by Emily Henry
“Sounds like metal,” Arthur shouted in reply.
Levi turned the volume down. “It’s like . . . groaning metal, or something,” Arthur repeated.
The metallic warble went on, changing in pitch and volume, and the screen stayed solidly white.
The only thing this video told us about those lost hours was that we’d likely sustained hearing damage during them.
“Why did we just ride two miles in like two-hundred-percent humidity for this, Levi?” I said. “You could have played this horrible sound over the phone!”
“Right!” He pulled up a tool bar. “But I wanted to show you something. Look. When the video plays at normal speed, it’s white. Just solid white, until the battery died and the video ends. But watch what happens when I slow it way down.”
Levi dragged the cursor along the bar at the bottom of the video until the moment before the flash, then tapped a few buttons, and hit Play. Again, that vicious CRACK rang out, but the sound that came after was lower, almost like a choir of humming voices.
The white rippled across his computer screen, but instead of a solid blanket of it, this time it flickered. So fast it was almost imperceptible.
Levi looked up at me, eyes alight, then spun to face Arthur. “Now watch.” He drew the cursor back and let the scene play out even more slowly.
There was the CRACK. The melodic sound like humming voices, or bows being drawn across a hundred quivering violin strings. The flashes of light came slower.
But in those off-moments, when the light retreated, the screen wasn’t entirely dark.
I could see myself and Arthur, trembling, shivering like the mugs in our kitchen cabinets when a train rushed past, like we were being electrocuted, seizing, and the whole thing was visible because the light wasn’t going out entirely.
Instead it was sucking back inward. Not into the disc—the disc was nowhere in sight now.
No, the light was cycling in and out of something else. A tall, narrow thing that absorbed the light in those jagged streaks and spat them out in every direction only to reabsorb them and repeat.
I stared at the computer, trying to make sense of our impossibly fast convulsions, the sparking eruptions of light, and the shape they leapt from.
“Is that . . .” Arthur trailed off.
In the glow of the computer, Levi’s eyes were glassy and his skin looked almost blue.
He jammed the space bar and the video paused, halfway between a flash and a moment of darkness.
Bits of light hung across the screen like frozen confetti. Through the splotches on the right side of the screen, my hand reached toward Arthur’s back. Tendrils of light seemed to be sparking off the fabric, crawling up my arm like ants.
And then there was Art, standing with his arm extended toward the disc.
Only the disc was, as I’d thought, gone. And in its place stood a person.
No, not a person. A person-shaped thing, its head and hands and legs all grotesquely elongated. A body made of white light, emanating shards of it in every direction.
I whispered exactly the same thing Arthur had said: “Is that . . .”
Levi nodded. “I think it is. And so do our commenters.”
“Commenters?” I parroted. “Mister KillYourself and Mademoi-selle RacialSlur have an opinion on what this thing is?”
“Guys,” Levi said, pulling up a YouTube Channel—not The Ordinary, a different channel named TheFallingSkyIncident, but the video on display was the slowed-down footage Levi had just played. “Everyone has an opinion on what this thing is.”
“Holy shit,” Arthur gasped.
There were nine thousand views already, and the count was rising before our eyes.
“So not only did we meet an alien,” Levi said. “We’ve also gone viral.”
I swallowed the fist-sized knot in my throat. “Pretty big day for us.”
FIVE
WHAT ELSE COULD IT be? It had fallen out of the sky during a meteor shower. It had hit the earth in a disc and unfurled into a person shape when that disc cracked.
“No way.” Sofía was still in her lacrosse shorts and a muddy NYU T-shirt, gnawing on one fingernail. Even so, she managed to be supermodel pretty and smell like a mix of rosewater and tea tree oil. It would’ve been annoying if she weren’t also the most truly kind and sensible person I’d ever met.
Which was why she couldn’t accept this.
“What else?” I said. “I mean, the options are basically that or superhero.”
