She had her chin perched on my knee and was staring at me all longingly and doe-eyed, as if she had no intention of letting me out of her sight. Ever. “Not that fancy, I gotta say.” I reached out and ruffled the top of her head, her ears flopping in two different directions when I did. “But she’s not so bad.”
I glanced around uneasily, less comfortable with my next question. “Dad, what are you doing here? What is this place?”
My dad followed my gaze. “I know it’s probably not what you expected, but it’s my home. This is where I live now. Ever since . . . well, since . . .” He lowered his head, rubbing his whiskery chin again. He went to the small kitchen, not really a separate space in the cramped trailer, and he turned on one of the gas burners. He kept his back to me as he filled a kettle. “It’s not so bad,” he finally finished, using the same words I’d used about his dog before facing me once more.
I winced. Not so bad. I didn’t really agree. It was worse.
There were stacks of newspapers and magazines and bills and notebooks on every surface that wasn’t covered with dirty dishes or laundry or bags filled with who knew what. There wasn’t a TV that I could see, but there was a giant telescope standing in the center of what I assumed was supposed to be the living room but was really more of a glorified walkway, complete with a two-seater couch that was also littered with clothes and newspapers. I didn’t see the booze bottles or empty beer cans, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here somewhere.
My dad, who had once been the epitome of neatfreakness, brushed aside a place for my mug at his wobbly kitchen table, where I was sitting with Nancy’s head in my lap. “Really? ’Cause it looks that bad to me. I’m not staying here, just so you know.”
He shrugged again. “You can if you want, but I won’t make you. Besides, I’m not sure your mom would let you anyway.”
I bristled at his words, and almost decided to stay just because he’d said that. I wondered if that was why he’d said it, because he knew how much I hated to be told what I could, and couldn’t, do. “She doesn’t have any say in the matter. I’m an adult, remember?”
At the stove, my dad cleared his throat nervously, and the gesture made me hyperaware that he, that all of them—my mom, my dad, and the dentist—were keeping something from me.
“What? Why are you acting so weird? I mean, besides rooming with a dog and looking all”—I waved my hand at him, indicating his disheveled appearance—“hobo chic?”
He pulled the whistling kettle off the burner and filled my mug, handing me a tea bag. I’d never really liked tea, never really had it before, so it seemed strange that my dad was offering it to me. I unpeeled the worn paper wrapper and plopped the tea bag into the steaming water. Before I could ask if he had any sugar, he was handing me a bowl of clumpy-looking sugar crystals.
Everything in this place was sketchy, right down to the sugar.
He cleared his own spot at the table, shoving a stack of papers and news clippings out of his way so he could set his own tea down in front of him. “The reason I’m acting weirder than usual . . .” His emphasis on the er almost made me smile, like even he realized he wasn’t exactly the dad I’d known. He raised an eyebrow at me as he scooped several spoonfuls of the sugar into his mug and concentrated on stirring. “Is something the dentist—Dr. Dunn—noticed on your X-rays.”
I raised my eyebrows back at him. Got that, I relayed with my impatient look.
“So he showed us the ones he took the week before you disappeared, when you’d been in to see him for your checkup, and he compared them to the ones he took today.” He spoke slowly, deliberately. It was painful the way he drew out each syllable and emphasized words like before you disappeared and compared and today, as if there was some significance to them that I should understand. I didn’t, and I just wanted him to get to the point already.
And then he did. “They’re the same. Five years later, they’re exactly the same.”
I didn’t understand. He was looking at me as if this was a big deal, something monumental, but I didn’t know why. “O-kaaaay . . .”
“Five years,” he repeated, still doing that drawing-out thing that was driving me crazy. “Five years is a long time, Kyr. Five years and not a thing, not one single thing, has changed on your X-rays.”
I lifted my shoulders. What was I supposed to say to that?
“It’s not possible,” he finally said, making his big, bombshell statement.
I still didn’t get it. “What do you mean, ‘not possible’? Of course it’s possible. You just said that’s what he saw.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean, it’s not possible.” He said it differently now, the word possible, like he was saying something magical. “He explained it to your mom and me in the waiting room. In five years, things change, especially in a teenager. Teeth erode from wear, nerves shift, cavities change—you had a cavity, did you know that? You had a little bit of decay between two of your teeth that your mom and him had decided to wait and watch, to see if the next time you came in it had changed, grown, and would need to be filled. Well, guess what? Five years later, and it’s exactly the same as it was. Exactly. Not bigger, not smaller. Just . . . the same.”
