“Redhead Rachel?” William asked.
“Yes,” I said, suddenly defensive. “She’s my new roommate.”
He lowered his voice. “You’re new here, so I’ll help you out. Rachel is trying everything she can to beat me for the Bruner in math. But it isn’t going to happen. I mean look at her—frizzy hair and never wears any makeup. Introvert. Half of the award is citizenship. Leadership. You know, like proving that you will represent the school well. And Rachel’s got a screw loose.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I didn’t know what the Bruner was, but if I was going to choose someone to represent me, it wouldn’t be William.
A short girl with platinum blond hair in a pixie cut and thick eyeliner appeared next to me. “Hi, I’m Brynne,” she said. “Your other new roomie.” She glared at William. “So, Will, how does that hazing charge get you good citizenship? I know your parents got it covered up, but it would be so easy to uncover it.”
His face twitched, but only for an instant. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked like a snake, ready to bite if provoked.
“Hazing?” I said. “That’s more than just losing a scholarship. That’s criminal and civil lawsuits. I bet your parents would love that.” I liked provoking snakes. He took a step toward me, and I held my ground.
“Hey, Alice,” Brynne said, tugging on my sleeve. “Let’s get back to the room.”
“Okay,” I said, my eyes still fixed on his. “See you, Will. You seem fun.”
Brynne grabbed one of my plates of pie, and we headed to the dorm.
“So you’re the succubus?” I asked.
“We all are,” she said. “The whole room.”
“You’re not fleeing? Heading home because aliens have landed?”
“I’m here on scholarship. Flying home at a moment’s notice isn’t part of the deal.”
“Really?” I asked, eying her perfect hair, perfect body, and immaculate clothes. “You look so, well, money.”
“Good genes,” she said. “Which is actually how I ended up here. Good genes. I won the national science fair last year.”
“Like won won? The whole thing?”
“Yep. Genetics. I thought about taking a bunch of tests during the summer to skip the rest of high school and go straight to college, but Minnetonka made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I get to do research instead of going to most of my classes, I have a full ride, and when I graduate from here I can practically write my own ticket to wherever I want. Maybe I’ll already be published. That’s the plan anyway. Not bad for a girl from Nowhere, Kansas.”
I nodded. “Gifted and talented.”
“That’s what they say.”
“I’m here because my dad works for NASA,” I said, feeling stupid about it. “So it’s not my gifts or talents—it’s his.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Brynne said. “We’ll figure out your G and Ts.” She opened the door to our room and Rachel looked up from where she was lying on the couch, reading David Copperfield.
“Here,” I said. “One cream, one fruit. I didn’t know which you would want.”
Brynne opened one of my shoe boxes. “Alice had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful William. He was as charming as always.”
I grimaced. “What is his deal? Please tell me he’s just here because his family paid his way in.”
Brynne laughed. “Nope. William is definitely in the gifted category. He’s vying for the top math scholar spot. Ooh. These are cute.”
Rachel took a forkful of whipped cream. “You’ll find that every room in this school is named after someone.”
Brynne smirked. “One day I’m going to come back and donate. The Brynne Fuller Memorial Janitor’s Closet. It’s the only room left, I think.”
“They’ll start putting plaques on the dorms,” Rachel said. “Brynne Fuller Made Out with Mark Richardson in This Room.”
“And Then Donated a Hundred Thousand Dollars,” Brynne said, closing the shoe box and sitting on my bed.
“Anyway,” Rachel said, reaching for one of my shopping bags. “Weren’t we going to help you unpack?”
The process didn’t take long. We all tried on the shoes, and Rachel fell in love with one of the sweaters. I told her she could have it, but she insisted she’d go buy one of her own. I found out that Rachel was Brynne’s sugar mama—Brynne got all her stunning clothes from shopping trips with Rachel. In exchange, Brynne tutored Rachel in biology and genetics.
I tried not to feel completely out of my depth in the room. I was there with two of the front runners for Bruner Scholars, one in math and the other in biology, while I was proud that I had my social security number memorized.
Oh well. Maybe I could be the Bruner Scholar in Fast Cars and Accessorizing.
The next morning at 8:04 sharp, I was in the office of the headmistress, Mrs. Cushing, sitting in the chair opposite her and getting an austere, if nervous, lecture about the history of the school. She seemed to be eager to name drop, as though she thought I was a spy from the Large Donation Society who was checking to make sure that philanthropists were getting the appreciation they deserved: the James Moore Center for Leadership, the Lynda Day Multimedia Lab, the Jack Montague Lecture Hall. I tried to put on a serious face and do some rigorous nodding at the importance of these names.
But in the end, aliens had landed, and I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She wanted to hear from me more than I wanted to hear from her, so I relayed everything my dad had told me (which, by now, was all on the news anyway), and she listened with rapt attention.
She took down my sizes and told me that I’d have uniforms ready the next day, and in the meantime I could wear anything that fit within a small encyclopedia’s worth of guidelines. From a cursory glance, it ruled out just about everything except for the uniform and perhaps Elizabethan ball gowns.
Oh, and I had to dye the blue out of my hair. I told her I would as soon as I could, and I decided that I could wait through at least four or five more warnings.
