Keeping Score
By S. J. Lyman

My name is Kit, short for Christopher. I live in a junky little space freighter with my pa, George; my dad, Ed; and my little foster sister, Lllth. “Lllth” is the sound you make if you talk while sticking your tongue out, which is pretty appropriate if you ask me. Lllth is one of the BLllth people. She looks pretty much like a lizard. She comes up to my knees standing up, but when I lie down we’re about the same length.

She’s way ahead of me at schoolwork, especially math and science. That’s humiliating enough, but on top of that Dad says she’s about to go through a growth spurt and become much stronger than I am, so I’d better stop holding her in the air by her tail when she gets annoying. I say, If not now, when?

Anyway, the other morning at breakfast Lllth and I were sucking up our scrambled egg slurpies, and my parents were insulting each other’s taste in professional thumb wrestling teams, when one of the consoles beeped. We had the scanners on permanent alert for large touring spaceships, space stations, and colony ships, which are how we make our living.

We need big ships full of bored rich people to hire Pa. He’s a culinary artist—he sets short stories to dinners. Each character is a different taste, changing subtly as the story unfolds and being continuously influenced by the other characters (represented by other tastes and combinations of spices). As the plot gets more intense, so does the food. At the end is a creamy sweet dessert (for the happy ending). Pa always chooses happy endings. He says that before he had that policy he was forced to end one performance with pimentos and stale heels of bread, and he was never going to let that happen again. He told me, “Kit, it’s all about the art for me, but at some point you do have to think about keeping the audience happy.”

I ran to the console as soon as I heard the beep. Lllth ran after me, her toenails clicking and scratching on the polished freighter floor. The scanners showed a ship like a hairy blob, with tunnels, extensions, and wires sticking out all over something that had never had any shape to start with. Clearly a colony ship; they’re just made for a one-way trip, and no one on board worries about how they might be seen by anyone else.

Dad sent us back to our breakfasts and worked on contacting the ship and bringing us into port. They gave us permission to board. They always do—ship food gets boring fast, and we could probably board any ship just because of the spices and pickles in our storerooms.

We docked the ship. Lllth and I pushed our way ahead of our parents to get out of the exit first. After a month in our freighter studying mathematics (me) and the influence of string theory on breakfast preparation (Lllth), we were more than ready to have some room to move and meet some new people.

A human man with an automatic clipboard was standing at the door blocking our way to the rest of the ship. I managed to stop running before I bumped into him. I could hear Lllth’s toenails scraping to a stop behind me, a sound that’s enough to make all the skin on your face clench itself into a knot.

“Please state your names and businesses for the official record,” the man said in a clipped version of Universal Trade Lingo, not looking up from his clipboard.

“I’m Kit Everton, and this is Lllth, and we don’t really have a business. We’re here with our parents.”

“Parents!” The man looked at me with interest. “You have some parents with you? Will they be parenting you while they’re aboard this ship?”

The intensity of his interest seemed odd. I looked at Lllth, and Lllth looked at me. “Yes…?” she said, using the gestural version of Universal Trade Lingo.

The man put his clipboard aside and looked around quickly as if he were afraid that someone might be listening in on us. “Would you say that your parents are particularly good at parenting?” he asked in a low voice. “I wouldn’t ask, except the betting’s getting pretty heavy, and I have some high stakes on—”

Just then the door to our freighter slid open, and our parents came out, each carrying a stack of boxes as well as the duffel bags they had strapped on their backs. They must have decided that Pa would need samples in order to assure himself a job here. For samples he uses a haiku and three bite-sized portions of the appropriate food, arranged on a plate so that they meet in the middle.

Pa’s stack was big enough that the top of the boxes brushed his short beard. “Kit,” he said sharply. “Do you think you could lend a hand here?”

I hurried over to help him before he dropped all the samples and wrecked the presentation. We got the top bunch transferred to my arms without dropping anything. I glanced back at the man with the clipboard and saw that he was making some kind of a note on a blank document. He noticed me looking and switched back to the official questionnaire. Then my dad came up carrying a smaller stack of boxes. He balanced them with one hand and reached over to smooth a bit of dry skin off of Lllth’s neck. She made a low greeting sound deep in her throat. The man with the clipboard had switched back to his other document and made another note. When he realized we were all standing in a group staring at what he was writing, he quickly brought out his form.

