Lily & Kosmo in Outer Outer Space Read online

  For Meghan and Dorothy Whatever smiles this book may bring originated with you

  CHAPTER 1

  Brooklyn, Earth, 1949

  The night Lily Lupino locked herself in the bathroom and cut off all her hair, a piece of space crash landed in her living room, in the form of a boy astronaut named Kosmo Kidd. He came by rocket, a small beat-up number that smashed through the ceiling while the Lupinos slept—well, not Lily. Lily was too mad to sleep. It started with a radio, looming over the living room like a cherrywood lighthouse, and the whine of a theremin, announcing the start of tonight’s episode of Trip Darrow: Star Pilot. . . .

  • • •

  Mr. Lupino was done listening to the evening news, and Mrs. Lupino’s favorite music program, Bandstand, didn’t come on until eight. Seven p.m. belonged to Lily Lupino, Astronaut in Training. For the fifth Thursday in a row, she sat cross-legged on the carpet, in the amber glow of the radio’s dial, grabbed the knob, and tuned in to join the baritone spaceman Trip Darrow, and his squeaky sidekick, Deirdre. Tonight, the five-part epic “Mutants on Moon Base Four” would reach its thrilling conclusion.

  Lily took off her horn-rimmed glasses, let the living room dissolve into a blur . . .

  The opening theremin music faded, and the story picked up right where it had left off last week, with Trip and Deirdre hiking across an alien moon, in search of the missing chemist Dr. Wyndecott. Their footsteps thumped through moondust. Their metal space gear clinked with every step. Their voices echoed inside their helmets. . . .

  TRIP: Activate the Vita-Scanner, Deirdre! On a barren moon like this, even the smallest blip should lead us straight to Dr. Wyndecott’s lab.

  DEIRDRE: Golly, Mr. Darrow, do you really suppose the doc’s air supply coulda held out this long?

  TRIP: It’s not his lungs I’m worried about, but his very soul.

  Deirdre’s Vita-Scanner blipped faster and faster. The hum of the theremin rose to a desperate pitch. . . .

  DEIRDRE: Mr. Darrow, look! The doc’s lab! There’s a light on, and . . . And there’s the doc, locked inside the Morpho-Sphere!

  TRIP: Alive?

  Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak. A clash of cymbals drowned out the radio, and Lily turned to see two piggish eyes smiling at her from under the sofa. It was Alfie, her two-year-old brother, with his windup velveteen pig-soldier, Colonel Shanks.

  “I can’t hear!” Lily shouted, and cranked up the knob.

  DEIRDRE: Sure, he’s alive all right, but . . . but he’s . . . changing. . . .

  TRIP: Yes, Deirdre, mutating. Before our very eyes!

  “Can it in there! I’m on the telephone,” growled Mr. Lupino in his study, covering the receiver, and coughing pipe smoke. Actually, to call it a “study” isn’t quite right, more of a nook between the coatrack and the broom closet. But there was room for a desk, a desk lamp, a telephone, a high-backed leather chair, and a pipe tray. And that was all Mr. Lupino needed—well, that and a little quiet. “You hear me? Quiet, I said!”

  “Okay!” said Lily. “I’m turning it down.”

  “No, not down. Off.”

  “Off?” cried Lily. “But it’s the conclusion!”

  “Lily, sweetie!” called Mrs. Lupino from the kitchen. Her scalp was pulled tight with curlers, her brain was adrift in show tunes, and her hands were drowning in dish suds. “You heard your father. Radio off!”

  “Fine,” groaned Lily. But when she turned the knob, she stopped just short of off, leaving just enough signal that she could hear it if she leaned in close. . . .

  TRIP: I’m afraid we’re too late, Deirdre. The serum’s already taken hold. The doc . . . he’s completely—

  Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak. The clatter of cymbals pounded straight into Lily’s eardrum, and she turned to find Alfie giggling, holding Colonel Shanks next to her head. She snatched the pig, and sat on it. Alfie pushed and poked, but Lily wouldn’t budge. He got hold of one of the Colonel’s legs, and tugged with all his might. Stitches popped, and Alfie toppled to the floor, holding the cleanly ripped-off velveteen leg. Tears filled his eyes, his mouth gaped, and he began to wail.

  “Shush!” Lily yelled, pressing one ear to the warm speaker, and covering the other with her palm. She shut her eyes. If she hadn’t, she might have seen Mr. Lupino glaring at her through a veil of pipe smoke, his face turning red as a fire engine. . . .

