I'm an Alien and I Want to Go Home Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Frontispiece

  My Family—The Kendals

  The Big Fat Family Secret

  The Trouble with Photographs

  The Truth About Me and My Life

  Photographs—Who Needs Them?

  Assembling the Mission Team

  When Is an Alien Not an Alien?

  I Am a Long Way from Home

  The Most Awesome Plan Ever

  The Truth About Cryogenics

  The Big Thaw

  The Boy Who Came from Earth

  Teacher Spit and Other Problems

  До ыоу спеак Руссиан?

  The Great Halloween Transformation

  Trick or Treat?

  A Spark of Genius

  The Supreme Communications Device

  The Trouble with Satellites

  Hiding the Evidence

  The Weird Case of the Hypnotic Laptop

  Communication—How to Do It

  Too Close for Comfort

  The Chosen One

  When Is a Friend Not a Friend?

  The Weird Case of the Missing Parents

  Voulez-vous un rendez-vous?

  Distraction Technique

  The Alien Mother Ship

  The Trouble with the Police

  The True Meaning of Friendship

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Text copyright © 2014 by Jo Franklin

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Marty Kelley

  Cover design by Lisa Vega

  First published in Germany in 2014 by Coppenrath Verlag.

  Published in English in the United States in 2015.

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Franklin, Jo.

  I’m an alien and I want to go home / Jo Franklin ; illustrated by Marty Kelley.

  pages cm

  Summary: Daniel has only two friends, is unusually tall, is picked on by teachers, and does not look like anyone else in his family, so when he learns his mom saved a newspaper clipping about a meteor that landed nearby on his birthday, he embraces his pretend alien heritage and launches a mission with his two friends to return to his home planet.

  ISBN 978-0-544-44295-5 (hardback)

  [1. Humorous stories. 2. Honesty—Fiction.] I. Kelley, Marty, illustrator. II. Title. III. Title: I am an alien and I want to go home.

  PZ7.1.F753Im 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015006822

  eISBN 978-0-544-44297-9

  v1.1115

  For Eleanor and Cedric

  1

  My Family—The Kendals

  Mom and Dad claim they met on a nudist beach in the tropics somewhere. These days they are only nudists in the shower. I am also a nudist in the shower, but I wear clothes at all other times.

  My incredibly annoying older sister, Jessie, has a Random Mood Generator. Her favorite tracks are Psycho, Bossy, and Mega Mean.

  When Mom lost her wedding ring, she located it using a metal detector. It was in the body of my baby brother, Timmy. She had to dig through all his dirty diapers until she found it. She still wears it. Gross.

  We live at 26 Beechwood Road. Dad thinks our address is boring, so he named our house and stuck a sign on the front. He thinks calling a house Konnichiwa (“hello” in Japanese) is cool. He is wrong.

  No one in my family knows my name. They call me Bean, short for Beanpole. I happen to know that my name is Daniel Kendal.

  I have nothing in common with my family.

  2

  The Big Fat Family Secret

  I like to eat breakfast on my own before going to school. It’s safer and quieter that way. Every day, I eat four single-serving boxes of Mega Flakes, which I stack like two double-decker buses parked next to each other on the table. I need the calories to feed my growing legs, which are very long and very hungry.

  Today I was still eating when Jessie came in to annoy me.

  “What is it with you and those freaky long legs, Beanpole?” Jessie said, waving her hair straightener around like a pair of manic chopsticks.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my legs.” I was unarmed. I grabbed my cereal boxes and built a wall across the kitchen table.

  “They’re weird and I don’t want them anywhere near me.” Jessie snapped her straightener at my feet.

  I pulled my legs back to my side of the table. No way was I letting her grab me with those superheated jaws. I was already the tallest kid on the planet—I didn’t need to be covered with stinky burnt hair as well.

  “I don’t even know what you’re doing living in this house,” she said.

  “I’m your brother.”

  “Really?” Jessie pushed the cereal boxes off the table and got right in my face.

  I had a clear view up her nose. I wasn’t sure how Jessie got that hair straightener up there without burning her nostrils, but the hair in her nose was definitely straight.

  “Wanna know the family secret?” she said. “The one about you?”

  “There are no secrets in this family,” I said. This is one of Mom’s favorite sayings.

  “No secrets?” Jessie said in her sarcastic voice. “Really?”

  She was right and Mom was wrong. There were lots of secrets in our family, and I knew some of them.

  Mom said she’d given up chocolate, but I’d found a giant almond Hershey bar behind the microwave, and the bar kept getting smaller.

  Timmy knows three bad words. I taught them to him myself.

  Jessie had a puff on a cigarette at Uncle Jimmy’s fortieth birthday party and then she was sick. (Serves her right.)

  When Mom thought Dad was cutting Mrs. Jenkins’s hedge, he was actually fixing Miss Duffy’s car. Dad calls Miss Duffy Carol. Mom calls her Killer Heels.

