The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother)

by David Levithan

  “At least you’re not the biggest story,” I said.

  After the commercial, we were back in the newsroom. The anchor mentioned our town, then, “Live with the story…Adam Goldman. What have you found out, Adam?”

  “There are lots of questions swirling around this town,” the reporter said from our front yard. “And they all come down to the fabulous story a twelve-year-old boy told. Last week, life came to a standstill for local residents as they desperately searched for him. Now they’ve learned that his alibi is something out of a fantasy novel.”

  “Only people accused of a crime need an alibi,” I pointed out.

  “Shhh,” Aidan chided.

  It was surreal to think that the reporter was maybe fifty feet away from us but we were still watching him on a screen. Then the story jumped to a nearby diner, where he’d interviewed “local people” about what had happened. I didn’t recognize a single one of them.

  “Kids today think they can say whatever they want,” an older woman said, shaking her head. “I don’t even blame the kids. It’s the parents. They let them get away with everything.”

  An even older man sitting across from her said, “I figure that family owes the town the full cost of the search, if he was okay the whole time and now wants to lie about it.”

  The report returned to our front yard, focusing on our front door.

  “The child’s parents refused to comment,” the reporter said. “According to police spokesperson Julia Koblish, the investigation is ongoing, and whatever the story he told when he returned, they’re just happy this has ended up being much more a comedy than the tragedy it could have been.”

  “Thanks, Adam,” the anchor said. “When you go to the acupuncturist, are you sure the needles are always clean? In her investigative report, Stacey Martinez goes undercover to see whether your pressure points are really safe. Stacey?”

  Aidan closed the Channel 7 window and found the News story.

  “That has to be Kelli McGillis’s mom,” he said when we were done reading the article again. “Figures.”

  There wasn’t any way that we’d go back to sleep, so instead Aidan loaded up a two-player game and played me without complaint. When school started elsewhere, we began to get texts from our friends, all of them asking what was going on. I group-messaged Busby, Truman, and Tate and told them it was all a plot on my part to get out of school, mwahaha. Aidan was a little more serious with Glenn, telling him we were pretty much trapped inside, even though the camera crew was probably gone. (I pulled back the shade again; they were indeed gone.) Glenn asked for more of the scoop, to which Aidan replied, What scoop? You know what happened.

  Glenn texted back: Totally. Got it.

  Mom, Dad, and Julia from the police all checked up on us. Once the police were gone (“but still patrolling,” Mom assured us), Dad made pancakes and tried to pretend it was a holiday or something, where we all had the day off. The phone kept ringing, and Mom always checked the caller ID before answering.

  Dad told us that Julia had said the question would be whether Channel 7 or other stations would be back for the six o’clock news. “Hopefully someone in Washington will tweet something stupid and the attention will move somewhere else,” Dad said.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to go to school, but it was strange to be stuck inside our house. Even when Aidan had been missing, it wasn’t like we’d been confined indoors. The whole day, Mom and Dad kept the shades drawn, as if there might be reporters with telephoto lenses waiting for us to slip up. For all I knew, there were reporters with telephoto lenses outside.

  I was reminded of the goldfish we’d had when I was in second grade. Just one goldfish in a simple bowl, it spent its day swimming around and around. We fed it twice a day, and that was the only interruption to its routine. It seemed happy enough. Every now and then, I’d be staring at it through the glass and it would stop and stare back. I always wondered whether it actually knew it was being watched. Did it know who I was, or was I just this color pattern that leaned in from time to time? It felt like my family was in the fishbowl now, but it was the opposite of the way it was with the goldfish. We were trapped, but had no idea for sure if we were being watched. We just acted like we were.

  By lunchtime, we were all a little sick of each other. Nobody wanted to talk about why we were trapped, so we weren’t talking about anything worth saying. After lunch, Mom told us to do our homework, and when we said it was all done, since we’d thought we’d be going to school today, she told us we had to do something educational—which in the end meant watching something from the documentary section of Netflix. Aidan picked a series about the Battle of the Bulge. I didn’t argue.

  The big excitement came around three o’clock when the doorbell rang again. Mom and Dad didn’t even want to go to the peephole to see who it was, just in case it was a reporter who would know we were home. (“The family is at home, hiding behind a door right now,” I imagined the reporter saying.) The doorbell rang again. Then there was knocking. Mom called the police, who got in touch with the squad car outside. There was a pause, and then Mom laughed.

  “It’s only Glenn,” she told Dad.

  We opened the door.

  32

  We went into the den, supposedly so Glenn could explain our homework assignments to us, but really, I suspected, so Glenn and Aidan could play a few games before Glenn had to go back home.

  “I’m not really sure what the point is of me going around and getting this for you,” Glenn said as he unpacked his bag and handed us some assignments. “All the teachers were like, ‘This is what email is for, so we can send home assignments.’ But I guess your parents still think it’s the twentieth century or something.”

  “Maybe they just like your personal touch,” Aidan joked, putting his assignments aside.

  “Yeah, that must be it,” Glenn said, sitting down on the couch. After he did, I saw him reach to his pocket and adjust his phone.

