54 pages • 1 hour read
The True Meaning of Smekday
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Part 3, Pages 155-290Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Attack of the Clones”
Part 3, Pages 155-189 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.
Tip continues her story in a private journal, with instructions for no one to read it until the time capsule is unearthed and she is dead.
They drove west and Tip parked for the night in a junkyard. When she woke, they were caught in a flash flood brought on by a hurricane. J.Lo said the Gorg bring bad weather. Tip drove while J.Lo used Boov technology to bail out water through an open window. Panicked, Pig got tangled in a camera strap and jumped out the window. J.Lo dove in after her and made two trips, fetching Pig and the camera. Tip was emotionally overwhelmed and hugged him.
In the two days it took to wait out the storm, they exchanged stories about their species. J.Lo doesn’t know how families work; Boov don’t know their parents, but myriad people, whose job it is to teach or feed them, raise them. In the present, Tip includes a comic book J.Lo drew about Boov’s life and culture on the way from Florida to Arizona.
The comic retells the evolution of the Boov. A social class called the HighBoov eventually made general education available only to their chosen, condemned, and reclassified scientists who said industry is polluting the ocean as “the Forgotten,” and established the Boov “Grand Destiny” on land (173). On land, the Forgotten taught the Boov how to live until the HighBoov exiled them. They began exploring space for “new friends,” from whom they got teleportation technology. They met the Gorg, also called the “Takers” who were unfriendly and took “Boovworld,” forcing the Boov to wander the galaxy.
J.Lo drew another comic with eight facts about the Gorg. For instance, “Gorg” were each of their proper names, while their species were called Nimrogs, or colloquially the “Takers.” After their lengthy civil wars, they started “policing other planets,” claiming they intended to overthrow “bad governments” (185). Tip had renewed hope and wanted to fight the Gorg.
Part 3, Pages 189-242 Summary
As they drive through Texas, the huge purple Gorg moon, which they’ve seen since they left Florida, fights with Boov ships that fly overhead. The Boov are defeated immediately, and the Gorg fire at Slushious. J.Lo tells her that the Gorg took and improved Boov teleporting technology. A Nimrog named Gorg discovered they can clone infinitely, which is how all Nimrog became “Gorg” clones. Even their moon-like ship is made of Gorg skin, so it can heal itself.
As they drive, the Gorg ship seems to get closer. J.Lo says they will enslave and kill humans before eating the Earth itself. When they pass by Roswell, J.Lo wants to visit, but Tip says it’s unlikely a spaceship crashed there. J.Lo swerves to avoid hitting a boy on a bike, and they crash. J.Lo and Tip hide. She pulls a sheet over J.Lo, cuts eyeholes, and tries to pass him off as her little brother in a ghost costume when a group of humans checks on them. She introduces them as Grace and JayJay. An adult named Vicki is sympathetic to them, but another woman named Kat is suspicious and thinks “JayJay” sounds like a Boov.
They go to Vicki’s apartment. She’s lived in Roswell her entire life, but everyone else got trapped there during a UFO festival when Moving Day was announced. The adults connect the recent invasion to other conspiracy theories, like claims of prior invasions or the hollow earth theory. Vicki doesn’t want them to go to Arizona alone. Tip asks if an adult will drive them, and they find out the only working car in town belongs to an old man Vicki calls Chief Shouting Bear, who claims to have found a spaceship in 1947. Vicki disparages and insults the Chief and doesn’t think the saucer is authentic.
That night, J.Lo and Tip return to Slushious. J.Lo doesn’t have the parts he needs to fix the broken brakes, and a part from his old scooter called the Snark’s Manifold could explode at any moment. They see Boov ships shooting toward a white object. J.Lo draws a comic to explain: the Gorg ship launches a small teleporting booth. If it reaches Earth, Gorg will teleport out of it. The Boov ships rush to destroy the booth, and the Gorg ship destroys the Boov ships.
