“Where are you, dude?” Will asked, having called me a minute after we departed for Boston. “You made the train, right?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said. “I’m on like, the third-to-last cart or something. We’re all good.”
“I told you you were going to be late!” Julia shouted. I guess we were on speaker… cool. “What’d I say? I said don’t be late!”
“Can we not have this conversation on a crowded train on speaker phone?” I asked. “Sam there…?”
“Yeah,” he said. Oops, that was awkward. I really didn’t think he would be. I blushed right away, and cupped my face in my hands.
“Hey man,” I said. “You uh… You alright?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” he asked.
“I… What?”
“What?”
“I don’t… I don’t know, I’m just check… just checking in, I guess,” I stumbled, like a colossal fool. I guess he decided not to tell everyone about earlier; I should have guessed as much, Sam liked to keep his pride in order sometimes a little too much. Nobody would have blamed him, it was an alien for Christ’s sake, but… whatever.
“Alannah, what are you doing?” Alex muttered. “Stop shoving through people, we just started moving!”
“I’ll be right back!” she said, sounding distant.
“You’re gonna get mugged!” Will warned.
“I’ll follow her,” Sam said.
“Wait, is she coming to me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Alex grunted.
“Probably,” Julia said.
“So, now they’re both…” I sighed. “Alright, this phone call’s been going on way too long. I’ll see you guys in a little bit, okay?”
“Alright, meet us by the–!” Julia tried to direct. Bit of a dick move to just hang up, but to be fair, I was technically hanging up on Will, not her. Plus, I was very nervous now, for reasons I’m sure you can understand.
Alannah and Sam both reached my cart, which was mostly empty, just a couple minutes later. It was one of those smaller, kind of a room but kind of not carts; there weren’t a ton of seats, they were more like benches on either side, and poles to hang onto.
I was sat down on the end of one of said bench-things when the two of them arrived.
“Hey,” I said.
“Why were you so late?” Sam asked. “Why do you smell like the swamp?”
“Oh damn, is it seriously still there?” I said, smelling my hands. I knew it wasn’t on my skin, it was the chestplate, but it’s not like I was about to just whip that out of nowhere.
Alannah sat down next to me, and Sam just sort of awkwardly watched, as he held onto the pole in front of us. I stared at him, equally as uncomfortable, and Alannah just looked at the both of us like we were insane.
“Look, can we just drop this– whatever this thing is– for now?” she asked. “Just, for tonight.”
“I don’t have a problem,” Sam said. Yeah, okay.
“Yeah, okay,” Alannah scoffed. Wow, look at that. “Just chill out, both of you. We’re still all friends, here… Where were you, Jason, really? I mean were you like… erm, busy?”
“You could say that, yeah,” I replied. “Had a… run in with a few people. Old friends.”
“Who?” Sam asked. Damn, I forgot we’d known each other since we were like two years old. Everyone I knew, he knew!
“Uh…” I stammered, glancing at Alannah for some backup.
“Great Uncle’s friends or something?” she asked. “Distant family?”
“Y-Yeah, super distant,” I said. God, what a life saver. “Haven’t seen them in a long time; they never come around, you know. Ran a little late saying my goodbyes and stuff, Vinny had to rush over to drop me off– you know he can be a prick about that stuff.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam nodded. “It…It’s fine, don’t worry about it. You’re here, right?”
“Right,” I said, smiling a little. It felt nice, pretending things were normal. Even if they weren’t. They should have been, but whatever, I could work with pretend for now.
“Why’d you ask if I was okay earlier?” Sam said. “You weren’t checking in, you never check in.”
“Sure I do,” I argued. “I like to know when my people are doing good.”
“Oh, your people,” Alannah laughed. “Okay, thanks, captain.”
“Last I checked, this was actually Julia’s ship to steer,” Sam said. “But… I’m fine, really… Thanks.” He looked right at me, and I stared back. I smiled a little, and nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
Then we were quiet for a second, but it wasn’t an awkward silence, for the first time in a while. It was just kind of… nice. Peaceful, even.