He asked us for our names and businesses, level of financial security, recent and chronic illnesses, religious needs, aggression levels, preferred conversing space, and about twenty other questions. My parents took turns answering. We go through this a lot, but even so, they usually come up with some new question that we don’t have the right documentation for. The last question was one about dependents.

“We only have the two,” Pa said, indicating us.

“Yes,” the man said, leaning forward. “The children were telling me that you are parents. I’m sure the referees will be contacting you soon, but I’d just like to say, I wish you the best of luck. We don’t often have visiting teams. Have you competed before?”

Dad looked confused. “I’m afraid we don’t share your cultural reference,” he said politely.

“You know, parenting,” the man gestured at us. “These children said you were their parents. They indicated that you had a certain level of skill, although my own assessment based on what I’ve witnessed would be a bit mixed, I’m sorry to say.”

“It’s not your place to judge…” Pa started, drawing himself up. Pa’s aggression levels are a bit high. He always has to have an anger management form as a supplement to his documentation. Dad put a hand on his arm.

“No, no, you’re right,” the man said. “I haven’t had any of the training of an official judge. I’m just a fan. Like anyone else. Speaking of which, would you sign this?” he took a piece of plant fiber–based paper out of his pocket and a colored stick of wax.

Dad signed it with a flourish; then Pa did, still looking a bit put out. I felt a tickling on my calf and moved my leg. It stopped for a second, then it started again. Lllth must be getting bored. This time after I moved, I stepped down on the place where I guessed her tail might be.

She hissed angrily, sticking out her tongue and spraying a few drops of her highly acidic spit on my pants. “Pa, he’s stepping on my tail! The tip’ll come off, and it’ll be his fault.”

“Tattle-tale slobber-spraying baby brat!” I shouted. “Look, Dad, she spit on my pants. Now they’ll have holes in them, too, like all the others!”

“Kids,” Dad said. “Stop it right now. Can’t you tell that this isn’t the time to fight?”

“She started it. She was poking me.”

“Kit, you’re old enough to not get into these things with your sister. Get off her tail right now.”

I moved off, but I made a rude sign at her in Blth as soon as he turned to her. “And Lllth, you know that spit ruins your brother’s clothes. No more spitting at him, do you understand me?”

Pa was asking the man about where we should stay while we were here, but I saw him making more notes as soon as Pa looked away.

“Come on, kids,” Dad said. Lllth spit at me again, a drop right between my feet, just enough to be insulting without getting herself in trouble with Dad.

I thought about retaliating, but Pa was at the door with his pile of boxes looking at us impatiently, and I decided I’d better wait for later.

We followed the man’s directions to a warehouse-sized space that had been divided into cubicles and hallways with partition boards. Our cubicle was actually about half the size of our living space aboard the freighter. There was a full wrap-around sensory and experience grid—but only one.

Lllth headed toward it right away. “I want to watch the five dragon princesses of the pink and lavender planet!” she said, trying to trip me with her tail so I wouldn’t get in there ahead of her.

“You’re going to let her, aren’t you? You always let her do everything first.” I complained to Pa and Dad, jumping over her.

“No! Stop right there, both of you. Go out and explore some. See if you can figure out where we’re supposed to go to eat. There doesn’t seem to be a dispenser here or any kind of cooking equipment.”

Lllth stuck her head hard against the backs of my knees, and I fell over on top of her, almost knocking over a pile of Pa’s samples.

“Please, kids. Just go,” Pa said. “We’ll all go exploring together later, but right now I’d just like some space to get organized here, okay?”

“She made me do it,” I muttered. Pa narrowed his eyes at me. “Okay, okay we’re going.”

As we walked out the door, Lllth stopped suddenly, staring at something. I almost tripped on her again. There was a small camera positioned on the door frame on a swivel stand so that it could record everything in the cubicle. A light blinked slowly from its base.

“They’re spying on us!” Lllth said, her thick tail twitching back and forth.

“Calm down, honey,” Pa said, reaching down to scratch some peeling skin near her tail. “They’re probably just very concerned about security. We can’t expect to always have the privacy we have on our own ship.”

“It’s not like they can’t hear everything we say over the top of this thing anyway,” I said.

We were all silent for a moment. On our right I could hear someone telling a morality tale for children in a dramatic voice. On our left someone was trying to cajole some kids into getting dressed; there was an answering chorus of “No!”

“You know, with this little privacy and the cubicles and so forth, a truly escapist fantasy would be in order,” Pa said. “Maybe a historical romance. That would add an extra dimension to the meal preparation of course…”

“Come on, Lllth,” I said. Once Pa starts talking about his culinary/literary plans, it can be hard to get him to stop.

