Chapter 10: Brooks Hatlen High

Homecoming was rigged, I tell you. Rigged! Of course Michael Melville, local football god and soon to be an actual Harvard student was crowned Homecoming King. His date, Marina Revenna, the current head cheerleader, was Homecoming Queen. This was all expected. This was the normal way of things in high schools across America. What was not natural was his campaign to get me elected as Senior class Prince. His successful campaign, damn him! It also meant I had to pose with the Homecoming Court alongside the Senior class Princess, Amanda Hodecker, who had starred as the lead in every school play the drama club had performed during our four years at Brooks Hatlen High. She was also the person likely to finish as class Salutatorian behind me, as I was the assumed Valedictorian, and in fact unofficially was, as I’d been told to prepare a speech and have it ready for the principal and the school board to approve before February 1st. Apparently these days they did ‘plagiarism searches’ to make sure the speech was not ‘tainted’ with cheating.

However my disgruntlement over this conspiracy was overshadowed, vastly overshadowed, by the girl on my arm almost every other moment of the dance. Natalie Brooks was a vision! Her dress was, of course, emerald green, her hair done up with emerald stars and sparkles and little white flowers of some kind. Her dress was long and flowing at the bottom and clingy at the top with a modestly plunging neckline that revealed what I considered to be an ample amount of cleavage. A lot of other guys must have thought so too, as I caught a lot of them staring.

We danced almost every slow dance and most of the fast ones. The only reason it was almost every slow dance was that Mike and I swapped partners for one dance. One only. Not that he asked for more, but I turned down all other requests the entire night. Towards the end of the night, after the king and his court were announced but before they dimmed the lights and called the last dance, which was long and sappy but a great song to grope to, we were dancing in a corner of the gym floor where the Senior couples seemed to have migrated and suddenly Nat molded herself to me, looked up at me all dewy-eyed, with moist lips and heaving breasts and while managing breathless and gushing at the same time said. “I’m dancing with the Senior Prince, Oh My God, I can’t believe it!”

I looked down, managing to keep my eyes from continuing down to that cleavage and while staring, eye to eye, raised an eyebrow.

Which cracked her up. She laughed a hard, high pitched laugh that thankfully did not descend into anything embarrassing. This caused some spectacular jiggling to commence down where I had NOT been looking. I fought to keep my eyes on hers and failed, several times. She sighed and molded back into me, this time a little less cling, but put her cheek on my shoulder and gave me a hug. I hugged back.

No after parties, no suite reserved at a local hotel (I wasn’t sure our local hotels even had suites). We drove back to the apartment building and rode the elevator up. Mom was awake when we walked through the door. We had a toaster strudel and a cup of cocoa and went to bed; me in mine and Nat in the guest room. It was directly across the hall from my room, so when we got there, I thanked Nat for being my prom date and for making prom a moment I would remember forever.

“Here’s another one,” she said and pulled me down for a kiss.

A long, very warm and tender kiss. Yes, it would be one of those memories.

Mom made us breakfast in the morning and then Nat drove off, headed for home and then to catch the plane back to Blacksburg, Virginia and her dorm at Virginia Tech. I rode my bike down to the warehouse and stared around for a while before I broke my mood and headed for the hangar.

We had gotten the ship opened up that day back in August. It was sort of anticlimactic, in a majorly jaw-dropping way. With Nat holding the ladder she had lowered down into the ship I climbed down with Brainstorm close behind. Stellar was going to stay at the bottom of the ladder and monitor us. That was the plan. As soon as I had both feet on the floor inside the ship, that changed a little.

After a long few minutes of staring around at the featureless walls, floor, ceiling and what looked like empty counters, empty console panels and otherwise empty spaces we began looking for a way out. We gave up an hour later. My alien spaceship appeared to be an empty shell.

From that moment until Homecoming I’d banged my head against the problem of a disappointingly empty ship. Meanwhile the Gadgeteer had steady work fixing and repairing super suits.

The Egyptian hero Dust showed up for his suit a week after Stellar and the rest had left. Portal had offered Wraith and the Subaru a lift back to Independence, so she’d been able to stick around to say her goodbyes with a few serious smooches!

Dust really liked his suit. It was impressive to see him suddenly turn into a mini dust storm and flow into the suit and reform himself inside it. I wondered why he even needed a suit given his abilities, but when I asked, he laughed showing a huge gold tooth on the left side of his mouth.