One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney Page A

three tickets available, so the couple’s older two children, their son, Squirrels Running On Highways, and their other daughter, Dolphins Tangled In Nets, were told to stay at home, which they agreed to with a surprising enthusiasm. In fact, when her parents told Windows Falling On Sparrows she would be the one taking this long voyage with them, she slammed her bedroom door and screamed how it
wasn’t fair!
and sulked for days. Sedenker and Exonarella thought she was simply being a drama queen over nothing, but in fact, she was annoyed at missing, again, all the secret wild parties her two older siblings were going to organize the moment their parents left the apartment.
    Her dismay was short-lived, disappearing as soon as she understood the itinerary, which her mother almost canceled the trip over.
    “We have to stay on the Moon for two days!” Exonarella complained. “In a hotel in LEM Zone One! That horrible, sleazy place! What was my brother thinking! How can he give us tickets like this! I want us to go directly out to Saturn! Not spend a moment in that hellhole!”
    “These are free tickets,” Sedenker commented. “I don’t think we should complain.”
    “It’s a horrible place,” his wife shot back. “A wicked den of thieves and prostitutes and sick people. I’m canceling. I’m calling my brother, and we are not going.”
    “Okay,” was her husband’s reply, as he honestly did not care. Exonarella was a woman of many prejudices, and Windows Falling On Sparrows could never understand where she got them from. Her mother was never clear as to exactly why she had such a negative opinion of the Moon, especially since she had never been there herself. Windows Falling On Sparrows, on the other hand, was thrilled by the prospect.
    The Moon. A bad place.
    On the other hand, Chez Cracken San, a resort over by the Rings of Saturn, was guaranteed to be a touristic, shopping-mall experience of living death. Exactly the kind of place her mother would love. A plastic, prefabricated, and controlled environment with piped-in music, about as exciting as an elevator. No wonder her uncle gave those tickets to them — only losers went to places like that. Only adults, especially older ones, went on these voyages. She would be the only teenager, surrounded by lecherous middle-aged men in toupées who wouldn’t stop staring at her while their brain-dead wives all chatted with each other about their sons and daughters and which ones went to medical school and which one was a lawyer. She was going to suffocate to dear death, especially knowing her older brother and sister would have moved all the furniture out of the living room and turned their fat into a non-stop rave festival by then. Everyone was going to be there, except her — she would be stuck between Mom and Dad and their dumb petty arguments over nothing. Confined to close quarters with her overbearing mother and passive-aggressive father…
    Rings of Saturn? So what? SO WHAT!? I’ll go there when I’m old!
    Touristic. Waste of time.
    But the Moon. Especially if they were really supposed to stay in a hotel in the infamously sleazy LEM Zone One! It would be easy — she would escape from her parents and wander around LEM Zone One just like the girl in that film
Blood Crater
, the one starring Janet Xan, who infiltrates a Sea of Tranquility mob family and ends up killing three hundred gangsters in a casino lobby. Or like the woman in
Cheap Cheat Chuck-Off
, who starts off as a prostitute who gets stabbed by her pimp, only she comes back later and cuts his head of then kills all of his henchmen with a machine gun, also in a casino. Windows Falling On Sparrows was a big fan of violent Lunaxploitation films, so the chance to see this infamous part of the Moon was very compelling. All her friends would be so jealous.
    And there was also another reason.

    She had a deep fascination with One Hundred Percent Lunar people. What she had heard about them was both