Tip drives Slushious slowly to the crash site so she doesn’t need brakes. She sees the teleporting booth and a crashed Boov ship, with another Boov ship shooting at emerging Gorg. J.Lo is hopeful the booth could help the Boov fight the Gorg. Tip distracts the Gorg from pursuing the Boov. As she drives, J.Lo crawls outside and throws the Snark’s Manifold on the Gorg right as it explodes.
Part 3, Pages 242-290 Summary
They hide the Slushious and return to Vicki’s in the morning. J.Lo heads to Vicki’s before Tip wakes. On Tip’s way to Vicki’s, she sees Trey, a rude Roswellian who is more skeptical than the others. He tells her where the Chief lives. They see 100 marching Boov, and Tip asks what they are doing. They are relocating away from the Gorg. Tip finds J.Lo, and they go to the Chief.
Tip notes the Chief doesn’t wear any of the stereotypical dress associated with Indigenous people, but instead wears standard Western clothing and an old pilot’s cap. He leads them to the UFO, which Tip sees is made from papier-mâché. While Tip takes a picture, J.Lo searches the junkyard outside. Still in his sheet, he leads Tip to the Gorg teleporter. The Chief doesn’t know what it is but knows it is the Gorg’s. Tip wants to barter for it; the only thing the Chief is interested in is Slushious.
Vicki and Kat arrive; Vicki doesn’t seem to want them visiting the Chief with Slushious tomorrow. He yells at Vicki and Kat, calling them “palefaced devils” and “Indian giver” (261, 262). When they leave, Vicki calls him “a poor, sick man” (263), but Tip says he didn’t yell until they arrived.
They spend the night at Vicki’s. In the morning, she’s overbearing and doesn’t want to let them out of her sight. She’s okay with them going to check on Pig but doesn’t want them returning to the Chief. When they leave anyway, she takes her infant, Andromeda, and follows them, scolding them and telling them her conspiracy theories. A Gorg robot looking for cats approaches them. It says all cats should be surrendered to the Gorg, or humans harboring them will be killed. J.Lo and Tip deny having a cat. Vicki says nothing but seems strangely pleased. The robot and Vicki leave.
J.Lo and Tip push Slushious to the junkyard. The Chief says that his real name is Frank, though Tip continues to address him as “Chief.” While Chief checks out Slushious, J.Lo disappears. A Gorg flies overhead. Chief runs to move the teleporter, taking Pig to hide her, while Tip hides under Slushious. The Gorg find Tip and interrogate her; they’re looking for the Chief. Chief returns to defend Tip, but the Gorg knocks him out and starts wrecking the junkyard. The Gorg finds nothing and flies off. J.Lo returns and uses his bedsheet to staunch Chief’s head wound. He says he hid so the Gorg wouldn’t smell him. Tip says this Gorg seemed to have a cold and was sneezing, which J.Lo thinks is impossible.
They put the Chief in the wrecked Slushious and push the car to town. J.Lo leaves to find a car they can steal, and Tip calls for help. They take the Chief into the UFO museum with Vicki disparagingly asking if he is drunk, because “Indians drink” (285). When Tip says the Gorg were looking for Chief, everyone looks at Vicki, who flees. The Chief seems addled, but Trey helps him. A man named David wants all humans to leave Roswell. Tip returns to the junkyard for Pig and sees Vicki pinning her to the ground. She says Tip endangered them all by having a cat and needs to turn her over to the Gorg.
J.Lo sneaks up behind Vicki, undisguised. He pretends to be a “Chief Animals Control Officer” who comes to collect cats (289). She gives him Pig and seems smug as she leaves.
