“Yes, it does.”
“Why, if it isn’t Clytemnestra Jenkins.”
Duke—it had to be Duke—had come up from behind Annie. He sat down opposite her at the table.
“Dukakis Clementine,” Annie said. “We meet at last! Again!”
“Once more!”
Cora managed to roll her eyes audibly, somehow.
“How are we enjoying finals week?” he asked.
“Beats the hell out of a zombie apocalypse.”
“Is that what we’re comparing it to?”
“Yeah, it seems apt. Nobody’s getting any sleep, everyone’s dressed for bed, lots of haunted stares. It’s pretty similar.”
He laughed.
“Well, I hope it feels like home then.” His eyes darted between Annie and Cora. “And I’m glad to see you’re okay. After the other night. You know.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I meant to reach out.”
Annie was telling a partial truth. She wasn’t all that proud of what happened in the observatory after she discovered Rick Horton in the hallway. Proximally, Cora called Annie to ask if she was okay and Annie told her she was not, and could Cora please get inside immediately. Cora, and three other agents who were substantially less subtle than Cora, did that very thing, in under two minutes, breaking down a set of doors to do so. They found a deeply shaken Annie Collins in the bathroom, but no apparent threat. This didn’t stop them from searching the entire building for a less-than-apparent threat, which was how Annie learned that she’d evidently hallucinated Rick Horton.
That’s essentially what she told them: She’d had a nightmare. It wasn’t true, and it made her sound like a child, but it was better than telling them she was being haunted by the ghost of a childhood acquaintance.
A far graver problem had to do with the reason Cora called Annie in the first place.
It turned out that at around the same time Annie saw Rick, the spaceship began performing what the Pentagon was calling ‘evasive maneuvers.’ This was different from the barrel rolls she’d deliberately put it through a few hours earlier, and much more disturbing. The ship repositioned itself above Annie, and an aperture nobody knew existed opened up on the side.
Everyone agreed that Annie’s periodic threats to shoot lasers down from space were only cute because it seemed like she was probably kidding. It stopped being cute that night, because for about ten minutes it looked as if it was going to happen. That she didn’t even mean to do it only made it worse.
Shortly after clearing the building (proving she was the only one who could see Rick), the Secret Service hustled Annie out of the place. She never got the full overnight-in-the-observatory experience. Unfortunately, neither did anyone else. Everybody was awakened and questioned.
Socially speaking, it was a fiasco… probably. Annie wasn’t really the kind of person who was incredibly concerned about what other people thought of her—the past two years would have been a lot worse if she was—but it did make things awkward, especially whenever she ran into any of the people from that night.
She assumed there were a lot of ‘Annie Collins is such a freak OMG’ conversations going on just out of earshot, and that was fine. She had freaked out, after all. And it was a little unfortunate that some of those people could have ended up being a friend at some future point were it not for the creepy ghost of Rick Horton.
But whatever.
Still, she’d meant to call Duke. It’s just that after you accidentally force the government to go to DEFCON 2, you end up getting pulled into a bunch of meetings and before long a month has passed and the school year is almost up.
“It’s all right,” Duke said, “I’m glad you’re okay. Or, whatever. Not real clear on what happened. Can you guys tell me?”
“No,” Cora said.
“Not really,” Annie added. “It was nothing personal, if that helps.”
He nodded.
“Yep, that does help. You’re a scary girl to hang out with, Clytemnestra.”
“Yeah, it’s a tough gig.”
“So, when are you done?”
“Last final is in… three hours.”
“Awesome. Mine’s Saturday morning, which is not only cruel and unnecessary, it’s doubly so for being an Ethics class. What’s after that, you taking a rocket to Mars or something?”
“Back home, but not for a couple of days. There’s a whole army to reposition. You know how that goes.”
“Yeah, we’ve all been there.”
“But I hear good things about Mars, so maybe later.”
“Hey, get semester-abroad credit, maybe. You’re still in town tomorrow?”
“Should be.”
“Cool. ‘Cuz there’s a party.”
Cora leaned forward, as if Duke had just confessed to a crime and she wanted him to repeat it on the record.
“A party?” Cora asked.
“Yes, Annie’s scary stepmom, a party. Can she go to parties?”
“I can go to parties,” Annie said.
“She probably shouldn’t go to parties,” Cora said.
“I can go to parties. What kind of party?”
“Oh, the bad kind,” Duke said. “The post-finals kind. Starts at sunset and runs through to sunrise, with all sorts of drugs and alcohol and unprotected sex. We like to give everybody one last chance to ruin their lives before summer break.”
“Why that sounds like exactly what I’m looking for, Mr. Clementine.”
Cora made a whining sound Annie decided to ignore.
“Cool, I’ll slip you the deets. You’re not gonna get everyone arrested this time, right? That seemed like a one-time thing.”
“She might,” Cora said.
“Shh. No, I won’t.”
“I’ll forward the invite. And ah… it’s Cora, right?”
“Agent Blankenship.”
