My name is Johnny, and I live on Mars. I know what you’re thinking, but no. I’m not some freaky green alien. I’m a regular human being. I just live on Mars.

It all happened one day when my dad came home and said, “Son, we’re moving to Mars!”

I think he expected me to jump for joy, but what I really wanted to do was jump into the toilet. No way did I want to leave all my friends just to go to some dumb planet.

“Man, that sucks,” my friend Pete said. “Are you going to bring your Halo 20? I heard they have an extra baggage charge of $5000 dollars per pound.”

“No,” I groaned. “All we could afford was a toothbrush.”

“Huh. Can I have your Halo 20 then?” Pete questioned.

I just glared at him.
Pete just grinned.

One of the worst things about being on this planet is missing Pete. Apart from me, there’s only one other kid on this dumb planet, and it’s a girl. Ugh. And since we’re on Mars, she has Mars cooties. Pete tells me they’re ten times as strong as regular cooties.

You’re probably wondering what life is like here on Mars.
For one thing, there is no school here because nobody wanted to pay for any teachers. So, Cootie and I have to teach ourselves. We usually end up throwing things at each other.
After school, I just fool around at the Mars Cars factory where my dad is a mechanic. Basically, I climb into all the empty cars and pretend to drive them. Sometimes the factory owner gets mad at me, but he can’t fire my dad, because he needs all the workers he can get. Importing people from Earth isn’t cheap.
The food here kind of sucks. All our meals come dehydrated and vacuum packed in foil and we just cut them open and add some water to it. Even after the water, it tastes all dry and mushy like rotten old applesauce. No one here is overweight. In fact, they call it the Mars Diet. What we really need is a McDonald’s, but even they have limits as to where they’ll franchise.
After skipping dinner, I go outside with a bag of Cheerios and pretend I’m a space frog. Because Mars has only a quarter of Earth’s gravity, I can jump super high. My favorite game is to jump from the ground to the roof of our metal marshmallow until my mom explodes out of the house and starts yelling at me. Apparently it’s kind of noisy.
It’s kind of lonely up here. Sometimes I wish we had paid the extra few bucks to bring Halo, and I wish we had paid more attention to taking care of our planet. Sometimes as I’m about to fall asleep, I look out the window and gaze at Earth, and wonder why we hadn’t.