“Are you okay?” she asked. “I mean, is Aidan okay? I know we’re not supposed to ask where he was…but I can ask if you’re okay, right?”
“And if you happen to want to tell us where he was, we won’t argue,” Tate added with a grin.
“We’re not really talking about that,” I said apologetically.
“No worries,” Busby said quickly. “At all. Everyone’s just glad he’s okay.”
Tate nodded. “Yeah. Both my mom and dad were part of the crew looking for him.”
“Mine too,” Busby said.
“So, yeah…we’re all just glad he came back.”
This would happen to me over and over throughout the day—kids telling me how their parents had looked for Aidan. Even some of the teachers told me they’d been part of the search parties. Other kids told me how much they’d prayed for Aidan’s return. Everyone said how glad they were that he was home safe…but I could tell that at least some of them were expecting more from me than thanks. They wanted to know what had happened. They felt they were owed an explanation. And I had nothing to give them.
Busby laid off at lunch, but Tate and another friend of ours, Truman, were relentless.
“You don’t have to tell us,” Truman said. “But if we guess right, throw a French fry our way.”
Then they started guessing.
“He ran away to Disney World.”
“He was abducted by Ms. Holt for science experiments.” (Ms. Holt was our not-particularly-friendly bio teacher.)
“He was abducted by aliens.”
“He’s been an alien all along and needed to visit his real parents in a galaxy far, far away.”
“Two words: time travel.”
“Two more words: witness protection.”
I kept my French fries to myself, and hoped hard that my friends wouldn’t actually guess Aidan’s story, because if they’d said, “He went into another world, like Narnia,” I wasn’t sure I could keep my expression neutral.
But they never got near it.
Eventually Busby told them to cut it out, and changed the conversation to weekend plans.
I gave her a few French fries in thanks.
19
Although I was thinking about Aidan all the time during school, I didn’t see him until the end of the day. Once again, we weren’t taking the bus—Mom had given us instructions on where and when to meet her, and she backed those up with a series of texts.
I met Aidan by his locker, which had been decorated with balloons and streamers, as if it was his birthday or he’d won a big prize.
He saw me looking at them and said, “They also made a big ‘welcome back’ banner for my homeroom. Ms. Geller made a really big deal about it. She gave this speech about how good it was to have me back. Then she made the whole class applaud and cheer. It was mortifying.”
“Was it better after that?”
Aidan did the combination for his locker and accidentally popped a balloon when he swung it open. “Not much. I think whatever Principal Kahler said to them in the assembly only made them more curious. For the most part, they left me alone…but I could tell they didn’t want to.”
“Yeah, I got that too.”
He stared at me hard. “But you didn’t say anything, right?”
“Of course I didn’t say anything.”
Aidan’s stare moved over my shoulder. I turned and found Glenn hovering there.
“Bad time?” he asked.
“Nah,” Aidan said, taking the last of the books from his locker and closing it fast enough that another balloon fell off. “Mom’s picking us up.”
“Cool. I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“Right.”
“Even though you’re grounded?” I asked.
Aidan looked annoyed with me. “Grounded means I can’t leave the house. It doesn’t mean Glenn can’t come over.”
I wasn’t sure about that—but I figured we’d find out soon enough. Neither of us had been grounded before. Not like this.
“Yeah, what do you know?” Glenn chimed in scornfully. Which I thought was unnecessary.
“I know more than you do,” I shot back, regretting it immediately.
“Stop,” Aidan said to me. Then he smiled at Glenn and said, “We’ll definitely hang out tomorrow. Just show up.”
“Cool. See ya.”
“See ya.”
Aidan started walking to our pickup point. Kids kept stopping him to say welcome back and that they were glad he was okay. Some girls even told him how scared they’d been when he’d been missing—I couldn’t tell if they were friends of his or not. He wasn’t unfriendly to anyone, but he also made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it. He kept walking. I kept following.
The phones buzzed in our pockets at the same time. Mom, already there. Mom, waiting.
When we got in the car, she asked the usual question—“How was your day?”—but it felt more loaded than usual. As if to confirm that, she added before we’d even answered, “And how did the talk with the counselor go?”
“It was fine,” Aidan mumbled from the back seat.
From the front seat, I could see that this answer wasn’t good enough for Mom.
“Aidan,” she said, trying to keep her voice light and only half succeeding, “when you disappear for six days, you forfeit the right to give brief, unhelpful answers. So let’s try again. What did you and the counselor talk about?”
“We talked about my ‘re-entry’ into school. Since I’d only been in school for four periods, I told him I was ‘re-entering’ fine. He asked me if there was anything else I wanted to talk about, from when I’d been ‘away.’ I told him I didn’t. He went on for another ten minutes about how he was there for me if I needed him. I told him that was great. Is that a good enough report for you?”
“Why didn’t you want to talk to him more about it?”
“He’s a guidance counselor, Mom. He’s not a psychiatrist.”
“Would you like to speak to a psychiatrist? Your father and I have gotten some names and are trying to get you an appointment for Monday.”
“Are you asking me or not asking me? It’s kinda unclear.”