  DEIRDRE: His face! He—he ain’t human!

  TRIP: Mercy, Deirdre! He’s seen us!

  And if she weren’t so close to the speaker, she might have heard the familiar squeak of Mr. Lupino’s chair as he stood up, and the floorboards creaking as he marched across the floor. . . .

  TRIP: Fear not, Deirdre! My Dissolve-O-Ray will make fast work of that fiend.

  DEIRDRE: Rats, Mr. Darrow! Now I’ve gone and done it: I forgot to charge that Dissolve-O-Thingy. Can you ever forgive me?

  TRIP: The fault is mine, Deirdre. A barren moon like this is no place for a simple Earth gal like you. Now, hide your eyes, dear lady. It’ll all be over soon.

  DEIRDRE: Hold me, Mr. Darrow. Hold me close!

  A spark lit up the living room, as Mr. Lupino yanked the radio’s cord from the wall. The dial went dark, and the fates of Trip and Deirdre faded from Lily’s ear, leaving only the din of her bawling brother.

  Mrs. Lupino dashed into the living room, shaking suds from her pruny hands, and scooped Alfie off the floor. Alfie’s piggish little eyes peered over his mother’s shoulder, and Lily could swear those eyes were smiling at her.

  Her teeth clenched. Her nostrils flared. Her fists clawed into the carpet. . . .

  “Bed!” snarled Mr. Lupino.

  “But—” began Lily.

  “No fuss!” said Mrs. Lupino. “Go and wash up for bed.” Lily grabbed her glasses, and stomped off down the hall. “And brush that hair!” Mrs. Lupino shouted after her. “You’re looking ratty.”

  Lily stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. She grabbed a hairbrush from the cabinet, and started hacking at the stubborn knots of her long black hair. Past her scowling reflection, her eyes met the steely gaze of Trip Darrow, printed on the cover of a comic book sitting on the tank of the toilet. Trip stood, proud and heroic, with his fists on his hips, and Deirdre huddling beside him. Nobody made Trip brush his hair before bed. His hair was short and shiny, much more sensible for piloting rockets and battling the hordes of Planet Reptillia.

  Lily propped Trip on the sink next to the mirror, opened the medicine cabinet, and swapped the brush for a pair of scissors. Shwip-shwip. Shwip-shwip . . .

  • • •

  Angry knuckles rapped on the door.

  “Just a second!” Lily answered—shwip-shwip, shwip-shwip—as locks of black hair gathered on the tiles around her feet.

  “You better not be reading comic books in there,” warned Mr. Lupino.

  “I’m not.”

  The doorknob rattled. “Lily Lupino, you unlock this door! Now!”

  “I’m almost done! Geez,” said Lily, dropping the last fistful of hair into the wastebasket.

  “Five . . . ,” Mr. Lupino began. “Four . . . Three . . . Two . . .” Lily didn’t care to find out what would happen when he got to “one.” She unlocked the door, gave it a gentle push . . .

  • • •

  Once, when Lily was very little, she stuck a thermometer into a bubbling pot of pea soup, just to see if it would blow up. It did. Glass sprinkles flew everywhere, and Lily wasn’t allowed in the kitchen for a whole year. Tonight, when the door opened, and Mr. Lupino saw his daughter’s handiwork, his face turned so red that Lily thought he might suffer the same fate as that old thermometer.

  CHAPTER 2

  Inte
rrogation

  The evidence lay neatly on the desk: a pair of scissors, three locks of wavy black hair, and one full-color issue of Trip Darrow: Star Pilot. Smoke curled from Mr. Lupino’s pipe, glowing in the light of the desk lamp. He ran his fingers over his mustache, and scowled across his desk at Lily, who sat, staring into her lap.

  Mrs. Lupino stood off to the side, steadying herself against the coatrack, with mascara streaking down her cheeks. She stifled her sobs, and her face brightened for a second. . . .

  “We’ll get her a wig!”

  “No,” sighed Mr. Lupino. “Anything convincing is going to be too expensive.”

  “Then we’ll just have to keep her indoors, out of sight, until it grows back.”

