by Carrie Ryan
But for our sixth birthday, we all hung out together, me and Kyle and Radha and Duncan—Duncan Mulroney, he’s Kyle’s best friend. At least, he used to be until Kyle and Amber started going out. Kyle’s basically been attached at the hip to Amber all semester, don’t ask me what he sees in her. Amber Johnson is a mental case and it would be a public service if you guys could lock her up instead of me.
But whatever, everyone thinks I quit the team to spend more time with the Science Olympiads. Which I did, basically. Because the Olympiads treat their opponents with dignity and respect.
I don’t know, it’s probably lame. But I was just so sad for the way things used to be when we were all younger and things were less … complicated. When we didn’t have to lie all the time. I guess that’s it. I was sick of all the lies.
So, okay, I’ll admit it. I ended up doing the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life—well, maybe the second stupidest thing. And that was blog the truth about what happened to Kyle and me the night of our sixth birthday.
How was I supposed to know what was going to happen? I didn’t expect anyone to read it, because no one reads my blog but Radha, not even my mom. I certainly didn’t expect you guys to show up, much less him.
Well, maybe I expected him.
So there, I explained. You know all this, since you read it, obviously. That’s why you’re here. Good timing, by the way. You guys really helped. Did you note the sarcasm in my voice just then?
So, can I go now? Because I invoked my right to counsel and I don’t care what agency you’re with, the Sixth Amendment—
What do you mean, the Sixth Amendment doesn’t apply to matters extraterrestrial in nature?
Excerpt from KC Conrad’s LiveJournal
BIRTHDAY BLUES
… it was right after our sixth birthday party, the one with the explorer theme (remember, Radha? I got the sleeping bags and the inflatable mattresses to go with them? Kyle got the binoculars and that gigantic tent).
After you and everybody else went home from the party, Kyle wanted to try out all the camping equipment. He bugged Mom and Dad so much, they finally relented and helped us set it up in the backyard so they could keep an eye on us from their bedroom window.
Only I think Mom and Dad had a little too much wine with the rest of the parents. They conked out, and were nowhere to be found when the trouble started.
Which it totally did a few hours later when the wind began to pick up … so hard that a corner of the tent came undone. Kyle, Dad’s Little Intrepid Explorer, was running around, yelling at me to try to help him peg the tent corner back down, only the wind was blowing so much, I could hardly see anything except flying leaves and bits of mulch from Mom’s vegetable garden.
But I didn’t want Kyle to lose his precious tent, so I was trying to help.
That’s when I heard the roaring sound—like a freight train—and looked across the yard to the empty lot next door.…
Except of course the lot isn’t empty now. It’s where Duncan Mulroney lives. On whom, I would just like to state for the record, I do not have a crush, despite what everyone seems to think. Why would I have a crush on someone who doesn’t even know I’m alive?
And Kyle uses those binoculars he got ten years ago to check out Duncan’s mom whenever she sits around their backyard pool in her bikini. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true.
Anyway, that’s when I saw it.
I can’t really explain what it looked like. Imagine the most beautiful fireworks display you’ve ever seen.
Then imagine that fireworks display right above your head, attached to the underside of a gigantic helicopter, hovering just above you.
That’s what it was like. The grass, the trees, Mom’s cherry tomato plants, everything around us was being flattened by the air coming out of its exhaust jets. That’s where the wind was coming from.
For some reason I’ll never be able to explain, I wasn’t scared. I was excited. I guess I was too young to know better. When you’re six, you think tornadoes take you to Oz.
And I guess you think that’s where ships from outer space are going to take you, too.
Of course I threw down the tent peg I was holding and rushed toward it. I didn’t think twice about it. I wanted to get on it. I wanted to go inside it. It looked like the world’s most amazing carousel ride to me.
But Kyle felt differently. He wanted to get the heck out of there.