Mom did not like that response.
“Again, Aidan, I’ll point out that you forfeited some say in what happens when you ran away for so long and caused so much pain and worry. If I were you, I’d stop the arguing right here, right now.”
“I’m not arguing,” Aidan said flatly. Which seemed to me a lot like arguing, but I wasn’t going to point that out.
Mom let out a deep breath, then turned to me.
“How was your day, Lucas?”
I really had to stop myself from saying, “It was fine.” Instead I gave her a play-by-play of daily life in Roanoke, which was what we were studying in American history. This lasted long enough to get us home without Mom and Aidan arguing anymore.
When we got to the house, Aidan bolted from the back seat and headed inside before I’d even undone my seat belt. I figured he was running to our room, but when I got there, I found it empty. Instead there were footsteps over my head. He’d run to the attic.
I stood still, listening. What would I do if the footsteps suddenly stopped? It sounded like he was going to the dresser. I could imagine him opening the doors, and then—
The footsteps pounded back down the stairs. A few seconds later, Aidan was in our room, looking angry.
“Find anything?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he said.
“Don’t take it out on me if they don’t want you back,” I said.
A direct hit.
“You don’t understand me at all,” he swore.
But from his reaction, I could tell I’d understood at least a little bit of what he’d been hoping for up there.
Dinner was strained. Dad asked the same questions about school that Mom had, and got the same answers (except a little less about Roanoke from me). Aidan again made a weird face when he tried to eat, like the turkey and stuffing were poisoned but the executioner was insisting he eat it all.
“I think it will be great for you to talk to Dr. Jennings on Monday,” Dad said. “He’s a smart guy.”
“If that’s a part of my prison sentence, fine,” Aidan replied.
“You are not in prison,” Mom pointed out. “You are home. Being grounded means you’re home.”
“Whatever,” Aidan said. I really didn’t think he was helping himself out. He usually knew when to stop, but now it was like he didn’t care whether he crossed lines or not.
Dad put out a hand toward Mom, signaling her not to say whatever he knew she’d want to say next. He leaned over to look Aidan right in the eye.
“Look, buddy, you’ve gotta help us out here, okay? Everyone was super nice to us when you were gone, and they’re being super respectful now that you’re back. Everyone wants you to get beyond this. It would help us to know a little more. Right now, all we have is your story…and that’s not much to go on.”
Aidan looked at the table. “It isn’t a story.”
“But it is a story, Aidan. We all know that. If it’s the story you need to tell, we understand. But at the end of the day, we all know it’s a story, and stories always have some meaning behind them. We’re just trying to get to the meaning, bud. That’s all.”
“I told you…it’s not a story.”
It struck me right then that the word story might be too big for us. Because the same word could be used for something that had happened and something that was completely made up. Me telling my parents what happened in school, sticking totally to the facts, was a story. But me telling them I’d spent the school day on Mars would also be a story. It was tricky, the way it could mean both things.
“Aidan,” Mom said gently, “you’re not making this easy…especially for yourself. That’s why we want you to talk to Dr. Jennings.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” Aidan pointed out, looking up again.
“Well, that’s good!” Dad said cheerily.
We didn’t go near the topic of Aveinieu again.
21
Once more, I waited until the lights were out and the house had fallen silent. I waited until the hour when we were still awake but had already let go of the day. Waiting for sleep to come…and having some words arrive instead.
“What was it like there?” I asked from my bed.
He could have pretended to be asleep. He could have told me to stop it already—I wouldn’t have been surprised by that.
But instead he asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what was it like in Aveinieu? Were there cities? Castles? Shires?”
“It wasn’t like any of that. There weren’t many people—like, people weren’t the point of everything. There weren’t any roads or electricity or things like that. People didn’t even ride horses—not unless the horse offered its back, which it only did when there were emergencies. We had to walk everywhere. I lived in a wood cabin that Cordelia and some of the others had built.”
“There wasn’t any electricity?”
“Nope.”
“Why didn’t you, like, invent it for them?”
“Would you know how to invent electricity?”
I thought about it for a second. I didn’t have a clue how electricity worked, or how it got into the sockets.
“I guess not,” I admitted.
“But there were toilets. Plumbing. It was all from tanks that caught the rain.”
“Phew.”
“But no toilet paper, of course.”
“Of course.”
I waited for him to tell me something else. When he didn’t, I asked another question.
“Were there other kids?”
“You mean, human kids?”
“Yeah.”
“There were a few. There was one kid a couple years older than me who was from our world. His portal was in China—he didn’t speak any English and I didn’t speak any Mandarin, but luckily one of Cordelia’s friends spoke both. So we figured out how to talk. He was a little freaked out because the weather was really warm, and he was from somewhere really cold. I mean, he was freaked out about other things too. Like the maddoxes.”
“The maddoxes?”
“We don’t have them here. They’re, like, part bear and part ox. It’s hard to explain. There were a lot of creatures like that. Honestly, I only saw about one percent of all the creatures they have in Aveinieu. We didn’t travel that far.”
“Why not?”
I could hear Aidan turn over in his bed to face me.
