I slammed the door in his face.
I don’t know how long I sat there, grinding the steering wheel with my hands, my insides like hot soup. I’m guessing thirty minutes. Or four hours. Somewhere between thirty minutes and four hours. J.Lo was still there, though, motionless beside the car.
I got out, slammed my door good and hard, and came around to face him.
“Where did you learn that word?”
The Boov twittered his fingers together.
“I…I was already to telling you I did learn it from the tu—”
“Not ‘wicked,’” I shouted. “Turtlebear!”
“Is…is a perfectly good word.”
“WHERE DID YOU LEARN IT?”
“Fromto th-the tutor. Is a term of affection.”
I fell back against the car, all my breath squeezed right out of me.
“No…” I said. “It’s not, okay? It isn’t a word at all, except to me…and my mom.”
I didn’t like even mentioning Mom again. I didn’t want the Boov to know his people had hurt me. But then he said something that turned me on my head.
“Oh! That is explaining! Gratuity’s mom was probably J.Lo’s tutor!”
After that, I was just a screaming tornado of fists. I battered the Boov with everything I had.
“What? Stop! No! Whyfor?” he shrieked.
I went back to the car, grabbed the Boov’s toolbox, and began throwing its contents at him as he ran downhill.
“Oh, please,” he said. “No…do not, we willto be needing that—”
I found one of those aspirin things and whipped it at his head. Suddenly he was a big, lumbering snowman trailing fat chunks of foam.
“Aaah! Help! Help now!”
I tackled him. The foam exploded all around us. I drew back to punch the Boov in the face. He uttered something in Boovish and my knuckles cracked against his fishbowl helmet, which had just snapped into place.
“Ow! Stupid…Put that helmet back down!”
“No. Whyfor—”
“You stole my mom!” I said, rubbing my hand.
“Mimom?”
“My mom!”
We sat inches apart. I teetered on the edge of attacking him again.
“Oh, yes! Yes! Gratuity mom must have to been one of the tutors! We invite many humans to help teach the Boov!”
I was hyperventilating. “The…the mole…” I said. “On her neck.”
“Yes! A storage device! It holds up every word she say or think for long time. Then the Boov did call her back to remove this mole. Its information was to planted in all the Boov that was to live in Gratuity’s area! Gratuitymom is very helpful!”
My eyes stung. I pawed at them with the heels of my hands.
“‘Is’?” I said. “‘Is very helpful’? Is she…She’s still alive?” It hurt to ask. I just then realized that I’d thought she was dead.
“Of course she is alive!” said J.Lo. “What a question! She is alive and certainly to be waiting in Florida for her Gratuity!”
I couldn’t decide between hugging him and kicking him in the head, so I just sat there. Purple spots swirled before my eyes, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt like I was going to pass out. Then a few seconds later I went ahead and did it.
After the fight, it was more difficult to carry on as we had. I was just permanently steamed, a little at J.Lo, and a little at myself for feeling too exhausted or beaten down to even hate him properly. Given what I’d learned, I thought I was entitled to ditch the Boov somewhere and keep going on my own. But there he was, curled up in the passenger seat, tense, guarding against the human and the cat who would certainly start hitting or biting him at any moment.
I eventually gave in and veered off the highway at a King Value Motor Lodge so we could break into a room and take showers. The motel grounds were empty, apart from a raccoon. Someone had taken out some sort of grudge against the ice machine. There were abandoned cars in the parking lot and a moped floating in the swimming pool. One of the vending machines was completely cleaned out. The second was tied with a chain to the back of a pickup truck, which, as far as I could tell, had dragged it for forty feet before running into a telephone pole. Then the machine had been smashed like a piñata and looted.
Way off in the distance, a cluster of bubbles loomed in the sky. The smallest of them must have been bigger than a minivan, and they formed a shape like an octopus, or a galaxy, trailing tendrils of singular bubbles in a disk around it. I felt like it was watching us as we approached the building.
J.Lo bent over in front of the doorknob to room fourteen. I was expecting some really interesting tool that melted the lock or turned it into butterflies, so I was disappointed when he just picked it with a hairpin.
The showerhead sputtered out something like gravy for ten minutes before the water ran clear. As J.Lo showered, I sat staring at the bathroom door, thinking, I could leave right now, I could leave without you. A little while later he emerged, and I took my turn.
We left the motel with armfuls of towels and little soaps, as was the custom.
WELCOME TO FLORIDA
said the huge metal sign. It was shaped like the state itself, and dotted with pictures of attractions and exports and things. It was in this way that I learned the state motto is “In God We Trust,” which is just terribly original, and that the state beverage is orange juice, and that it’s filled with old people and swamps. Way to go, Florida.
“What did that to say?” asked J.Lo as we hovered by.
“What,” I said, “can’t you read?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked this.
“It passed behind to us too fast.”
I sighed. “It said, ‘Welcome to Florida,’ and then it said a lot of other things about beaches and oranges.”
“Ah, yes. I am liking these oranges. Perhaps we could to be getting some—”
He was interrupted by a piercing wail behind us. I looked in the rearview mirror, which I dared not touch or the muffler would fall off, and saw a flashing light approaching.
“That’s strange,” I said. “That noise. It’s a siren. It’s like a strange siren.” It seemed we had a cop following us. But I hadn’t thought there were cops anymore.
“Why do you think—” I began to say, but J.Lo was scrambling into the backseat. He landed with a thump and pulled one of our blankets over his curled body. Pig followed him underneath.
“What’s with you?” I shouted, with one eye on the view behind us. It was night, and hard to see with that flashing light, but I could tell that there was no police cruiser or motorcycle cop approaching. It was one of those gliding antler-spool scooter things, like the one J.Lo had left behind.