“And if they provide you with this information,” Mother said, “then what happens?”
Kaufman gave Ishmael and me a long look. “They’ll probably get off with community service and maybe a fine.”
I was optimistic but wary. It seemed too easy.
“But, like, isn’t Oz already in jail?” Ishmael asked. “Why do you need more info?”
Ruiz spoke up. “Because John Oswald has spent his life doing terrible things and we need to make sure we can keep him in jail for a long time.”
Something struck me. I spoke to Ruiz: “You were never here because of aliens, were you?”
“No.”
“You only showed up when Oswald did.”
“As I said, we’ve been watching him for a long time.”
I felt oddly defeated. Not that I wanted to be the subject of a federal investigation. But I’d actually thought my hoax was so brilliant it caught the eye of government authorities. It hadn’t, though. It never would have. It was Oswald from the start.
“So,” Kaufman said. “Do we have a deal?”
Ishmael shrugged agreeably. “I’m down.”
All eyes turned to me.
“Gideon,” Ruiz said, “Oswald has scammed a lot of people out of a lot of money. He conned you too, when he got you to turn that lava lamp on—and believe me, he didn’t hesitate to place all the blame for the explosion on you.”
“He admitted on my recording that he lied about the aliens and the elixir,” I said. “Why isn’t that enough?”
“Because lying about aliens isn’t a crime, and the elixir hasn’t been sold yet. He didn’t admit to falsifying claims about any of the products already on the market.”
Oh. I’d overlooked that part. I’d overlooked a lot of things.
I couldn’t help but feel they were grasping at straws, searching for anything that would keep Oswald behind bars. Not unlike what happened to Al Capone. (Al Capone (1899–1947): a notorious gangster who, though suspected in numerous crimes—including murder—eventually went to prison for tax evasion.)
I did have something to give Kaufman and Ruiz though, information they might be very interested in. But that information wasn’t mine to give.
“Can I make a phone call?”
“Gideon!” Mother gasped, as if she couldn’t believe my gall.
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
Kaufman nodded and gestured for me to step out of the room. “Make it fast.”
I locked myself in the men’s bathroom and called Arden, quickly explaining the situation.
“You want to know if you can tell them about me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Will you have to use my name?”
“I think I will,” I said apologetically.
Arden was silent for a long time. My gaze wandered around the bathroom, which probably hadn’t been properly cleaned since the station had been built. I moved to the center of the room so nothing could touch me.
Finally, Arden said, “He’s not a good man, is he?”
“No.”
“He tricked all of us.”
“He did.”
Including me. I’d told myself I was immune to Oswald’s charm, but he’d appealed to my ego when he asked for my help with the lava lamp. And I’d fallen for it. He didn’t need me. Anyone could have figured out the mechanics of the lamp with just a little effort.
Oswald knew I was skeptical of him. It was so easy for him to make people love him, he couldn’t handle it when someone refused to bend to his will. And after I caught him with Arden, he had extra incentive to bring me to his side.
He made me complicit in a scam I’d passionately rallied against, simply by making me feel special.
I’d gotten played.
The whole time I was thinking of Oswald as my nemesis, I was nothing but a pawn to him. It was depressing to realize the person you considered a rival never felt the same way about you.
“Okay,” Arden said. “Do it. Tell them whatever they want to know.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she replied. I heard strength and resolve in her voice that I couldn’t help but admire.
Back in Kaufman’s office, Ishmael sat casually in his chair, sipping a Coke. How could he be so relaxed?
“All right,” I said, sitting down. “We’ll tell you everything.”
Kaufman asked if she could record the conversation. Ruiz took out a notepad.
“You might want to bring some chairs for my parents,” I suggested. “This will take a while.”
Five minutes later, we were all settled in.
“Where should we start?” I asked.
“At the beginning,” Kaufman replied.
“Well,” said Ishmael, and I could tell part of him enjoyed the moment, looked forward to the performance he was about to give. “It started with an explosion…”
Aftermath
Word traveled quickly in a town the size of Lansburg. It wasn’t long before everyone found out what Ishmael and I had done.
Adam Frykowski wrote a blog post praising Ishmael and me for being “hoaxer masterminds.” Robert Nash, of Basin and Range Radio, sadly informed his listeners of the hoax, calling my brother and me “punk kids.” Our classmates joked with us, and some asked questions about how we’d pulled off certain things, but we didn’t get much flack. After all, a lot of them had claimed to be abducted too.
Really, that went for the whole town. Nearly everyone had played a part in the alien mania. To call my brother and me out would be admitting their own UFO sightings or abduction stories were fake or imagined. Instead, most people picked up and went on with their lives, leaving a mild air of embarrassment lingering over Lansburg.
The embarrassment was probably exacerbated due to the coverage our town got on the national news. The reveal of the hoax proved to be even more attention grabbing than the hoax itself. Lansburg was famous. My brother and I had done it—we’d left our mark.