“Let’s go, KC,” he cried. Tears were streaming down his face. “Let’s go get Dad. He said to, remember? He said to go wake him up if anything went wrong. And this is wrong.”
But I didn’t want to go wake up Dad. I wanted to stay. I was dazzled by all the lights. Maybe I was just dazzled.
And though I’ll always kind of hate myself for this, I turned to Kyle and said, “You go wake up Dad if you want to, Kyle. I’m going to stay. I want to see.”
That’s when Kyle did something amazing for someone so young. Something that—no matter how much he annoys me with all the Amber Johnson drama today—I will never forget, and that I’ll always love him for.
Because Kyle could have gotten away. He could have run, but he didn’t. Instead, he came right up to me and took my hand.
He stood there and waited with me as the door to that ship opened. He was scared as could be—I could feel his fingers trembling in mine—but he stayed as a man stepped out of that ship (blue-eyed, dark-haired, and handsome as any nonthreatening teen heartthrob could be) and said with a great big smile, “Hello, children. Won’t you come in?”
Of course, they tell you never to go anywhere with strangers, especially strangers who offer you rides in cars.
But no one ever mentions anything about strangers who offer you rides in their spaceship. Obviously I said yes. It was a spaceship that had all these shiny control panels with thousands of blinking lights and buttons and gear shifts and stuff.
We didn’t really get a chance to look at them too much, though, because the man started explaining right away about how brave and smart and cool we were—way braver and smarter and cooler than anyone else he’d met on earth so far, because we were the only kids who’d chosen to talk to him instead of running away, screaming.
Which was why he was selecting us for the biggest honor his kind could bestow. See, his planet was in a lot of trouble: it had run out of many of the natural resources that we had in abundance on earth, such as clean water, air, and other things like that.
He just needed to analyze how we managed ours, and send that information back to his home planet. If Kyle and I would be willing to help him do that, that would be really amazing. And if we didn’t tell anyone (because of course our helping him had to be a secret, since everyone else on earth besides us was such a big scaredy-cat), there’d be an enormous reward:
We’d become the most famous people on earth.
They were always telling us in church that we were supposed to help those who were in need. And this definitely seemed to apply to the poor spaceman whose planet was literally being choked from pollution. How could we not help? Not helping seemed like it would be wrong. Even Kyle, who hadn’t wanted to get involved in the first place, had to agree.
All we had to do to help was let the spaceman stick a blue dot into each of our arms. It wouldn’t hurt, he said. We’d just get a little sleepy. But, the spaceman explained as our eyelids drooped, that was normal during the “implementation and activation” process. When we woke up, he said, we’d feel good as new.
And he was right, we did. Until Mom noticed the blue dots the next morning, and we forgot we weren’t supposed to talk about any of it, and we ended up at Dr. Hall’s office, with him numbing my arm, then digging around for my blue dot with a needle.
I remember Dr. Hall muttering things like “Can’t say I’ve ever seen one buried quite this deep. Sorry, hon, didn’t mean for that to hurt,” and “Appears to be some kind of foreign substance,” and my mom wailing, “But you said it was harmless,” and “Is it c
ancer?” and Dr. Hall saying, “If I can just get a grip on it …”
Meanwhile, I was sitting there with tears running down my face. Dr. Hall had promised it wouldn’t hurt, because of the local anesthesia he used.
But it really, really hurt. I can’t even describe how much it hurt. I thought I was going to pass out.
I knew Dr. Hall was going to start digging into Kyle’s arm next. Poor Kyle who would never have been in this situation if it hadn’t been for me. The promises we’d made the night before—the thrill of saving someone else’s planet—were wearing off as quickly as the local. Who cared if some spaceman whose face we could barely remember had said we were destined for greatness someday? Right now, our destiny seemed awful.
Then something terrible happened—worse even than the pain I was experiencing. Dr. Hall suddenly froze up, then let out a scream, like … well, like someone had stabbed him with one of those needles, and without anesthetic. I’ve never heard a grown man scream like that before, and I hope never to hear it again.
