Life on Mars by Jennifer Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

hundred times, he scurried in through his garage, like he never heard us at all.
    â€œDid that seem weird to you?” Priya asked.
    I shrugged. “What do you expect? Tripp’s weird,” I said, even though, yeah, I totally thought it was weird. But Priya simply nodded and we went back to our lookout.
    â€œHey, Priya.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œWhat do you think Mr. Death does out there?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe he meditates or prays or something. Or hunts.”
    â€œHunts people?”
    â€œNo, silly. Animals. Maybe he traps rabbits. My cousin knows how to make rabbit traps.” But I could see it in the way she bit her lip as she held the Mickey binoculars to her face—even Priya was a little bit frightened.
    That was why I growled, vampire-style, when Mom pulled open my blinds. I had been up way too late the night before, wondering exactly what Mr. Death was hunting out there, and if he knew how to make seventh-grade-boy traps, too.
    â€œCome on, you’ve got to get up,” Mom repeated. “Ugh.” She made a face as she picked up a used pair of underwear that had been draped over the back of my desk chair and dropped them into my clothes hamper. “You’ve got to get yourself presentable before she gets here.”
    I pulled myself up on my elbows, still snarling.
    â€œBefore who gets here?” I asked.
    Mom high stepped over a Lego representation of the physics behind centrifugal force, then stopped in the doorway. “Aunt Sarin.”
    If you look east in the spring and summer night sky, you will find the “celestial strongman,” fifth-largest constellation, Hercules. Unlike Orion, Hercules wouldn’t have been afraid of a puny bug, because he pretty much spanked anything that got in his way. Leo the lion, Hydra the nine-headed serpent, and even Cancer the crab.
Crack, crash, thud
. Even in his constellation form, Hercules is socking it to Draco, his left knee planted firmly on the dragon’s star head.
    But it’s over in Hercules’s right knee that you will find a white subgiant—the 198th brightest star in the sky, to be exact—called Sarin.
    Being in a warrior’s knee sort of fits my aunt Sarin. She is sturdy and tough, doesn’t take a lot of guff from anyone, andsupports the whole family. If anyone has something they need, they go to Sarin. And she always says yes, because she’s reliable like that.
    â€œI thought she was having a baby,” I yelled, but my mom had already left the room. I’d overheard Mom talking on the phone to Aunt Sarin two nights before, and Mom had said something like, “
You’re gonna have that sweet pea any minute now
.” I guess I’d thought she really meant any
minute
now and not any
day
now. Why people hardly ever said what they really meant was something I would never understand.
    I got up and dressed, taking a quick peek outside to see if Mr. Death was maybe doing something normal like mowing the lawn or putting water in the scaly bird bath Widow Feldman had left in the backyard when she moved out, but no such luck. As usual, his yard was empty, his curtains shut tight, his house as buttoned up as Widow Feldman’s housecoat.
    I went downstairs and the first thing I noticed was the giant suitcase. And by “noticed,” I mean stubbed my toe on, because it was literally sitting right at the bottom of the staircase, with two rogue pairs of shoes and a hairbrush resting on top. Tripp would have totally wiped out if he’d been there.
    I stepped around the suitcase and went into the kitchen, where Mom was filling a plastic bag with snacks.
    â€œWhere are you going?” I asked. “Why is Aunt Sarin coming? Did she have her baby? I didn’t know we had Fruit Roll-Ups, can I have one? What’s the suitcase doing out? Where’s Dad?”
    Mom held out her hand, stop sign–style. “Whoa. Too many questions. Here.” She