about him. Emery hits play before I can explain that Jules’s face is perfectly healthy.

“Well,” Darby says. “Guess who’s infected? Yep. Our own
Saturn bad boy, Jules Rossi. The reports are all over the map, but some say it left a minor scar. Others? They say he needed full facial reconstruction on the left side of his face!”

Emery inhales sharply. “Oh gosh!”

“Emery,” I say. “His face is fine. He’s here, with us. You see him every day. This is all just gossip.”

Darby continues speaking. “I thought you guys might need to prepare yourselves for what Jules may look like once the tour has resumed, so here are some possibilities
thanks to the wonders of Photoshop. Until tomorrow, this is Darby signing off from Darby’s Daily Dose of Drama!”

She blows a kiss at the screen. Then the altered images of Jules’s face pop up in a slideshow. The first one has a blue glass eye in his socket. Emery cringes, but I laugh. The next shows his nose squished into a thin line down the center of his face and his eyes drooping. Emery laughs this time. The last one has his eye pulled tightly to one side, stretching it thin. His eyebrow is also pulled toward his ear, flattened out as not to show the “infection scar.”

“He looks like Mulan,” Emery says. “But uglier.”

I exit the browser.
I just can’t take it anymore.

“Don’t tell the guys,” I say. “You can’t let them know about Darby. I watch her every day, so you can start watching it too. But it has to be our secret. You especially can’t tell Jules.”

She nods her head like I’ve threatened her with her life. But then she sighs.

“I have to tell you something
,” she says, hanging her head. “It’s a big secret.”

This actually terrifies me.

“I…I like…” She freezes. “I like Harry Styles more than Jules even though Jules is in Spaceships Around Saturn.”

Her shoulders fall, and her chest releases like she’s just spilled her guts and can finally breathe again.

I run a fake zipper across my lips and toss the imaginary key.

“It’s safe with me
,” I assure her.

“It’ll be our sister secret,” she says. “We can be secret Saturnites together. And you can follow Zayn, and I’ll like Harry more than Jules.”

Oh God. Does she think I’m a true Saturnite now? I mean, yeah, behind closed doors or hidden in tents, sure. But with Emery? That’s a bit beyond my comfort zone. It’s too late to turn back now, though.