  Aidan sat down next to him and loaded up a game. Casually, he asked, “So how was school today? What are they saying?”

  Glenn shrugged. “I dunno, dude. Kelli was all like, ‘My mom broke the story,’ and I said, like real loud, ‘Well, who wants a broken story, Kelli?’ Even Keegan laughed at that one.”

  “Great,” Aidan mumbled.

  Glenn didn’t notice Aidan was less than enthused—or if he did, he went on anyway. “Totally! I mean, you’re a bigger mystery now than ever before, because you’re, like, a famous mystery. Frances was saying she could imagine it on one of those programs like CSI. I mean, who do you want to be you in the movie version, right?”

  “Let’s just play.”

  For the first time I’d ever seen, Glenn tried to delay a game.

  “Nah,” he said, shifting on the couch and looking down at his phone again. “I want you to tell me what happened.”

  “Dude,” Aidan said, “we’ve been through that.”

  “Yeah, but…I wasn’t paying attention. I mean, there was a lot going on, right? So, like, tell me again what you told me before, about how this whole unicorn thing is a cover story for what really happened. You got lost in the woods, right? Then, like, stumbled your way home and were all out of your mind and came up with the story about the fantasy world. That’s what you said.”

  Aidan, sitting next to him, couldn’t see, but Glenn’s hand went to his phone again. It was in his pocket, but the bottom was sticking out a little.

  “Right?” Glenn pressed.

  I jumped in and asked, “Are you recording this?”

  “What are you talking about?” Glenn turned to me to protest. His hand went to his pocket again.

  This time Aidan noticed. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing!” Glenn turned back to Aidan to say. While he was doing that, I swooped down and plucked the phone from his pocket
.

  The microphone was totally on. I held it up so Aidan could see.

  “I wasn’t—” Glenn sputtered.

  But Aidan interrupted. “You totally were. Give me the phone, Lucas.”

  I did. He hit stop on the recording, then replayed the last few seconds.

  “Give me the phone, Lucas.”

  Aidan hit delete, then handed Glenn’s phone back to him.

  “What’s going on, Glenn?” he asked.

  Glenn slumped back on the couch.

  “I’m totally sorry,” he said. “Honestly, I was thinking I could help you. Everyone’s asking for the story, and there are so many reporters—like, decent reporters, not Kelli’s mom—who would love to hear your side of the story.”

  You’re kidding, right? I thought.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Aidan said.

  Glenn threw up his hands. “Look—you have no idea how hard this has been. Like, everyone knows you’re my best friend. So ever since you disappeared, everyone’s been asking me about you. First about where you could’ve gone, and now about what the real story is. I get that you’re saying you told me the real story and want me to keep it a secret. But what I don’t understand is if it’s the real story, why do you want to keep it a secret? Why aren’t you telling everyone? Yeah, people will be all, ‘Why can’t he say where he was?’ But at least they won’t be calling you Unicorn Boy!”

  “And they won’t be calling you Unicorn Boy’s best friend,” Aidan added coolly.

  “That’s not my point!” Glenn said.

  “Are you sure?” Aidan asked.

  “Look, it was stupid to try to record you. Let’s just play. We don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

  Aidan looked at him for a second, then passed him a controller.

  I wanted to kick Glenn out of the house. But it wasn’t my call.

  They played games for about an hour. Every now and then, Aidan would invite me to play too, taking one of their turns. So I stuck around.

  Finally, Aidan finished a round and said, “I guess we better start that homework. Sorry, dude.”

  Glenn put his controller down. “No worries. I should probably head home anyway.”

  They said goodbye, and I almost asked to check Glenn’s phone before he left. I had been watching him closely the whole time, but I might have missed it when I was playing—not that we’d been saying anything worth recording.

  When Glenn was gone and Aidan and I were back in the den, I couldn’t help myself. “I can’t believe you let him stay!” I said.

  Aidan spread his homework out in front of him. Then he looked up at me and replied, “If I’d kicked him out, he would’ve told everyone I kicked him out. He would’ve said he tried to get me to confess, and that I got angry at him instead. I’m not going to trust him, but I’m not going to cut him off either. Because if I cut him off, you know exactly where he’ll go.”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  Aidan looked at me funny. Like, What a strange thing for you to say.

  “I guess it is,” he said finally. “But the saddest thing is that I’m not really surprised.”

  “Do you wish you were back there?”

  Aidan shook his head, said, “That’s a pointless question,” and started on his homework even though there was no way of knowing if we’d be going to school the next day.

  33

  Even though we didn’t talk about it, we all kept checking the news on our own devices. We typed Aidan’s name into search engines to see if any new stories came up. A few local sites had picked up the story from the morning paper, but for the most part it stayed local, not viral.

  The only acknowledgment that we were monitoring the outside as much as it was monitoring us came when six o’clock rolled around. Each of us took a local channel to watch, with Aunt Brandi tracking the internet. There hadn’t been any more camera crews or reporters at our doorstep. And Julia, the press liaison, said she’d been getting fewer and fewer questions as the day went on, so we were hoping we’d be ignored.