We chatted a little bit the rest of the way over, and then as we got off the train, we met up with the others. The whole group gave me crap for being late, but Sam did too, and somehow that made it all that much more okay. It was like… I don’t know, like we really were one cohesive unit again.
Granted, every time Alannah got a little close with either me or him, all the guys– myself included– would notice a little too evidently, and try to swerve things around as soon as we were caught out. It’s like we were skirting around the problem as best we could, because we all knew Sam and I weren’t ready to deal with it. Not that night.
“Where are we going, again?” I asked.
“Bruegger’s Bagels,” Julia said. “It’s just a ways away; couple blocks or something.”
“Why are we going to a bagel place for dinner again?” Alex asked.
“Shut up, Alex,” Alannah waved off. “I didn’t see you making any dinner plans.”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I think it’s cool,” Will added. “I like bagels.”
“Wow, you’re just a bag of colorful characteristics, aren’t you Will?” Sam chuckled. Will flipped him off, and everyone laughed and grinned, it was great.
“So, you guys hear about that armored flying guy?” Alex picked back up. “They’re calling him like, Wanderer or something; the Wanderer? I don’t know. No one knows if he’s an alien or not, but I’m pretty sure he’s human.”
Alannah and I shared a quick, nervous glance, and I just faked a little laugh. God, it sounded so weird…
“I don’t think so, man,” I said.
“What the hell kind of laugh…?” Sam muttered.
“Yeah, I don’t know, he seems too… powerful you know?” Alannah added. “Humans can’t fly, Alex, or have you forgotten.”
“I don’t know where this attitude is coming from, Ana, but I’m gonna have to go ahead and say you need to drop it,” Alex said. “I don’t know, stranger things have happened, right?”
“Than a human being flying?” Julia asked. “I don’t think so.”
“Well why else would he be here, though?” Will said. “Like, why would an alien show up on Earth, fight other aliens showing up on Earth, and not be from–”
“If you say Earth one more time I swear to God I’ll make you eat your teeth,” Alex said.
“He’s got a point, though,” Sam said. “I mean, when I– from what I heard, I mean, he sounds like a human being. Just a… normal dude.” Well, normal is a relative term, but sure, he wasn’t wrong.
“Jules, what did you say this place serves again?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation elsewhere. “I mean, beyond bagels?”
“If he was a human, don’t you think we would have heard about it by now?” Julia asked, totally ignoring me.
“You think an alien just chose our small town of all places to fight the majority of monsters? What’s so nice about a small, nothing town in Massachusetts?” Alex pressed.
“Well, home is home, you know?” Will said. Alex pointed to him, nodding.
“Home is home,” he repeated. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Hey, Sam, you remember that reading Mrs. Keller gave us?” Alannah asked. “I can’t believe we got a twenty-six page–”
�
��Oh my God!” Julia shrieked. Everyone jumped, and I jumped into a defensive stance, ready to suit up and take off. She pointed up, and we all gazed toward the top of a twelve-or-so story building.
There was a woman there, standing on the edge. Her hands swayed back and forth in the wind, and she just stared down at the pavement far below her. I don’t know if she could see us, but I was willing to bet she was in a whole other world at the moment.
“Oh my…!” Sam said, pulling out his phone. “We have to call the cops. Someone…Someone try to get her attention or something!”
The gang all ran closer to the foot of the building, and I stood back. Alannah stopped, turning around to look at me, and nodded up toward the woman. I knew what she meant, and I just nodded back, taking off into an alleyway.
I had to slow my running down a little, otherwise it would have looked like… well, it would have looked like I running at stupid speeds, basically. Nonetheless, once I got in there, and made sure no one was looking at me, I suited up and took off into the sky.
Once I was a good ways up above the clouds, I slowly made my descent, and got closer to the woman on the rooftop.