It seemed as if there was at least one kid in every cubicle we passed. There were no doors, so we could look right in. Most of them seemed to be involved in some kind of project or earnest discussion with an adult. In fact I didn’t see any kids on their own at all. Two doors down from us, a blond boy about my age and a smaller girl were playing a card game with their mother. Lllth and I stopped to watch. It was a matching game with equations on all the cards. The children both had a stack of cards beside them; so did their mother, but hers was just a little smaller.

“Do you have a -3i?” said the girl.

“No. Go fish.” The mother said, smiling fondly at her daughter.

“Aww,” the girl said, but she smiled and took another card.

“That means it’s my turn!” said the boy, bouncing up and down on his heels.

“Hello,” I said. Pa says that as the visitors it’s our job to demonstrate that it’s possible to be friendly with a stranger.

The boy stared blankly at me. After a moment he twitched and said, “Hello, my name is Jordan, and this is my sister, Angel, and my mother, Melody. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“I’m Kit, and this is my sister, Lllth.”

“Lllth?” the girl said. “That’s not a name.”

“Honey, that girl’s name is probably just right for her. Try again, and this time be more polite.” Her mom gave Angel a meaningful look.

Angel stared off into space for a second, and then she said, “I’m happy to meet you too. Would you like to play with us?”

I hesitated. It looked like a really hard game, but Lllth said, “Sure.”

“Oh, you speak Gestural Universal Trade Lingo,” said the mom. “That’s wonderful! The kids’ grasp of it is very good for their age, of course, but their grammar could certainly use some work. Now you’re welcome to try to play this game, but I’m afraid it might be a little too difficult for you. Both of my children test at the tenth grade level in mathematics, even though they’re only ten and six. I’ve worked hard to keep them challenged and to make math fun for them.”

“I’d like to play,” Lllth said. She sat down between the two kids.

“I think I’d rather just watch,” I said.

The mom dealt the cards. I watched the activity around the cubicles while they played. There were a lot of kids walking in and out of the cubicles, all of them with parents. Many of the children had sports equipment with them. The parents mostly looked kind of nervous. There were also a lot of people watching the parents and children closely and making notes on various kinds of machines.

“Do you have a 3 x -2?” Lllth asked.

I wasn’t surprised when she lay all her cards down in five neat stacks. “That means I won, I guess.”

The mother drew in her breath, “That’s not possible. My kids always win. Are your species natural mathematicians?”

Lllth shrugged. “I don’t think so. Of course I’m ahead of Kit, but numbers don't really make sense to him.”

The mother glared at Lllth. “This is not fair. Their father whispered the times tables to my children in the womb. I taught them multiplication of fractions with their pancakes when they were four. We worked to win the Intellectually Advanced Points. They can’t take them away from me with a lizard savant! I’ll bet you weren’t doing proofs with your finger paints as a toddler.”

I knew that Lllth had spent her toddlerhood chasing stinging cockroaches around the boulder-strewn hillsides of BLllth. That had been before her mother had been declared religiously unclean and was sent off for a two-year ritual by the religious authorities on her planet. My parents had been visiting at the time and had been given Lllth to care for. She had been placed in Pa’s arms, painted completely white to show that she was not connected to her mother’s spiritual dirt, with a purple ribbon around her neck, to show the connection between the BLllth and humans that was being formed by our care for her and by their trust in us.

The mother was still glaring at Lllth. Her short blond hair seemed to stand up higher on her head, as if every bit of her found Lllth’s mathematical knowledge offensive. One of the observers had wandered over to the game and was gazing over the players’ shoulders at the cards and taking notes.

“Umm, can you tell us where we go to eat?” I asked, thinking it looked like a good time to change the subject and get out of there. “Our parents wanted us to find out.”

The mother smiled charmingly at the observer and swept all the cards into her bag. “What, honey?” she asked, pouring extra sugar onto her words. “Right over there, dear. There’s a large room behind those doors. All the parents and children eat together so that it’s easier for the observers to compare parenting techniques, table manners, and picky eating.”

She looked at Lllth thoughtfully, as if trying to gauge whether she might turn out to be a picky eater. She was, but I certainly wasn’t going to mention it.