“Or coincidence,” Sofía said. “It’s a—a trick of the light. It’s a random pattern, and that’s just the shape our brains can most easily compare it to.”
“It’s an alien,” Arthur said.
Levi nodded eager agreement.
“It’s not,” Sofía said.
“We all know where you stand, Bill Nye,” Nick said. He was wearing the button-up and khakis he worked in, but he’d stuffed the Walmart vest in his back pocket and rolled the sleeves as soon as he arrived, like his tattoos needed to breathe, or maybe we couldn’t recognize him without them. “Space light or alien, either way, that thing knocked us out for six hours. Let’s just be glad it’s gone.”
“We don’t know that,” Levi countered. “The camera died hours before we woke up. We have no idea what happened.”
“Exactly.” Arthur pounded Levi on the back so hard that he coughed. “Levi’s right. We’ll have to go back to the field.”
Nick’s mouth fell open. Sofía closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. They both said, more as a statement than a question, “Why.”
For Mark’s necklace, I thought futilely.
“For answers,” Arthur said. “We witnessed something, and none of us can even remember it. We need to find out what it was. We have to go back.”
Nick guffawed, but Levi nodded. “We can get more footage for our new fans on The Falling Sky Incident!”
“Horrible name, by the way,” Nick sniped.
Sofía dropped her face into her hands and groaned. “You’re stoking mania, Levi. You’re part of the problem.”
“What problem?” he asked, aghast.
“Groupthink!” Sofía said. “Inaccurate assumptions spreading faster and farther than facts!” She looked to me for backup.
I shrugged. “You are so vastly overestimating my understanding of Everything.”
She huffed and pushed off the bed. “Okay, setting aside the irresponsibility of sharing that video with impressionable conspiracy theorists, there’s the fact that you posted proof we were at the substation that night. Exactly where the sheriff practically begged us to never reveal we went. We broke the law, Levi!”
“I posted this from a new account!” Levi said. “There’s nothing here to link this video to The Ordinary, or even Splendor!”
“Besides,” Arthur jumped in, “don’t you think keeping what we saw to ourselves goes against your ‘justice for all’ thing?”
“That’s from the pledge of allegiance, Art!” Sofía said. “Not a diary of my legally trademarked thoughts!”
“Whatever that thing was, the public has the right to know about it, right?” he said. “It’s our duty to follow up on this.”
He said it with such conviction that I almost believed this had nothing to do with the ways his brain was rapidly calculating how this “duty” could bring him fame or wealth.
Sofía chewed her lip. “If they’re really worried about what happened in that field, we should give the sheriff the video. It’s the right thing to do.”
“And Stanford will be thrilled about your resulting breaking-and-entering charges,” Arthur said. “Going to the sheriff would just get us into trouble, and we’d lose ownership over this. The whole thing will be swept under the rug.”
“I had the same exact thought,” I deadpanned. “Harvard will have me out on
my butt.”
“And my job at the U.N. certainly wouldn’t last,” Nick added.
Sofía shot me her best Please be serious look.
“The comments just keep coming in,” Levi said, still scrolling at the computer.
I perched on the edge of the desk and read along with him. There were still plenty of “I hope you REALLY get electrocuted, FKWAD,” but there was also enthusiasm.
Alien emojis. UFOs formed from keyboard symbols. “They are here, among us” and various typo-ridden phrases proclaiming the same thing. “This is some real Barney & Betty Hill shit,” one person wrote. “Look it up! They saw a strange light on the highway and next thing they know, they black out and wake up thirty-five miles down the road. We are NOT ALONE, PEOPLE!”
“We should turn this into a docuseries!” Levi said. “A real one. We can interview people in town—the sheriff, the owner of the field, maybe someone from Crane Energy. This is a story worth telling.”
“Dude,” Nick said. “Arthur and Remy have two weeks before they leave for college. Fairly busy time.”
