The kids around the fire were in little clusters of three and four, all in deep conversation about something, half with their backs turned to Annie. She knew it was irrational to think so, but this felt like something personal.
Then someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hi… um, hi, Annie.”
It was a girl Annie had never met before, but someone she sort-of recognized.
“Hi!” Annie said, sticking out her hand like this was a job interview.
Good lord, Annie Collins, what is wrong with you?
“I’m Lindsey?” the girl said, in a way that made it sound as if she herself wasn’t entirely certain that this was her name.
“Annie,” Annie said. “I mean, you know that.”
“Uh-huh…”
Lindsey held onto Annie’s hand for about two beats too long, and then looked like she was going to have a heart attack.
“Are you okay?” Annie asked.
“Sure, sure. I’m… oh wow, this went so much smoother in my head. I’m a big, big fan.”
“Oh, okay. Great!”
“Like, no, a really big fan.”
“Okay.”
It’s nice to meet you, do you want an autograph? Annie thought. What can I do for you?
Dumbstruck fans were a thing sometimes, but it had been a while. Not since she arrived at Wainwright, basically. Annie never really learned how to handle them, but most times it was in a situation when Annie was on her way somewhere, so the conversation didn’t have time to get past the big fan portion.
“I have a website,” Lindsey said.
“A website about me?”
The girl looked about ready to faint.
“Collins… Collinsworthy? Have you heard of it?”
“No way! Are you Canny Ollins?”
“Yeah…”
“Dude, I always thought Canny Ollins was a guy!”
“No, that’s me. You know about the site?”
“Of course I do,” Annie said. “It was the first, right? Imagine you’re me, and you wake up one day to find out somebody thinks enough of you to build an actual fan page, of course you remember it. It’s Lindsey, right? Do you go to school here?”
“Yeah, we’re the same… I’m in your class.”
“That’s awesome! How come you waited this long to say hello?”
Annie was perhaps irrationally happy to find someone who was glad to meet her. This seemed to only increase Lindsey’s evidently native trepidation.
The erstwhile Canny Ollins was—aside from gender—not at all what Annie expected. The online version was chatty, confident, and sometimes really funny. The real-life version looked like she could win a shyness competition. Annie couldn’t even put herself in Lindsey’s position to try and understand how this must feel, because Annie had never been so interested in another person that she created a fan page for them.
It was probably a lot to deal with, though.
“I didn’t even…” Lindsey began. She was rewriting her responses as she went, it looked like. “I wasn’t planning on introducing myself at all.”
“But why not?”
“I figured it would be better, I don’t know. I didn’t want to bug you.”
“I’m glad you did. Honestly, it’s good to meet a friendly face.”
“That’s…” Lindsey leaned in closer, as if to whisper. It wasn’t really possible to whisper because the volume on the music was too high to allow for it. This also meant nobody could hear them talking to one another, so whispering was entirely beside the point. It did, however, add a conspiratorial bent to the conversation.
“That’s why I decided to talk to you,” Lindsey said. “Something’s really wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“On the Internet. I have to show you something. I think…”
“Hey, there you are!”
Duke had arrived. He inserted himself between Lindsey and Annie as if Lindsey wasn’t even there, and handed a cup to Annie.
“There you are; I’ve been here,” Annie said.
“I know, I heard. I figured when you got in I’d know it. Word gets around. I was in line at the keg so you could hit the ground running with a full one.”
“Okay, cool.”
Annie still didn’t like beer, but that was what was in the cup so that was what she was having.
“Duke, this is…”
She gestured to Lindsey, or rather to the spot Lindsey had just occupied.
“Well, that was Lindsey. She’s an old friend I just met.”
“Awesome. Don’t know her, but the night’s young, you can introduce me later. C’mon, let’s go meet some peeps.”
It had been a strange month for Lindsey.
As part of her job as the official caretaker of CollinsWorthy, she spent a lot of time mining the Internet for news about Annie, but up until the hate mail started pouring in at a rate far exceeding the historical pattern, it never occurred to her to try and quantify that news. This meant trying to assign a value to each bit of information, which was entirely subjective, but it produced a clear and obvious pattern. That pattern was terrifying.
Basically, she read everything anyone had to say about Annie, gave it a 1-to-10 score, and then went from there. It was immediately obvious that more people were talking about Annie online than they had since The Incident, and about 90% of that chatter was negative. Some of it was outrageously so: a perfect 10 of hatred.
It was baffling, because so far as Lindsey could tell there wasn’t a triggering incident. She could have maybe argued that what happened at the observatory was that trigger, but her online mining didn’t indicate that Annie’s reported meltdown that night was common knowledge outside of Wainwright. Also, the negativity predated that evening.
