by Emily Henry
My mind wandered toward the memory of the white light unspooling across the gravel lot, into me. Move.
I closed my eyes, and pictured the rail switch flopping like a fish on dry land as that buzz rode through my blood. I could feel the energy, but it was like it was no longer close to the surface, and the tendrils of it I grasped at were evasive, slippery.
MOVE.
My eyes snapped open. Art, Levi, Nick, and Sofía were all still leaning toward me, eyes wide and tense.
The switch was lifeless.
“I can’t.”
Levi let out a breath, and Arthur pressed his thumb to his chin. “You made it happen back at the hermit’s house, and then again when he was closing in on us in the tunnel.”
“And when you were alone in the Jenkins House.” Sofía pursed her lips. “Maybe it’s like a defense mechanism? Like adrenaline. Like an energy source that’s released when her pulse speeds . . .”
“You’re saying she has to be scared?” Arthur asked, and she shrugged.
“Maybe not has to be. Being scared or surprised might make her involuntarily release the energy, but there could be a way to voluntarily trigger it.”
“Like pee,” Nick said. “You can get it scared out of you, but you can also go in the toilet.”
“Charming,” Sofía said.
“I think she’s right,” I said. “I can feel it in me, but it’s subtle, not like when we were in the tunnel.”
“On par with the fainting goat or the dead-playing opossum,” Levi narrated, “the Frances Schmidt has been known to respond to threats with displays of electrokinesis.”
“Electrokinesis,” Sofía pointed out, “does not exist. I’m not even sure that word exists.”
“Tell that to Electro,” Arthur murmured.
“Superhero?” she guessed.
“Villain,” I said, and she looked away suddenly. Arthur had never cared for Spider-Man—he was more of a Batman guy—but Mark briefly had, so we were both familiar.
“She has to be scared,” Nick mumbled to himself. “We can work with that.”
I gave him a shove. “I carry Mace. Think about that before you try to scare the lightning out of me.”
“You own Mace, Franny,” Nick said. “You don’t carry it.”
“She’s supposed to.” Arthur lit up a cigarette—did he keep hand-rolled cigarettes in his pajama pants now?—and took a long puff. “We’ll work at it more tomorrow. I’ve got a plan.”
“Great,” Nick called. “So now we just drop the alien hunt you were so amped on for Operation Superhero?”
“We still need answers, something that will keep us out of jail if we get linked to those field burns,” Sofía said.
Arthur waved, like they were flies buzzing around him. “Figuring out what our extraterrestrial did to us is only going to help us figure out what it is, what it wants, and where it went. Trust me.”
Levi nodded emphatically. “Right, if it wants something from us, then our abilities are the key to determining that.”
My stomach felt like a giant hand was pinching it. Maybe I was coming down with something, or maybe it was simply guilt-induced nausea springing from the secret Sofía had uncovered, and the bigger one I was keeping.
“Y’all need to come back from the Marvel Universe,” Nick said. “Franny, Bill Nye, someone be the voice of reason here.”
Sofía massaged the bridge of her nose. “I’m actually with Arthur on this. I can’t spend the rest of my life popping into your heads. I need to figure out how to undo it, or at least how to control it, and the same goes for Franny. And what about you? Don’t you want your . . . piano nightmares to stop?”
“Well, you don’t need to say it like that,” Nick said. “Have you ever tried sleeping with one song on repeat in your head at full volume, nonstop?”
“That’s the point, Nick,” I said. “We have to figure out how to make this stop.”
“And why it’s happening in the first place,” Levi added. “And document it!”
Arthur turned on his heel and started down the tracks, puffing his cigarette like it was a glass of water he’d found in the desert. “This is going to be amazing,” he said, to us or himself. “Absolutely incredible.”
I fought another wave of dizzy nausea and fell into step behind him. We all did. We always did, but even so, that didn’t mean I wasn’t alone in this.
Maybe the shocks we’d sustained at the substation had affected all of us in some way—or at least Sofía. Maybe there was alien shrapnel lodged in the others, doing strange and impossible things, but I was the one an alien had outright walked into.
When I got home, I was going to write Bill back.
My stomach hitched and gurgled.
First I was probably going to throw up.
* * *
* * *
Dear Bill,
Thank you for your reply, but before I can say more, I need proof that you’re who you say you are.
Tell me about your “encounter.”
How did it all start, and when did it stop?
—F
Dear F,
I’ve seen three of our Little Friends. My first encounter was in the fall of 1986, during the Orionids. It’s a meteor shower, like the one that must have brought your visitor, but this one is the product of Halley’s Comet.
I was driving through Texas. At first I didn’t think much of it. Shooting stars streaking past on occasion, but that was about it.
Then, suddenly, this light fell from the sky, about a half mile off the road. It didn’t move like the meteors—in an arc—it dropped, straight down, brighter than all the lights on the road or anything else.
I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. It was very late, and I’d been driving all day. But as the light was falling, my radio cut out. My engine died. And all the lights down the road blew. Like they’d had some surge of power. The road, my windshield, the desert all went white it was so bright, and then, just as quickly, it went pitch-black. Nearly wrecked my car.
