Chapter 2, Part 2
Douglas stares at the gunmetal grey of his locker. “Normal…right.” He runs his fingertips over the peeling, bumpy surface of the paint. It feels dead, dull, nothing like the surface of the ship he touched. The tactile memory is fading fast, and that worries him. He wants to etch the memory into his brain, let it sink into his soul, keep it in the back of his mind like a precious stone in his pocket. It’s the one thing he has that validates his existence here.
He should have gone ahead and skipped school, he thinks. Nobody will notice that he’s gone, and it’s a waste of time today anyway. He’s drifted through the first two periods, unable to concentrate on the lessons. His teachers’ words hold no meaning, random syllables that hurt his ears. The giggling girls and roughhousing boys passing him in the hall seem unreal, like a movie playing in a theater; he could walk out of it at any time, and it wouldn’t make a difference. The only thing that seems real, that seems important, is the alien.
It landed. I saw it. Nobody else knows. I’m the only one.
Maybe he’s the unreal one, he thinks. The idea pleases him.
The bell rings, and the halls slowly empty. He closes his eyes, savoring the sudden quiet. Any other day, he’d be rushing to get to class, notebooks held close to his chest, head down, praying that nobody takes enough notice of his existence to push him or trip him. Today, he knows nobody will. They can’t touch him.
There’s a short, sharp pain on the back of his head. His head jerks forward involuntarily, and his forehead collides with the locker. He staggers back, stunned, into a mass of muscle and leather.
A familiar hiss in his ear. “What’re you doin’, freak?” He feels fingers digging into his arms, holding him back.
For a second, he wonders how Spiff could have seen him, penetrated the veil of unreality settled around him. He was just fooling himself. He’s no different than before, and today is the same as every day…it would be useless to try and break free. All he can do is ride it out and hope that Spiff will lose interest quickly.
“N-n…” His mouth is dry. “Nothing.”
Spiff shoves him into the locker door. The metal rattles, and Douglas staggers. At least he’s free. “Shouldn’t you be in class, geek?” A single hand in the middle of his back, and he’s rammed into the locker door again, the pressure keeping him there. “What’s so interestin’ about that locker door?”
Douglas closes his eyes, feeling the cold surface of the locker pressed against his cheek. He can feel Spiff’s breath on his neck, warm and reeking of something rotten. Maybe if he just doesn’t move, plays possum…
“Looked like you were starin’ into space. What’s up there? Huh?” Douglas jolts back at the words, almost involuntarily, and feels Spiff’s body slam against him, crushing him against the locker. He squirms, trying to find a modicum of breathing room. The greaser’s hipbones are pressing into him, and it hurts.
“Nothing,” he says quickly, the words coming in gasps. “Nothing up there. Can you-can you let me go? I need to get to class…”
Spiff hisses with displeasure. Clearly, this is not a satisfactory answer. Douglas searches for the words that will satisfy him, make him melt back into the mass of the unreal day. “Do you-do you want my homework? My lunch money? Take it…” His hand darts down to his pocket, digging for the fifty cents.
A final shove against the locker, and Spiff steps back. Douglas sags, breathes, relieved. He looks up. Spiff is staring at him, greasy locks of hair falling over his cold yellow eyes.
“I don’t want your fucking money,” Spiff snarls.
There are echoing footsteps in the hallway. Spiff’s head whips around, a sudden jerk in the direction of the noise. His wiry body tenses, as though he’s poised to flee. Douglas turns his head to follow Spiff’s eyes. It’s the principal, Mr. Sheptoski, striding through the hall with a clipboard in his hand.
“Class has started. Get to it.” The principal gestures at a classroom door with the clipboard.
Spiff narrows his eyes at the principal, backs away from Douglas. “Sure. Class.”
“Now.” The principal nods at Douglas. “I don’t want to see you two hanging out in the halls anymore.”
“Right. Sorry. Sorry…” Douglas opens the door of his locker, watching Spiff out of the corner of his eye. The greaser bares his teeth at Douglas, then shoves his hands into the pockets of his tight black jeans and turns his back, adopting a sullen slouch as he slinks out of sight.
Douglas feels the principal’s eyes on his back. He shuffles through the books haphazardly arranged on the shelf in his locker. “Sorry. I’ll, uh…”
“Fighting in the halls.” The principal snorts in disgust. “You want me to kick you out of school? This isn’t a rumble, you know.”
“I know. I’m sorry...” He slips his History textbook out of the pile, balances it on top.
“You’d better be.” Douglas glances back. The principal is standing, arms folded, showing no signs of going anywhere else. He focuses his attention on the locker. “Every week, I see you two mixing it up…” He tunes out the principal’s rant, trying to find the notebook he knows is hidden inside one of his books.
