John Scalzi - Zoe`s Tale

"Oh, look," Gretchen said. "Teenage boys, about to do something stupid."

"Shut up," I said. "That couldn't possibly happen." But I looked anyway.

Sure enough, across the Magellan's common area, two clots of teenage males were staring each other down with that look of we're so gonna fight about something lame. They were all getting ready for a snarl, except for one of them, who gave every appearance of trying to talk some sense into one guy who looked particularly itchin' to fight.

"There's one who appears to have a brain," I said.

"One out of eight," Gretchen said. "Not a really excellent percentage. And if he really had a brain he'd probably be getting out of the way."

"This is true," I said. "Never send a teenage boy to do a teenage girl's job."

Gretchen grinned over to me. "We have that mind-meld thing going, don't we?"

"I think you know the answer to that," I said.

"You want to plan it out or just improvise?" Gretchen asked.

"By the time we plan it out, someone's going to be missing teeth," I said.

"Good point," Gretchen said, and then got up and started moving toward the boys.

Twenty seconds later the boys were startled to find Gretchen in the middle of them. "You're making me lose a bet," she said, to the one who looked the most aggressive.

The dude stared for a moment, trying to wrap whatever was passing for his brain around this sudden and unexpected appearance. "What?" he said.

"I said, you're making me lose a bet," Gretchen repeated, and then jerked a thumb over toward me. "I had a bet with Zoë here that no one would start a fight on the Magellan before we actually left dock, because no one would be stupid enough to do something that would get their entire family kicked off the ship."

"Kicked off the ship two hours before departure, even," I said.

"Right," Gretchen said. "Because what sort of moron would you have to be to do that?"

"A teenage boy moron," I suggested.

"Apparently," Gretchen said. "See—what's your name?"

"What?" the guy said again.

"Your name," Gretchen said. "What your mother and father will call you, angrily, once you've gotten them kicked off the ship."

The guy looked around at his friends. "Magdy," he said, and then opened his mouth as if to say something.

"Well, see, Magdy, I have faith in humanity, even the teenage male part of it," Gretchen said, plowing through whatever it was that our Magdy might have had to say. "I believed that not even teenage boys would be dumb enough to give Captain Zane an excuse to kick a bunch of them off the ship while he still could. Once we're under way, the worst he could do is put you in the brig. But right now he could have the crew drop you and your family at the loading bay. Then you could watch the rest of us wave good-bye. Surely, I said, no one could be that incredibly dense. But my friend Zoë disagreed. What did you say, Zoë?"

"I said that teenage boys can't think beyond or without their newly dropped testicles," I said, staring at the boy who had been trying to talk sense into his pal. "Also, they smell funny."

The boy grinned. He knew what we were up to. I didn't grin back; I didn't want to mess with Gretchen's play.

"And I was so convinced that I was right and she was wrong that I actually made a bet," Gretchen said. "I bet every single dessert I'd get here on the Magellan that no one would be that stupid. That's a serious bet."

"She loves her dessert," I said.

"It's true, I do," Gretchen said.

"She's a dessert fiend," I said.

"And now you are going to make me lose all my desserts," Gretchen said, poking Magdy in the chest. "This is not acceptable."

There was a snerk from the boy Magdy had been facing off with. Gretchen wheeled on him; the boy actually flinched backward. "I don't know why you think this is funny," Gretchen said. "Your family would have been thrown off the ship just like his."

"He started it," the boy said.

Gretchen blinked, dramatically. "'He started it'? Zoë, tell me I heard that wrong."

"You didn't," I said. "He really said it."

"It doesn't seem possible that anyone over the age of five would be using that as a rationale for anything," Gretchen said, examining the boy critically.

"Where's your faith in humanity now?" I asked.

"I'm losing it," Gretchen said.

"Along with all your desserts," I said.

"Let me guess," Gretchen said, and waved generally at the clot of boys in front of her. "You're all from the same planet." She turned and looked at the other boy clot. "And you're all from another planet." The boys shifted uncomfortably; she had gotten their number. "And so the first thing you do is you start picking fights because of where you used to live."

"Because that's the smart thing to do with people you're going to spend the rest of your life living with," I said.

"I don't remember that being in the new colonist orientation material," Gretchen said.

"Funny about that," I said.

"Indeed," Gretchen said, and stopped talking.

There was silence for several seconds.

"Well?" Gretchen said.

"What?" Magdy said. It was his favorite word.

"Are you going to fight now or what?" Gretchen said. "If I'm going to lose my bet, now's as good a time as any."

"She's right," I said. "It's almost lunchtime. Dessert is calling."

"So either get on with it or break it up," Gretchen said. She stepped back.

The boys, suddenly aware that whatever it was they were fighting about had been effectively reduced to whether or not some girl would get a cupcake, dispersed, each clot headed pointedly in a separate direction from the other. The sane boy glanced back at me as he walked off with his friends.

"That was fun," Gretchen said.

"Yeah, until they all decide to do it again," I said. "We can't use the dessert humiliation trick every time. And there are colonists from ten separate worlds. That's a hundred different possible idiotic teenage boy fight situations."

"Well, the colonists from Kyoto are Colonial Mennonites," Gretchen said. "They're pacifists. So it's only eighty-one possible idiotic teenage boy fight combinations."

"And yet still only two of us," I said. "I don't like the odds. And how did you know about the Kyoto folks, anyway?"

"When my father was still thinking he'd be running the colony, he made me read the reports on all the colonists and their original planets," Gretchen said. "He said I was going to be his aide-de-camp. Because, you know, that's really what I would have wanted to do with my time."

"Comes in handy, though," I said.

Gretchen pulled out her PDA, which was buzzing, and looked at the screen. "Speaking of which," she said, and showed me the screen. "Looks like Dad's calling."

"Go be aide de camp-y," I said.

Gretchen rolled her eyes. "Thanks. Want to get together for the departure? And then we can go have lunch. You'll have lost the bet by then. I'll get your dessert."

"Touch my dessert and you will die in horrible ways," I said. Gretchen laughed and left.

I pulled out my own PDA to see if there were messages from John or Jane; there was one from Jane telling me that Hickory and Dickory were looking for me about something. Well, they knew I was onboard, and they also knew how to reach me by PDA; it's not like I went anywhere without it. I thought about giving them a call but I figured they would find me sooner or later. I put the PDA away and looked up to find the sane boy standing in front of me.

"Hi," he said.

"Uh," I said, a testament to my smoothness.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to sneak up on you like that," he said.

"It's okay," I said, only a little flustered.

He stuck out his hand. "Enzo," he said. "And you're Zoë, I guess."

"I am," I said, taking his hand and shaking it.