Dana and I look at each other. Blonde Bombshell is the kind of chick who makes girls, like Dana, feel like shit because they'll never compare, whereas guys, like me, look at themselves and feel like shit for a whole different set of reasons. She's unattainable. Everything about her.
I set down the mop and wipe my hands on my apron. "Uh, can I help you, ma'am?"
"Do your products contain high fructose corn syrup?" she asks. Her voice is stiff, not the molasses drawl I'd hoped for -- one I could imagine being covered in.
From Dana, I hear an audible scoff. She's thinking: Of course, Bombshell can't eat what the rest of us do.
I'm instantly thrilled that the nights get boring enough around here that I've read the nutrition facts and ingredient lists, and, so, I know the answer to this question. "It's in all the sauces, and likely the candy you can put in the Blizzard, but technically the corn syrup in the ice cream itself isn't 'high fructose' per se . . ."
She tilts her head to the side. Weirdly. "That will do. Make me something. Large. Lots of candy and sauce."
"You want a large sundae?" I asked.
"Sundaes. Yes. I would like to order five."
It takes me a second to process, realizing most people ask the question about high fructose crap and then don't want to eat it. I shake off the confusion and get to making. I'm so distracted, I forget to charge her for them, but when she's gone, I realize there's a $50 bill sitting next to the register. Dana and I don't say another word.
She was the first one I saw. Dana drove me home that night and when we got to the shabby craftsman-house coated street I've lived on my whole life — Maple Street — we saw the moving truck was parked at the end of the block.
There were five of them, all adults, moving into a big square saltbox house that sits at the end of my cul-de-sac. Everything about the house always stuck out: different architecture, twice the size of everything around it. Vines covered the siding and bricks. The windows on the front looked like eyes staring at you. We pulled into my driveway, got out, and probably stood there for five solid minutes just watching them. Blonde Bombshell carried boxes on her shoulders, still in the heels.
"I think I'm going to go home," Dana said, neither of us able to wrap our heads around what we saw.
But I stayed out on the stoop, swinging on the porch swing, just watching. They unloaded that 18-wheeler in an hour, and at one point Blonde Bombshell carried in a leather recliner by herself.
Forty-seven new families moved to our tiny town in the next sixty days. And they all seemed drawn to the house on Maple Street, like a weirdo mecca. Maybe because it's the South and we're good at denial, or maybe because people like thinking everything is fine when it isn't, but whatever the case, no one said anything.
My mother, who lives in a uniform of mom jeans, nurse shoes, clunky sweaters from my childhood, and scrunchies, welcomed the mysterious group of five adults living in one house with a tray of chocolate chip brownies she made from a mix. I stood next to her as she introduced herself to the tall, suave man with caramel colored hair. While we exchanged pleasantries — well, while they did, and I watched awkwardly — he ate the entire tray.
Sugar. There was something about sugar. Blonde Bombshell with her apparent need for high fructose corn syrup. Suave Caramel dude with his brownie consumption. The more families that came, the longer the lines at the DQ got. I'd go into gas stations, and the candy aisles would be picked clean. Hostess treats — or whatever people started making after Hostess shut down — and candy, Icees, Cokes and Hi-C, Pixy Stix, and doughnuts, and so on. And so on. And so on. They ate it all. Sugar. The town was going crazy for sugar.
It took me three months to say the word "alien" out loud. I stayed up late reading about extraterrestrial encounters. Though it was safe to say my encounters weren't of the floating-faceless-object or little-green-men persuasion, there seemed to be a number of stories out there about people who just appeared, often to a small town, and then things began to seem . . . off. Just like they had in our tiny ass town.
I thought about an Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode I'd seen on Hulu — my older sister, Hanna, always reminisced about the show, and bored one night last summer, I'd watched them all online. You know the one I mean, right? With the aliens in the abandoned building, trying to take the twin or something? I don't know. They seemed like that. I decided the Maple Street sugar psychos — or fructose freaktoids, as I got to calling them (eventually shortened to fructoids in my head) — were certainly aliens. I just couldn't determine if the rest of the forty-seven families were aliens or were under some kind of spell.
