by David Liss
“This is so huge,” Alice said, clapping her hands together three times in excitement, like she was about to open a present. “You admit it’s you.”
“I’m not admitting anything,” I said. “But what is this picture? Where did you get it?”
She was practically bouncing in her chair now. “Come on. You have to tell me. What do you know about them?”
“About who?”
“Not who,” she said. “What. About the UFOs.”
The panic was now reaching thermometer-exploding proportions. I guess she had connected the dots, which meant that there had to be dots I didn’t know anything about. “UFOs? Are you crazy?”
“Stop playing dumb. I want to know everything.”
I tried to piece this all together. Last year, around the time the Confederation sent its representative to Earth, the instances of UFO sightings had gone through the roof—maybe because there were real alien ships zipping all over the planet. The sightings had been noted and laughed off by respectable journalists, but they’d become a big deal in certain circles. I’d seen a couple of articles about them on a few of the blogs I looked at. The fact that these sightings were connected to the president, including him talking to an unknown kid on a driveway in Delaware, didn’t make me any less surprised that someone had figured out that I was involved.
“I don’t think that’s me,” I attempted, kind of pathetically.
“You don’t think that’s you? Like you wouldn’t be sure whether or not you met the president?” She began to flip through more images on her phone. Blurry photos of what I instantly recognized as Confederation shuttles. There were also government reports, pictures of dead aliens of the giant-headed and goggle-eyed variety. No one in the Confederation looked like that, so I figured these had to be rubber fakes. I would have written her off as a total nut, but she and whoever had compiled this stuff were right at least as much as they were wrong, and alongside obvious nonsense were pictures of a real UFO and actual evidence of the president’s involvement with aliens.
“It’s not me,” I told her.
“Come on,” she said. “I just helped you.”
“Because you thought I was someone I’m not.” I began to get my stuff.
She looked at me like her eyes had some kind of power to make me obey. “If you don’t talk to me, I’m going to tell everyone in the community that you’re here, in this school. I will post it on the major discussion boards.”
“You can’t do that,” I said, before I could stop myself.
She smiled.
I sighed. “I mean, you can’t do that, because I don’t want any part of your crazy theories.”
“Nice try, Zeke. And I promise not to tell anyone if you let me know what really happened. In fact, I’m totally lying. I’m not going to tell anyone either way. I don’t want to mess up your life. I just want to know.”
I felt myself relax slightly. I hadn’t really believed her threat. She didn’t strike me as mean or vindictive. Unfortunately, the fact that she wasn’t planning on trying to force me to speak to her weakened my resolve to tell her nothing. I’m a softie that way. “Why do you care?” I asked, stalling for time in which to remember all the reasons I had to keep my mouth shut.
“Because I want to believe there is more to the universe than just this,” she said, gesturing around the cafeteria. Her hand ended up pointing to a girl who was laughing so hard at something her friend had said that milk was coming out of her nose.
Of all the answers she might have given, I don’t know that there was another that would have made me as sympathetic.
“I appreciate that you’re not going to rat me out,” I said. “That works in your favor. I just need to think about this, okay?”
I looked across the cafeteria and saw Mr. Palmer, the teacher I’d dismissed as oblivious before. Suddenly, he didn’t seem so clueless to me. Maybe I was getting paranoid, but now I thought there was something menacing about this teacher. He was kind of young and looked like he was in decent shape—maybe even military shape. He stood with perfect posture, staring straight ahead, like a soldier. His floppy hair and thick glasses might have been a disguise. A couple of kids walked by, blocking my view, so I couldn’t be entirely sure if I saw him speak into his wrist or not.
“What do you know about that guy?” I asked Alice.
She glanced at him, and he turned away. “Not much. He’s new this year.”
He was probably just a teacher, but he also might have been an actual government agent who was at this middle school for no other purpose than to keep his eye on me. It was a sad fact about my life that these two possibilities were equally likely.
“Put that stuff away,” I said as authoritatively as I could. I suppose in the past I might have asked her to do it, but I’d become a little more commanding since my adventures off-world. “I’ll tell you what I can after school, but you have to keep everything one hundred percent quiet. This isn’t a joke. If the wrong people find out, I could get in serious trouble—the sort of trouble that makes me disappear and never come back. This is real. You understand?”
She slid her phone into a pocket in her backpack. “You want to go to your place?”
I shook my head. I needed to know just how much this community knew about me and the Confederation, and for that we’d need a computer. I didn’t want to do any significant Internet searching at my place.
“No, yours,” I told her. “My house is bugged.”
She broke into a huge grin. “That is so excellent! But my place is no good. We could go somewhere public, like the library.”
I definitely did not want to talk about any of this in public. “Too risky,” I said. “If we can’t use your place today, we can wait until there’s a better time.”
Her mouth twitched, like she was trying to make a decision. She looked nervous, maybe. Vulnerable. For the first time since our whirlwind conversation began, I started to think that maybe this girl had problems of her own.
“Fine,” she said. “My house. Just . . . be cool, okay?”