I made my way back upstairs and sat down in the cafeteria with a plate of eggs and potatoes. And I know what you’re thinking: eggs and potatoes from a school cafeteria are usually powdered and frozen. But I’d swear these eggs had been hand-delivered from organic farms in the south of France, and the potatoes were yellow and purple and every color but brown. Everything tasted amazing. It made me think about my dad and the nothing he was probably eating.
I called him. The phone rang five times and went to voicemail. As I was leaving a message about the wonders of my breakfast, Kurt sat down across from me. He looked exactly the same as he had the night before, right down to the untucked shirt and loosened tie. Maybe this was just what he wore all the time. I’d have to consult my encyclopedia, but I thought it was against code.
“Good morning,” he said, reaching for the pepper.
“Aren’t you a little late for breakfast?” After my orientation with Mrs. Cushing, it was nearly ten o’clock.
“Maybe I was waiting for you.”
“Were you? Because that would be weird.”
“Would it?”
“Yes. Because you could have eaten already, and then waited for me, and still sat at this table and you wouldn’t have been hungry all morning.”
“But then I wouldn’t have a good excuse.”
I speared a potato and popped it into my mouth. “Do you need an excuse?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“This is a very weird conversation.”
“I agree,” he said, now taking the salt to his food. “Because most people make up reasons for doing things. Most people would find it weird for me to wait around for you and sit down without a plate of food. But food brings people together. We’re sharing a common experience, and that leads to emotional bonding.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Gifted and talented: psychology.”
“Gifted and talented: money.”
I held up my hand. “That’s me, too.
High five.”
Kurt slapped my hand, and then returned to his breakfast. “You’re lucky. You’re sharing a room with two Bruner Scholars. I share a room with three other guys who have rich, detached parents. We play a lot of video games.”
My phone buzzed, and I looked down at it.
“Important business meeting?” Kurt asked.
“Message from my dad.”
I clicked on it.
Turn on your TV.
I glanced up at the TV on the wall across the room. It was still on nonstop CNN. I reached for Kurt’s hand and pulled him with me toward the small group of kids clustered around it.
CNN was showing the same thing they’d been showing for days—a wide shot of the ship with an inset of a commentator talking. Standard CNN format for everything.
Then the camera shifted and I saw Wolf Blitzer turning in his seat and putting his finger to his ear. The shot of him was quickly replaced with a close-up on one of the rectangular insets on the hull of the ship. It looked like any of the thousand other nooks and crannies on the side of the ship, except for the fact that it was glowing and sparking.
“What the hell is that?” someone asked, and then everyone started talking, pointing at the rectangle, calling it a door or a window or an airlock or a dozen other things. I texted my dad the same question, but I didn’t get any response and I knew that I wouldn’t, probably for a long time.
I sat down on the couch and felt Kurt’s hand on my shoulder. I thought about shoving it off, but somehow my hand ended up in his, holding on tight. I looked down the row of TV watchers and saw Brynne at the far end, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Some boy was absentmindedly combing through her hair with his fingers.
“Brynne,” I called, “do you have Rachel’s number?”
Brynne stared at me for a moment, then pulled out her phone and typed out a message.
It was like we were watching the moon landing from the point of view of moon men, waiting to see what came out of that Apollo landing craft.
“They don’t have power,” William said from across the room, a smile on his face. “They can’t open their own doors. They have to cut them.”
“They have power,” Kurt answered. “Enough power to cut through that metal—the metal that dragged across two states without breaking.”
It took a long minute for someone to find the remote, but once a girl extracted it from the couch cushions, we turned up the volume. Wolf Blitzer was talking, describing the scene. He wasn’t saying anything that the rest of us weren’t already thinking. No brilliant insights, just the typical news anchor babble.
A different camera angle showed us that this rectangle was higher than the tallest tree, maybe a hundred feet from the ground.
Rachel came running in, wearing flannel pajamas and a thick bathrobe. I motioned for her to sit at my feet, and once she did, I let go of Kurt’s hand and put my hands on Rachel’s shoulders.
“What did I miss?” she asked breathlessly.
“They’re cutting their way out,” a dozen people said at once. The caption at the bottom of the CNN screen read, Are They Cutting Their Way Out? Nice work, CNN.
The sparks reached the top of the rectangle and began moving across it.
An inset camera showed a group of two or three hundred soldiers advancing into the space below the rectangle.
There were alien letters written above the rectangle. Blocky and angular, and exactly the kind of font you’d expect an alien to use.
“Anybody good with languages?” I asked.
Brynne pointed to a girl. “Emily’s amazing. Going to be the Bruner Scholar in languages, I bet.”
Emily shrugged as she looked at the letters. “There’s only a dozen letters there, if they even are letters and not numbers. Either way, that’s not nearly enough to make an educated guess.”
“Look at the angle,” Rachel said, changing the subject. “When it breaks loose, that thing is just going to fall out. I hope whoever’s inside is tethered in.”
“You’re hoping the aliens are okay?” another girl said with a sneer.
“Sure I am,” Rachel said.