I stopped scratching Nancy’s scruffy woolen head, and she yawned against my knees but stayed where she was.
“So . . . I’m just different than most people. . . .” I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince him or me, or if I was asking a question or making a statement.
My dad just shook his head and repeated, “Not possible.”
“But it is. . . .”
He scowled at me like I was the one who wasn’t making sense. And then he glanced toward the telescope, and I swore I finally understood what he was getting at.
I shot up from the table. Tea spilled, and Nancy yelped as her chin banged on the wooden chair I’d been sitting in. “Uh-uh. No way. That’s what’s not possible. Dad, please, stop it. You’re scaring me. You don’t really believe . . .” I couldn’t say it; it was so hard because it meant I was admitting just how crazy he was. “There are no such things as aliens.”
“Kyra . . .” He sounded so reasonable when he said my name that I almost didn’t notice the crazy mountain-man beard or the stains on his flannel shirt—the same shirt he’d been wearing when he’d come to see me that first day. “You don’t know what I do. You haven’t been living with this, gathering information for the past five years, trying to find out what happened to you. If you’d just stop to think about it, it makes perfect sense, really. And it explains what the dentist told us today, if you’ll only listen to me. Please, just . . . just try to have an open mind.” He stood now, too, and my chest constricted as his hand reached toward mine. His fingers, though . . . his touch when his fingers closed over mine was so comfortingly familiar that my legs nearly buckled. “For me,” he whispered as his eyes locked on mine.
It was that—those two words—that were my undoing. He was still in there, my dad. My number one fan. Begging to be heard. For me to take him seriously.
I didn’t know if I could, but I owed it to him—didn’t I?—to at least try.
“So you’re trying to say that I’m . . . I’m still sixteen?” Just saying the words sounded beyond insane, and I hated that I felt like I was indulging his delusions. “That I’ve been . . . what . . . stuck in some alien spacecraft for the past five years . . . and they just . . . put me back here? Why, Dad? Why would they do that? Why would they keep me all that time and then just . . . send me home?”
Something about my questions, or maybe about the fact that I wasn’t running the other way, set my dad in motion then. Like snap! and he was pulling me toward the back of the trailer. Nancy followed us, not nearly as leery as I was about my dad’s sanity. I wished I could be as trusting as her, maybe then my heart wouldn’t be trying to beat its way out of my chest at that very moment. Maybe my eyes wouldn’t be stinging with frustration and fear that my old man had cracked.
When he flipp
ed the switch inside the only bedroom, the one I’d assumed he slept in, I realized I’d assumed entirely wrong. There was no sleeping going on in that room.
It was full-on crazy-town in there. Like the X-Files had thrown up in there.
“Look, I don’t know why they do the things they do,” he was saying, but all I could think was What the holy hell is going on here? Was my dad part of some alien conspiracy cult? Because I was looking at four walls that were plastered in what could only be described as star charts and maps, and photos of blips in the night sky that I assumed were supposed to be alien spacecrafts, and drawings of beings with skinny bodies and oversize heads and eyes, and more photos and drawings; and across them all were pieces of string connecting one thing to another in a way that seemed to make no real sense at all. And in one far corner, just above a desk that was as cluttered as the walls, with books and more maps and a computer that had newspaper clippings taped to it, was a series of missing-person flyers and milk carton cutouts.
There was one, in the very center of them all, that I recognized all too well: my own.
They’d used my sophomore class picture, the one where I was wearing Cat’s silver sweater and was quasi-hung over because Cat had decided that we should try shots of tequila the night before, when her parents had gone to the symphony. After watching her throw back three of them, I’d finally let her convince me to try one, and I’d nearly thrown it up before finally gagging it down.
Yet somehow she’d managed to talk me into four more. Cat had always been like that—persuasive.
None of that showed in the black-and-white image that stared back at me now. “You have got to be kidding me,” I finally managed.
My dad cleared his throat, and I was glad he had the grace at least to be a little uncomfortable about bringing me to his cracked-out shrine to Martians. “Please, try to have an open mind about this.”
I shrugged a “Fine, go ahead” shrug. But inside I was thinking, He’d better make his point soon, because he is losing me.
Fast.