“What could be more important than this?” Levi said. “My parents are gone for eight more days. We can just camp out here, do the whole thing rapid-fire!”
As he twisted in his chair to appeal to the others, I read the top-rated comment: “I want to believe.”
Beneath it, the comment with the second highest number of votes read, “FAKE. BAD EDITING.”
My eyes caught on a reply to that one.
“It’s not fake,” a commenter with the handle CitizenOfThe-BlackMailbox wrote. “I saw this, twenty years ago. DELETE THIS IMMEDIATELY AND CONTACT ME: BlackMailboxBill @COTBM.com. THEY ARE WATCHING!!!”
“What do you make of this?” I asked.
“Huh?” Levi spun back, read the comment, and shrugged. “It’s the Internet. Best to approach everything with a healthy dose of skepticism.”
Sofía crossed her arms. “Something your rabid fan base could learn from you.”
“Listen to this,” I said, and read the comment aloud.
“We’re not contacting him,” Arthur said. “We’re not contacting anyone until we get back to that field and see what we find. This is our UFO.”
“You’re flying way too close to the freaking sun, dude,” Nick said. “Talking about our UFO.”
“Speaking of the field.” Levi stuffed some gummy worms into his mouth. “What do you think the deal with the cows was? Did you see on TV, how they all lined up on the burns?”
“That part’s easy,” Nick said. Everyone’s attention snapped to him like one of his bulgy eyes had finally popped out of his head and rolled across the floor.
“Not all of us are bovine scientists, Nick,” I said. “Explain.”
Nick scritched the back of his head, and his fingers lingered, drumming out that restless beat he’d played against the car window earlier that morning. “Magnetic fields.”
“Magnetic fields,” Levi said in his documentarian voice, adjusting his hat.
Nick scooped up a fallen gummy worm and threw it at him. “Cows eat facing north to south. Or south to north. Either way. People think they sense Earth’s magnetism or some crud. Arthur’s beloved space critter must’ve messed that up with its spaceship.”
Sofía sighed. “Meteorite. Gas, or energy, trapped in a space rock.”
“It wasn’t rock,” Arthur said. “It was like jelly. Squishy.”
“That definitely sounds like space junk,” Sofía said.
“Wow, both a bovine scientist and a space-junkologist in the same room,” I said.
She shot me another reproachful stare.
Nick rolled his eyes. “No wonder the alien chose us, y’all.”
“See, that’s the part—well, one of many parts—that doesn’t make sense,” Sofía said. “If intelligent life were going to reveal itself to mankind, why would it choose six kids in Splendor, Ohio?”
Levi shook his head. “Maybe it crashed. The docuseries will uncover all that.”
“Give it up, Levi!” Nick said. “Not all of us have swimming pools full of money and buttloads of free time to bop around town with our fancy cameras and a Nancy Drew notepad. Some of us have jobs! People depending on us to pull our weight.”
“We just need to get back to the field,” Arthur murmured, as if he were part of an entirely separate conversation.
“Don’t use we,” Nick said. “I never agreed to this little investigation.”
Arthur bristled. “Fine, I’ll know more when I get back to the field. Until then, no one say anything about this, to anyone.”
Nick scoffed. “No problem. People in this town already got enough to say about my family without me running around screaming about aliens.”
“We need something more definite before we come forward with this.” Arthur was still on his own plane of existence. He leapt onto the mattress, then climbed into the hammock hung from the ceiling over it.
“I mean . . . my video’s pretty definitive,” Levi said, a little put out.
Arthur waved his hand. “It might tickle the whole Conspiracy Rabbit Hole YouTube Crowd, but it looks like a homemade video we put a shoddy aftereffect onto.”
“Which . . . is something we regularly do, with consistent online documentation,” I pointed out.
“But the video’s real!” Levi argued.