  “And have her falling behind in school? No.” He snapped his fingers. “I know! We’ll say it was an accident: She wandered a little too close to your electric fan, and it ripped the hair right off her head!” He was clearly proud of this suggestion, and confused when it only made Mrs. Lupino sob all the more. He scowled at Lily. “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself! You’ve finally done it. You’ve broken your mother. And after all she’s done to make a decent, normal little lady out of you. First you tear up your brother’s favorite pig . . . I’ve never seen him so upset.”

  “I didn’t tear it up. He did!”

  “No tantrums!”

  Tantrums! Little Alfie could be screeching like a barn owl, oozing from every hole in his purple face, and Mr. Lupino would say he was “upset.” But if Lily so much as raised an eyebrow, it was always “a tantrum.”

  “Then you hole yourself up in the bathroom and . . . and . . . mutilate yourself! Whatever possessed you to do that to your head?”

  Lily shrugged. She knew he wouldn’t like her answer.

  “You answer me right now, young lady!”

  “Astronauts don’t have long hair,” Lily stated. “In zero gravity it floats around inside your helmet and tickles your face.”

  Mr. Lupino’s face turned so red that his teeth and the whites of his eyes seemed to glow. Then he cooled himself with a long pull on his pipe.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Do you know any other girls your age caught up in this space baloney?”

  Lily stared at her lap. She hardly knew any girls her age period, and had neither a clue nor a care what “caught them up.”

  “Of course you don’t! Because they’re all busy doing the things normal little girls do. What about that expensive tea set Nonna Lucille bought you? Have you ever even tried it?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “Well, soon you’ll have plenty of time for tea parties, because tonight you bid farewell to Mr. Trip Darrow.” He tore the cover off the comic book. “And Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers, and all the other space cadets.” He ripped out page after page, until the comic was stripped bare. Then he tore the pages up, until there was nothing left but a mound of motley, star-spangled confetti. He brushed it off his desk, into the wastebasket. Finally he dumped the dregs from his coffee mug on top of them.

  “Lily Lupino,” he declared, “you’re not an astronaut, so just put that thought out of your head for good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s no job for a lady.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Purge

  Lily sat on her bed, refusing to cry, while Mr. Lupino combed the children’s bedroom for all traces of outer space and piled them into a cardboard box. He plucked the solar system mobile down from the ceiling. He stripped clippings of comics off the wall. Finally, with a sweep of his arm, he cleared the shelf over Lily’s bed, catching squads of tin spacemen and windup robots in the box. Then he taped the box shut, and hoisted it out of the room. (He left the expensive tea set from Nonna Lucille in the corner, untouched.)

  Mrs. Lupino carried the sleeping Alfie into the room, straddling her hip and drooling on her shoulder. She lay the boy in his crib, placed the one-legged Colonel Shanks beside him, kissed the boy’s forehead, and headed for the door.

  “Mom?” said Lily. Mrs. Lupino paused in the doorway. Lily wanted nothing but for her mother to look at her, but Mrs. Lupino just switched off the light, and closed the door behind her.

  Lily tiptoed across the room, and leaned over her brother’s crib. Even in his sleep, his piggish eyes looked like wicked little smiles.

  “Bed!” roared Mr. Lupino through the wall.

  Lily flopped onto her bed, and soaked her pillow with hot tears. Streetlights spilled into the bedroom through gauzy curtains, onto bare walls and empty shelves. She tried closing her eyes, but Mr. Lupino’s scowling, reddening face was always there, waiting behind her eyelids.

  So it was that Lily was still wide awake, charged with anger from head to toe, when Kosmo Kidd struck the Lupinos’ apartment like a meteor.

  CHAPTER 4

  Stars in the Living Room

  Lily sat up, as the last aftershocks rippled through the apartment. In his crib, Alfie gave a little squeak, then sighed himself back to sleep.

  Lily slid out of bed, blew the dust off one of Nonna’s teacups, set the rim against the bedroom door, and pressed her ear to the bottom of the cup. . . .

  Aside from the syncopated snores of Mr. and Mrs. Lupino, the hall was silent. How had no one else heard the crash? No matter—it was up to Lily Lupino to investigate.

  She put on her glasses, reached under her mattress, and pulled out the one item she had managed to hide from Mr. Lupino’s ransacking wrath: the red, retractable Trip Darrow telescope she had cut out and taped together from the Sugar-Roos cereal box. She hung its string around her neck. A bit of extra string hung down, which she tied to the handle of Nonna’s teacup. She figured it might come in handy.