I spoke up in her defense. “If they’re nice aliens, then we don’t want them to get hurt. And if they’re bad aliens, we don’t want them to get pissed off.”
“Besides,” Brynne said, “way to make first contact. Whoops! Fall to your death!”
“How are they going to get down?” someone else asked.
“Helicopters,” a girl said. “There are a bunch of them hovering over the ship.”
Kurt leaned forward on the couch behind me. “What if it’s like the Blob?” he asked. “That was an alien. What if some jelly monster comes oozing out of the hole?”
“I don’t think a blob could build a ship that intricate,” Brynne answered.
“And I don’t think a blob could hold a blowtorch,” I said. “Do we have any scale on that door? Are these things people-sized or monster-sized?”
I started braiding Rachel’s hair, because I needed something to do with my hands. It was a good thing it was her sitting in front of me and not Kurt. “If they have big gray heads and big black eyes, we’re going to owe the conspiracy theorists an apology.”
“We already do,” a guy said. “Maybe not flying saucers, but the conspiracies were right on this one.”
I shook my head. “They’re only right if these aliens match the theories—if they make crop circles or mutilate cattle or something. But yeah, if we get inside that ship and find big cattle mutilation factories, then I’ll agree.”
“No,” the guy said, and he pulled out his phone. “I looked it up yesterday. The two most commonly mentioned kinds of UFO are flying saucers and ‘cigar-shaped’ UFOs. What is this if not cigar-shaped?”
He held his phone out to me and there was a shaky YouTube video of a gray cylinder.
“Okay,” I said. “So let’s say that these aliens have been coming across the galaxy for years and have been abducting our farmers and probing our backsides. Then what’s the deal with this one? Did it try to scoop up an Iowan and just drop too low? Were they playing chicken with a cornfield? Was this the new guy’s chance to pilot the ship and he colossally screwed up?”
The cutting torch—if that’s what it was, and that’s certainly what it seemed to be—had moved on to the final side of the door. This was the moment of truth.
“I think that might be it,” Kurt said. “How often are you on a flight and they have a delay because of a mechanical problem? Only in this scenario, they’ve just flown all the way from Alpha Centauri and there’s nowhere to land. Wouldn’t you aim for somewhere nice and flat, like Iowa, and try not to crash?”
“Like the Sea of Tranquility,” Rachel said, turning her head and almost yanking the strands of hair out of my hands. She must have noticed my blank look. “Sorry. That’s where we landed on the moon—in the flattest, emptiest place we could find, so that nothing would go wrong.”
They were halfway through the last side of the door. “Well,” I said, “something went wrong this time.”
“What if it didn’t?” Rachel said, looking back at CNN. “What if this is the best possible outcome?”
“Eighteen thousand people died,” a girl said.
“What if there are more than that on the ship? It’s three miles long and half a mile wide. If you assume that each person has a cube ten feet by ten feet—and that’s pretty generous given what things like submarines are like—you’d get a total of a hundred and thirty thousand people on there.”
“Why would you call them ‘people’?” the girl said with a sneer. I decided I didn’t like her. She was wearing sunglasses in her hair, inside the school, in Minnesota, before lunch.
“Sorry!” Rachel said. “I should have called them aliens. I should have called them freaks. Or monsters or whatever else.”
“The point still stands,” Kurt said. “If there were a hundred and thirty thousand aliens in there and they were going to crash—�
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“Then they should have crashed in Nevada,” William said. “Or Canada, or someplace without so many people.”
“Guys, look,” Brynne said, and pointed. The sparking light had gone all the way around the rectangle and was back in its starting position.
Everyone was glued to the TV. The boy at the end of the couch had stopped playing with Brynne’s hair, and I’d long since pulled the braids back out of Rachel’s. I could smell Kurt’s aftershave behind me, could see Sunglasses Girl leaning forward, elbows on knees.
The shot was a close-up of the rectangle, taken from the left side. It was zoomed in so close that the camera shook a little. But as we stared, I realized that the movement wasn’t just a jiggling camera—the rectangle was moving slightly. A slight jolt at first, and then a shudder.
I got a sudden lump in my throat. This was the biggest thing that had happened in history, and I was surrounded by strangers. I needed human connection. I needed someone I cared about and who cared about me.
I took Rachel’s hand, and she squeezed back.
And then the door fell away.
FOUR
The shape in the doorway was strapped into a harness. It held what looked like a large sledgehammer in its hand. Everyone in the room gasped, and Rachel and I fought to see who could break the other’s fingers.
The shape, to put it simply, was human. Two legs, two arms, short hair that was as platinum blond as Brynne’s, and an albino complexion. It was covered with what looked like mummy bandages everywhere but its face, hands, and feet.
The man—at least it looked like a man—hung there in the shadow of the ship, staring out at the people below.
Wolf Blitzer was giving a speech that was obviously rehearsed—someone had probably been writing it since the ship landed. CNN clearly wanted this to go down in history as one of the greatest moments on TV, and undoubtedly it would, but it felt completely manufactured.
In the darkness behind the man, I could see more shapes—different shapes. They might have looked like people, too, like humans, but it was hard to tell with the poor light and the shaking camera.
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