  I’ll be getting a new bike for Christmas. I wasn’t supposed to know, but I saw the catalog with a page ripped out. I hoped Mom would order the right bike. She likes pink, but I hate it.

  These were my top-five family secrets. I didn’t think the big fat family secret Jessie was referring to was my new bike.

  Jessie’s Random Mood Generator was stuck on Mega Mean. “You aren’t really my brother,” she growled.

  An icy chill crept up my back and wrapped itself around my neck.

  “You’re an alien, abandoned on Earth by your alien parents.” She snapped her straightener at me.

  “Dad didn’t want you.” Snap.

  “I didn’t want you.” Snap.

  “But Mom felt sorry for you. And now we’re stuck with you.” She whacked her stupid straightener at my head as she got up to leave. “Why don’t you take your alien legs and go back where you came from? And you can take Serena Blake with you. She loves aliens.”

  “Serena Blake?” I said. “Who’s that?”

  “A nutjob in my class. See ya later, alien boy.” Jessie threw a crust of toast at me and stormed out.

  What did she mean? Aliens didn’t exist. Except in movies, and those aliens had tentacles, crazy black eyeballs, or telescopic necks.

  I wasn’t like that. I was normal. Well, not exactly normal, but I was convinced I was one hundred percent human.

  So what did Jessie mean? She sai
d I wasn’t really her brother.

  A rock of doom smashed me in the stomach.

  Was she telling me I was adopted?

  3

  The Trouble with Photographs

  I was still wondering who I was when Timmy charged in and pointed at me.

  “Bean,” he said. “Bean bad.”

  “Thanks, buddy, I’m beginning to realize that.” I slumped on the chair, the rock of doom so heavy, I couldn’t stand.

  “Bean!” Timmy bashed my knees with his fists. I held his pudgy hands and looked at him closely. Then I thought about the other members of my family and what they looked like.

  TIMMY

  JESSIE

  MOM

  DAD

  ME

  EYES

  Baby blue

  Evil blue

  Normal blue

  Bloodshot

  Mud brown

  HAIR

  Blond with cereal

  Blond with hair gunk

  Blond with help from hairdresser

  Missing

  Brown

  HEIGHT

  Toddler

  Teen plus heels

  Normal plus heels sometimes

  Shorter than Mom

  Taller than everyone else in my family, my school, and my neighborhood

  My conclusion: I didn’t have a single strand of DNA in common with any of my so-called family.

  When Mom and Dad came into the kitchen, all I could do was stare. How come I’d never noticed it before? I looked nothing like them.

  “Jessie gone to school, Bean?” Mom said as she strapped Timmy into his highchair.

  “Duplo!” Timmy shouted.

  “She told me I’m not her brother,” I said.

  “Oh!” Mom and Dad said at exactly the same time, as if they were telepathic. It’s perfectly normal for best friends to be telepathic, but it was totally weird between a mom and a dad, particularly when they were being telepathic about me. I thought their reason for freaking out at exactly the same moment was that the truth about my misfit DNA was no longer a secret.

  “I’ll speak to Jessie later,” Dad said. “Remind her that we’re supposed to be nice to each other.”

  “Duplo!” Timmy banged his fists down on the tray of his highchair.

  “Jessie can’t be nice,” I said. “Why did she say that? I want to know the truth.”

  “Don’t take any notice of Jessie.” Dad picked up the toaster and turned it upside down, as though the bread was stuck inside. I guess Dad was studying the guts of the toaster as a way of avoiding my question. His bread was still sitting on his plate.

  “Where did I come from, Mom?” I said.

  “It started with a little egg and a little seed, but I haven’t got time for this now, Bean.” Mom grabbed a cereal bowl and slammed it on the table. Her ears had turned bright red, as if she was embarrassed. She knew I knew all the sex ed stuff, so I figured she was embarrassed because she was hiding the secret about me being adopted.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” I kicked the chair. “I mean me!”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Mom didn’t even look up. “Timmy, it’s breakfast time. No Duplo bricks at the table.”

  “Duplo!” Timmy shouted.

  “Cereal!” she shouted back.

  Timmy prefers toast. But Mom won’t give it to him, not since the time I taught him to play toast Frisbee and a stray piece stuck to her backside. It could have saved her a trip to the sandwich shop at lunchtime, but a dog found it before she did and nearly ripped her skirt off.

  Toast Frisbee is now forbidden in this house.

  “How did I come into this family?” I said.

  Dad cleared his throat and stared out the window.

  “Open wide, Timmy,” Mom said as she tried to push the spoon into Timmy’s mouth.

  “Any more butter?” Dad asked.

  “In the fridge,” Mom said.

  I felt exactly like that piece of Frisbee toast. Lonely and stuck somewhere I didn’t belong.

  Dad was too busy avoiding the little egg/little seed talk to listen to me.

