"So, what were you talking about with Zim?" Zita asked me as she all but dragged me across the playground. I didn't really want to go wherever she was taking me, but she didn't seem to care.
"Not much," I replied. "Dib showed up right after I started talking to him."
I had managed to learn that the green kid's name was Zim. Someone had yelled it out when the really tall boy in the jersey had been torturing him.
Zita rolled her eyes. "Ugh. Dib."
"Tell me about it."
"So, anyway, you might want to stay away from Zim."
"Why?" I asked, digging my heels into the dirt of the playground. The purple-haired girl just pulled harder. "He seems nice."
Zita stopped and looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted another head.
"What? He does. Well, maybe a little on the psychotic side, but better than Dib."
"After a week in our class, you'll change your mind," she said confidently, resuming her journey. "Oh, look! There's Sara and Jessica!"
She waved maniacally, and two girls over by the swings waved back. One was dark-haired, and the other was blond. The former looked relatively nice, and the latter had the expression of a queen bee who was just waiting for one of her underlings to serve her.
"Hi, girls," Zita said as we arrived. She finally let go of me, but I thought that it might be rude to bolt before I had been introduced. "This is Ila—um, what's your last name?"
"Ila's just fine," I told her.
"Right. Well, this is Sara, and this is Jessica." She pointed to the dark-haired girl first, then the blond. Sara smiled, and Jessica appraised me through narrow eyes.
"So, where did you move here from?" Sara asked.
"Another city," I replied. "Further north. We have moose there."
"Moose," Sara giggled. "Heh. Doesn't that remind you of that field trip, when we didn't go anywhere, and Dib—"
"Oh, man," Zita said. She started to laugh. "I had almost forgotten about that. They didn't let Zim go for whatever reason, and so Dib said that he had launched us all into space, and we were heading to—"
"A room with a moose!" Sara finished. Both of them cracked up.
Jessica rolled her eyes. "That was so uncool."
"A room with a moose?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. That was pretty much the most random thing I had ever heard.
"A room with a moose," Zita confirmed.
"I don't get it."
"Neither do we!" Sara said. She and Zita started laughing again. I glanced at Jessica, who just tapped her foot impatiently. I wondered why she hung out with them.
Zita and Sara had finally regained their breath, but now they were engaging in a rapid-fire conversation that seemed to be mostly about bashing Dib. I would have joined in, except for the fact that they were mainly discussing events that I hadn't been here for.
Rapidly tiring of the girls who, for some reason, had taken it upon themselves to be my friends, I glanced around. There was a kid with bright orange hair and a sweatband playing tetherball with a tall boy, a turquoise-haired girl jumping rope while a girl with a ponytail watched, and another girl, sitting on a bench away from all of the others. Her hair was a shade of magenta that I had never seen on a human head before, and she was hunched over a hand-held game system of almost exactly the same color. Her clothes said "Goth," her position said "antisocial," and her expression said "don't mess with me unless you feel like getting your organs rearranged."
This girl, I might be able to relate to.
"Who's she?" I asked, pointing to her. Zita and Sara noticed me, then looked to see who I was indicating.
"Her?" Sara asked. "That's Gaz."
"Dib's sister," Zita added.
I squinted. "She looks nothing like him."
"Yeah, just one of the lesser mysteries surrounding her and her brother," Sara said, shrugging.
Lesser? "What are the more prominent ones?"
"Who their mom was," Zita offered.
"Why they don't have birth certificates," Sara told me.
"Where they got their fashion sense," Jessica sneered.
I turned to Zita. "Who's their dad?"
"Professor Membrane."
"Seriously?!" I thought back to Dib's hair. Yeah, there was some definite resemblance. "I didn't know he had kids."
"Yeah...'kids'," Sara said. I was about to ask just what she meant by that, but suddenly, Zita said, "Uh-oh."
A kid was approaching the bench that Gaz was sitting on. He had sparse red hair, a blue shirt with a rainbow on it, and a vacantly happy expression. I vaguely remembered seeing him earlier, when I had introduced myself to the class.
"Keef," Sara explained. "He used to hang out with Zim. For, like, a day."
"He was never really the same after that..." Zita mused.
"Not like he was normal to begin with," Jessica scoffed. "Anyway, this ought to be good."