“Right, you can come too, just don’t narc on the underage drinking.”
Cora fixed Annie with a thoroughly disbelieving raised eyebrow.
“You heard him,” Annie said. “No narc-ing.”
“Right.”
Duke stood, and offered up a fist-bump, which was somehow more intimate than a handshake in college for reasons Annie was unclear on.
“Rock that last final,” he said.
Annie returned the bump, and off he went.
“You can’t go,” Cora said. Duke was barely out of earshot.
“What are you talking about, of course I can.”
“Do you remember all the vetting that went into the overnight?”
“I bet that was a mess,” Annie said. Cora was explicitly not saying the next part of her point, which was remember how that turned out?
“And we don’t have a list of attendees for this one.”
“Seems like that makes the party easier. Nobody to do a background check on.”
“No, I don’t think you…”
“Yes, I understand. I don’t really care. I’d like to go to the party, so I’m going to go to the party. I’d also like it if you guys didn’t frisk everyone who came within a yard of me. Look, I’ve done parties before.”
“Yes, but not since… It’s going to be difficult, that’s all.”
“Cora, I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you guys I’m going to a party tomorrow night, so if you have to scramble fighter jets before then, you’d better get moving.”
Annie got up and marched away from Cora, which wasn’t the sort of thing one did with one’s security detail, but it had been that kind of week. Also, Rick Horton was at the back of the cafeteria, and he’d been trying to get her attention since Duke showed up at the table.
She walked past his position and into the hallway, toward the bathrooms. If Cora—or Agent Yount, who picked her up as soon as she exited—asked, Annie would say she was heading to the bathroom.
“What is it,” she muttered. She was pretty sure even though nobody else could hear Rick, they could hear her just fine. “Make it quick.”
; “You can’t trust that guy,” he said. She could smell alcohol on his breath. It seemed impossible that he wasn’t there.
“Duke?”
“That’s his name? What a dumb name. Yeah, him.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“You should, I’m haunting you for a reason.”
“Yeah? What is that reason?”
“For starters, to tell you not to trust Duke. Christ, that’s a dog’s name, what is wrong with parents, man?”
“Thanks for the advice. You’re not here, so I’m not going to listen to you. Now excuse me.”
She pushed through the bathroom door. Again, although she had no reason to expect this, Rick didn’t follow.
The final was in European history, which was something Annie thought would be interesting back at registration, but turned out to be a little less than that a few months later. It felt like one of those courses that delivered information she might be thankful to have been exposed to, a decade later, on discovering a television show set in the same period… only with people a little too white, clean and pretty to be realistic. Possibly, she just didn’t like the professor, who for some reason was an elderly Jesuit on loan from Boston College. Maybe Wainwright just had a shortage of historians. Or a shortage of Jesuits, if that was a thing.
She figured she was looking at a B or a B-minus to close out the course, and she could live with that.
Far more important was what the final represented: the last hurdle before the summer break.
Like a lot of things that seemed like a big deal prior to actually being accomplished, the end-point of her first year in college felt a little anticlimactic. Annie wasn’t sure what she should have expected—fireworks, or something—but the world after the last final wasn’t any different than it had been before the last final. She appreciated that she was coming from what had to be an extremely jaded perspective when it came to the small victories of day-to-day life, but that didn’t make it any less of a let-down.
It was also probably true that moments like these were supposed to be memorialized in a phone call to Carol, and that wasn’t possible any more, and she still wasn’t really okay with that.
“How’d it go?” Cora asked.
Cora went into classes with Annie, but not into finals. It was a reasonable compromise between the college and the Secret Service that Annie had no issue with, given she didn’t think Cora should be in the classroom at all, exams or not.
“Okay,” Annie said with a shrug.
“You want to do a dance, or have a cigar or something?”
“A cigar, definitely a cigar.”
“Really?”
“No, but I get you. It’s too early for a drink, and I was just thinking fireworks would have been appropriate.”
“Well, I can’t offer you a drink, or a cigar, and the Secret Service doesn’t have the budget for fireworks.”
“Sure it does. But, it’s the middle of the day.”
“Yes, there’s that too.”
“I was thinking I’d head back to the room to procrastinate until the last minute, then start packing up.”
“All right.”
Cora had two or three expressions that Annie could cleanly identify. One of them—the one presently on display—indicated she had something to tell Annie and wasn’t looking forward to it.
“What is it?” Annie asked.
“The van wants a chat.”
“The entire van?”
“Agent Riviera.”
“Wendy.”
“Yes, her. She has a room downstairs.”
“Must be serious.”
Cora went back to being difficult to read again, which Annie took to mean that either, A: it actually was serious, or B: Cora didn’t know.
Wendy Riviera had indeed commandeered an entire classroom on the first floor for this occasion, which was a little less impressive than it perhaps would have been had she done so any time during the semester outside of finals. At this point, most of the rooms were empty anyway. It was possible she literally just checked doors until she found one that was unlocked. Annie had already been in two study groups that used that exact approach to find a space.