Only, sometimes leaving a mark should be called leaving a scar. At the center of Lansburg, proudly on display, the town’s broken and empty lava lamp was blocked off with sawhorses and caution tape. It would be dismantled and hauled away as soon as town officials figured out how exactly to dispose of a sixty-three-foot-tall lava lamp.
Ishmael and I had plenty of time to look at the lamp and reflect on our actions. Though we hadn’t officially been given community service orders yet, Kaufman suggested it would look good if we started ahead of time—by cleaning up the town square.
The myTality™ distributors had fled the day after the explosion and Oswald’s arrest. The Seekers had taken a little longer to disperse. I ran into Arnie Hodges as he packed up, loading his step stool into the back of his van.
“We hoped this time was real,” Hodges told me, and even his mad-scientist hair looked limp and defeated. “That we’d get hard evidence of extraterrestrials and the world would have to take us seriously.”
I realized how much I’d offered him and the other Seekers, and how much I’d taken when they found out it was a lie. A surge of guilt ran through me. Why had I thought it was okay to use their faith in aliens to manipulate them?
“What’s next for you?” I asked.
“There’ve been sightings in the Pacific Northwest,” he said. “We’ll head that way.”
So the Seekers departed but left behind a mess in the town square. Ishmael and I spent days picking up trash. Worse than the trash were bits of paraffin that clung to everything. When the lava lamp exploded, it was like candle wax got dumped all over Main Street. I became very adept at working with a paint scraper.
On a particularly cold afternoon, I was removing paraffin from the window of Super Scoop. Inside, Laser stood behind the counter, watching me and smirking.
As I d
ragged the paint scraper across the glass, I wondered, for approximately the hundredth time, what would happen next. When the strangers were gone, when the town square was cleaned up, when the lava lamp was dismantled, what then? What would happen to me?
I’d thought my sociological research would get me noticed by MIT—I needed the edge so badly. Deep down, I’d always suspected I wasn’t a good enough candidate on my own. My grades weren’t extraordinary, my extracurriculars were minimal, I didn’t start a company at age nine or invent a life-changing product at age thirteen. I wasn’t special. But maybe, with a sociological paper reporting on an alien abduction, I could be.
When it was revealed to be a hoax, and I was revealed to be behind it, it minimized all of my efforts. I was a fraud. What would MIT want with some fraud practical jokester? And beyond that, what would NASA want with someone who unabashedly broke the law? My record was marred beyond hope.
In my quest for glory I’d sabotaged the career I’d always dreamed of. And I had no one to blame but myself.
For the sake of absolute transparency, I’ll admit that I may have shed a tear or two over this.
I couldn’t remember a time when my future was so unclear. I’d always had a path. I’d always had goals and knew the steps I had to take to achieve them. Now what? Where would I be in the coming years? What would I be?
The question haunted me. While I cleaned the town square, while I tried to get caught up in my classes, while I tossed and turned in bed late at night. I couldn’t stop thinking of my murky future and how, for the first time in my life, I had no direction.
“Hofstadt,” said someone behind me, breaking me from my thoughts.
I glanced back and saw Adam Frykowski.
“Have you gotten my messages?” he asked.
“I have.”
“And what do you think? About giving me an exclusive interview?”
He looked so eager. I knew he was trying to make a career shift, move away from his paranormal news stories to more serious reporting. I felt a little guilty about crushing his hopes. “I’m ninety-six percent sure that’ll never happen.”
I moved away from him and toward the next shop, the next glob of paraffin. He followed.
“I visited Oz,” he said.
I stiffened. “You did?”
“He had a lot to say about you, Hofstadt.”
It didn’t matter what Oswald said about me. I’d moved forward. I’d gotten a grip on the unhealthy emotions that had driven me to compete with him.
Except…
How could I not be curious?
“Fine, I’ll bite. What did he say?”
“I’ll tell you if you give me an exclusive.”
“Forget it.”
“He hates you,” Frykowski spoke up quickly, trying to entice me. “He called you his archenemy.”
“Interesting,” I said as blandly as possible.
I turned away from Frykowski so he wouldn’t see the smile that crept onto my face.
“You really don’t want to know more?” he practically pleaded.
“Nope,” I replied, using the paint scraper to remove another strip of paraffin from the wall. “I’m done with all that.”
I was done with it.
But that didn’t mean I wasn’t pleased Oswald finally saw me as a worthy opponent. In the end, neither of us won. But at least he realized I’d been part of the game.
Event: Guidance—Part 2
Date: Nov. 16 (Thurs.)
I wasn’t surprised when Ms. Singh called me in to “have a chat.”
“Things have certainly changed since we last spoke,” she said, getting to the point as soon as I was seated in her cramped office.
“That’s an accurate assessment.”
She held up a printed document. “I have your current grades here.”
I winced.
“They’re not great,” she went on.
“I suspected as much.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you’re probably out of the running for valedictorian.”