  Mom was too busy looking after Timmy.

  My parents didn’t want to speak to me, their maybe-adopted son. I needed hard evidence. Then they’d have to tell me the truth.

  I grabbed my backpack and pretended I was leaving the house. But I sneaked into the family room instead. The photo albums were on the bottom shelf of the bookcase.

  Every year on New Year’s Eve, Mom goes through all the photos she has taken that year and picks out the best ones for the album.

  I pulled out the album for the year I was born and flicked through the pages. My birthday is in April, so I expected to find myself a quarter of the way through the album.

  Photos I found:

  Jessie in a Snow White outfit, trampling over seven dwarfs.

  Jessie ripping a teddy bear’s arms off. Mom had written underneath, She hasn’t changed.

  Jessie at the beach with no clothes on.

  I turned the page quick. Jessie was only four in the photo and I hadn’t even been born, but I didn’t need to see her training to be a nudist.

  After that, the pages were completely blank.

  Mom’s photo album for the year I was supposed to have been born was empty. There were no photos of me as a baby.

  The rock of doom had left me. Instead I felt empty.

  Four single-serving boxes of Mega Flakes weren’t enough to fill the howling emptiness of not being a true member of the family.

  I slapped the empty book shut. A scrap of paper flew out from between the pages and floated to the floor. An old newspaper clipping. Probably something about Jessie winning the Most Beautiful Baby competition or Granddad winning a ribbon for his prize pumpkin. I didn’t know which page the scrap came from, so I shoved it in my pocket.

  I grabbed the next album off the shelf and flipped it open.

  Jessie’s first school photo.

  Jessie dressed as a pirate, missing a tooth.

  I flipped the page.

  At last, a picture of me. I was standing by the kitchen table with my hands in the air. Mom had written I can walk! underneath it.

  In the photo I wasn’t a baby. I was already a toddler.

  I kept turning the pages. There I was:

  Riding my kiddie car, knees up to my chin.

  In a child seat on the back of Dad’s bike, my feet dragging on the ground.

  At the beach, using my cone of soft-serve ice cream as sunscreen while the rest of the family ate theirs.

  In every photo I was getting older and taller.

  The other albums were the same, chock-full of photos of Jessie and me growing up. The albums for the last two years included pictures of Timmy.

  In one photo of the three of us, Jessie and Timmy looked like twins with an age gap—blond hair, blue eyes, smiling. I was standing apart from them, scowling.

  My hair was different from theirs, and I never smiled for photos. I looked like a neighbor dragged along on a Kendal family outing.

  There was absolutely no photographic record of Baby Daniel—me. In a family where photos were taken all the time, that could mean only one thing.

  I wasn’t part of this family when I was a baby. I was born somewhere else.

  I must have been adopted.

  4

  The Truth About Me and My Life

  I left the house to walk to school. But I couldn’t walk, I trudged. The photographic truth weighed me down so I couldn’t lift my feet off the sidewalk. I wasn’t a true Kendal.

  “Nice socks!” the mailman said.

  I looked down at my ankles to see what he meant.

  I like to get dressed in the dark. That way I don’t have to look at myself. Who wants to be reminded first thing in the morning that they’re too tall to be normal? Unfortunately, I had put on the socks Jessie gave me as a sick Christmas joke. Black with big pink hearts. The worst socks ever.

  A constructio
n worker whistled from the top of some high scaffolding.

  “Nice socks!” he shouted.

  I was going to be massacred when I got to school. Weird socks are not cool. I ducked behind a trash container and raided my backpack for a black felt-tip. Then I colored in the hearts so it looked like I was wearing black socks below my too-short jeans. Unfortunately, the black pen rubbed off onto my skin, so it looked like I hadn’t washed for a week. The black felt pen didn’t smell, though, and I hoped no one would notice.

  If Mom bought me jeans that fit, the whole “nice socks” thing would go away. But obviously I wasn’t as important to her as her other kids, the ones she gave birth to.

  I managed to get into my classroom without any more socks comments. Eddie was already there.

  “I have a good one for you today, Dan my man,” Eddie said. “Ready for the Toxic Samurai? Stand back—I could accidentally kill you.”

  Eddie is always trying to impress me with his extreme personal habits.

  He tensed his body and raised his hands in a defensive kung fu position, his potato-chip bag clenched between his teeth. He scowled and went cross-eyed.

  “Get on with it, buddy,” I said. “Mr. Pitdown’s going to walk in any minute.” Mr. Pitdown is our teacher. He’s not impressed by Eddie’s performances.

  Eddie hopped up and down on one foot and lashed out with the other leg, spinning his whole body around. As he whizzed past, he let out an enormous fart. Then his foot caught under a chair, throwing it into the air. It sailed over his head and toward a huddle of girls whispering and giggling.

  “Watch out!” Rooners, the superjock, shouted as he launched himself at the girls, shoving them out of the way.