Chapter 1
“But I’m not four—I’m eight!” Lizzy said sternly, making a fist and slamming it into one of the many pillows littering the floor of their fort.
“Well, on Earth we’re eight, but on Mars we would be four. A Martian year is twice as long as an Earth year,” Marina mentioned, her antennae swishing back and forth as she flipped through her book, shining her flashlight on the pages. Lizzy frowned and plopped herself down on the blankets.
“Wait. So since you’re Martian, do you have to go by Martian years?”
“I don’t think so, but I think some people just say both so there’s no confusion.”
“Well, I’m not telling anyone I’m four,” Lizzy said, sticking out her tongue. “They’ll think I’m a baby or something.”
“You are a baby!” Marina grinned. Lizzy threw a pillow at her with a laugh, which started a pillow fight between the two of them. Lizzy’s pillow of choice caught on the blanket above them, and soon, their whole fort was caving in.
“Oh nooo!” Marina sighed dramatically, lying herself down on the blanket that had just been their ceiling. “Lizzy! What have you done?!”
“Mwahahaha! It was all part of my master plan!” Lizzy said in a deep gurgly voice. “Because I’m actually a spy from the shadow government sent to bring down your castle from the inside!”
“Gasp! You traitor!”
The two girls giggled and started hitting each other with the pillows again.
They froze in place when they heard footsteps padding down the hall.
“Agh! We’re supposed to be asleep!” Lizzy whispered, diving under the blanket. Marina quickly turned off her flashlight and followed her, and the two of them hid under the covers as the footsteps passed by the open door of Lizzy’s bedroom. The two girls poked their heads out.
“Was that your dad?” Marina whispered.
“Maybe. Or it could be his friend, Peter.”
“What’s he doing up?”
“I don’t know. Want to go see? We’ll have to be sneaky.”
Marina nodded, and the two of them snuck out of the bedroom and into the hallway, feeling their way towards the kitchen, where Peter had gone. The two of them poked their heads around the corner to see Peter Vancouver, a man who had been living with Lizzy and her father for the past several months. He was her father’s best friend, but she still wasn’t sure how she felt about him yet. The man stood there in the darkness, the only light coming from the moon through the kitchen window. At the moment, he was pacing nervously around the room, fidgeting and wringing his scarred hands.
“Is he ok?” Marina whispered.
“He’s just like that,” Lizzy said flatly.
“What do you mean?”
“He does weird stuff all the time.”
The two girls watched as Peter leaned on the counter, trembling and sniffling.
“Is he crying?” Marina asked.
“Yeah. He does that a lot,” Lizzy said nonchalantly.
“But why?”
The two of them hushed when Peter wiped away his tears and went to the cabinet to get a glass. Shaking, he went to the sink to get a glass of water, but on the way, he stumbled and dropped the glass onto the floor, causing it to break in several pieces. Peter knelt down on the floor, clutching his curly black hair and starting to sob. Lizzy sighed.
“I guess I better go get my Dad…”
Marina followed Lizzy back down the hallway and into her father’s room. Lizzy approached her father’s bed, where he was hanging off the side and snoring softly. He looked exhausted, and she felt bad for waking him up, but she didn’t want to deal with the weird guy in the other room, so she didn’t really have a choice.
“Daddy,” Lizzy whispered, tugging on his sleeve. Her father, Jordan, stirred and then finally sat up, his shaggy brown hair sticking up in odd places.
“Lizzy? Did you have a bad dream?” he yawned.
“Peter is having another freakout in the kitchen,” she told him bluntly. “It woke up me and Marina.”
Of course, Peter hadn’t actually woken them up, but for some reason she wanted to get Peter in trouble. He was always doing stuff like this, and her dad never got mad at him. Jordan sighed, rubbed his face, and then pulled himself out of bed.
“I’m sorry. Hold on. I’ll go get him.”
Lizzy and Marina watched as he made his way down the hallway towards the kitchen, where Peter was now trying to pick up shards of glass from off the floor with his bare hands. The crazed man looked up when Jordan flicked on the lights, tears glistening on his scar-ridden face, and in his surprise and embarrassment, he accidentally cut himself. Jordan bent down to be on his level, putting a hand on his back.
“Peter, it’s ok. Nothing bad is going to happen. You’re safe here.”
Peter shook his head and hastily tried to pick up the pieces of glass again, blood dripping onto the tile. In response, Lizzy’s father grabbed the man’s hands and gently encouraged him to let the pieces go. Peter grabbed at the black curly hair on his head again, trembling and gasping for air as Jordan attempted to pull him over to the side so he could start sweeping up the glass.
Lizzy and Marina simply stood there and watched with a sort of morbid fascination as this grown man wept on the floor and held himself. Lizzy’s father glanced over to them and sighed.
“You girls go back to bed. I’ll take care of Peter.”
Without a word, the girls ran back down the hallway and into Lizzy’s bedroom.
“What’s wrong with your dad’s friend?” Marina asked as soon as they had plopped back onto their destroyed fort. Lizzy fell back on the blankets and stared up at the ceiling.
“His family was killed by lunalites.”
“You mean those people who are from Venus?”
“Yeah, my dad said they hurt him real bad. That’s where he got the scars on his face and hands. He’s too scared to be by himself now, so he has to live with us.”
“That’s so sad…” Marina said pityingly.
