Jumping Off the Planet

MOM AND DAD I've got an idea!" dad said. "Let's go to the moon." "Huh?" I looked up from my comic. "I mean it. What do you kids think? Do you want to go to the moon?" "Yeah, sure," I said, not believing him any more than I had all the other times he'd dangled promises in front of my nose. In the last thirteen years, or at least as much of them as I could remember, he'd promised me the stars, the sky, and a trip to Disneyland. The only time I saw the stars was on TV, the sky was brown, and I still hadn't ridden the Matterhorn bobsleds and probably never would, at least not until I paid for the trip myself. So when he asked me if I'd like to go to the moon, it sounded like just another one of those things that adults say for no other reason than to use up air. Is it just me, or is there something about grownups? What happens when you turn twenty-one? Does the brain shrivel up automatically or do you have to have an operation where your judgment lobes are removed? Adults can't stay in the same room with a kid without having to talk. Adults think they have torelateto me. But I don't want to berelatedto. I want to be left alone. Dad shows up twice a year. We get him two weeks at a time. "We" includes me, my weird older brother and my stinky younger brother. Sometimes the older brother is stinky and the younger one is weird. I think they've got some kind of a deal where they have to take turns. I hate being the middle kid. Weird builds worlds. He never shows anybody what he builds, but he spends hours a day at his terminal. He rents processor time from UCLA, and pays for it by fumigating code for the evolutionarily challenged. He's in the scholarship pipeline, so he's deep into the net. As big brothers go, he's not the worst, but he never pulled a bully off me either, so what good is he? Mom and him had a big fight just before my birthday, about his money for college, and his job, and stuff like that. Nothing was resolved, except that things were more sullen than usual, which is hard to do, because sullen is normal in our house. The two of them avoided each other like they had been magnetized in the same direction. It was fascinating to watch. I think they call it agavotte. That's a kind of a dance where everybody moves slowly and carefully and keeps out of everybody else's way. They didn't even talk to each other at my birthday dinner. That's when Mom announced that Dad would be coming early for us this year and we'd be spending a month with him instead of two weeks. She said it while cutting the cake, like it was supposed to be an extra present for me. She said it was what Dad wanted and she wasn't going to argue about it, it would be good for us to spend a little more time with our father. But I figured she just wanted usout. She looked tireder than usual, and she kept saying she wanted out of the war zone. Like she was blaming us. But we didn't ask to be born. Especially Stinky. Stinky doesn't do much of anything except whine and wet his bed. Dad thinks Mom is ruining him. I think he's already ruined. I once told him he was an accidentthe accident that split up Mom and Dadand that was another multi-megaton war. Now I know why they call it the nuclear family. Mom spent half the day trying to calm Stinky down, and the other half on the phone with Dad, and I got all the fallout from everybody. I spent the next three months trying to stay out of the house as much as possible. I would grab some recordings and my headphones and get on my bike early in the morning and see how far I could ride befGerrold, David is the author of 'Jumping Off the Planet' with ISBN 9780812576085 and ISBN 081257608X.