“Because it was just life,” he said. “There wasn’t any quest. There wasn’t any treasure to find or secret to unlock. It was like living on a farm, only the farm happened to be in a completely different world.”
“I thought you didn’t like farms!”
“This wasn’t a third-grade field trip to see some cows and goats, Lucas. It was so weird. All the colors were off—Cordelia said it might be our eyes, and that the light just hit them a different way. But there was a green sky and a silver sun and these trees that were—”
“Blue,” I said, suddenly remembering the leaf that had been in his hair.
Aidan turned on the lamp next to his bed.
“Why did you say that?” he asked.
I was already up, digging through my hamper for the pajama bottoms I’d been wearing two nights ago.
“There was a leaf in your hair!” I said as I dug. “I put it in my pocket.”
The pajamas were now in my hand, and I reached into the pocket and felt the crushed leaf in my fingers. Even before I pulled it out, I could tell it was now in pieces.
Aidan was up and next to me. “Let me see,” he said. “Give it over.”
I cupped the remnants in my hand, then offered them to him.
He and I saw it at the same time:
Not only was the shape destroyed, but the blue leaf had turned…brown.
It looked like any other leaf.
“No,” Aidan said. “No.”
We stared at the pieces in my hand.
“I swear, it was blue when I picked it up. And shaped kind of like a diamond. Here.”
I put the remains of the leaf in his hands. I didn’t know what else to do with them. And now he didn’t know what to do with them either.
“This is all that’s left, then,” he said sadly.
“It’s something, right?” I offered.
“Is it?” he said, putting the brown pieces in his top desk drawer, then shutting it.
“I’m sorry I didn’t put it somewhere safe. A lot was going on.”
He got back into bed and turned out the light.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”
Maybe he was right. But I still felt bad.
“Tell me about some of the other colors,” I said when I got back into my bed.
“Nah. I need to go to sleep.”
So we stopped there.
He didn’t ask me if I believed him now. Which was good, because I still didn’t know what to believe. Maybe in all the excitement, I’d been wrong about the leaf. Now it just seemed like a normal, broken leaf.
It no longer had any story to tell.
22
True to his word, Glenn showed up at ten o’clock the next morning. Mom and Dad clearly hadn’t talked about whether a visit would be against the rules, and once Glenn was there, they weren’t about to chase him off. I followed Aidan and Glenn down to the den, but they positioned themselves on the couch in a way that made it obvious I w
asn’t wanted. And then, just in case I didn’t get the point, Aidan said, “It’s a two-player game, Lucas.”
I went upstairs to get my homework—there was still a lot left over from the week we’d missed. Then I made a space for myself behind the couch. Glenn and Aidan knew I was there, but as long as I wasn’t in their way, that was fine.
Usually when Aidan and Glenn played two-player games, it was a very loud sport. They loved making up insult jokes for each other—“My grandma drinks tea better than you shoot zombies!” “You’re steering that car like it’s a half-wheeled bicycle!” “I’ve seen better hand-eye coordination in ticklish sloths!” It was like their commentary about the game was as fun as the game itself. But now…mostly I heard the sounds of the game. At one point, Glenn yelled out, “I crush you like an ant with my clown shoes!” but Aidan didn’t have a response. I figured Glenn was letting him take the lead. Then, after about an hour of them playing, I heard Glenn say, casually, “So, dude…where were you?”
I made myself really still, because I knew if my presence was felt, Aidan might not answer.
The game sounds continued. Finally, Aidan asked, “Does it matter?”
Glenn laughed. “Of course it matters! It’s all anyone can talk about! And since I have, you know, best friend status, they’re asking me all the time. Not that I’d tell them, right? But a guy’s gotta ask.”
Aidan tried a joke, but it sounded forced. “You afraid that they implanted a supercomputer in my brain, which is why I’m beating you so badly at this game?”
“How’d they get a supercomputer in there?” Glenn bantered back. “Oh yeah, there was all that extra space from you missing a brain.” Then he steered back to the original question. “Seriously, I’m dying to know.”
Aidan hedged. “I’m really not telling anyone. That’s what the police wanted.”
“But you can tell me.”
Tell him, I thought. Glenn wanted to know so badly…and if Aidan couldn’t tell him, then I knew he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone else.
Aidan kept playing the game. As he did, he said, “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t remember a lot of it. They think I must have been sleepwalking or something. But I left the house and walked into the woods and got completely lost. I must’ve been walking and walking. Even after I woke up, I had no idea where I was. Eventually I found this cabin, but no one was home. I found a key under the front mat and let myself in. It didn’t have electricity or anything, and barely had food. I didn’t feel good and I must’ve been really sick, because I completely lost track of time. I must’ve had the worst fever, but there wasn’t any way to call for help. So I just stayed there until I was strong enough to leave. I walked for a while and eventually got to Route 95—I was afraid to get into a stranger’s car, so I just walked in the woods alongside the highway until I knew where I was. Then I made it home. I left a note in the cabin and I’m hoping they’ll call here, so I can figure out where I was. But I don’t think it was close.”
The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother) Page 5