Dana was the first person I spilled my hypothesis to. She'd rolled her eyes. She'd asked if I was high. She didn't even humor the thought past giving me the jeez-Fenton-how'd-I-get-stuck-with-you-as-my-best-friend-when-you're-so-lame face. I knew that face too well. The older we got, the more she thought it. And the more stupid shit I said out loud, the more serious she was in asking herself that question.
Too bad Dana was a mean, sarcastic, difficult-to-deal-with, chubby chick in small town Tennessee. She was outcast for the obvious, superficial reasons, which I could care less about. That clearly didn't keep me from befriending her, or liking her. But on top of that, she wasn't exactly a pleasant person. She wanted to know how she got stuck with me? I wondered how I got stuck with her.
People made jokes that we'd get married. That I'd be the pussy-whipped skinny husband who got elbowed around by the drill sergeant wife twice his size. You don't know that stereotype? You're lucky. There's a lot of that around here.
But all that brought a few things to light about my alien theory. One, this sugar obsession didn't seem to rot the population of Small-Town-Shithole, Tennessee the way you think it would. The girls were beautiful. The guys were athletes. They were all way too pretty in a really uncomfortable, Stepford or airbrushed or perhaps Kardashian sort of way. They were constantly overdressed and over-made and wearing clothes that might have passed in a big city — Nashville, maybe, or probably New York — but certainly did not pass here in the land of Walmart and oversized American Eagle jeans. And all they ever ate was sugar.
Secondly, no one seemed to know anything about these people. You'd ask questions of the kids in school, but they wouldn't be able to answer them. Teachers would call on them, they'd stay silent, and then the teacher would leave them alone, as if they had answered, or as if they'd suddenly been compelled — by alien mind melding, duh — to not require an answer of a student. I figured that one out pretty quickly after several of them showed up in Mr. Fence's third period American History class. Fence was a nervous man, in the Army once, and kind of jumpy now. Kids made fun of him, which was terrible. He always kept his dog tags on him. In the middle of class, he'd take them off, and then wrap them around his wrist, like a nervous habit. I kept a running tally of how many questions he asked the Fructoidss, and a count of how many they answered. One particular day, I looked at my rows of tally and hash and counted them as 0 for 47. He never once gave them a hard time. He'd just look at them, they'd look back, he'd wind the necklace chain around his wrist, clasp the tags in his palm, and then say, "Moving on."
Third, they only hovered about in little groups of Fructoids, but they'd say nearly nothing. My high school got 128 new students in the town's population influx — we had started at 400 — and yet the lunchroom got quieter. They'd be quiet and then people would be quieter, probably just to stare.
Fourth . . .
"Fenton, stop." Dana's voice. She'd had enough. (I'd been explaining this to her, my second attempt to make a case for aliens when she came in for her Blizzard. With things getting busy, she'd come right when it was time to close up shop, keep me company while I cleaned, avoid the line of weirdly pretty people staring at her while she ate.) "Tell me this is a lamely detailed April Fools' joke."
"You don't believe me," I said.
"Of course I don't believe you, you insane little fool. But I see a flaw in your theory," she s
aid.
I sighed, rolled my eyes. With air quotes, I said, "Aliens don't exist."
"No, not that. That you don't believe anymore. And it's subjective. I see an actual hole in your logic." She licked soft serve off the spoon. I idly wondered, if she'd been anyone else, would I have found that hot?
"I'm listening."
"It sounds like you're suggesting that they're playing some kind of mind voodoo on everyone. Like you think that's why no one cares what they're doing, or asks who they are. Right?"
"Right."
"Well, why isn't it working on you?" she said.
I hadn't thought about it. I'd been awake too long and thinking too hard, and somehow, I hadn't figured out my own strength against them.
A corner of that obnoxious smile of hers turned up, and she started to laugh. "You don't have an answer for that one."
