by Carrie Jones
“The woman in charge needs to not be in charge,” I say as we finally spot the lights of a town and a gas station. “Bartlett. My mom’s mom was a Bartlett.”
“My mom’s mom was an alien,” Lyle says.
And I want to say, “At least you know who your biological mom is,” but that’s unfair because it’s not his fault I was adopted. Plus, his mom sucks. She was the last person to kidnap Seppie. It’s a trend, which I mention as we enter the Circle K gas station-slash-convenience store.
“They know she matters to you. It makes her vulnerable. Makes you vulnerable.”
“So, I’m supposed to not have friends?” I blink against the hard glare of the store’s overhead lights, which make Lyle’s skin sallow.
“Do you think China has friends?”
“My mom?” I suggest, checking on Enoch, who is supposed to be standing guard by the door but is actually licking unmentionable doggy places.
“She didn’t really have a ton of friends, not close friends, if you think about it.” He sounds apologetic. “And she’s in a coma, which is additional proof of how dangerous this all is.”
“Good point.” I sigh. “First things first. We need to get to Seppie quickly. We have no car.”
“And food.” Lyle grabs two boxes of Turkey & Cheddar Lunchables, which also feature Capri Sun Pacific Coolers and Skittles.
“Seriously?”
“It’s made with ‘whole grain.’” He points at the box and moves on to a tube of cookie dough.
“That’s raw. We have no oven.”
“Right now, I wouldn’t think salmonella is about to be the thing that takes us down, and if I’m going out in a blaze of glory, I’m going to go out with a happy stomach.”
“A salmonella stomach is not a happy stomach,” I say and grab a tin of Nutella. “Look, it’s the snack of the gods!”
He picks up a box of Little Debbie’s Cosmic Brownies and a bag of Bar-B-Q Fritos. “This is a snack of the gods. We have candy-coated chocolate on top of moist brownies coupled with the barbecue awesome crunch of the Fritos.”
Staring at the bag and the trippy Little Debbie’s box, I sigh. “Do you have any money?”
He makes a face. “Of course.”
“Your kidnappers didn’t take your money? Or your wallet? Or anything?”
“No.” He brings the items up to the counter. The woman there is stone-faced and yawning. “That’s probably weird, isn’t it?”
“Probably?” I sigh and watch him pay the cashier, and I decide not to comment further until we are back out in the cold with our bag of healthy yumminess. I am kidding here about the healthy part. Then I have a last-minute thought and say, “Hold on!”
Rushing to the back wall, I grab two Pepsi bottles—caffeine—and place them on the counter. “Just in case.”
He doesn’t disagree. The clerk lady just runs the bar codes over her scanner and makes no comment at all except to announce the total we owe her.
Once we’re out I say, “You were actually kidnapped, right? That isn’t some lie and elaborate setup?”
“Of course!” He has ripped open the Fritos and is munching through them like a machine.
“You don’t know how to get out of duct tape restraints?” I lean against the side of the building and pry open the Cosmic Brownies. I try not to think about all the chemicals in them but I can’t avoid it, so I change over to the Lunchable. It probably isn’t much better, but at least it has protein.
As if he’s reading my thoughts, Lyle says, “You can have my turkey.”
“Thank you, Mr. Vegetarian.”
“No problem.”
Lyle doesn’t like to eat things with a face.
“So, at the training place, they didn’t teach you about breaking out of duct tape restraints. Did they teach you about what kind of alien you are?”
“They did.”
He keeps eating and it isn’t until he’s done chewing that he says, “I feel a little awkward talking about it, honestly.”
My heart plummets. I can’t believe he won’t tell me. “If you can’t tell me, who can you tell, really? Other than Seppie?”
“That’s not it. I’m just not into talking about myself.”
I scoff. He punches my arm. I punch his and almost drop the contents of the Lunchable, which would be horrific.
“Since when?”
“Since all this started happening? Since I realized I didn’t know who I was.”
His voice is so sad and so honest. There’s no trace of teasing, sarcastic Lyle, no trace of dorky, science fiction–loving Lyle. I offer him a cracker with cheese. He takes it, engulfing it. I’ve been so focused on my identity crisis, and my mom, and worrying about the eradication of humanity, that I’ve forgotten about my own humanity, my friends, and how all of this was impacting them.