Glass shards landed on the hood, from the blown-out bulbs, and I pulled over just in time to see where the disc hit the earth.
You can guess the rest.
I left my car and walked out to the light. It was crackling in its gel receptacle. When I touched it, the receptacle opened and the being entered me.
So that was how it all started, but as for how it stopped, that’s more complicated, and I CANNOT discuss at length in such an insecure way.
What matters is that of the dozen of us I’ve met since I started my research, I’ve now lost contact with all but three.
If those responsible for my peers’ disappearances locate you, there will be no protecting you. I saw your video had already been removed. That suggests they’ve seen it. They’ll want to keep it quiet.
They’ll arrive with a cover story. They will give your family all the answers they want, every reason to trust that they are looking out for you, but trust me: All they want is the being. To them, you are nothing more than a vessel.
I can help you, but we must act fast. Where shall I meet you?
—Bill
Dear Bill,
I understand the need to be careful, but you’re a stranger. On the Internet. HOW can you help me?
—F
SIXTEEN
THE NIGHT BEFORE I turned eleven, Mom made red velvet cake. It was terrible. Dense and overbaked, and it had whiskey in the frosting, which Mom insisted shouldn’t affect us, but Arthur pretended it had gotten him drunk.
We took it down to the yard, where we sat on a blanket under the stars, making exaggerated “mmmm” noises while we tried to eat it.
“Jeez, Eileen,” Dad said. “Where did you ever get the idea to put cream cheese frosting on this meat loaf?”
“Is there garlic in this turd?” Arthur a
sked.
“Theoretically, I’m good at baking!” Mom cried through laugh-tears. “It’s science!”
“See, that’s the problem with you science types,” Dad teased. “You put too much stock in theory, when you should be putting stock in Marie Callender’s.”
“Or buying stock,” Mark said, “since we’re going to keep them in business.”
“I think I broke a tooth,” I said. “Some birthday!”
Even at 10.9999 years old, I knew how my family played with one another, the rapid-fire sarcasm.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Mom was laughing so hard she could barely get out words and kept having to wipe her eyes. “You’re practically Oliver Twist, aren’t you?”
Arthur spat his mouthful across the lawn, and Dad chided, “Now, that’s not nice, Arthur! What if a poor unsuspecting groundhog wanders across that and tries to eat it!”
Then Mom ordered six lava cakes for delivery from Domino’s and we sat out under the stars, waiting for the weed-infused delivery boy to arrive, and Mark showed us an app he’d downloaded so he could hold his phone up to the night sky and the screen would show him the constellations and cosmic bodies right overhead, with labels and glowing outlines.
It played a beautiful ambient song, slow and swelling, that changed with your movements as if each star had its own variation on the cosmic theme. Soon our giggles died down and we fell into raptured silence. Fresh tears bloomed in Mom’s eyes as we studied the sky, and she whispered, “Sometimes I love to feel this small.”
“I wish there was a hole in my ceiling,” I said. “I wish I could sleep under this every night.”
The next morning, on my birthday, I woke to find Mark spreading a drop cloth on my bedroom floor. “Surprise!” he said.
“What,” I said.
“I’m giving you a Milky Way,” he said.
“What,” I said.
“For your ceiling.”
Mom came in with muffins then. “Tada!”
Arthur slipped past in the hallway, grabbed one off the plate, and shouted over his shoulder, “Don’t worry—I saw her take them out of the package. They’re from Sam’s Club.”
For the rest of the day, the whole family filed in and out of my room, watching Mark’s progress. The blues and purples and blacks spread out, the white gaps shrinking into stars and planets.
Despite his artistic talent, Mark tended to dress in worn-out Old Navy jeans and whatever T-shirts he got for Christmas, and that day he wore his BLACK HOLES DON’T SUCK shirt.
He was nothing if not on brand.
Late in the afternoon, Mark took a break to eat leftover pizza with me and Mom, and I asked him, “Why do you like black holes?”
Ever since the day we’d found the nautilus shell at the beach, the thought of them had haunted me. I pictured black holes like toothy mouths, screaming across the universe, swallowing everything in their paths.
Destroying solar systems. Ending worlds.
Massive grim reapers, chasing stars and planets down, forcing them into a place with no sunshine passing through leaves or soft lavender smell on a breeze, no chirping cardinals or voices you knew singing you Carole King, nothing but darkness, loneliness.
They were worse than the unknown: They were the certain Nothing.
Mark’s brow crinkled in confusion until he realized I was looking at the white words across his chest. “Oh!” he said. “This doesn’t mean, like, black holes are cool. That’s the joke. People always talk about them like giant vacuums, just sucking everything into them.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Not really.” He shrugged. “Black holes are these massive bodies that suddenly collapsed into one tiny point, right? But they still have the same mass as before, it’s just more concentrated, packed into a singularity. And mass sort of creates gravity.”
“What’s that mean?”
