2 SELF-DEFENSE WITH PLUMBING

2 SELF-DEFENSE WITH PLUMBING Lunar day 216 Too late to get help There were a lot of things I didn't like about living on the moon, but the Sjobergs were the worst by far. And to be more horrible than a space toilet is really saying something. Patton and Lily had come to Moon Base Alpha with their parents, Lars and Sonja, as the first lunar tourists. The whole family was filthy rich and staggeringly mean. They had forked out more than half a billion dollars to visit MBA, and when the whole experience turned out to be far below their expectations, they had taken out their anger on everyone else. They were desperate to go back to earth—and we were all desperate for

them to go back as well—but it wasn't that easy. Travel to and from the moon was locked into an inflexible schedule, and the Sjobergs didn't have seats assigned on a rocket for another three months —if everything went smoothly. Which it probably wouldn't. Rockets to the moon got delayed all the time; even someone as rich and powerful as Lars Sjoberg couldn't control that. In the meantime, the Sjobergs were doing their best to make everyone else miserable. Only Cesar Marquez, a Moonie teenager who Lily had a crush on, escaped their wrath. For everyone else, any encounter with them was toxic. On that night, Patton and Lily seemed to be in a worse mood than usual. Something had really ticked them off. "Who were you just talking to?" Patton demanded. "No one," I said. "Don't lie to us," Lily snarled. "We heard you, you little jerk." The Sjobergs were practically the first purely Caucasian family I'd ever met in my life; back on earth—and at MBA—almost everyone was a blend of ethnicities. I'd heard there were people who actually thought the Sjobergs were quite attractive,

and that Lily was particularly exotic and beautiful, with her long blond hair and her fair white complexion. I always found her hideous, though. Maybe because I couldn't help but see the ugliness beneath her skin. "I meant I wasn't talking to anyone here," I corrected quickly. "I was on a ComLink with my friend Riley back on earth." "No, you weren't, turdface." Patton moved toward me menacingly. He was a big kid who spent most of his time at MBA in the gym making his muscles even bigger. "You were talking to Roddy, weren't you?" That would have been Rodrigo Marquez, Cesar's younger brother and the only other boy on the moon my age. Since Lily liked Cesar and Cesar didn't like Roddy, Roddy had become Patton and Lily's favorite target at Moon Base Alpha. Often it was unwarranted, but sometimes Roddy actually did things to deserve it. He could be such an obnoxious know-it-all that there were times when I wanted to punch him. "I haven't seen Roddy tonight," I told them. "We saw him come this way," Lily said. She stayed by her brother's side as they moved in on me,

blocking my escape route. "That doesn't mean he came in here," I pointed out. "Where else could he have gone?" Lily demanded. "His residence," I suggested. "Or the gym. Or the medical bay..." "I'm gonna send you to the medical bay if you don't tell me the truth," Patton snarled. "Where's Roddy? What were you two talking about?" "Nothing!" I exclaimed. "Why are you so upset with Roddy?" "Just tell us where he is!" Patton lunged across the room, apparently ready to pound the answer out of me. I was ready for him, though. With Patton, I was always ready for a sneak attack. I ducked under his arm and scrambled for the door. Patton and Lily both roared with rage and came after me. I tried to get away from them quickly, but that was hard to do on the moon. The gravity here is only one-sixth of earth's, so you can't run. Instead you just bob along slowly. Each step launches you as high as if you've bounced on a trampoline. Luckily, Patton and Lily had the same issues and couldn't go

any faster than I did. It wasn't like there were many places to run to anyhow. Moon Base Alpha isn't very big. The rec room sits in the center of it, along with the greenhouse and the control rooms, looped by a single circular hallway. On the exterior walls are the gymnasium, mess hall, bathrooms, science pod, air lock, medical bay, and two floors of residences. That's it. I bounded out of the rec room into the hall facing the residences, hoping to find some adults who could tell Patton and Lily to back off. The hall was two stories tall, with only a metal catwalk to access the upper residences, so I could see every door. Unfortunately, all of them were closed; there wasn't an adult anywhere. Quite possibly, everyone else was already asleep. So I veered toward the science pod. If any Moonies were up late, they'd be there, working. Patton and Lily stayed on my heels. We raced through the air-lock staging area, then past the control rooms. Just as I reached the science pod, Patton body-slammed me. On earth, we would have thudded to the ground. On the moon, we flew. Patton's force sent both of us

sailing into the men's bathroom door, which sprang open, and we crashed onto the floor inside. We might have tumbled all the way to the far wall if we hadn't slammed into the first toilet stall, which halted our progress quickly and painfully. Patton ended up on top of me. He pressed his arm against my neck, choking me, fury in his eyes. "Tell me what you and Roddy saw," he growled. By this point, I was quite sure that telling the truth wasn't going to work out for me. Patton was obviously looking for an excuse to hurt someone, and I wasn't about to give it to him. However, fighting wasn't an option either. Patton was much stronger than me and he already had the upper hand. So I did the only other thing I could think of. Except for the toilets themselves, the toilet stalls at Moon Base Alpha look exactly like ones you'd see in any public bathroom on earth; the walls don't go all the way to the floor, which meant that my head was disturbingly close to the toilet. Lunar toilets are horrible things. Since we have very little water, they don't flush. Instead they're more like vacuum cleaners for your private parts, designed to suck every last bit of poop and pee away from you. The poop goes into the composter, while our urine heads