Then Dr. Hall dropped the tool he’d been using to remove what he’d called my blue nevus, and ran out of the exam room like his hair was on fire.
He didn’t come back for a long time. Mom was pretty mad because he’d left in the middle of removing my blue nevus, with me just sitting there on the exam table, bleeding. She had to go out and get one of the nurses to tape gauze to my arm.
When he did finally come back, Dr. Hall looked completely unlike his normal professional self. His hair was kind of standing up on end, his tie askew, and his fingers shaking.
But he told Mom not to worry. He’d checked some of the tissue he’d managed to dig from my arm, and said it wasn’t malignant.
“But it’s what you called it, right?” Mom asked. “A blue … whatever?”
“It’s blue, all right,” Dr. Hall said. And though Kyle swears he didn’t hear it, I know I heard Dr. Hall mutter this under his breath: “Whatever it is.”
He told Mom to continue a pattern of “attentiveness” and contact medical authorities if there were any changes. Then he said, “I’m not going to charge you for today, Mrs. Conrad. And I’m sure we don’t have to mention any of this to the colonel.” Then he gave me about five billion root beer lollipops in a sort of distracted way and walked out again.
That was our last visit to Dr. Hall’s office, because he closed his practice right after that and moved to a house so far out into the countryside, it was practically in another county.
But it was okay, because our blue dots never did get bigger or anything. They stayed exactly the same, just this weird blue discoloration on the same place on each of our right arms.
And over time, I started to believe they were what Dr. Hall said they were … just moles that appeared overnight. I started to forget what the spaceman looked like, or even that any of it had ever happened, except when I’d see the camping equipment all boxed up in the garage—Dad never did let us use it again, and we certainly never asked—or when Mom would jokingly tell other people that we’d once insisted we were “destined for greatness.” Wasn’t that adorable?
Still, there’s one thing I’ve never forgotten, and that’s bothered me ever since I got old enough to realize it:
How could Kyle and I help an alien civilization? We were six. What could we have told that spaceman’s people (especially about water and air purity on our planet, if that’s what he really wanted to know, which sometimes I sort of doubt) that he couldn’t have learned from the Internet, which surely, considering how advanced his civilization must be, he’d have known how to access?
I’ve wondered about this ever since. It’s all so unlikely: Aliens visited our planet, and they chose to visit me—well, me and Kyle, whatever. Was the whole thing just a freak mutual twin hallucination? Maybe there was peyote growing in Mom’s vegetable garden, and some of it blew up our noses, and Kyle and I didn’t know it.
But on the other hand, there is this thing in my arm. Is it really a blue nevus? What else could it be?
I’d like to find out … but I’m also afraid to. After what happened to Dr. Hall, there’s a part of me that doesn’t really want to know.
And who would even believe me if I tried to tell them? I’m sure you’re reading this now, Radha, going, “Right. A spaceship.” And you’re my best friend.
Oh, who even cares. It’s midnight. Happy sixteenth birthday to me.
Interview of Kyle Conrad
RESTRICTED ACCESS: EYES ONLY
Look, I know you guys need to talk to me about what happened last night. But can we postpone this till a little later? I got a girl waiting for me, and she’s upset. You know how that is. So, if you could undo these handcuffs, that’d be great.
Wait, what did KC say? No, no, that’s not how it went down at all. Look, I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about my sister. I mean, she’s crazy, but, she’s crazy in a good way, you know?
Take this mole thing. Whenever anyone asks me about mine, I just say it’s part of a gang tattoo that never got completed because another gang interrupted while I was getting it done and everyone in both gangs got shot to death in a rain of chaotic gunfire … everyone but me, because I ducked in time. I’m the lone gang survivor. Sweet, right? Girls totally believe it.
But then my sister goes and ruins it by posting the truth about it on her blog. She never even considers what would happen if anyone (besides her best friend) ever read the stupid thing.
