CHAPTER 8

Late that night, I’m sitting in the launch station waiting to catch a rocket back to Earth along with about twenty thousand angry sports fans. All the TVs above the passenger gates are showing stories about Quake dislocating his arm and us losing 45–26 once the Expectocrats realized I could only run the plays programmed into the ball.

Seeing as how I’m the cause of pretty much all their unhappiness, I cleverly improvise a disguise by painting giant red eyebrows on my face with a packet of hot sauce and putting a fake plant on my head.

It would probably be more effective if I wasn’t still wearing my uniform. But I couldn’t face my friends after letting them all down. Instead, I left a note that said, I quit, and ducked out the back of the locker room before anyone knew I was gone.

I also left a case of W00t! on my locker. The note is so they’ll know why I’m gone. The W00t! is for the team. It always cheers me up.

An old guy with a giant foam finger and an enormous hot dog glares at me as he walks by, and a lady wearing a Defenders’ jersey gives me the evil eye as her pink poodle snaps at my ankles.

I can’t blame any of them. Because of me, all humans are going to be kicked off Earth or end up working for the alien overlord, Schnozly Grofsplot. The poodle might also be a football fan, or she just doesn’t like the smell of the hot sauce.

A bunch of angry-looking dudes with their faces painted in the team colors spot me and get up from their seats.

Ducking my head, I come up with an escape plan that involves snagging a luggage cart, breaking a window, and borrowing the uniform of the rocket pilot eating a burger to my left.

Just as I’m about to launch operation Crashing Cart of Catastrophe, one of the guys yelps as a treelike arm lifts him in the air and a deep voice calls, “Quake to the rescue!”

Quake?!

I turn around quickly to see the entire team walking toward me.

Getting one look at the Planet Earth Defenders, the guys with the painted faces hightail it out of the launch port like a bunch of kindergartners who just realized they have to go to the bathroom.

“What are you doing here?” I gasp.

Andromeda tosses me a can of W00t!. “You left this.”

Nitro looks at my improvised disguise. “Brilliant camouflage, noodle brains.”

I shrug. “It would have worked if everyone didn’t keep thinking I was you.” I pat the plant. “It’s probably the hair.”

Then I look at the bandages on Quake’s arm and feel as low as a worm squished on the wheel of an abandoned shopping cart that got hit by a bus, fell into a manhole cover, and got wedged in a sewer pipe. “I’m sorry about your arm, big guy.”

Quake shakes his head. “RU-MD says I’ll be good as new by next week.”

“You shouldn’t have wasted your time trying to bring me back,” I say. “I quit the team for good. You’re better off without me.”

Nova plants her hands on her hips. “We didn’t come to bring you back. We quit too. Do they have any good fish-and-chips places around here?”

I pop out of my chair. “What do you mean? You can’t quit.”

“Already did,” Moustapha says. “Last I saw, Coach was curled up in a ball wondering why he came out of retirement.”

Nitro sneers. “I didn’t want to quit, but Astrid threatened to put my head in the toilet and mess up my hair if I didn’t.”

Astrid laughs. “Swirly, swirly.”

This can’t be happening. I turn to Nova. “If you all quit, you’re giving Earth to the aliens.”

Crush folds his arms across his chest. “You already did that.”

“I know,” I say, feeling more guilty than the time I switched my substitute teacher’s toupee with a mophead. “That’s why I had to go. I’m sorry I let you all down.”

Sunny shakes her head. “You didn’t let us down by losing, Wyatt. We lost the game together. You let us down by leaving.”

“Remember how you shared your squiggly red food with me last night?” Andromeda asks.

“I remember how you took a bag of my Cheetos without asking and then failed to appreciate their cheesy goodness,” I say.

She flaps her wings. “Whatever. My point is that we shared something. Even though it made my mouth burn afterward. Playing football is just like that.”

I shake my head, thinking her comparison probably lost something in the translation from her culture to mine.

Ajay links his fingers together. “What she’s saying is that we’re a chain, man. We win together and we lose together. But if one of the links goes, it breaks the whole chain.”

“Except we’re not really a chain,” I say. “We’re more like one of those necklaces kids make out of colored macaroni. We play football together. We watch films together. Some of us steal each other’s snack food. But we don’t really have a lot in common.”

“Then make us a chain,” Nova says, grabbing my wrist. “You’ve seen great football teams. Turn us into one.”

Even in my abject despair I appreciate the fact that I’m almost, sort of, if you don’t look too closely, holding hands with the girl of my dreams. But she just doesn’t get it. “Didn’t tonight make it clearer than ever that I will never be a football player?”

Nova snorts. “None of us are, Wyatt. FERN could have picked the best under-fourteen football players in the world to join the Planet Earth Defenders. The kind of stars college teams start recruiting when they’re in elementary school. But she picked us. Nine kids who have never played football in our lives.”

I get lost in her eyes but still catch most of the words she’s saying. I shake my head, and the fake plant pokes me in the face. “Maybe that’s true. But at least you’re all athletes. You need a team leader. I’m not that guy.”

Quake lifts me off my feet and crushes the air out of me with a massive hug.

(All right, this is the embarrassing part. Turn the page already.)