Clones vs. Aliens by M.E. Castle

Geminolvia. Claire was just telling me about it before class. Named, of course, for the great General Tixtillorsk, who, uh, was so great that naming one or two or six lakes after him just wasn’t enough.”
    He heard his own breathing in his ears as the room went silent and everyone’s attention turned from the Gemini to him. They seemed to have bought it. If anything, they were just annoyed that someone other than Claire had spoken.
    “Well, thank you for the background, Fisher,” Ms. Snapper said. “Please go on, Claire.”
    The rest of Claire’s answer was a perfectly ordinary description of B and T cells and contained no furtherreferences to planets nobody’d ever heard of. Still, Fisher realized he might soon find himself explaining some very strange facts about the wildlife in Geminolvia.
    One period down. As Fisher headed to math, he saw four of the Gemini standing with the Vikings by a bank of temporary lockers that had been shipped in along with the trailers. Apparently, the Gemini had forgiven the Vikings for being massive wastes of carbon and hydrogen, and the Vikings had apparently forgiven the Gemini for nearly blowing them into nanovikings.
    Brody and Leroy were shuffling their feet, and their hands hung at their sides like freshly caught grouper fish. Willard was telling the Gemini all about his rocket scientist dad and his work at NASA.
    “It really is very s-simple,” he said. “B-Beethoven’s Fifth Law says that an object at rest will stay indoors, ex-except after C,” he said. “Or C minor.”
    Fisher kept walking. The Gemini, he thought, looked amused—kind of like a person watching a dog trying to carry a long stick through a narrow door over and over again.
    Math went smoothly, until the last twenty-five minutes, when Anna and Bee recited the first three thousand digits of pi. Fisher had heard experts recite a thousand pi digits before, but he’d never seen two people go back and forth, not making a single error and inperfect rhythm, until the class was nearly hypnotized.
    As Bee spoke the three thousandth digit, the bell rang for lunch.
    “Brava!” Mr. Taggart, the math teacher, burst into enthusiastic applause before dismissing the class. “Truly remarkable. Thank you, girls.”
    Fisher was getting increasingly confident as the day went on. The Gemini were a hit—and he’d seen no signs of their earlier
explosive
tendencies.
    He might actually be able to pull this off.
    Fisher and Alex shepherded Anna and Bee through the trailers that currently made up Wompalog. The school had set up a temporary cafeteria under a tent, but Fisher and Alex weren’t going to subject the Gemini to Wompalog food and risk another fiery display of temper. Instead, they guided the extraterrestrial visitors to the one redeeming feature of their parking lot school’s existence: the King of Hollywood.
    As usual, the KOH was flooded by the Wompalog population at lunchtime, with a line out the door. Rather than stand in line, however, Bee and Anna walked immediately to the soda station, and grabbed a huge handful of cup lids. Then they marched up to the counter. The kids in line still marveled at the sight of them and let them cut ahead without complaint. They didn’t even seem to notice the lid collection.
    “All of these, please,” said Anna, indicating the lids.
    “Er … okay!” said the woman behind the counter, radiating confusion. “What size do you want the drinks?”
    “We get drinks with them?” said Bee with a giant smile.
    Fisher scurried up to the cashier, and explained that the girls were from Geminolvia and things were very different there. He then pointed out the wall menu to the Gemini, and soon he, Alex, Anna, and Bee, had loaded up trays with delectable grilled and fried Earth cuisine.
    They took their lunch to a big, round table. Alex pattered ahead, set his tray down, and pulled out a chair for Bee, who graciously accepted. Alex, instead of sitting down himself, pulled his chair