  She peeked out of her bedroom door. . . .

  The hall was empty. Her parents’ door was open just a crack. She stalked past it into the living room.

  The wood floor felt cold against her feet, and she could see her breath. There was a breeze from above. She looked up, and where there had been ceiling, now she saw stars. The night sky was spilling into her living room through a great big hole.

  There was a smoldering trail scratched into the floor. Lily followed it into the kitchen. There, nestled in the misty glow of the open refrigerator, lay a small, rusty rocket ship, like something that had broken loose from a carnival ride. The living room rug was rumpled, pinched between the fridge and the rocket’s dented grille. On the side of the rocket, a hatch was open.

  Lily tiptoed between scattered leftovers, spilled condiments, and the shards of a broken jelly jar. She knocked on the rocket’s rusty hull, and was startled nearly off her feet by an electronic chirp—SQUIZZ&#$@!—from the unmanned dashboard. But where was the pilot?

  “Not a peep, lad!” hissed a high voice into Lily’s ear. The voice echoed slightly, like someone talking into a tin can. A small, gloved hand grabbed her arm from the darkness, and something cold poked her back. “Do exactly as I say, and you won’t end up deep-fried.”

  Deep-fried? Oh! It was a ray gun. Of course!

  “Where are we?” asked the voice.

  “Brooklyn.”

  “Planet Brooklyn . . . ?”

  “No, Planet Earth.”

  “Ah, Earth: prison planet, maximum security. Right on course, then! This is a rescue mission. I’m here for Agent Argos.”

  “Who?”

  “And we’ll be leaving in a hurry, so be a good lad and keep your eye out for any Earth Men while I prep our getaway.” He spoke like a London street-tough from a Sherlock Holmes mystery. His voice was high, but it had gravel in it.

  “Could you please stop calling me ‘lad’?”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m not a lad. I’m a girl.”

  The captor’s grip loosened. Lily slipped free, and got her first good look at him. She couldn’t tell how old he was. He looked younger than her, definitely smaller, but there was a seriousness in his eyes that was almost scary. He wore a black, red, and gold uniform that seemed cobbled to
gether from attic scraps and box-top mail-in prizes, with a blue star stitched to the tummy of his tunic, and a slouching red garrison cap. And to top it off, he wore a big, fishbowl space helmet that made his voice sound tinny. He kept the ray gun pointed at Lily. His eyes narrowed to little slits in his brown face, and he sneered, showing a top row of tiny teeth.

  “What’s your game, boy-o?” spat the boy. “Wearin’ a lady’s dress!”

  “I’m not a boy-o, either. I’m a girl.”

  “With hair like that?” The boy crowed with laughter, rocking so far back that his helmet fell off. Trying to act like it was on purpose, he sniffed the air.

  “Air seems breathable,” he said, and rolled his helmet back toward the rocket.

  Lily giggled.

  “Oy!” he barked. “The jig is up, lad. Off with the disguise!” He tugged at her nightgown. She slapped his cheek. The little astronaut dropped his weapon, and backed into the shadows to hide his moistening eyeballs, and nurse his stricken cheek.

  “Oh, come on!” said Lily. “I barely hit you. Trust me, if I hit you for real you’ll know it!” She picked up his weapon. “Here, you dropped your—”

  “Give it here!” He snatched it. “Dangerous, that.” It didn’t look all that dangerous. In fact, it looked kind of cute, carved out of wood, with a fin on its back and a barrel that looked just like the honey dipper in Mrs. Lupino’s junk drawer. The boy tucked it back into its holster.

  “Sorry I smacked you,” said Lily. “But you shouldn’t go pointing guns at girls and trying to pull their dresses off.”

  “Aye,” the boy answered gravely, staring a thousand-light-year stare. “War does things to a man.”

  Lily introduced herself, “Lily Lupino,” and reached out to shake hands.

  The boy didn’t. Instead he placed his fists on his hips, and stuck out his chin.

  “Kosmo Kidd,” he said. For a moment, he reminded her a bit of Trip Darrow. He even seemed to grow a couple inches before her eyes. “Heard o’ me?” he asked. Lily shook her head, and the boy instantly deflated to his previous size. “You’re ignorant. I’m quite famous, you know. In fact, this puny planet of yours would probably be a dust cloud by now if it weren’t for me! Now, be a good lad and keep your eyes peeled for hostiles while I power us up.”