Which is exactly what happened to me last night, driving home from the lake. I get this text from my girlfriend, Amber: “You like boobs? Fine. Go look at Duncan’s mom’s. You’re never looking at mine again.”
I didn’t even know what she was talking about until I started looking at my other texts. Everyone had read KC’s blog, it turns out. Because Amber has a Google Alert on her name and the minute KC posted, Amber read her entry and went nuts. Amber wouldn’t listen when I called and tried to tell her that I only looked at Duncan’s mom’s boobs that one time.
KC posting that thing on her blog is classic KC. She’s book smart—she gets great grades, and she’s read every book in our school library, even the ones that aren’t by James Patterson—but she’s not what you’d call street smart, like me. There’s a difference. KC doesn’t always think ahead. She saw that spaceship, and she wanted to go inside it. She didn’t think about what that spaceman might do to us. She blogged about me and the binoculars, but she didn’t think about how mad that might make Duncan.
But Duncan’s grabbing that baseball bat and showing up on our lawn to kill me as I pulled in the driveway on the way back from the lake? See now, that was overkill, in my opinion. Duncan’s the single reason we won the championship last year, and why we’re headed for another one this year, too. He’s in my same grade, but because his birthday is in August and his mom held him back from starting kindergarten a year because she was worried he’d be the smallest kid in class, he’s huge. I mean, he went from being the smallest kid in school to being the hugest guy in the county, practically.
So having a guy that big standing in your yard, holding a baseball bat—even if he’s your best friend—in the middle of the night, that’s pretty intimidating.
Which is why I texted KC to get downstairs and distract him somehow, and I didn’t get out of the car (that I know technically I’m not allowed to drive without an adult accompanying me in the vehicle but it was like one in the morning. So, am I going to get busted for driving without a license, too? No? Cool, thanks).
Anyway, I was like, “Duncan, it was only one time.”
Except of course it doesn’t matter how many times you check out a guy’s mom in her bikini with binoculars. Once is all it takes to get a guy really, really mad.
So it was a good thing I’m so street smart and didn’t get out of the car. Because Duncan wasn’t ready to listen, you know? He wouldn’t even let me talk. He just raised up that bat and was like, “Get ready to die, Conrad,” and started to swing.
&nb
sp; I was sure the next thing I was going to feel was shards of Mom’s windshield and the Duncan’s Louisville Exogrip embedded in my head. Though mainly I was worried about Mom’s windshield, because then she’d totally know I’d taken her car out for some unsupervised driving.
Instead, I heard KC going, “Put the bat down, Duncan. Violence never solves anything.”
Honestly, I didn’t think things could get any scarier than Duncan Mulroney swinging at me.
But then I saw KC standing in the front yard wearing this teeny-tiny nightgown, and Duncan staring at her with his mouth hanging open, and I realized they could get scarier than that.
Because when I’d told her to distract Duncan, I’d meant with Mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies or something, not her body, which frankly I never even knew KC had, because all she ever wears are cargo pants and flannel shirts from Old Navy.
I was all, “KC, what’s the matter with you? Go back inside and put on a robe.”
And she was all, “You can’t tell me what to do. Get back in the car, you idiot.”
Which is when I realized I’d gotten out of the car, just like—well, what she said. An idiot.
And that I was standing there, totally defenseless, in front of Duncan, who still had his bat, and was totally mad at me for creeping on his mom (just that one time, though).
Only it was okay, because it was like I didn’t even exist to Duncan anymore.
“Hey, Kaleigh,” Duncan was saying, in this super concerned voice I’d only ever heard him use before with dogs and his grandma. “Kyle’s right. You should put on a robe. It’s kind of cold out.”
KC looked at him like he was a crazy person and was all, “Gee, thanks, Dad. Why don’t you go put on a robe?”
I totally understood where she was coming from, because first of all, he’d called her Kaleigh. No one calls KC Kaleigh and gets away with it.