"Maybe it's because I saw them first. When Blonde Bombshell—"
"Are we still calling her that?" Dana huffed.
I ignored her. "When Blonde Bombshell came here that night. I was probably the first person they spoke to here."
"So, what, that made you immune? Wouldn't that, by logic, mean that you were the first infected? Wouldn't that mean you were the most under their spell?"
"It's not a spell," I said. "You're thinking of the wrong kind of—"
"Mythical creature." She cut me off again. "Look, Fenton. You've always been weird. And you've always been my friend. So I'm telling you, as your friend, to let this go."
I crossed my arms, and stared at her. "Then what's your explanation? Fifty new families. A hundred plus new kids at school. Sugar bust?"
She looked me dead in the eye and said, "I don't need one."
"You don't understand."
"Stop being such a freak," she said. She got to her feet, not even halfway done with her ice cream, and she left.
That night I walked home since Dana had left me to fend for myself. When I got to the house it was dark - save for the glow of a TV coming from the family room, where my mom was undoubtedly asleep in a recliner.
When I rounded the corner of the house to come in the kitchen door, like I always did, Blonde Bombshell was standing there. Stiffly.
"Whoa," I said out loud, before I could stop myself. She was dressed like a sexed-up superhero sidekick in a comic book movie. Maybe like Scarlett-Johansen-as-Black-Widow-in-The-Avengers. Black bodysuit sort of thing. The same thigh-high boots. Hair big and all over the place. Red lips, dark eyes.
"Fenton Marsh," she said. Stiffer than the Siri robo-speak. It was so odd to hear her talk. You so rarely heard their voices.
"Yeah . . .?"
"Pleasantries suggest you should greet me with one of the acceptable phrases. And you should call me by my name, like I called you by yours."
"I never got your name," I said, which was true.
"Clarice," she said. Silence of the Lambs, I thought. She tilted her head to the side, like she had the night we met. A jerky movement. A robotic function.
"Hello, Clarice. What are you doing here?" I asked. My palms were sweaty. My hair stuck to my forehead.
"Do you like your profession at the Dairy Queen?" she asked.
"I wouldn't exactly call it my profession," I said. Surely I'd break out of the damn Dairy Queen. Surely this was my high school job, not my maximum potential.
"You do it for work, do you not? Professional denotes payment for service, a job. Am I incorrect in my linguistic understanding of the word, 'profession'?" she asked.
"No, you're right, it's just that . . ."
"What is just what?" she asked.
"Why are you talking to me about Dairy Queen?"
"We like it. It is a good source of food for us. Perhaps you will be useful for us, when the time comes."
My heart was beating out of my chest. When the time comes. Aliens! Invasion! Holy crap!
"Say aloud what you are thinking," she said, at my silence.
"What if I don't want to be useful?" I asked.
"Then we would have to take different measures with you," she said.
"Such as?"
"To start, we would need you to forget all that you think you have deduced about our existence," she said. "We only offered a select few that privilege. We would, of course, revoke it immediately."
As in: I was one of only a few whose perception wasn't being controlled by them. I was one of the few who had a chance to do something about it.
And though I'd never actually help them — though what were they seriously thinking I'd do, make them sundaes on a space ship for the rest of my life? — I knew better than to turn down the bit of wisdom I'd gained with them.
So I needed to play along. "Then I'm happy to be useful in whatever way you need." I put out my hand toward Clarice, to shake on it.
She stared at my hand and then back up at me. "I cannot place my palm in yours as is customary in your societal tradition. We try not to touch people. The salt in their sweat can hurt our epidermal layers. Your hand appears to be coated in residue of dried perspiration."
I looked at my hand and then back up at her. "Of course, I understand."
"Thank you for your compliance, Fenton Marsh. I will now inform the others it is safe to speak to you. They will likely choose not to speak, but if one speaks to you, speak back."
"Of course," I said.
She turned on her heels, like a German soldier, and she headed mechanically back toward the house at the end of the cul-de-sac.