Lllth and I went to explore the ship some more. The section we were housed in seemed to be the only one with any kids in it at all. The rest was mostly work space and living space. There didn’t seem to be much recreational space and no commercial space, which maybe wasn’t so surprising on a colony ship. The rest of the ship was much more homey than the section for parents and children. Rooms were decorated with soft wall hangings and warm colors. No one else appeared to be living in cubicles, either. There were lots of posters showing children and adults together, with rows of statistics underneath.

Suddenly a woman crouched down in front of me. “Excuse me, where are your parents?”

I didn’t think her question reflected any concern for us; she was already pulling a pad out of her pocket.

I started to say that they were back in the cubicle, but Lllth elbowed me in the side. “Our parents are teaching us to be independent and resourceful in alien situations,” she said. “They expect us to remember all they have taught us, even when we’re away from them.”

The woman’s eyes widened. She took out her notepad and began typing furiously into it. I raised my eyebrows at Lllth.

“Come on, Kit,” she said. “You know that Dad has always said to treat our time as valuable so that we could live up to our full potential.” She started walking quickly away from the woman. When I caught up to her, she was whistling softly under her tongue.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Having some fun with them,” she said. “Isn’t that what playing a game is all about?”

Dinner was odd. Not just the food, although that seemed to consist mainly of green vegetables and sweets. The place was crawling with people with notepads, some of them wearing a kind of blue uniform. None of them was eating. They mostly sat on the benches and stared at the families eating dinner. Younger children were demanding sweets or threatening to tantrum if they had to eat vegetables, while parents were trying to get them to be quiet in any way except actually giving them the sweets.

Pa stared at the rows of boiled vegetables and piles of sweets in bewilderment.

“They need my help even more than I realized,” he told Dad.

“No more than three,” Dad said, as he saw my hand darting toward a stack of chocolate donuts. “And you have to eat…”

His voice trailed off as he looked at the rows of vegetables in the certain knowledge that we weren’t likely to eat any of them. Finally he spotted a stash of sandwiches hidden on a low shelf. Some of the parents were furtively consuming them while they played “shuttle coming into the hangar” to try to get their toddlers to eat from a plate piled high with greens and zucchini.

“At least one of these,” he finished, giving us each a sandwich. He had to tuck mine under my elbow because my hands were holding a cookie, a piece of pie, and a donut. We all sat down to eat. Immediately a ring of note takers formed around us.

We ate quickly and went back to our cubicle. It felt too small almost immediately. Lllth seemed to be taking up more space than usual, and she kept whistling annoying tunes in the space under her tongue. I asked her three times politely to shut up, and she responded by whistling more softly but closer to my ear. Finally I gave her a good pinch, and we found ourselves sent out to explore again.

There was no one outside the cubicles at all. We could hear the sounds of children practicing instruments, adults coaching on academics, and books being read aloud. We sat down and sniped at each other for a while. Finally the blond woman came out of her cubicle.

“Do you want to come and visit my children? Usually we use the hours before bedtime to have some family time together. Some people may not feel this way, but to me every minute that my children are young is precious.

 “Come in, and we’ll play a nice intellectually stimulating game of five-person chess.”

I looked at Lllth. I didn’t like the woman, and Angel and Jordan seemed kind of strange, but I knew that Lllth wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity for any kind of chess.

The children were already seated at the board. At first I thought there was something odd about the way they were lined up side by side, but then I realized that they were sitting so that their faces were clearly visible in the doorframe camera.

“Our mom sure takes good care of us,” Jordan was saying.

“She’s the best mommy,” Angel replied.

Lllth rolled her eyes at me. I sat down across from them with my back to the camera. Lllth sat down beside me. Melody shifted the board so she could be between me and Jordan as if she was afraid of what would happen if I got too close to him.

It was an odd game. I expected to be eliminated right away, but instead all three of them concentrated on whittling down Lllth’s pieces and completely ignored me. I had even managed to get an extra queen before Lllth slipped out from between them and managed to play Jordan and Melody off each other so that she could use Jordan’s queen to complete a checkmate against Melody. Once she had Melody’s pieces as well as her own, none of the rest of us had a chance against her. As she put me in mate, I thought about how I’d gotten stuck playing chess against her when I’d managed to get out of it for the last two years.

As the game wound down, Angel and Jordan were looking more and more nervous. Angel kept playing with her turquoise enamel barrette, and Jordan fingered the collar on his shirt. They would lift their hands up, start fiddling, and then jerk their hands down. Melody kept staring at Lllth. I was glad she was staring at her instead of me. People staring at me make me nervous. Lllth doesn’t notice staring. Her people stare all the time.

