The dude stared for a moment, trying to wrap whatever was passing for his brain around this sudden and unexpected appearance. “What?” he said.
“I said, you’re making me lose a bet,” Gretchen repeated, and then jerked a thumb over toward me. “I had a bet with Zo? here that no one would start a fight on the Magellan before we actually left dock, because no one would be stupid enough to do something that would get their entire family kicked off the ship.”
“Kicked off the ship two hours before departure, even,” I said.
“Right,” Gretchen said. “Because what sort of moron would you have to be to do that?”
“A teenage boy moron,” I suggested.
“Apparently,” Gretchen said. “See—what’s your name?”
“What?” the guy said again.
“Your name,” Gretchen said. “What your mother and father will call you, angrily, once you’ve gotten them kicked off the ship.”
The guy looked around at his friends. “Magdy,” he said, and then opened his mouth as if to say something.
“Well, see, Magdy, I have faith in humanity, even the teenage male part of it,” Gretchen said, plowing through whatever it was that our Magdy might have had to say. “I believed that not even teenage boys would be dumb enough to give Captain Zane an excuse to kick a bunch of them off the ship while he still could. Once we’re under way, the worst he could do is put you in the brig. But right now he could have the crew drop you and your family at the loading bay. Then you could watch the rest of us wave good-bye. Surely, I said, no one could be that incredibly dense. But my friend Zo? disagreed. What did you say, Zo??”
“I said that teenage boys can’t think beyond or without their newly dropped testicles,” I said, staring at the boy who had been trying to talk sense into his pal. “Also, they smell funny.”
The boy grinned. He knew what we were up to. I didn’t grin back; I didn’t want to mess with Gretchen’s play.
“And I was so convinced that I was right and she was wrong that I actually made a bet,” Gretchen said. “I bet every single dessert I’d get here on the Magellan that no one would be that stupid. That’s a serious bet.”
“She loves her dessert,” I said.
“It’s true, I do,” Gretchen said.
“She’s a dessert fiend,” I said.
“And now you are going to make me lose all my desserts,” Gretchen said, poking Magdy in the chest. “This is not acceptable.”
There was a snerk from the boy Magdy had been facing off with. Gretchen wheeled on him; the boy actually flinched backward. “I don’t know why you think this is funny,” Gretchen said. “Your family would have been thrown off the ship just like his.”
“He started it,” the boy said.
Gretchen blinked, dramatically. “‘He started it’? Zo?, tell me I heard that wrong.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “He really said it.”
“It doesn’t seem possible that anyone over the age of five would be using that as a rationale for anything,” Gretchen said, examining the boy critically.
“Where’s your faith in humanity now?” I asked.
“I’m losing it,” Gretchen said.
“Along with all your desserts,” I said.
“Let me guess,” Gretchen said, and waved generally at the clot of boys in front of her. “You’re all from the same planet.” She turned and looked at the other boy clot. “And you’re all from another planet.” The boys shifted uncomfortably; she had gotten their number. “And so the first thing you do is you start picking fights because of where you used to live.”
“Because that’s the smart thing to do with people you’re going to spend the rest of your life living with,” I said.
“I don’t remember that being in the new colonist orientation material,” Gretchen said.
“Funny about that,” I said.
“Indeed,” Gretchen said, and stopped talking.
There was silence for several seconds.
“Well?” Gretchen said.
“What?” Magdy said. It was his favorite word.
“Are you going to fight now or what?” Gretchen said. “If I’m going to lose my bet, now’s as good a time as any.”
“She’s right,” I said. “It’s almost lunchtime. Dessert is calling.”
“So either get on with it or break it up,” Gretchen said. She stepped back.
The boys, suddenly aware that whatever it was they were fighting about had been effectively reduced to whether or not some girl would get a cupcake, dispersed, each clot headed pointedly in a separate direction from the other. The sane boy glanced back at me as he walked off with his friends.
“That was fun,” Gretchen said.
“Yeah, until they all decide to do it again,” I said. “We can’t use the dessert humiliation trick every time. And there are colonists from ten separate worlds. That’s a hundred different possible idiotic teenage boy fight situations.”
“Well, the colonists from Kyoto are Colonial Mennonites,” Gretchen said. “They’re pacifists. So it’s only eighty-one possible idiotic teenage boy fight combinations.”