As for why they were in a classroom instead of, say, in the van, was probably because nobody wanted Annie to see what the inside of the van looked like.
An agent Annie didn’t know was outside the room. Wendy was alone inside, standing at the window, looking important.
This was the first time since the initial sighting of Rick Horton, back in March, that Annie had shared a room with the agent in charge of her protection. Annie still mostly dealt with Cora, who dealt with the van, and everyone seemed all right with that set-up.
Notably, for this exchange Cora remained out in the hall.
“Hey,” Wendy greeted, “How’d it go?”
“It went fine,” Annie said. “What’s up?”
Wendy smiled. “I just wanted to circle round on our preparations for the summer. We were considering an escalated timeline.”
“You want to leave sooner.”
“Yes.”
“When did you have in mind?”
Only a day earlier they’d settled on a schedule that had Annie leaving Wainwright five days from her last final. She was going to be driven in a government vehicle to Sorrow Falls, a trip of a little over 90 minutes on a good day. Being home meant ¾ of the security detail took the summer off (or went to guard someone else for a while) since Annie had no plans to leave the town until the fall semester began.
There were a number of reasons Sorrow Falls was considered a low security risk compared to Wainwright, but the biggest one was something the Service wasn’t even aware of: When Annie visited Violet, she was essentially impossible to locate.
Annie had to negotiate the government’s perspective on her personal safety within the confines of her home town. It wasn’t an agreement everyone was happy with.
“We were thinking about leaving tonight,” Wendy said.
Annie laughed.
“I’m not even packed,” she said.
“We can help with that.”
“Thanks, no. Where’s this coming from? A couple of days ago you guys sounded like you would have been happy if I stayed in the dorm all summer.”
Wendy nodded, and left the window. She took a seat at the desk at the front of the room, where the professor ordinarily sat.
“There’s been a lot of talk on my end lately,” Wendy said. “Mostly about what happened last month. I’ll be honest, everyone’s still a little on edge about the whole thing.”
“I guess I can understand that,” Annie said. “But how does that translate into my leaving sooner?”
Then she got it.
“Oh. Ohhhh. The party.”
“The Pentagon feels it would be unwise if you went to the party,” Wendy confirmed.
“I appreciate the Pentagon’s concern, but—and I mean this in the nicest way possible—unless the Pentagon is also my dad, it isn’t the Pentagon’s business. It probably still wouldn’t be if it was my dad, just in case someone’s gonna try and get him on the phone next.”
That they were even talking about the US military command in this context was a little interesting and a lot complicated. The Secret Service didn’t answer to any arm of the military, which included anybody inside the Pentagon. What the Service did was protect public servants and capture counterfeiters, which was a combination Annie never failed to find weird. The spaceship, however—and Annie by extension—was definitely a military problem, so when it came to protecting her, it was first thought that the army would be doing that.
There were a host of issues there, too, because not only was the army not in the habit of guarding private citizens on US soil, they didn’t really know how to do that. Annie was also not at all keen to be followed around by soldiers in khakis all day, no matter how cute they may or may not be in those uniforms.
Short of Annie enlisting in the military, or running for public off
ice, there was therefore no official government entity to whom the responsibility for her continued well-being naturally fell. As a result, her protection was enacted by way of a one-of-a-kind joint task force between Homeland Security—and by extension the Secret Service—and the many-headed hydra known collectively as the Pentagon. The whole thing came together in something called Team Babysitter.
Annie had no clue what the real chain of command was within Team Babysitter, and never bothered to learn. The entire thing was a compromise she was never fully comfortable with. Deep down, she still thought if she had nobody guarding her she’d ultimately be okay.
“They’re worried that you’re not really stable right now, Annie,” Wendy said. “So am I.”
“I’m fine. College is stressful, that’s all.”
Wendy’s expression clouded.
“We’re also discussing some changes in how you’re protected over the summer. We’d like to renegotiate the perimeter.”
The perimeter in question was the border of the town. Annie had effectively gotten them to agree to treat Sorrow Falls the same way they treated her dormitory: put a van outside of it and leave her alone when she’s inside. Cora would be the exception.
“I figured it’d come to this,” Annie said. “The answer is no.”
“I’m afraid we can’t accept that.”
‘You can’t accept that? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that we insist on a different arrangement. It’s not just me talking here, Annie, it’s everyone. You understand that what happened at the observatory… this kind of thing has consequences.”
“Yeah, and I don’t care.”
Wendy stood, doing her best to look intimidating, which was a stark reversal from the motherly, friendly person Annie met the last time around.
“You should care. We’re here for your safety, but we have other concerns and you know that. You seeing dead people in crowds for instance.”
“You said that was staying between us.”
“Oh, it was, until what happened last month. Don’t tell me they aren’t related. On top of that we’re pretty sure we’ve captured you speaking to empty spaces. Who do you think you’re holding conversations with when you do that, Annie? Is it this Horton kid still, or are you seeing other dead people now?”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 19