"Hey, wait!" I called.
She stopped. "Wait on what?"
"Can I tell my friend? Dana?"
Head-flinch, as if a glitch in machinery. "No. You may tell no one."
"Oh. Okay," I said. Defeated. She'd still think I was crazy. I'd still be alone.
"That saddens you," she said.
"It's hard having no one," I said.
"You need a," she paused, "friend. That will be arranged. Good night, Fenton Marsh."
As I unlocked the house, wondering if I was dreaming, I realized she gave me the most valuable piece of information yet: Sugar was sustenance; salt was a weapon. And she was to deliver on the promise of friend? She'd just given me one of them.
The next morning, a Fructoid stood at my locker. He was my height, about my skinny build. He had jet-black hair and ice-blue eyes to my sandy blond and brown. He had on a t-shirt and hoodie and Vans, just like I did. Most of them were a head taller than I was, with athletic bodies and everything else girls drooled over. But this one was just as forgettable, as short and small and normal as I was. They didn't just find me a friend. They found me a friend like me.
"Uh . . . can I help you?"
"Fenton Marsh," he said. The first Fructoid voice I'd heard other than Clarice's. "My name is Travis. I am your friend."
I laughed kind of. Looked around. A few kids looked at me, but not like I'd thought they would. No one noticed me. Maybe I could use that to my advantage.
"Nice to meet you, Travis. So she told you what's going on?"
"You make ice cream," he said. "And you'll be useful. And you need someone to talk to."
I slung my backpack over my shoulder, weighted down with my history and math books. Travis followed closely.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm going with you," he said.
"They aren't your classes."
"That won't present a problem," he said.
"Going to use your Jedi-mind tricks on them?" I said.
"I appreciate your Star Wars reference. It amuses me," he said.
I stopped and looked at him. "You know Star Wars?"
"We are assigned to study people. Culture. Colloquialisms. We are assigned to . . . fit in," he said.
"I see." He was so much more normal than Clarice. It irked me. Only I kind of liked it.
I got to my first period Trig class, and Mrs. Knots looked up with a furrowed brow when she saw Travis. He smiled back. Mechanically but warmly. Then she smiled back and looked back at her desk
.
I took a seat, and he sat next to me. "Jedi," he whispered. He reached out a fist as if to fist bump me.
"What about the salt worries?"
He left his fist hanging there. "I sense no excess perspiration," he said. And in his most human-sounding voice, he whispered, "Clarice's strict. The rest of us are more . . . chill."
Chill. If they were supposed to be studying colloquialisms, he was doing a damn good job. I smiled, and fist-bumped.
It was nicer having a friend than I expected. I mean, I didn't know if Travis was really my friend, and I still felt a little weird being in with them — never mind how weird it felt that there was in fact a them -- but it was nice. Between classes, at lunch, after school, and even at the DQ, Travis was there. I asked a million questions. He answered some of them. I kept thinking it would get annoying, but it didn't. Which means I didn't know how lonely I had been until then.
Dana had more or less disappeared. She only showed up for Blizzards every few days, and she never spoke to Travis. She looked over her shoulder at him with a particular breed of bitchy disdain, and then she looked at me with about half as much. One night, when she came in, she managed to have an entire conversation with me while Travis hovered, and she never so much as looked his direction. When she walked out, he looked at me and said, "Does she like you or hate you?"
"Hate," I said. "Or something."
"I thought they were often one in the same," he said.
I raised an eyebrow at him. "Do you . . . like girls, Travis? Normal girls? Human girls?"
"Girls are girls, Fenton friend. I do not make a habit of analyzing DNA before checking one out."
Touché.
"Any particular type of girl?" I said.
He looked out to Dana as she stuffed herself into her tiny Civic. "Ones that might have an interest in talking to me," he said.
"No one talks to you," I countered.
"That doesn't mean I don't wish they could, you know?" he said. I did know. "Good thing I have you."
Take Me To Your Reader: An Otherworld Anthology Page 8