I nodded. It wasn’t a shocking revelation. I’d been thinking of little else for days. It stung, but part of me also felt…oddly liberated. Being a great student had never come naturally. I’d pushed myself because I wanted to be on top, because it was a competition, but it never meant as much to me as my own experiments—which was fairly clear, considering how easily I’d ignored my slipping grades for months. Let Sara Kang be valedictorian; she was the one who deserved it.
“MIT might also be off the table,” I said. There was no point dancing around the subject.
Ms. Singh seemed thrown off by my calmness. “I’ll never say never. But you might want to look into backup colleges.”
“I have,” I said. “I started a list.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh! That’s wonderful. Maybe you can bring the list by and we can go over it together.”
“Sure,” I agreed.
A silence fell in the room and Ms. Singh shifted in her seat, like she wanted to broach an uncomfortable topic. “You seem to be taking this well.”
“I’m really not,” I admitted. My next words nearly caught in my throat, but I forced them out anyway. I wasn’t going back to being the person I was before all of this. If that happened, the hoax would’ve been a complete waste. “I’m scared about the future.”
For a moment, Ms. Singh seemed at a loss for words. Maybe students didn’t usually open up to her like this. Maybe she’d just never expected me to. “It’s okay to be scared, Gideon. It’s okay to feel unsure.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself. I’m actually starting to see a therapist,” I said. “Not only because of the hoax, but to work through a lot of issues.”
“That’s wonderful! Therapy can be so beneficial.”
“I hope so.”
Ms. Singh smiled as if she was proud of me, which only made me slightly embarrassed.
I cleared my throat and brought the conversation back into safer, less emotional territory again. “About my goals, though… I’m not ready to give up yet. I’m still applying to MIT and I’m still hopeful that NASA might eventually hire me. But if not, I’ll come up with another plan. Maybe I’ll find something even better.”
“It’s interesting you say that,” Ms. Singh said. “I know you previously weren’t receptive to the idea of working for Triple i…”
I perked up a bit.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I called my friend who works there. I told her a little about you and your situation. She said Triple i is always looking for people who…think outside the box. We discussed possible internship opportunities for you in the future and she’d be willing to put in a good word. Maybe you can spend a summer there and decide if it’s really so far off from the career you wanted.”
Triple i wasn’t NASA. Nothing would ever make it NASA. But there was something to be said for what they were doing. Maybe NASA really was outdated. Maybe Triple i was the future.
Or maybe neither organization was meant for me. It was probably wrong to be so set on one path. I was closing myself off from other opportunities that might arise.
“I’ll certainly think about that, Ms. Singh,” I said. “But not yet. I need to get myself back on track in the present before I worry about what’ll happen in the future.”
Ms. Singh smiled. “That’s wise of you.”
After everything that happened, the last thing I felt was wise. But that didn’t bother me. I was okay being exactly who I was.
Event: Bonfire
Date: Nov. 18 (Sat.)
On Saturday, two weeks after The Incident, my parents watched as I packed my lab equipment into boxes. The boxes would be stored in the barn until I “proved I was mature enough to have a lab.” Something told me that wouldn’t happen before I moved out.
Kepler twisted around my feet as I packed, meowing aggressively. He didn’t like the situation either. If he wanted to spend time with me, he’d be forced to venture into the house.
While I dismantled my lab, Ishmael built a pen for Muffin, who’d be coming to live with us the next day. For the first time in decades, there’d be livestock on the Hofstadt Farm. Or, “one livestock,” as my brother might say. Maggie watched Ishmael work and made unhelpful comments until Mother told her to go inside.
It hurt to pack up my lab. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself without it, where I’d even spend time. But it was a fair punishment. More than fair. Considering the grief we caused an entire town, my brother and I were getting off lightly.
That night, Ishmael and I got to have one last hurrah before being grounded for an unspecified amount of time. We were allowed to invite our friends over for a bonfire.
The boxes of myTality™ products Mother had stored in the barn were dragged into the field, to the very spot where Ishmael and I had blown a crater into the ground. The spot was chosen because damage had already been done, the grass had already been burned away—but it felt fitting.
“All those products are worthless now,” Mother said.
“They were always worthless,” I replied.
Father stacked wood around the boxes and doused them in kerosene, but Mother was the one to light the match. The boxes immediately went up in flames.
The group of us—my family and the friends we’d invited over for the occasion—stood back, putting distance between ourselves and the noxious chemicals being released into the air. I was close enough to feel the heat of the flames, though. To hear the popping of hundreds of bottles of pseudo-health products combusting.
I looked at Mother and saw her dab a tear away.
Watching the boxes burn probably hurt her as much as losing my lab hurt me. She’d put so much time and energy into the company. And, scam or not, she’d been successful.
I put my arm around her. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I’m being silly,” she replied. “There are always other opportunities. In fact, I was thinking after everything that’s happened, this town could really use a wellness center.”
It Came from the Sky Page 31