Free Mothership by Martin Leicht, Isla Neal Page A

Ducky kicks the pebble back to me. “And rainbow sprinkles.”
    I bite my bottom lip. Okay, so maybe I’ve been obsessing just a smidge.
    “Look,” he says as a car zooms by on the road beside us. “Britta McSicker is evil. We know that. Let’s move on.”
    I laugh. “I think you mean Britta McPricker,” I tell him.
    “Britta McLicker.”
    Ducky and I have been walking to and from school together since we were eleven, after our month-long campaignto convince my dad that we would be safe from international terrorists and/or wild beasts on the bucolic streets of Ardmore. No matter what happens in school—and usually because of it—my walk with Ducky is always my favorite part of the day. I mean, sure, Ducky spends almost all his time at my house anyways, but the walk is special. Like how he insists on buying me an iced tea from Louie’s Pizza Palace almost every day, or how, when we cut through the old graveyard, he makes up life histories for all the people whose gravestones we pass over. I’m almost— almost —not looking forward to getting my license this year, because if my dad ever actually lets me borrow the car, I’m afraid I’ll end up playing designated driver for all of our friends, and I’ll lose that time with Ducky for good. Luckily I don’t turn sixteen for a month and a half, so I have plenty of time for walking.
    “All I’m saying is,” Ducky tells me after a good five minutes of excellent Britta puns, “you spend a whole lot of time talking about someone you claim to hate.”
    I scrunch my eyebrows together. “Are you saying I’m secretly in love with Shitta McFlicker?”
    Ducky scratches his head. “No. Not with Britta.”
    I flick him right in the forehead for thinking such putrid thoughts. “Um, gross,” I say. “As if.”
    “As if,” he replies, rubbing his forehead. “I can’t think of a conversation in recent memory that hasn’t turned to Cole.” He clasps his hands to his chest, in what I’m pretty sure is supposed to be an impression of me, and he makes his voice all high and girly. “‘Who cuts their hair like that?’ ‘Where did he come from, anyway?’ ‘I didn’t even know they made cologne that smells like a spring morning.’”
    While Ducky may have a remarkably awesome falsetto, the fella’s seriously asking for a beat-down. Laughing, I flick him again in the forehead, then the arm, then his puny-boy chest, his arms grasping to catch me before I can get the flicks out, but I’m too quick for him. “Uncle?” I say. Flick, flick, flick!
    “Never!”
    Flick!
    He doesn’t give in until I flick the tip of his nose. “I didn’t say that thing about the cologne,” I tell him as he rubs the red out of his pores.
    Ducky laughs. “I apologize,” he says. “You are clearly not obsessed with the guy. My mistake.”
    “Thank you.” I stick my hands into my pockets, and we walk for a while in silence, until I remember what I’ve been meaning to ask him. “So,” I say, “Spring Fling is next week.”
    “Yeah?” Ducky perks his head up.
    “I’m thinking Molly Ringwald marathon?” Every school dance, Ducky and I hole up at my house and watch old flat pics together. Last month it was British gangster flicks, and before that there was an unfortunate period when I was pretty into vampires. The movie marathons are our miniature rebellion against the mindless drones at school preening in off-the-rack evening wear. When you’ve got popcorn, nachos, and a four-liter of GuzzPop, who needs dresses and mirror balls?
    “Oh,” Ducky says, and I don’t have to have been best friends with the guy for eleven years to know that he hates the idea. “Yeah. Molly Ringwald. That sounds good.”
    “I thought you liked all the Ringwalds.” My good ol’ buddy Donald Hunter Pence IV actually got the nickname Duckyfrom a Molly Ringwald flick— Pretty in Pink —way back in kindergarten, the year we officially became PIP: Peas in a Pod. Up until that point he’d