  There was a sewer main break. An exposé of the fruit flies that had descended on a Whole Foods. Traffic. Weather.

  Nothing about unicorns.

  Brandi called as soon as six-thirty hit and asked me to put it on speaker.

  “How are you all doing?” she asked as we gathered for dinner.

  “Ready to go for a jog,” Dad said. “And I don’t jog!”

  “She knows you don’t jog,” Mom said. “Everyone who knows you knows you don’t jog.”

  “Aidan?” Brandi asked.

  “Couldn’t be better!”

  There was a pause. Then Brandi said, “I’ll accept that on a grammatical technicality.”

  “I’ll call you later,” Mom said. “It’s time to eat.”

  I hung up, but it was still another half hour before dinner was ready. Mom threw together what she called a “spontaneous potluck”—even I could tell we were eating whatever had been left in the fridge because my parents were afraid to go to the grocery store or have a delivery person at our door.

  I was amazed that the phone didn’t ring the whole time we had dinner. Then, after we were done, Mom said she’d check the messages, and I realized they’d turned off all of the ringers.

  “It’s best that way,” Mom explained when I asked what was going on with the phones. “It’s been a steady stream of nosy neighbors, crackpots, and every now and then a friend or relative who has no idea what to say.”

  I thought of all the people who’d been in our house the week Aidan was missing, up to the minute he returned. Back then, the way they’d shown support was to show up. Now they called or emailed. Although it was possible that Mom and Dad had told them to stay away.

  After we were done with the dishes, Dad called another family meeting.

  “We’re returning to normal tomorrow,” he announced. “You two are going to school, and Mom and I are going to work. Obviously, if anyone tries to talk to you about what happened, you don’t say a word. And if anyone gives you any trouble in school, you go straight to the principal or the counselor. We talked to them earlier, and everyone’s on board with this plan.”

  I was honestly relieved to hear we’d be leaving the fishbowl, even if it remained to be seen whether we’d have to wear smaller fishbowls to school.

  Aidan didn’t look relieved at all. “I don’t want to go,” he said.

  Dad chuckled. “As with any other normal morning, you don’t really have a choice, Aidan. You’re going to school.”

  “I can’t go back there,” Aidan said.

  And I realized: He wasn’t talking about just tomorrow. He was talking about never going back again.

  Dad didn’t get it. He kept up his joking tone and said, “Look, if I have to go to work, you have to go to school. That’s the deal.”

  But Mom shook her head. She understood what Aidan was really saying.

  “You want to go to a new school?” she asked.

  Aidan nodded.

  Dad appeared dumbstruck. “Look, I know it’s rough, but—”

  “It’s never going to stop,” Aidan said flatly. “We all know that.”

  Mom didn’t miss a beat. “Is this about what happened?” she asked. “Or is this about before what happened? Has someone been giving you trouble at school?”

  Aidan stood up from the table. “No. It’s not about that at all.”

  “It’s okay,” Mom said carefully. “If that’s why you ran away—”

  “I didn’t run away!” Aidan interrupted.

  Dad slammed his hand down on the table. “Yes, you did. Let’s be very clear about that, Aidan. No matter where you went, you ran away. You weren’t kidnapped. Nobody forced you to leave. You left. Whether you stepped into another world or went to stay at a four-star hot
el in Paris, it doesn’t matter—you left us high and dry. No word. No warning. No trace. So you are going to sit back down and you are going to listen to whatever your mother and I have to say, and when we are through, you will do your homework, and then tomorrow morning, you will go to school. If, as your mother is asking, there was something that happened at school that led you to run away, we’re all ears, and we will help you deal with it.”

  “I told you,” Aidan said, sitting down, “there wasn’t anything wrong.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Dad said.

  Mom was staring at Dad, surprised. He never slammed his hand on the table or yelled. Now we all sat there, awkward. Dad had made Aidan stay for the rest of the conversation…but the conversation seemed over.

  “It’ll be good to get back to a routine,” Mom said, but the sentence didn’t lead to any other sentences.

  Finally, since I knew Aidan wouldn’t do it, I asked if we could be excused. Mom looked to Dad, and Dad said okay. He looked like he wanted to cry, or maybe yell again.

  We left as quickly as we could.

  34

  The darkness of our bedroom, almost midnight.

  “I didn’t think of it as running away,” Aidan said from his bed.

  “Of course not,” I said from mine.

  “I was just taking a look. It’s not like I thought I was going to stay.”

  “How could you?”

  I tried to picture it, right above our heads. The light coming through the doors of the dresser. Opening it up. Seeing the green sky.

  If that had happened to me, I would have gone in too.

  Or.

  Wouldn’t I have come back downstairs first?

  Wouldn’t I have woken up Aidan, made him take a look to make sure I wasn’t dreaming?

  But Aidan had gone ahead without me.

  “I wish you’d come to get me,” I mumbled, sleepy.

  “I didn’t even think about it,” Aidan said. Not apologetic. But honest. “I just went.”