“My mother taught me to be a good sport,” Angel said. “You played a great game, Lllth.”

“I’d love to play against you again,” Jordan said. “Mom and Dad taught me to keep trying even if I fail.”

“What’s that buzzing noise by your ear, Jordan?” Lllth asked.

“Lllth, I’m glad you could come over,” Melody interrupted. “And your brother too. My children can learn so much from having social interactions with children who are different from them. Also it gives me an opportunity to make up for some of the gaps in your parenting.”

There was a knock on the entrance to the cubicle. We looked up to see Dad standing at the entrance looking annoyed. I figured that he’d overheard the comment about gaps in our parenting.

Lllth must have thought that too because she said, “We have great parents.”

She went over to stand by Dad, wrapping her tail around his leg. Dad smiled at her and scratched her neck. A few flakes of skin fell off.

Melody smirked. “Well, we’ll have a good assessment of that when your statistics go up tomorrow, won’t we? The points always tell, that’s what I say.”

“I’m afraid we’re not competing.” Dad bit off the words. He put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s time to go home, Kit. Tell them thanks for a nice time, kids.”

“Thanks for the nice time,” I mumbled it, and Lllth barely sketched it in the air, but Dad didn’t say anything. He turned me around by the shoulder in a way he hasn’t done for years and marched us through the doorway. As soon as we got back to our cubicle, he put a shirt over the camera.

Pa was out late working on a culinary experience for some of the community leaders and senior members of the crew. Dad told us a story like usual, and we went to bed. In the middle of the night I moved to the corner behind the table. The open doorway bothered me in the darkness. I started to imagine that it was the mouth of the space station and it was going to eat us up.

The next morning I was glad I’d moved; a man in a blue uniform was standing outside our cubicle peering in at our sleeping family and taking notes.

“Dad, wake up,” I whispered.

“Kit, find some way to amuse yourself until everyone’s awake,” Dad muttered. Pa groaned and rolled over.

“No, Dad, I mean it. Wake up. There’s a guy here.”

Dad opened his eyes and sat up. His curly brown hair was flattened on one side and sticking straight up on the other. When he saw the uniformed note taker, he said a bad word under his breath. The note taker frowned and added something to whatever he had on his machine.

Dad smoothed down the front of his red polka-dotted pajamas and glanced longingly at the bag that held the rest of our clothes.

He took a deep breath and spoke to the uniformed man in a polite voice, “Is there some way I can help you?”

“No, sir, you can carry on with your parenting. I am here in an official capacity as referee. You have covered up your camera, which does not directly affect your point totals since it is not directly related to your parenting. However, it does mean there needs to be an official observer of your home life.”

“Has it occurred to any of you that being able to relax in a private, noncompetitive atmosphere might be part of a family’s home life?” Dad said, exasperation edging his words.

“No sir, but that’s very good,” the referee said respectfully. He typed furiously for a moment.

“Great. Can you go now?”

“No, that was an excellent line, and I’m sure it will jack up your competitive levels, but to leave you unobserved would violate all the rules. Of course, you could take that shirt off the camera.”

“Don’t you understand? We’re not playing.”

“You mean you don’t wish to continue parenting?”

“What? Uurgh! Of course that’s not what I meant. Okay, I’ll take off the shirt.”

Dad yanked the shirt off of the camera, balled it up, and threw it near (not quite at) the referee. “Now will you go away?”

“Certainly.” The uniformed man hesitated, then looked quickly from side to side. He held out a small piece of paper. “Will you autograph this for me?”

“No!” Dad reached out as if to slam a door, but the cubicle didn’t have one. He settled for kicking the doorframe instead. The man made a note on his pad and left.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I don’t really like it here that much.”

“The sooner the better,” Dad said. “George, what do you think?”

Pa sat up in bed. He rubbed at his bald head and yawned. “I’m sorry, guys, but I’ve got to stay. I’ve planned a number of experiences already. We could be out of here by next week, though.”

“I may be insane by next week,” Dad told him.

“Insane—you? But Ed, you’re supposed to be the calm one.”

“I’m hungry,” Lllth said. She walked out the door toward the breakfast room while the rest of us were trying to change out of our pajamas under the covers.