Keef had reached Gaz. He smiled brightly, and opened his mouth to say something. Before he could get a single word out, she folded up her game system, put it in her pocket, grabbed the front of his shirt, and threw him over the bench. It took her about five seconds to walk around to where Keef was dazedly getting up, grab him again, and throw him onto the other side of the bench. Gaz once again followed him, and this time, she picked him up, pummeled him in a swift, efficient manner, then drop-kicked him all the way to the basketball court. Satisfied that he had been properly dealt with, she pulled her game out of her pocket, sat back on the bench, and resumed playing.
"That," I declared, "was the most violent-slash-amazing thing I have ever seen."
"Consider it a lesson on why you don't bother Gaz," Zita told me.
"She's scary," Sara shuddered.
"Whatever," Jessica sighed, wandering off in search of people cool enough to be blessed with her company.
The bell suddenly rang. Zita grabbed my arm, and I tensed to leap back, wary of her repeating our earlier journey. But her grip wasn't that tight this time.
"You have to sit with us at lunch," she told me.
"Um...okay."
Satisfied that she had gotten her way, Zita let go of me and beckoned to Sara. The two of them scurried off, apparently content to let me find the way to the lunchroom on my own.
Not like it was that hard. All I had to do was follow the general flow of children. When I walked into the cafeteria, I automatically flinched and looked for the nearest trash can, just in case. The smell was actually that bad; I was surprised that my hair didn't catch on fire. What were they serving?
Despite my misgivings (the feelings were a little stronger than that, but I'm not going to go into it right now), I got a tray of turquoise-ish glop and a carton of milk.
I glanced around the lunchroom. I spotted Zita and Sara, sitting at a table with Jessica and a couple other kids from our class. Zita waved at me, then pointed to the empty seat next to her. I waved back and held up a finger in the universal "give me a minute" sign. She shrugged, as if saying, "Have it your way." Then she turned to Sara and rejoined whatever conversation they'd been having.
I carefully scrutinized each table. There were a few that were almost empty. One held Keef, a kid with a large head who struck me as sort of slow, and a violet-haired girl with braces. Gaz and Dib were seated at another, and I quickly turned away before Dib noticed me (he seemed to be absorbed in a conversation with his sister, so I was in luck). And Zim had claimed the last one as his undisputed territory, poking at his "food" with an absentminded mixture of disgust and curiosity. This was the table that I walked over to.
Zim looked up sharply as I sat down, seeming shocked that anyone would dare to approach his table. I looked him up and down, going for an in-depth observation this time. My view of him had been obstructed by another child's head in class. And I had barely had the opportunity to glance at him when we were out on the playground; he had been in motion most of the time.
Black hair, purple eyes, the green skin that set him apart from everyone else. He was wearing some sort of magenta shift that fell to a few inches above his knees. He also had on black gloves, boots, and leggings, and there was something on his back. It looked sort of like a backpack, but there were no straps. Was it attached to him somehow?
The entire ensemble reminded me of some sort of military uniform, designed for efficiency, conformity, and a certain degree of comfort, but that was ridiculous. Why would a kid our age be wearing a military uniform?
And why did he only have three fingers?
"Ila? What are you doing?" he asked me. Not threatening, just curious.
"Sitting," I replied.
"You can't sit here," Zim said.
"Last time I checked, it's a free country. Has something changed in the past few days? Did President Man issue a decree making himself king?"
He said nothing for a few moments, just stared at me. Finally, he spoke again.
"Why are you here?"
"I thought that you looked lonely," I told him, prodding the glop. Was it just my imagination, or did it move?
"Lonely?" He sounded like the word was foreign to him. "I don't get lonely. Zim needs no one!"
These last words were spoken at the top of his lungs, while standing on the bench next to the table. When everyone in the cafeteria shut up and turned to stare at him, Zim coughed slightly and sat back down. He kept his eyes on his tray until they started talking again, then his gaze flicked briefly to me.
"Seriously, why are you here?"
I kept poking the glop, watching it intensely. Yep, it moved.
"Ila?"
Was it alive?
"Answer me, Earth-child! Why are you here?!"
I looked up at him, and smiled serenely. That must have weirded Zim out, because he raised an eyebrow and leaned back a little bit.
"Isn't it obvious, Zim? To serve the Irken Empire."