She was pretty young– older than me, maybe in her mid-twenties or something– with short, dark brown hair. A little on the heavier side, probably a few inches shorter than me, and she had brown eyes.
From those eyes, I saw fresh and stained tears dripping down her trembling cheeks, as she stared daggers into the floor however many feet beneath her. The wind cooed around us this high up, and the stars were just starting to come out of hiding, peering past the parting sky at the scene laid out before us.
As I got a bit closer, she looked up at me, and almost fell backward onto the roof. She caught herself, but she still looked shocked.
“Hey,” I said, just a foot or two above her, and just beyond the building. I gave her a little wave, and she just looked at me, slack-jawed.
“H…Hi,” she said. “You’re…You’re–”
“The Wanderer,” I said. “Yeah, that’s me…! Uh, what’s your name, miss? Would you mind telling me?”
“My name’s S-Sharon,” she introduced.
“Sharon,” I repeated. “That’s a nice name. Well what’re you doing up here, Sharon? I know Fridays are be overrated, but this is kind of an overreaction, right?”
“I…” she muttered. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Well,” I said, floating closer, “I might. Maybe you just need to talk it through with a friend. Talking things through always works a heck of a lot better than… letting it simmer, you know?”
“I don’t even know you,” she said, staring back down at the quickly growing crowd below us. “You wouldn’t understand… I-I don’t even know you…”
I took a breath, weighing out the severity of my next move, and I landed on the edge of the roof next to her. I clicked the back of my ear, and the helmet retracted. She almost fell off the building seeing my face, no joke. I had to grab her shoulder to keep her stable.
“Y-You– You’re human!?” she asked. “You’re so… You’re only a kid!”
“I mean, sixteen and a good few months,” I said. “That’s close to manhood, right?” she scoffed a little in disbelief, and I smiled. “I’m Jason.”
“Jason…” Sharon said. “The Wanderer’s name is Jason.”
“Not bad right?” I smirked.
Sharon’s surprise faded quickly away, and she looked back out beyond her, this time at the sky. It looked so much closer from up here, but after being up in the clouds as far as I had, there was still a long way to go before you reached the stars. This was nothing.
“Jason…” she said, her right hand shakily inching closer toward me. I cupped it in my left and looked at her, waiting for more. “I just… I try so hard, you know what I mean? I work my ass off, and nobody cares. I go out on dates, and I either get stood up, or I’m ‘a really cool person, but not what their looking for right now.’ My friends all have dream jobs, with perfect relationships, and perfect bodies… I just don’t get it. I mean what’s the point? What’s the point of trying so hard, and never getting anywhere closer to what you want? It’s a never-ending race to something I know I’ll never achieve. If I even did manage to get a boyfriend, a promotion, a better body, I’d never be happy; I never have been. And– and no one gets it. They act like they do, but after a while I’m supposed to just ‘get over it, move on,’ like that’s even possible.”
I nodded, and stared out at the sky myself. No, it wasn’t any beyond-the-clouds among-the-stars kind of view, but it still was something, I guess. Maybe not the best of the best, but still, pretty good. Pretty damn good.
“Have you ever tried?” Sharon asked, glancing over to me. “You know…?”
I gulped hard, and looked down at everyone else. There were at least fifty people down there now, some cops, but mostly passersby. I saw my friends, all looking up anxiously. All except for Alannah; she just watched– watched me.
“When I was thirteen, I uh… I took a walk out into the woods, past my house,” I said. “I lost my parents when I was barely a kid, raised by some distant great uncle who doesn’t care in any way about me, always says I’m another useless expense. Anyway… I wasn’t feeling too tip-top, got picked on just one too many times that week over just a few too many over-the-line things, and I…I walked out to the train tracks…”
“And you waited?” Sharon asked, picking up the silence I’d begun to get lost in. “Waited for the train?” I scoffed a little, and sniffed hard through my nose, wiping it.