“You think the gah-damn FBI are going to investigate this video, find out it’s ours, and then scroll through our channel like”—Nick rubbed his chin thoughtfully—“Damn, Agent Cooper, aren’t we lucky these hicks in Asshole, Ohio, had a camera on them the night of this alien encounter? We make crap like this all the time, Levi. And post it online. No one’s going to believe us. I couldn’t even get Mrs. Spencer to believe I wasn’t the one who spray-painted the dick on the football field.”
“Nick,” Sofía said. “You were the one who spray-painted the dick on the football field.”
He threw his arms out to his sides. “But she didn’t know that!”
“Apparently, she did.” Sofía was the only one of us who seemed bent on slowly guiding Nick to the realization that he had a lying problem. So far she hadn’t had any luck.
Nick’s lies didn’t bother me. They were pretty much always in service of making us laugh, and aside from that, the Colasantis were the butt of a lot of jokes (a truck-driver mom who stopped leaving the house after the accident and filled her windows with horrifying antique carousel horses; an older sister who’d started dating one of her teachers two months after graduating), so I didn’t blame him for wanting to at least control the ridiculous things people said about him.
But Sofía was a Libra (one who thought astrology was just “something Forever 21 made up to sell nail decals”) with a strong sense of justice, and a lie was a lie in her eyes.
“Nick’s right,” Arthur said. “You can’t spend five years avoiding your whole town then expect them to believe you when you tell them something impossible.”
Levi frowned. “Or spend five years making Bigfoot Believers parodies and then expect your viewers to believe it when you show them the real deal.”
“And for that matter,” Nick said, “I’m beginning to think my ongoing ‘Phallus the Fields of Splendor’ project won’t help our credibility.”
Sofía shook her head. “Phallus the Fields of Splendor.”
“That sounds like a thrash metal album.” Arthur touched his chin in a way that usually meant he’d had an idea.
“Or a book of really horny poetry,” I added.
“It also reminds me of a beloved film,” Levi said. “Kevin Costner’s brilliant Field of Dicks.”
“Dude, that bruise on your head looks like a dick,” Nick said.
“It looks like Gary Busey,” Sofía disagreed. “Since when do you sleepwalk, by the way?”
“Since
9:34 AM today,” Levi answered.
“Think that’s weird?” Nick said. “When I got home and passed out I dreamed about pianos. Like, exclusively about pianos. Rooms full of them, hallways made of them that ended in little red kids’ pianos with German words written in freakin’ gold leaf on them. Pianos everywhere.”
“We need evidence,” Arthur said. He was staring out the window, eyes glinting as his mind spun plans. “We need to make contact.”
“Sun,” Nick said, holding up a fist. “Your current flight path, Icarus.” He took his other hand and slammed it right into his fist, making explosion sounds with his mouth.
“Tomorrow when I get off work,” Arthur said, ignoring him, “we’ll go to Jenkins Lane and see if we can figure out where that . . . thing went. Or I will.” He rolled his eyes at Nick.
Levi patted his camera like a puppy. “I’m there.”
Sofía sighed. “I’ll take a look. But only in a legal capacity, and just for as long as it takes to find the real explanation behind all this.”
“I’m not going near that place,” Nick said.
Arthur shrugged the sentiment away and fixed his sharp gaze on me. “Fran? You in?”
I didn’t like the way all of this somehow kept dredging up the past. I didn’t like that it reminded me how mercurial and brutal the universe could be, or that there was no limit on how many random horrors could slash through the same life, and I really, really didn’t like the look in Arthur’s eyes that told me he wasn’t thinking about any of that.
It scared me to see how badly he wanted this.
Wanting things was like needing people. It backfired every time.
Soon, he’d lose interest in this, like he’d lost interest in learning to count cards or play the bass guitar or slack line. It would all blow over.
In the meantime, we’d get my necklace back, wander a burnt field, and maybe even generate some ad revenue on our newly viral video.
Then we’d put this all out of our minds, like we did with everything else we couldn’t control.