“Yeah…” Lizzy trailed off, thinking of times when she was a little younger. “I used to go over to his house all the time to play with my friends Tilly and Maddy. They had a fun playroom with a bunch of toys and books and stuff. Maddy was always a goody two shoes, but Tilly was an adventurer like me. We’d have to promise Maddy to secrecy when the three of us accidentally broke the rules. Their mom, Mrs. Lady, made really yummy cookies, which was good because my Mommy could only make burnt cookies. Her real name was Addie-lady or something like that, but it was too hard to remember, so I just called her Mrs. Lady. Tilly, Maddy, and I would sometimes sneak into the kitchen during sleepovers and steal some. But … they’re … gone now. I don’t know exactly what happened to them, but my dad said they died on Venus.”
“What was Mr. Peter like before his family died?” Marina asked.
“He used to be fun and play with us. He was really good at telling stories, but he doesn’t talk anymore,” she responded absentmindedly.
Marina plopped down next to Lizzy and stared up at the ceiling, unsure of what to say.
“Sorry you lost your friends,” she finally said quietly.
Lizzy didn’t say anything. She could feel her eyes burning a little, but she didn’t want to cry in front of her friend. She remembered very clearly the night that Peter had come to their house. She had been playing with her stuffed animals in the living room with her mom when her father came in, holding onto Peter like he had a hard time walking. She almost didn’t recognize him at first. He had gotten really skinny since the last time she saw him, and he now had longer hair and scars on his face and hands.
“Lizzy, you remember Peter, right?” her mother asked her. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”
“Oh. Are Tilly and Maddy going to be staying with us too?” she had asked her mother excitedly. Her mother had a sad look wash over her face and hugged Lizzy tightly.
“No. Tilly and Maddy … they’re … gone. They died.”
“When are they coming back?”
“They aren’t coming back. Ever.”
Lizzy remembered how confused she was about the whole thing. She just couldn’t understand where they had gone and why they weren’t ever coming back. The reality of it fully hit her a few months later, when she was looking into a casket at her mother. People kept saying that Layla Shreve looked so peaceful, like she was sleeping, but Lizzy could tell at that moment that her mother was gone. Her body was there, but … she wasn’t in her body anymore. She didn’t know if her mom had floated up into space, or if she had just poofed in her brain, but she had wailed and cried until she fell asleep in her dad’s arms. That was when she realized what death was.
Lost in her thoughts, several minutes passed in silence, only interrupted by the soft sounds of her father escorting Peter back down the hallway. Soon, Marina was snoring loudly, causing Lizzy to turn over and put the pillow over her head. Eventually, she stood up, stretched, and started making her way back down the hallway and into the kitchen. She would just get a glass of water and go to bed. At the thought of this, she couldn’t help but think of Peter just a few minutes earlier and, for some reason, found herself starting to feel more upset than she already was.
Lizzy pulled herself up onto the counter and opened the cabinet. Even without the light on, she could see the glasses all lined up there, the moonlight from the window causing them to sparkle a little. The one Peter had broken was missing of course, which made another thought run through the eight year old’s mind.
Maybe she could just accidentally drop one like Peter did? Her dad couldn’t be mad at her for an accident, especially since Peter had just done the same thing. Then he would give her hugs and she could lean against him and feel the pressure in her face and chest go away for a little bit. It wasn’t fair that Peter had been taking all the comfort for himself. Lizzy wanted some too. She was sad too. She was hurting too. It wasn’t fair!!
Lizzy grabbed a glass and then let it slip out of her fingers and onto the floor, where it broke in a couple of places. She stood there for a moment on the countertop, looking down at the shards on the floor, and without thinking about it, grabbed another one and held it up higher. It dropped onto the floor and shattered. Lizzy felt tears filling her eyes for some reason, and angrily, she grabbed another glass and threw it as hard as she could onto the floor.
“Lizzy? Are you alright?”
Lizzy jolted at her father’s voice as she reached for another glass. She immediately started to regret what she had done. She didn’t want to look at his disappointed face. She knew she was in trouble. She knew she had done something bad, but when she finally looked up at him, his face was simply tired and sad. Lizzy dropped the glass, which hit the counter and broke on the floor with the others.
“I-I didn’t mean to!” she hiccuped, feeling ashamed of herself.
“Stay there on the counter. I’ll get it up,” her father said softly. Lizzy wiped the tears from her face, even though they kept coming.
“I’m sorry, Daddy…” she cried.
“It’s ok, Lizzy. Just give me a second.”
A moment later he was lifting her off the counter and holding her in his arms.
“Did Peter wake you up?” he asked gently.
“No. Marina and I were a-already awake. Even though I kn-know we weren’t supposed to.”
“Is Marina asleep?”
“Y-yeah.”
Lizzy buried her face into her father’s shoulder as he carried her into the living room to sit on the couch. He let her hug him and cry for a few minutes, patting her back and stroking her hair.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“...No.”
“Ok.”
Lizzy sniffed, feeling like her tears were all dried up now.
“Daddy, does Peter have to stay with us?”
“Yes. He needs someone to help take care of him.
“Why can’t someone else do that?”
“Because … It’s complicated. I’ll try to explain it to you when you’re a little older.”
She hated when he said stuff like that. It was always “when she was older,” never now.
“I miss Mommy.”
Her father closed his eyes, his jaw clenched.
“I do too. A lot,” he said, holding onto Lizzy a little tighter. “I miss her every day. Peter isn’t here to replace her—you know that, right?”
“I guess…” Lizzy mumbled.
“Peter is very sad and hurt right now. He misses Adelaide, Tilly and Maddy. He lost all of them.”
Well Lizzy missed them too, and she really missed her mom and felt sad about it, and yet Peter was getting all this attention. She didn’t mention anything about this though, since at the moment, it was just her and her father, and no Peter to get in between them.
“Please be patient with me and Peter,” her father told her, tucking her blond hair behind her ear. “I know this is all new and scary and hard, and I might not always be able to give you the attention and comfort you want, but I’m going to try my best, ok?”
“Ok.”