“You’re still the same you, Lyle. Your actions and thoughts are what make you you. It’s not about your DNA or your species or whatever.”
“Are you trying to give me a pep talk?”
I shrug.
He bumps me with his hip, like old times. “It’s better than Mrs. Bray’s motivational moments. Do you remember, ‘It’s about how high we jump and loudly we cheer, so remember we may not dominate the court but we rock the world!’”
Mrs. Bray is our cheer coach. She is the worst pep talker ever. You always feel more depressed afterward.
“Or, ‘When you raise your voices, you raise everyone’s spirits?’” I groan. “And ‘Players get breaks between halves. Cheerleaders are always on! So, be on!’”
“I’m sort of amazed she still coaches. She’s nice, though.” After a second he says, “How about I tell you more about it when we get to the training camp?”
“Okay. And how are we going to get there?”
Looking up at the dark sky, he smiles. “Well, nobody is going to see us, so I say we fly.”
* * *
Flying isn’t really exactly flying. My skill set is more like bounding, really bounding. I jump and move about the length of a football field, reaching up high toward the sky, over treetops, before landing and instantly taking off again. I make the space, the sky, the ground, my own, using the darkness to hide who I am, my powers, to get us there more quickly. I imagine my flying-jumping movement is sort of dorky and awkward-looking, but Seppie insisted it was actually cool and graceful. Lyle has to climb on my back so that I can keep him with me.
“No fireman carry?” he asks, referencing the carry where you sling someone over your shoulder and their butt is up toward the sky.
“If you want.…” I tease. “Or I can hold you in my arms like grooms carry brides when they cross a threshold.”
“Tempting…”
But we decide on the piggyback position, which allows Lyle not to get motion sick and also to see where he’s going. It’s awkward because he’s way taller than I am and his legs are sort of dangling.
“Are you strong enough to carry me?” he asks.
“I’m strong enough to carry anyone,” I say, because I am. I could even carry China. But I can’t carry Enoch and Lyle.
Crouching down, I explain the situation to her. She barks at me.
“I think she actually understands you,” Lyle says.
“That’s not the problem. The problem is that I don’t understand her.”
“You never learned to speak dog.” He shakes his head like this is a terribly disappointing failure on my part.
Smiling up at him, I say, “I’ve never learned a lot of things.”
For a second, I’m a tiny bit jealous of Lyle. He knows where he’s from now. He knows what he is. He might not be 100 percent cool with it, but at least he knows. At least they trusted him enough to try to teach him and use him.
Enoch makes a whimpering noise. She hits me with her paw.
“I’m trying.” I sigh.
“We have to get going.” Lyle fidgets, shifting his weight on his feet. “We need to go to camp, get the others, go to Maine t
o that YMCA place and save Seppie.”
“I’m not leaving Enoch,” I insist. “Even if it is to gather the troops.”
He lifts his hands up in surrender. “I’m not saying you shou—”
Enoch leaps into his arms and then scurries up and around his neck, dangling there like some sort of giant, furry scarf with jowls and paws. Lyle staggers for a second but keeps his balance and starts laughing. “I think she wants to try this.”
So, that’s what we do. Enoch stays draped across Lyle’s neck and shoulders while he climbs onto my back. I make an appropriate oomph noise under their weight but readjust. I take a sip from the Pepsi bottle, just a small one, before recapping it and stashing it in one of the oversize pockets of my vest.
“You guys ready?” I check, and then I take off. “Let’s go to that camp and get a bunch of Futures and rescue Seppie.”
“Rah. Rah,” Lyle monotones.
“No sarcastic cheering allowed,” I say, liking the way he has to hug my back. “We can do this.”
“Your motivational speech-making just needs a bit of work,” he says. I think he’s actually sniffing my hair.
“Doesn’t everyone’s?”
He and Enoch are heavy, but it’s doable. My leaps aren’t as high as when I first did this with Seppie, but between now and then I’ve been practicing surreptitiously and I have the movement down pat. It’s almost second nature. Lyle makes a whooping noise, which cracks me up. Seppie thought this was cool, too.