Mom dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “Like with the Earth. It’s so massive that if you throw something up into the air, the gravity will pull it back down. Or the sun—it’s so huge it pulls on the Earth, and that’s why we go around it. With a black hole, there’s so much concentrated mass that if something gets too close to it, it falls in. Even light waves can’t get out.”
“But that is scary.” I thought about the Milky Way over my bed, its millions of black holes lurking invisibly at its center. I pictured myself falling—if not exactly sucked—into a bottomless black pit.
“Nah.” Mark flicked my nose. “It’s comforting.”
“A giant hole in space?” I said.
“It’s not just a hole in space,” he said. “It’s a hole in space-time. The fabric of the universe.” He gestured with his pizza slice between us. “Like . . . there’s three feet between us right now, and that’s the space part, and then there’s the time part. If you’d gotten up five minutes before I sat down, then I’d be three feet and five minutes away from you.”
“What,” I said.
“Time stretches out forward and backward, just like with physical space, and the weird thing about space-time is that really big objects’ gravity bends it. So time passes differently in different places, based on how strong the gravity is, how much curvature the object creates in time-space. Following?”
I was newly eleven. I was not following.
“Say you were in a spaceship,” Mark said, “and you dropped someone into a black hole.”
My heart sped. My skin went cold. “Why would you do that?”
“You wouldn’t. But say you did. You could watch that person falling, and they’d be falling at a normal speed, the speed you’d expect, until they reached the event horizon. That’s what they call the area surrounding the black hole from which you can no longer escape. That’s where the gravity is so strong that you’d have to travel faster than the speed of light to get out of its clutches.”
He continued: “So you drop this person, and the gravity pulls on her, and you watch her fall, and like I said, it all seems pretty normal, until she gets close to that event horizon.”
“And then what?”
“Then she’s reached a point where space-time is curved so deeply by the black hole’s gravity that time goes wonky. From our point of view, it looks like she’s slowing down. Slowing and slowing and slowing, and just before she reaches that point of no return, she stops. She freezes, floating just outside the event horizon. We could sit there forever, but we’d never see her actually reach the black hole.”
“She stops?” I repeated.
“She does and she doesn’t,” Mark said, obviously delighted. “Out here, in our experience of time, we’d see her stop. But to her, everything seems normal: She keeps falling at the same speed and crosses the horizon. She enters the black hole and she either gets spaghettified—that’s when you get pulled into a string of atoms by the pressure of gravity—or she falls right into it and experiences something we can’t even begin to imagine! She’s both beyond the event horizon, inside the black hole, and she’s outside of it!”
“No one can be in two places at once.”
“But in a black hole, gravity’s so strong that all of space-time is infinitely curved,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, it’s a hole in space-time, where the laws of physics break down. Time inside a black hole isn’t like time out here. Right?”
“Pretty much,” Mom confirmed, smiling. “There’s a theory that if you did fall into a black hole, that because of the time dilation, you’d see everything that had ever fallen into it or ever would fall into it, all at once. All these pieces of our universe’s history that we’ve already lost—every cosmic body we ever will lose, and all the events that happened there—all occurring at the same time.”
“And then there are wormholes,” Mark chimed in. “Tunnels through space and time. If you fell into a black hole, you might travel through it and get spit
out by a white hole on the other end. You could see everything that had ever fallen or will ever fall through—whole histories of planets and moons and stars, all playing out at once—and then get popped back to some other point in space-time before those things even fell in! Of course, wormholes are still just a theory, but black holes started out as a theory too!”
“Because of amazing math?” Arthur grumbled from the next room, where he was hunched over something at the coffee table.
“Sort of,” Mark answered. “The point is, nothing in our universe, even the stuff that’s supposedly deleted from time and space, is ever really lost. It’s just hidden from our sight.”
He smiled at me. “There are things about black holes that break all the rules—or expand them in a way we don’t understand yet. As if the universe wants to exist so badly it makes loopholes in its own rules. I find it comforting, like this is all meant to be somehow, and nothing can take any of it away. Like everything is forever.”
Mom smiled at him across the wasteland of greasy paper plates and crumpled napkins. “One of these days, I’m shipping your butt off to space camp, kid.”
Arthur jumped up and came into the kitchen carrying a piece of paper and slid it onto the table. “Look,” he said. “I drew Batman punching Superman.”
“Cool!” I said, but Mom eyed it with a suspicious smile.
“Isn’t that the cover on one of your comics?”
“Batman Versus Superman,” he said.
“Then you traced it?” Mom asked.
Arthur’s face reddened. “No, I drew it.”
“Well, you copied it, buddy,” Mom said. “Maybe you should try making up your own characters? I’m sure you’ve got all kinds of ideas in that noggin.”
Arthur picked up the drawing and stared at it.
“Can I see?” I reached for it, but he jerked it away.
“You’ll get grease all over it.”
“I will not!”
“You ruined my controller by playing with it while you were eating popcorn,” he said. “You always mess up my stuff, and Mom lets you because you’re a small, dumb baby!”