She had in her pocket a printed collection of some of her favorite absurdities, in the event she got the courage up to talk to Annie directly. Originally, it was going to be a part of an email, but once she heard Annie might show up at this party—her expected arrival was well-known, even in the social circles Lindsey frequented—she changed the plan to an in-person exchange.
It did not go at all as expected. For starters, she planned on forming sentences, and that didn’t seem to be within her capabilities. Oddly, she anticipated something less than enthusiasm from Annie, and definitely hadn’t planned on her knowing anything about CollinsWorthy. That threw her off a lot. Then that guy showed up, and it looked like he and Annie were on a date or something. Lindsey chickened out before even realizing she was doing it.
Opportunity lost.
It didn’t change anything: Annie was still in danger, and Lindsey was nearly positive nobody knew it but her. She didn’t have any idea what the nature of that danger was. Could a critical mass of online negativity be considered a manifest threat? But she was positive if there was anyone equipped to take it seriously, it was Annie.
When Annie and her friend-who-was-a-boy left the fire pit for one of the quad buildings, the bodyguard trailed behind. (Lindsey didn’t know that one’s name, so she just called her bodyguard.) There were three other agents at the edge of the courtyard. Lindsey wondered what would happen if she showed one of them what was in her pocket. Would they listen?
She almost didn’t notice Ginger standing at the edge of the fire pit, on the other side of the flames. Lindsey gave a little wave. Ginger looked past her, as if Lindsey didn’t exist.
The auditory wall of music and chatter was so concentrated inside the quad house, it was almost as if the sound was a physical thing. That thing was squeezing Annie’s head. She felt the same way about the odor, which was a combination of sweat, beer, and a couple of smells that belonged in a public toilet and not any place most people would call a kitchen.
It was an almost overwhelming experience, and considering Annie once spent a few hours in an actual spaceship and had an alien idea renting space in her head, that was saying something.
“How are you doing?” Duke asked. He had to lea
n next to her ear and shout the question, as this was the only way anybody was communicating. He’d just finished introducing her to his roommates and then to one of the guys who lived there. The conversations weren’t all that engaging, and so they moved on rather quickly.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem okay, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“First time I’ve been to something like this,” she said. “Not sure what I expected. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Which part?”
“The part where I have to shout to talk to you, because everyone else is shouting to be heard over everybody shouting.”
“There’s the music, too.”
“Do they not know where the volume knob is?”
“They want it to be heard outside,” he said.
“It can be heard in orbit.”
“I think that’s probably a joke.”
“It might be.”
They were standing in the kitchen, which was really just a countertop and a wall of appliances. The floor was tile, though, while the rest of the place was carpeted, which was why the keg was there.
Between them and the front door was a pulsing mass of young adults in various stages of sobriety. Cora was in there somewhere; Annie couldn’t see her, but she knew she was there.
If there were a fire, Annie figured it would take her ten minutes to get out the front door. Fortunately, there was a back door, just on the other side of the keg. It was open, and a light breeze forced its way in at regular intervals. It also let bugs in, but that was forgivable due to the overall value of the breeze.
“Hey, c’mon, let’s get out of here,” Duke said, taking her by the elbow. She let him lead her through the back exit.
It led to the path between the buildings. Annie could see the van to her left. She imagined somebody in there was very happy to lay eyes on her at that moment, since Cora was undoubtedly busy freaking out inside.
“Oh, this is much better,” Annie said. Her ears were ringing from the aftereffects of all that noise, as if she’d just gotten out of a concert.
“Yeah, sorry,” Duke said.
“What are you apologizing for?”
“I don’t know; you don’t seem to be enjoying yourself all that much.”
She leaned up against the side of the building. Duke positioned himself opposite, which probably made the sharpshooter in the van (Annie just assumed there was one) relax a little.
“I’m afraid my mood could be unsalvageable, Dukakis Clementine.”
“I thought we agreed never to call me that.”
“I don’t remember any such agreement.”
“What’s the issue?”
“About your name?” she asked.
“No, the other thing. The mood.”
“Well, that’s complicated.”
“Maybe I’m good at complicated. What’s the situation?”
Annie sighed, and leaned up against the wall. The music was vibrating the side of the quad right through her bones.
“Someone I thought I could trust said something that made me rethink that trust,” she said. “Basically.”
“Ooh. Juicy. And what was that thing?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Tell me anyway.”
A nagging voice in her head—it was her own voice, at least—reminded her that one of the reasons to go to this party was to forget about what they were now discussing. Annie told the voice to be quiet.
“She more or less said it was selfish of me to keep the ship.”
He gasped.
“But that’s easily the coolest thing about you!” he said.
“Oh, thanks. Aren’t you the charmer.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Well, maybe I did. You’d still be a rock star either way, though.”
“Hah. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. And thank you for confiding in me, this challenging problem.”