Seppie.
As we move through the trees, I think about her. Before all this happened, Seppie and I were just two random cheerleaders who looked out for each other. In a school full of mostly white kids, we were each other’s support system, family. That’s how it always was with Lyle, too. We have been friends forever. When everyone else believed I was stupid, Lyle and Seppie didn’t. When strangers look at Seppie and think she is some sort of “mad black woman” stereotype, I have her back. When people taunt Lyle for being a cheerleader because it is something “girls do,” we verbally kick their ass.
We’ve always been a team.
And I’m mad at them for messing that up, but I get it. They were protecting me, the same way that I would want to protect them. I understand their motivation even if I don’t like their actions. Something hitches inside my throat. I’m so tired of people using my friends as pawns. I’m so tired of this life-or-death crap, this constant confusion about who is bad and who is good, and I blurt all this out to Lyle and Enoch as I bound toward the training camp, following along the highway.
“You feel like you need to choose a side and you don’t know which side is good or not?” he yells back, his words battling the wind.
“Exactly.” I bounce up again. It is so fast, moving like this; so free.
“So just choose a side.”
“I have,” I say.
“You care to share?”
“Nice rhyme, geek.”
“Punk.” He laughs as he says this.
“I chose the side of you and Seppie. I chose the side of friendship.”
“Corny! So corny.”
“Shut up.” I land on the ground and take off instantly again. “You know you love me.”
He squeezes a little tighter, holds on a little more, somehow. “I do.”
I don’t care if he means it romantically or platonically. All I care is that he means it. We are romantic, corny people—no aliens—whatever we are. I hope we never change.
I smile at him and say, “Let’s go get an army and rescue Seppie.”
CHAPTER 13
When my mom was in the hospital (after we rescued her and after I came back from Washington, D.C., where I had met with China) I had a bit of a nervous breakdown. That isn’t a clinical term, but I wasn’t diagnosed with anything, so it wouldn’t be right to use a clinical term.
Anyway, I just broke one day at school. The world history class was talking about ancient Sumer and its complex language system, which was mirrored by its super-multifaceted religious system that had hundreds of gods and rituals. Every city had a god to protect and guard it. The gods lived with the humans. The humans were the gods’ servants.
“Some postulate that the Nephilim from Genesis in the Bible also dwelled here,” Mr. Boland said. “They are sometimes thought of as giants, sometimes as fallen angels, sons of God.”
Someone got disdainful and said, all disparaging, “You sound like an episode of Ancient Aliens.”
I tensed.
Mr. Boland raised an eyebrow in that teacher know-it-all way and said, “They have collected clay tablets from Sumer. Do you know what one says? It says that Earth is the seventh planet from the sun. How would they know this? It was around five thousand years ago. Ancient tablets claim that the world was founded by humanlike aliens. They traveled the heavens, used the heavens for their own purposes, claimed the skies and our world as their own. They mined for gold and minerals and decided it was too much work, so they created humans—slaves to do that work for them. They used their own likeness to make us pathetic little creatures.”
Grayson Staggs started full-body laughing. Like he was literally convulsing in his seat. Seppie kicked him.
Mr. Boland just kept lecturing. He was used to this. “The first humans couldn’t reproduce, so they were tinkered with.”
I stood up.
“Ms. Trent. Sit down.”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit down. I took off. The world was too big and too horrible sometimes. I knew everyone just thought this ancient-aliens-in-Sumer thing was an amusing theory, that alien abduction was some silly horror movie plot, but I knew what it was like to be tinkered with, knew how possible the horror actually was. And I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it.
I ran to the bathroom and hid there, washing my face, trying to calm down.
Seppie found me there by the sinks. She peered at me, hand on my shoulder as I stared down at my freaking shoes, studying them like they held the secret to the universe.
“I know why you freaked out,” she said.
I looked up and her eyes were so big and concerned.
“It’s because Grayson had spaghetti sauce on his Converse, right? You just couldn’t abide the degradation of such awesome shoes?”
I make what I hope is a disgusted face.