Breakfast meant lots of vegetable omelets and trays of donuts. Lllth wasn’t anywhere to be seen. My guess was that she’d taken a stack of donuts and left the dining room before anyone could say anything about it. Both my parents seemed distracted and sat there eating their omelets without saying a word about what I should eat. I ate the egg part of an omelet and the jelly part of two donuts.

Lllth wasn’t back at our cubicle either. I thought she might be at the neighbor’s place, but I didn’t want to check there and end up roped into another chess game. Dad paced around the cubicle for a while; then he went out to look for Lllth. Before he went, he suggested that I go and check out the physical coordination and sportsmanship rooms. He had over heard another parent mentioning them during breakfast. The rooms were okay—there were good basketball and handball courts. I tried to join a game, but there weren’t any other kids there on their own, and the parents were so obsessed with improving their children’s behavior and skill that the games weren’t much fun. And they kept trying to hide their smiles when they asked me where my parents were.

When I got back to our cubicle, Dad was drumming on the table worriedly. “Did you see Lllth?” he asked.

“No. She’s probably fine, though, Dad. She never gets lost.”

“I know,” he said. But he didn’t look any less worried.

With Lllth gone I figured it was my opportunity to watch something good on the grid. I punched in a couple of cowboy stories and didn’t emerge for a couple of hours. When I came out, Dad was just coming back from looking for Lllth again.

“Did you check the neighbors?” I asked.

“A while ago—they weren’t home. Could you go check again?”

I went. If they suggested a game, I’d make them thumb wrestle me.

They were home now. Melody was braiding Angel’s blond hair and quizzing her on physics formulas. I asked if they’d seen Lllth.

“No, we haven’t, poor thing. So your parents have managed to actually lose a child, huh? That’s a new one. I suppose it’s what they get for letting you wander around all over the place unsupervised.”

“C’mon, Mom,” Angel whined. “Could you keep working on my physics with me? You know how much it means to me that you spend time working on my education.”

Melody gave the camera an almost fearful glance. She whispered urgently in Angel’s ear, “Not like that, honey, you’re almost whining.”

She put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder as she leaned toward her. A row of round burns about the size of peas dotted her hand. I had seen burns like that before. And felt them.

“Yes, Mom. Thank you for helping me act more mature,” Angel said out loud, directing her comment to the space between her mother and the camera.

I pretended I didn’t hear her, but for some reason the interchange reminded me of when Lllth had asked Jordan about the buzzing near his ear.

“Could you come with me for a second?” I asked them.

“What? Why?” said Melody.

“I have a very complicated strategy game I want to play with your kids,” I improvised. “Of course, without Lllth here, I’ll probably lose badly.”

I led them to the part of the ship that Lllth and I had gone to before. The part where there were only adults. When we got to an empty stretch of hallway that seemed entirely free of cameras, I reached up to grab Melody’s elbow and hissed at her, “Tell me where Lllth is, or I’ll tell one of the referees that you’re cheating.”

She pulled my hand off of her arm. “Silly boy,” she said, smiling condescendingly, “you have no idea what’s cheating and what’s not. I certainly wouldn’t cheat, and I have no idea where your smarty-pants lizard sister is. It was your parents who lost her, not me.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Let’s see who’s right.” Then I started shouting as loudly as I could, “She’s cheating! She’s telling her kids what to say all the time. She’s got them wired—”

Melody clapped her hand over my mouth. I bit her as hard as I could, so hard that I could taste blood, but she didn’t let go. I kept struggling, writhing and kicking. Her children just stood there staring at us. Finally I managed to get a leg hooked around hers. We both came crashing to the ground. I elbowed her and hit her in the face and managed to get free. I jumped out of reach and started shouting again, “She—” Finally some people were coming toward us.

“Stop,” Melody whispered urgently. “I’ll tell you where she is, but you keep your mouth shut. We were just playing a little game of hide and seek.”

A brightly dressed woman was coming up to us. “What’s going on?” she asked excitedly, pulling out a notepad.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to expose Melody for a cheater now and lose my edge. “We were just playing a game. Melody’s a wonderful game player.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointedly, but she made a note of it anyway.

“Come on,” I said to Melody. “Let’s go finish the game.”

She didn’t lead me back to the family area like I expected. Instead we turned and went down a long hallway toward the outside of the ship. We walked past a recycling chute and turned a corner. At the end of the hallway Melody opened an insulated door leading to a cold storage area. I stayed out of arms’ reach. Her children were walking side by side right behind us, which made me nervous. I was relieved to see that there were a lot of workers moving boxes around with forklifts and trucks. Melody led me to a child-size cello case in one corner.