“You suck at this, Dukakis.”
“You wound me! All right, I’ll try harder. I could tell you to forget about it, but—and I’m just guessing here—I bet you already tried this very clever solution of mine and it didn’t work.”
“You are correct.”
“Right. Right. Okay, so hear me out for a second. And this is me being serious.”
“Oh, you have a serious mode? I didn’t know.”
“It’s a shock to me too. But I have to ask: why don’t you hand over the ship? It seems like that would solve all of your problems.”
“Oh for goodness sake, not you too.”
“I don’t mean because I think you’re selfish, obviously.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course you aren’t selfish. I’m sure you had much better reasons than that. Like, that it’s amazingly fantastically awesome. But work with me.”
He was pacing a little, and ticking off points on his fingers, like this was some cross between a debate class and an important conversation in a hallway on a televised police procedural.
“You don’t like all the celebrity stuff,” he said, “I’m pretty sure you hate having to deal with your scary bodyguards non-stop, and you said you’re just trying to go on with your life. So, this leads me to think that if you did away with the one part of your life that is causing all of those things you hate, the one thing that’s making it impossible for you to, you know, be… not normal, but normaler… what’s stopping you from handing it over?”
“Normaler?”
“It’s a word.”
“It is definitely not a word.”
“I’m serious, though.”
“Yeah. I know. I get you, but it’s way more complicated than you realize.”
She wanted to explain that there was that alien idea demanding to be let out of her head and released into the world, but not only was the world still not ready for it, Annie didn’t understand all of it yet. It was possible understanding it thoroughly would take a lifetime, and that lifetime was going to have to include access to information that was on the ship.
Without the ship, she was pretty sure she would eventually go nuts.
“How much more complicated could it be?” he asked
She wondered if she was going to end up having variations of this conversation with everyone in her life at some point. If this was her future, she might have to assemble a frequently asked questions form or something.
“The reason I kept the ship at first,” she said, “was just so nobody threw me in a box somewhere and opened up my brain looking for evidence of aliens.”
This was an approximate truth, but it was serviceably honest.
“Yuck.”
“I mean, basically.”
“But that wouldn’t happen now, right? They can’t give you the extreme rendition treatment now that everyone knows who you are.”
“Probably. I don’t know. It’s not the only reason, but… I think it’s safer this way.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m not sure of anything.”
“All right. All right. But… safer for just you, or for everyone? Like, what if I tried to kiss you right now? Would someone shoot me?”
“You want me to give up the ship so you can kiss me? That’s probably the most roundabout proposition I’ve ever heard.”
“I mean it, is that their truck right there?”
He pointed to the end of the alley, and the van.
“Yeah, that’s them.”
“I bet they have someone looking at me right now through a rifle scope.”
“Probably not, but okay.”
“You and everyone you meet have to deal with that all the time. So maybe, just don’t do it anymore. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Just so you can go in for a kiss.”
He laughed.
“Yeah, sure. Do you want me to do that? I mean, I can. It was just to illustrate a point.”
“The point being, that I’m making everyone around me unsafe,” she said. “I do
n’t know a ton about romance but I don’t think you got very close with that.”
“That’s a no, I take it.”
“Seems like everybody is telling me to do something I can’t do, and it’s starting to wear on me. So, no.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” he said.
“I know.”
“It just sounds like the best solution. But, I guess I don’t have all the info.”
Nobody does, she thought.
“I understand.”
He sighed, stopped pacing, and looked up and down the alley a couple of times, as things had just gotten really awkward and Annie wasn’t in the mood to bail him out of it.
“Hey, how about we go back to the fire pit? Inside doesn’t seem like your thing, and I feel like I just blew my chance for a kiss for at least an hour.”
Annie smiled.
“Sure,” she said, “but an hour is optimistic.”
“I’m a bottomless fount of optimism.”
They walked back to the middle of the quad. The fire was still going strong, and this time Annie could clearly make out the smoldering remains of a big textbook. Maybe it was outdated stock or something.
The yard was a little emptier. There continued to be packs of students talking to one another in small, closed rings, but they were different students from before. Annie could see Cora near the door of the quad house, and Yount on the other side of the compound. A third agent whose name she didn’t know—it was the one who’d been in the hall when Annie went to talk to Wendy—was loitering near the door to another one of the houses.
“Do you think my guys scared people off?” Annie asked.
“Nah, I’m pretty sure everyone’s used to them by now. Especially with you here.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t know I was coming.”
“They might have known you were coming.”
“What’s that, now?”
“I may have let it slip to Joe,” he said.
“Joe, the guy inside with the bad body odor?”
“You have to be more specific.”
“Your buddy, who lives here, who’s throwing the party.”
“Yes, that’s him. I mentioned I invited you, and I think he told a few people by email or something.”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 22
