Free Life on Mars by Jennifer Brown Page A

days.
    It was going to be my last couple of days.

10

A Situation of Infinite Gravity

    When I was little, I used to think a black hole was a pothole in the sky, sort of like the potholes in the grocery store parking lot. Dark and deep, filled with oily water and floating leaves and Band-Aids.
    But a black hole is really more like a force.
    Technically, a black hole is gravity. But not just any gravity. Not the gravity you and I are used to, the kind that keeps your toothpaste on your toothbrush and keeps you from floating out of algebra class. It is more like gravity times eleventy gazillion. Gravity so extreme it overwhelms all other forces in the universe. Gravity that is impossible to escape. Even light can’t escape the gravity of a black hole.
    If you approached a black hole, first your body would be stretched pretty much to smithereens. But that wouldn’t matter for long, because as soon as you were sucked inside, you’d be squished into a tiny speck by all that awesome gravity.
Splat
. Infinite density.
    That was exactly how I felt when I pushed open Mr. Death’s door.
    â€œHello?” Vega called, peering into the darkened house over my shoulder. There was no answer, just the faint odor of cigar smoke and the hum of the air conditioner. She and I looked at each other, and we shrugged. “Hello?” she called again. Still no answer. We craned our necks so we were both peeking in through the open door.
    There was a cough from somewhere within the house. Deep, guttural, rattly. It made both of us jump and pull our heads back outside.
    Vega straightened and pushed her backpack up higher on her shoulder. “Well, he’s in there,” she said. “At least we know that much. And he grunted what sounded like a yes when I asked if you could stay, so …” She paused, licked her lips, glanced nervously back into the black hole that was Mr. Death’s living room. “You’ll be fine, Arty.” The Bacteria beeped his horn, and we both jumped again. Vega turned and gave him a hold-on signal. She turned back to me and bumped my back with her elbow. “So go ahead,” she said, though even she didn’t look too convinced.
    I took a step back. “No way. It’s dark in there.”
    She pushed me again. “You have to. I already locked the house. You have nowhere else to go. What, are you afraid of the dark now? I thought you got over that when you were three. Come on, I’m sure he’s really nice. Mom wouldn’t let you stay if he wasn’t.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s one night, Arty. I’ll come check on you if Mom doesn’t get back tomorrow, okay?”
    Again, a nasty cough echoed from inside the house. I took another step back. “He’s a murderer. A serial killer with a cemetery in the woods behind our house,” I blurted out. “I’ve seen it.”
    She cocked her head at me. “You can’t be serious right now.”
    â€œOr possibly a face-eating zombie.”
    She made a snickering noise in the back of her throat. “Now you sound like Tripp. Zombies don’t eat faces. They eat brains, in which case, you and Tripp are both safe. If our neighbor is into eating brains, he’s going to starve to death with you in the house.”
    The Bacteria honked his horn again. We looked back. He was head-banging to metal music in his car and had hit his forehead on the horn. He waved at us sheepishly. Talk about starving for brains.
    Vega shifted her weight impatiently. “Just go, Arty. Mom will call later.”
    She raced down the sidewalk and dove into the Bacteria’s car and they squealed away. And when I looked back at the open front door, I could swear everything around it—the flowerpot, the shrubs, the statue of a little girl with a watering can—was bending and distorting, the way stars did around the edges of a black hole. And just like falling into a black hole, I