“I will try not to burn your house down. But the urges, they’re harder and harder to control.”
She sneered at me. “Is that your idea of being cool?”
I shrugged. “You can uninvite me. It’s up to you.”
“No,” she said, her face set with determination. “You are going to talk to me.”
I had no idea how worried I was supposed to be about the possibility of the government finding out that someone knew about me. It was just one more thing to add to the list of problems. Colonel Rage might decide the world was better off if I was in a prison cell somewhere, or studied in a lab. He might think that my talking to this girl about UFOs made me a national security threat. These things worried me, but other things worried me more.
In spite of the lurking government agents who were supposed to keep me safe, spies from another country might try to grab me to find out more about the Confederation. Then there was the possibility that the Phands would decide to get back at me by adding Earth to their oppressive empire. It was also possible that the Phands might come to Earth not to conquer it but just to nab me and put me on trial. My mom and I had worked out a series of text and call codes so we could warn each other if something bad seemed to be imminent. I tried to convince myself that neither one of us would ever need to use the codes, but most days I glanced at my phone at least a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed a warning that would let me know that my life, as I had known it, was over. My life was kind of crummy, but I wasn’t ready for it to be done.
• • •
I texted my mom after school to let her know that I’d made a friend—I was, I admit, being optimistic—and that I was going to her house. I used the proper wording so she would know I wasn’t sending her false information under coercion.
Alice lived walking distance from the school. Most of the homes in the surrounding blocks were reasonably nice. They looked like they’d been built within the
last ten years, and they had well-tended lawns and unblemished coats of paint. As we walked along, Alice was chatty and enthusiastic, but after a few blocks she began to grow quiet. Her mood seemed to change as the houses became less manicured. I didn’t think she was worried about muggers or anything, but there were chain-link fences, cars on blocks on the front lawns, and angry dogs leashed to trees.
Alice had been walking with her eyes cast down for a good five minutes before she gestured toward a house with flaking paint that had once been, I could reasonably guess, pale yellow. A few patches of grass grew on a front lawn that was mostly weed and rocky soil. We stood on the lopsided porch for a few minutes, with her staring at the door.
“Did you forget your key?” I offered.
“Just be cool,” she said again. This time I did not think a witty reply was a good idea.
Inside, the carpet was old and curling up at the corners. The furniture was tattered, and the house smelled like cat pee, though there was no sign of a cat. I caught a glimpse into the kitchen and saw piles of tomato sauce–stained dishes. A large man, mostly bald, with a growth of pale beard, sat in a threadbare armchair in front of a TV set to one of the cable news stations.
“That you, Melissa?” he asked without looking up. His voice sounded strained and weak, almost dreamy.
“It’s me, Dad. Alice.” She went over to him and gave him a kiss. “I brought a friend over. We’ll be in my room.”
“Okay, hon,” he said. He smiled briefly, sadly, and there was a moist film over his eyes. He didn’t seem to register that I was there at all.
Alice walked over to me, her eyes begging me not to ask any questions. “Come on,” she said.
She turned to open a door, and on the other side was a space that belonged in a different house, maybe in a different universe. Unlike my room, and the room of just about any other thirteen-year-old in America, this one had no clothes left on the floor, no pieces of paper strewn about, no books left in haphazard piles. Alice’s bed was made with mechanical precision; her books—and there were a lot of them—were arranged neatly on shelves, and a casual glance told me they were alphabetized. The rug looked recently vacuumed, and the wood of her desk glistened with diligent polishing. The furniture in here looked newer too, and the laptop on her desk was slim and sleek.
“Is Melissa your sister?” I ventured.
“My mom,” she said, turning away from me. “She died three years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost my dad when I was seven.” I was fudging some facts here, but I didn’t think I was being dishonest. Mostly I wanted her to know that I was someone who understood what it was to have your family hit by catastrophic change.
During the silence I looked around the room. There were photographs on her dresser, mostly of her dad, when he looked more alert, and a woman who had to be her mom, who also had a lot of pale hair. In several photos her dad was dressed in a military uniform. In one he stood in desert camouflage with other soldiers.
Alice was playing with her hair again, but then she stopped. She took a deep breath and nodded. “I don’t usually bring people home, but I guess if I’m asking you to trust me, I should trust you. And I’m sorry I ambushed you at school. I’ve actually been planning it for a while, but I still wasn’t sure it was you. I figured this was my chance to find out. It’s so cool. It’s like you’re a celebrity, in the right circles.”
“Exactly how wide are these circles?” I asked, now getting nervous.
She shrugged. “Just hard-core UFO people, I guess. How many of us can there be?”
I hoped not that many. “Can you show me where you found that picture?”
She turned on her computer and took me through a couple of UFO-enthusiast websites. They were tinged with paranoid conspiracy theory, and, for more than a few of them, that overlapped with bizarre political positions and, on a couple, ugly racism. Alice saw my eyes narrowing, and she held up her hands in an I surrender gesture. “Some of the people who are into this stuff are gross. I swear I’m not like that, but you go where you have to for the info.”