“Yes, sir.” He draws the notebook out of the pile and shuts the locker, wincing slightly at the clang that echoes through the hall.
“Right.” The principal nods in satisfaction and looks at his watch. “Now. Go to class, and if I see you two fighting again, I’m kicking you both out of the school.”
Douglas watches him turn his back and stride down the hall. He waits until the principal turns a corner, then darts down the hall. He can’t remember which class he has next, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
Ω
Kay A’s Café is cool and quiet, the only light streaming in from the plate-glass windows, the fans turning silently on the ceiling, barely moving enough air to stir the dead flies on the windowsills. After school, the diner will be full of Douglas’s classmates, giggling in booths together and playing Pat Boone songs on the jukebox that sits glowing in the corner, but right now, the only patrons besides Douglas himself are three men in coveralls that sit in a huddled group in the corner, talking in low voices over cups of black coffee and plates of runny scrambled eggs.
Douglas sits limply on his stool, chocolate shake and plate of French fries pushed to the side, ballpoint pen poised over the blank blue-lined paper of his notebook. He didn’t speak to anybody on his short journey here, darted into doorways and hid around corners every time he saw someone familiar. The last thing he needs now is a friend of his mother’s collaring him and asking why he isn’t in school today.
Nobody’s looking at him now, not the men in the corner, not the colored boy listlessly moving a broom around the black-and-white checked floor, not Kay polishing already-clean glasses with a dirty rag. He can feel the veil of unreality settling around him again, pushing the world away from him. The Formica under his fingertips barely exists. It’s soothing, almost. The encounter with Spiff seems as though it happened years ago, an unpleasant memory that can’t affect him anymore.
Spaceship, he writes. He doodles a little UFO next to it, a stylized little thing shaped like a bowler hat, antennae sticking out of its dome. Crosses it out. That wasn’t what the ship looked like.
Touched me. He considers the words, underlines me. Circles it. Adds Talked to above the words. He wonders whether the professor could feel the pulses of information in the light emanating from the spaceship. He couldn’t have, he thinks; if he had, he wouldn’t have been so scared. He knows the alien didn’t want to hurt him, or eat him, or infect him.
He wonders whether the professor did feel something from the ship, after all. A different message, maybe. “Keep away” instead of “come here.” He circles me again. Why did the ship call to him? The alien healed his cuts. Was that all? Did it sense, somehow, that he was hurt? He taps the pen against the paper.
And where did it go? The professor said it was gone…in that short of a time? He draws mountains on the paper, vague triangular lines, a little blob hovering in front of them. It couldn’t have been just a crash. The landing seemed so purposeful. Why was it here in the first place? Just to heal his cuts? Why did it leave? Did he scare it away somehow?
He chews on the end of the pen. Maybe Valle Cerro was just a stopover for it. Maybe it really meant to go to Washington D.C. or New York. He wonders whether they’d announce it in school, if a spaceship landed in the middle of Central Park. Probably not.
“-goddamn thing right in my orchard.” He looks up, his trance broken. It’s one of the men in the corner, the farmers. “Good thing I had my gun with me.”
“You think it was a bear?” One of the other farmers. Douglas puts his pen down and listens.
“Naw, it didn’t have any fur. Darndest thing, though. I didn’t even know it was there ‘till it knocked over a tree. Was just setting traps for that mole that’s been digging tunnels all the hell over the place…”
“What’d it look like?”
“Like the devil hisself. Had these little things like horns coming outta its head, and these big blank eyes. Kinda like that old gasmask from the war you got in your attic, Merle, ‘cept with a bunch of little tentacles coming outta its mouth, instead of one big snout.”
He’s describing the alien. Douglas sits stock still, barely breathing. Maybe it didn’t go away…
“Tentacles, huh? Sounds kinda like one of them monsters in the horror stories my boy reads. You sure you ain’t just been up too late with funnybooks, Jed? Did it have leathery wings? Was it eldritch?” There’s a note of amusement in the man’s voice.
“Well, I don’t reckon I know what that word means, Casey. ‘Cept if it means “scared the bejesus outta me,” then yeah, I guess you could say it was eldritch, all right.”
Douglas clears his throat. “Did, um, the monster…did you see where it went? After it left?”
All three men stare at him for a long moment, and Douglas begins to think that maybe they think he’s the monster, dropped down out of space. “I don’t think so,” Jed says slowly. “I just wanted the damn thing out of my orchard. Didn’t care where it went. Didn’t see.”
The bell over the café door jingles faintly. The farmer sits back. “Hell, I don’t know. Could have just been a dream. Or a bear.” He shrugs and turns his attention to his scrambled eggs. “Hell, Kay, can we get some ketchup over here?”