“Your surprise is in there,” she said in a low voice. “You can peek, but don’t open it until you get home.”

I opened it a just a crack and looked inside. There was Lllth, looking withered and stiff.

“You’ve killed her!” I shouted. None of the workers even looked at us. I realized that they were all wearing noise-reducing ear muffs.

“I doubt it. Even if she's dead, we made a deal that you’d keep your mouth shut. If you don’t, this could all be blamed on you. We know all about sibling rivalry here. And you don’t have any evidence against me.”

Too late I remembered that we’d walked past the recycling chute, and that Angel and Jordan had been walking behind me. Melody saw me realize it and smiled. I really hated her. I thought maybe she was bluffing. There was no reason she had to show me where Lllth was once her children had disposed of their communication devices, unless she still thought she could get in trouble for cheating. Had she realized what a cold storage room would do to a lizard?

If Lllth was dead, I’d make sure that Melody was exposed. I turned and started running for the door as fast as I could, carrying the cello case. I could feel Lllth bumping around inside. Melody almost caught up with me at the recycling chute, but I managed a sprint fueled by full-blown panic. I didn’t trust Melody not to stuff me in there. Once I got to a hallway with people in it, lots of them started following me. I guess they wanted to see whether someone was going to lose points for me running around frantically with a cello case. I glanced behind me. Melody had disappeared. That made sense. The less she was seen with the cello case and me, the better it was for her.

I stopped running. The person closest to me was a short dumpy man with a large shoulder bag.

“Can you tell me where the family area is?” I asked.

“Just turn the corner and keep going,” he said. He rummaged in his shoulder bag. “Could you answer a few questions? Where are your parents, and why are you carrying that cello case?”

“I’m interested in music. I’m hoping that my parents will get me lessons,” I said over my shoulder as I headed down the hallway.

I ran into our cubicle. No one was there. Dad was probably somewhere out looking for us. I yanked open the cello case and pulled Lllth with me into the mound of blankets my parents had vacated that morning. I yanked off my shirt and wrapped my arms around her holding her chilly withered body against my belly. I lay like that for a long, long time. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Lllth was wiggling in my arms and Dad was pacing back and forth staring worriedly down at us. The cello case was lying opened beside us. I noticed that the lining was full of the little holes from Lllth’s spit. The parts that weren’t holey were shredded from her claws.

Lllth told us what happened. “That nasty woman who can’t play chess asked me if I played an instrument. I said, ‘Yes, the Kkft and the bongos,’ and then she grabbed me and pushed me into a cello case. It was cold.”

Dad knelt down and reached to hug both of us. He ruffled my hair and kissed our foreheads. “When I came in here, you were both in bed. You looked like you’d never move again,” he told Lllth, “but Kit warmed you up.” He turned to me. “You did exactly the right thing, son. If they have a brothering contest, you’ve already won it. Now tell me everything.”

I glanced up at the camera. “I’ll write it down for you, okay?”

I pulled his notepad out of his bag and wrote out the whole thing for him. He read over my shoulder.

“Okay,” he said when I had finished. “That settles that. These people are going to have to get through life with a scarcity of literary/culinary experiences.”

He started shoving everything that had gotten scattered around our cubicle into our bags. I helped him. We did the pile of blankets on the floor last. Lllth looked almost healthy again underneath them. Dad picked Lllth up in his arms and called Pa to fill him in a bit and to let him know to meet us on the freighter. We left the notepad on the table. Dad said he never wanted to see one again, and anyway there was something on there that he wanted to make sure everybody read—particularly the referees.

As we hurried through the halls on the way to the freighter, I saw one of those posters with pictures of parents and kids and statistics on it. There were me and Dad and Pa and Lllth, standing together as if we had posed, although I knew we hadn’t, and underneath the pictures rows and rows of statistics. Our numbers looked terrible, except for the intellectually advanced column, where Lllth’s mathematical abilities had moved us near the top. The rest were at close to zero or in the negative numbers. We were officially a terrible family with terrible parents. I noticed Dad looking at it too. He smiled at me and gave me a one-armed hug. Lllth was still in his arms, her chin resting on his shoulder. She reached out with her tail and wrapped it around me too. Pa came around the corner just then and barreled into us. We almost fell over, so he had to hold us upright.

“Come on,” said Dad. “Let’s get to our seedy little ship and have our own contest.”