Part 3, Pages 155-290 Analysis
In the form of Tip’s private diary, she recounts what happened after the Gorg arrived. J.Lo draws several comics to help Tip understand the history of Boov’s evolution, the advent of Boov’s “Grand Destiny” and colonization, and the differences between the colonial strategies of the Boov and Gorg. Learning about Boov’s history and society brings Tip and J.Lo closer together, further developing The Nature of Cross-Cultural Understanding. J.Lo learns what a family is, and they try to learn to write each other’s languages. Tip thinks the Boov’s written language of specially arranged bubbles is “pretty, once you got used to it” (177), showing her growing appreciation for extraterrestrial culture. They also develop a linguistic shorthand. When J.Lo is helping Tip pick a lock, she asks for “the purple thing” (187). When he asks which one, she replies, “You know, the purple thing. With the things?” (187). J.Lo then knows exactly what to hand her. As their friendship grows, they’re learning to understand how the other thinks and talks.
Rex continues to develop The Impact of Colonization from a Child’s Perspective through Tip’s growing insight about Boov’s invasion. Specifically, Tip begins to understand that J.Lo’s previous beliefs were due to how the HighBoov socialized him. For instance, the HighBoov enacted “the Purging,” which banned television. Additionally, they restricted access to a popular game, closed schools, and banished scientists who claimed industry was polluting their oceans. The HighBoov controls all platforms of information and communication: media, education, recreation, and science. They use this to control what Boov thinks about the world and their place in it. The HighBoov teaches that they have a “Grand Destiny” to occupy first the land of their world and then other worlds. It was Boov’s hubris, colonizing efforts, and taking of other planets’ technology that brought the Boov to the Gorg, a more violent extraterrestrial race.
A desire to escape the Gorg drives the Boov’s colonization efforts. Unlike the Boov, who developed and then controlled industries like art and science, Gorg society revolves around violence. Their first language is “based on punching” (184), and they fought centuries of civil wars before turning this violence to other planets, “often to take, and sometimes to trade” (185). The Gorg colonize to get resources under the guise of bettering governments and people in the way they think they should. J.Lo calls this “policing other planets” (185). This relates to the real-world idea of the “global policeman” or “world police,” which refers to a global superpower that interferes with other countries’ affairs. This interference often imposes the intervening society’s system of government onto the country they are invading. For instance, the United States adopted this role in the mid-20th century during its attempt to root out communism through Russia and Asia and in the early 21st century during its invasion of Iraq and the Middle East. Just like the Gorg invasions destabilize Boov and human societies, these real-world examples had more of a destabilizing effect than a stabilizing one. This phenomenon strengthens how Rex’s novel draws comparisons between the Boov and Gorg invasions and real-world European and American colonialism.
Different humans view the extra-terrestrial occupation differently. Tip views the occupation as an apocalyptic scenario. She relates it to the story of Noah and the Great Flood, a Biblical story that focuses on the flood purging humanity of corruption. However, Tip thinks that the most brutal part of the story is after the flood when Noah thinks “the worst is over, but no—he still had a family and about a million animals to lead down a mountain. And he had to find a place to live, and build shelter, and start the whole world over again” (179). Tip realizes that even if the extraterrestrials leave, humans will have an uphill battle to survive. This further cements The Complexity of Living Through and Recording Major Historical Events, a theme that rises in importance as the plot progresses.
Vicki is part of a group of Roswellian conspiracy theorists. She and her friends romanticize and theorize about extraterrestrial interactions. She claims that Boov landings in 1947, 1963, and 1985 led to contact between Boov and “the Argarthans […] an ancient race of people who live inside the earth” (217-18). By romanticizing fictional encounters, Vicki builds up a false image of what colonization under extraterrestrial rule will be like. At one point, she breaks down about the dissonance between expectation and reality, saying she “waited for the aliens to come, and now they’re here,” but “[i]t wasn’t supposed to be like this […] My aliens don’t push people around and cause families to break up” (268). The reality of living under a violent occupation breaks apart her fantasy. In an ironic twist, Vicki maintains her animosity and racism toward Chief, refusing to understand his feelings toward white colonists and eventually betraying him to the Gorg. As a Diné Indigenous person, Chief knows about the reality of colonization, land theft, and family separation. However, Vicki is unable to connect those historical realities to the extraterrestrial occupation.
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