“Is it because Lyle’s not as good a kisser as you expected? The current slate of presidential candidates is horrible? Is it because the current trending picture of a topless Miley Cyrus has just blown your mind?” she teased. She laughed and poked my cheek with her perfect fingernail. “Ah, there’s the famous Mana Trent smile, known to kill hearts throughout New Hampshire’s southern counties.”
I shook my head. “You’re such a dork.”
“Why you love me.” She announced this and gave me a quick hug from behind. And then she shifted gears, bending so that she could rest her head on my shoulder as we both stared into the disgustingly smudgy bathroom mirror. “We’ll find those bastards and get them someday.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. I’m with you, Mana, no matter what happens. You know that, right?”
As Lyle, Enoch, and I land on the outskirts of the training camp, I can’t forget that conversation. I can’t forget how much Seppie meant those words, how she followed me out of class just to make sure that I was okay. That’s what friendship is about. It’s about love that doesn’t have to do with sex. It’s about being there for each other, risking everything no matter what.
* * *
Lyle hops off my back and puts Enoch on the ground. They both stretch and groan. The sun is rising behind the pine trees. I’m exhausted, but hyped up, too. Enoch pees on a tree.
“Nice,” Lyle says.
“She’s a dog! You probably pee on trees all the time, don’t you?”
“Every chance I get,” he counters. His voice loses its teasing tone. “You’re hunched over. You okay?”
I straighten up. My back creaks. “Yep. Just a little
stiff.”
I stare at this place—this camp. This is what I wanted so badly, to be part of this team, to be fighting aliens, saving humanity, and it’s not that I don’t still want that, but I don’t want it this way. I don’t want to be involved with anything that Julia Bloomsbury created, anything that didn’t trust me enough, anything that made my two best friends lie to me. And right now I want to save Seppie more than I want to save humanity. That might not be right, morally, but she’s my priority, not this. If this agency couldn’t accept who I am, then they don’t deserve my talents or my loyalty. That’s that.
Lyle coughs, jolting me out of my thoughts. He looks … adorable, rumpled and tall and cute, with those super-big eyebrows and puppy eyes. He clears his throat. “Thanks for the ride. It was faster than me running and carrying you, that’s for sure.”
“It’s nice to be right sometimes.” I slap him on the back like we’re army buddies or on the football team or something.
He fake-coughs all awkwardly and says, “Easy, killer.”
We’re standing at the end of a driveway that leads to what I imagine Boy Scout camps would look like. There are log cabins surrounded by trees. A bus and cars rest off to the side. There is a bigger building that’s probably some sort of mess hall. A light dusting of snow covers the ground and there are tons of footprints.
“How are we going to convince them to help us?” I ask.
“Motivational speech?”
“Dear God…”
He smiles. “I can do that if you want.”
“Cool.”
“And they know Seppie. They’ve met her. Seppie is…”
“Popular? Awesome? Hot? Well loved?”
“All of the above. I think once they realize she’s in jeopardy they’ll all be on board.”
“Wait. What about the people in charge?”
“That,” he sighs, “is the problem. But I was thinking and I might have a plan.”
* * *
He goes into the building and as I wait for him to come back, I think about him. I can’t help it. Lyle is not the type of guy who normally makes a plan, especially the kind with a capital P. It isn’t that he’s dumb. He’s brilliant. It’s more that he’s a spur-of-the-moment type of person, extroverted like Seppie, happiest when he is in the present instead of thinking about the future. He doesn’t ignore the future—if he did that he wouldn’t have gotten into Dartmouth early decision—but he doesn’t dwell on it the way Seppie does, with all her hopes and dreams of a happy life full of academic and professional glory. She wants to be the first black woman president. She would be happy to be the third black woman president, she tells me, because she doesn’t want to bring down others’ chances for success. Lyle doesn’t know what he wants to be, or he didn’t know before all this alien stuff happened and he found out he wasn’t even human. Me? I dwell on the past, mistakes I’ve made, happy moments with my mom and/or dad (but mostly my mom), good goofy times with Lyle and Seppie. The future has never been something I wanted to think about and the present usually is just here.