For about a week before my departure into space last year, the Confederation had been flying shuttles between their main ship and our planet. They had tried to be careful, but there are always mistakes, and a lot of people had reported seeing UFOs during that time. Apparently, some of the more politically aware people on these sites had looked into the president’s schedule during the week of the UFO sightings, and someone had gotten very lucky. Alice called up a picture of me, the Boy with the Stupid Haircut, talking to the president in my driveway. On its own it probably wouldn’t have meant anything, but there was another picture of me at Camp David, and there was a picture of a Confederation shuttle flying above Camp David. The shuttle was moving so fast it was hardly more than a metallic blur, but you could make out that it was rectangular and wingless, clearly not an airplane or helicopter.
“People in the community have been trying to figure out the deal with you for months now,” she told me, sitting down on her bed, looking at me with wonder. “And now, here you are, in my room.”
I sat down next to her. “Alice, you seem like a nice person, and believe me, I get the enthusiasm. There are things I dork out over too, and I love talking to other people about that stuff. Maybe you want to be a big shot and go on these discussion boards and sort of hint that you’ve found the Boy with the Haircut.”
“Stupid Haircut,” she corrected.
“But I have to tell you that it would be a mistake. You might be arrested. I might be arrested. This could ruin both of our lives. It would probably be safer for you if you never went back to those websites again. Don’t look up anything about UFOs; don’t order books about UFOs from online stores or using credit cards. Don’t do anything that could leave a record linking you to spaceships or aliens. You have to give it up.”
She gestured at the computer. “I told you I’d keep it to myself. I don’t want to make a name for myself on the boards. That’s not important to me.”
“Then what is?”
“The truth,” she said. “I just want to know. Why were you meeting the president on that driveway, and why were you at Camp David? Was that an alien spaceship?”
I’d told my mom most of what had happened while I was off-world. I’d given her a rundown of the major events, the political fallout, and certainly everything to do with my dad. I’d told her about my friends, especially Dr. Roop and Captain Qwlessl, because I knew those things would make her feel better. I’d given pretty much the straight story to Colonel Rage as well. I had nothing to hide, but even though I’d talked and talked and talked after I returned, I hadn’t told anyone the truth. I hadn’t talked about the things that mattered to me. I hadn’t told them what it was like to be friendless, and then to make the most important friends I would ever hope for—and then to lose them again.
The prospect of having someone my own age I could talk to, who would care about what I said, and who would get it, was difficult to resist. Alice was staring at me, and there was something so hopeful in her expression, like I could tell her things that would make her feel the world was a more interesting place. Through the lenses of her glasses, her eyes were wide and earnest and a blue so pale they were almost colorless.
I was not ready to trust anyone, let alone a girl I’d met a few hours earlier, and I didn’t think I would be doing her any favors by telling her all of it.
“It’s not safe for me to tell you too much,” I explained. “It’s not safe for you.”
“You promised me, Star-Lord,” she began.
“I know I did. Just keep in mind that it’s my job to make the genre references.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll fangirl if I want to.”
“Look, I’ll tell you what I can—what I think would be okay for you, in case you are ever questioned. If you don’t know the details, then you can’t reveal them, and you won’t be considered a threat.”
She put a hand to her m
outh. “This is real, isn’t it?”
“Maybe more real than you’re ready for,” I said.
“No, it’s not. I want to know.”
So I told her the most basic stuff: Aliens had visited, and they were mostly good guys, and I had been chosen—randomly—to be one of four kids exposed to their culture. That was as far as I went. I didn’t mention names or dates or places. I told her nothing about the technology except to mention spaceships and faster-than-light travel.
“Maybe what you want to know is if we’re alone,” I said. “We’re not. There is so much life in the galaxy—hundreds of species, more planets than anyone knows about. Some of the beings out there are petty or mean or selfish, but there are others who are the best . . . the best people I’ve ever known.” I looked away from her. “I don’t think I should say anything else.”
She stood up and began to pace. Then she stopped and looked at me. “Are they coming back?”
“I don’t think so,” I said “Things went badly. Please don’t ask. I can’t tell you.”
She studied my face. “You know how I know you’re telling the truth?”
I shook my head.
“Because talking about it makes you sad.”
I didn’t say anything. Alice went over to her computer, called up her browser, and proceeded to delete all her UFO-related bookmarks. That in itself meant nothing—she could call them up again in an instant—and I had no idea if she was playing me or not, but I had a gut feeling she was being sincere.
“I don’t need them anymore,” she said. “I just wanted to know. And now I do.”
“I wish I could tell you more,” I said.
“I know you do. I can see it on your face. Maybe someday?”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
“Did you do the summer reading for English class?”
She shifted gears without missing a beat, and that was the moment I knew I could trust her. I felt like she knew I’d given her something, something important, and she was locking it away where it would not come back to haunt either of us. As unlikely as it seemed, I had made a friend, here on Earth, from my own planet, and there was no looming danger or conspiracy or explosions involved. For the first time since returning from Confederation Central, I began to think that maybe life here would not be so bad.