“Kind of,” I said. “I also took a sharp rock from a fort my friend and I made a few years before, and kept running it up and down my forearm. I wasn’t bleeding like crazy, but… I was getting there. It wasn’t the most efficient way of doing things, but I don’t know, I was a dumb kid… But yeah, then I waited. I just closed my eyes, dropped the rock, and waited for the train to come; it’d either hit my back, or nail me, right in the face.”
“What changed?” Sharon pressed. She seemed really wrapped up in my story all of a sudden. I don’t know quite why, but I guess it just formed a stronger thread between us.
“The never came,” I said. “I mean, I only sat there like thirty minutes, but still, nothing came. No rumbling tracks, no horn blaring like crazy. Nothing.”
“Well why didn’t you just keep waiting? Why didn’t you pick the rock back up?” I took a deep breath, and wiped my eyes before any tears could treacherously roll down.
“My best friend called me,” I said. “He called, just out of the blue, wanting to hang out. He knew, right away, that I sounded bad. I told him where I was, and he met me in the fort. We talked for like, three hours, and he smashed the rock against another one– shattered it. He let me explain everything that bothered me: my family, my uncle, my bullies, myself. He just listened. And then, eventually, we went back to his house; we’re neighbors, he and I.”
“Right.”
“We went back, and he had his mom help clean up my arm. He texted our other friends, and they all reached out to me, one after another. They wanted to make sure I was okay. They were there for me. They protected me– protected me from myself. They all let me know, in one way or another, that things were going to be alright. I never forgot about that. Never have.”
“And what, things just got better?” Sharon asked. “Just like that?”
“No, not completely,” I said. “I still have a lot of problems, Sharon, I’m gonna lie to you; I’m a basket-case.” She giggled a little, and I smiled. “But I could have ignored that call. I could have tossed my phone onto the tracks and just let go, but I didn’t. I’m not saying everything’s going to be solved, but sometimes you just need to take that step, let people in. And, I don’t know… sometimes you just need someone to tell you that everything’s gonna be alright.”
Sharon took another shaky breath, and the tears just kept on coming. It was awfully cold up here, but holding her hand like that, I think it did
us both a little good.
I stepped down onto the roof, and she followed me after a moment of pause. We were face to face, and I did my best to smile– and yeah, I had some tears in my eyes, so what? We were having a moment.
I wrapped her up into a hug, and she fell into it immediately. She started crying a little harder, and I just held the back of her head against my shoulder.
“Everything’s gonna be alright, Sharon,” I whispered. “Everything’s gonna be alright.”
We stayed there for a minute or so, and all the while, I heard the murmurs of the crowd growing larger and larger by the second, wondering where we just went. A few people cheered I think, happy to see Sharon off the edge, but most people were just confused.
“Thank you,” Sharon said, pulling away from me. “Thank you for being such a good person…for being a hero, tonight. My hero.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, I mean–” I argued, holding up my hands.
“Jason,” she said. “You might just be a kid, but you’re a good person, trust me. I’m older than you.” I laughed a little, and felt my chest sort of flutter. What a weird feeling, hearing things like that.
“Yeah, well… I don’t know…” was all I could manage. After all, no point in having the both of us start sobbing, right? “You alright to make your way down from here?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m good, I can…” Sharon trailed off. “Do you just want to sit here for a minute, though? I mean, just sort of enjoy the night, just for a little while?”
“I…” I said, glancing over the edge. I did have plans, but… it was turning into one hell of a night out. “Alright, I can stay a while.”
Sharon was lovely, and we got to know each other pretty well. Well, I got to know her pretty well; I still had to reserve a good bit of information, keep my identity at least a little bit of a secret, you know?
Anyway, we hung out on the roof for a while, but then people started knocking on the roof door, and I knew it was my time to bounce. We said our goodbyes, hugged one more time, and I took off, landing in another alleyway and taking the suit off, then running off to the bagel place. Thankfully, the others were still there, and there was a seat in the booth right next to a one Ms. Alannah Daniels. So, you know, I snagged it.
The Wanderer (Book 1): The Wanderer Page 11