No one could ever accuse my dad of doing anything halfassed, and that included this alien conspiracy thing. He’d definitely done his homework on the matter. He’d taken his ideas—his theories—and run with them. And apparently he wasn’t alone. I’d sat in stunned silence while he’d pulled up website after website, showing me, basically trying to prove to me, that there were others out there in our situation. That was how he kept putting it, like calling it “our situation” somehow recruited me to his way of thinking.
There were blogs and support groups, and a lot of them posted under pseudonyms and code names.
My dad’s was Supernova16.
He told me about people who had flashbacks and some, like me, who were missing chunks of time . . . and still others who’d seen the flashes of light themselves.
He quizzed me then, asking me questions interrogation style. Things like “Have you had any weird dreams or flashbacks since you’ve been back?” and “What do you think of when I say the word spaceship?” or my personal favorite “When the dentist was polishing your teeth, did you have any ‘unusual’ reactions to his drill?”
“No,” I insisted to his last question, but I knew by the determined set of his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed that he wasn’t buying it. Like he thought I might be holding something back. And I felt sick, because the more he dug in, the more I realized just how warped his thinking really was.
He held up a picture of some kind of creature with a freakishly large head and huge, pupil-less eyes and a short, squat body. He held up one after another, like they were flash cards, flipping through them almost too fast for me to process. Some looked kind of like insects, with long grasshopperish arms, and others were gray skinned and sickly, with giant-brained heads. “Do any of these make you uncomfortable?”
I shook my head because uncomfortable definitely wasn’t the word that came to mind. All they really made me was sad about what the heck my dad had been going through all these years that had led him to this.
I let him keep going because I’d promised him I would, and then he asked me the weirdest question of all. “Did you see them, Kyr? Did you see any fireflies that night?”
That one made me falter. “Fireflies?” I asked, wondering where he was going with this line of questioning. Aside from TV or movies, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually seen a firefly in real life at all. I mean, I knew they were bugs and that they glowed, like little insects with lanterns in their butts. But that was as far as my knowledge went. “No. Why would I? What do fireflies have to do with anything? Why are you even asking me that? All I saw was . . . that light . . . and then you were screaming, and then . . .”
Shit . . . nothing else. There was nothing after that.
A tear trickled down my cheek, only this time it wasn’t like when I’d been crying with Austin, and my dad didn’t try to force his arms around me. Maybe he should have, but he didn’t. He just stared at me.
We were at the exact same standstill we had been when we’d started. He believed and I didn’t, and I was sad because of who he’d become, and sad because I almost wished I could confirm one of his whacked-out ideas—something—to make it seem a little less . . .
Sad.
I stood there, holding my breath, when his eyes found mine. After a long, long moment, he blinked hard, and a pained expression crossed his face, and I was sure I saw him there—my old dad, buried behind the beard and sad, puppy dog eyes. “You’re right,” he finally admitted with a shaky breath, and I felt my shoulders and breath loosening, because he was still there. There was still hope for him. For us.
And then he spoke again, and he ruined everything. “I knew it was too much,” he said. “I knew I should’ve waited.”
I felt my own heartbeat pulse in my ears. I felt it stop beating.
“Dad, no . . .” My voice was barely a whisper, but he heard me all the same. He hadn’t given up on it at all. And it was then I knew the truth; he wasn’t in there anymore, in that husk of a body, not my dad. This was some other dad. Some replacement dad.
I thought I’d stopped crying, but I tasted the tears when I opened my mouth to say, “Just take me home.”
* * *
The minute I walked through the front door, my mom started questioning me, but she was the absolute last person I wanted to confide in. She was half the problem. If she hadn’t pushed my dad away in the first place, there was no way he would’ve ended up in that crap-ass trailer overflowing with star charts and hidden booze bottles. But instead of facing her like a grown-up, I opted for the more mature choice of running to my fake bedroom and locking myself inside. And by locking I mean pushing my nightstand in front of the door.
She at least had the decency not to shove her way inside, which she totally could have since my nightstand weighed like ten pounds.
Instead, she stood out in the hallway and spoke to me through the door, which is how it felt like she’d been talking to me ever since I’d been back—through a barrier.
Listening to her attempts to coax me out was almost worse than listening to my dad tell me about his online forums and how everyone on there agreed with him, that I was certainly-surely-most definitely a victim of alien abduction. I pinched my eyes in an effort to suppress the headache my dad had given me with all his crazy talk and did my best to stop thinking about my father and what he’d become. I wondered if he’d ever, ever come back to me the way I’d come back to him.
I stayed quiet until, eventually, my mom gave up and went away.
When my new phone buzzed in my pocket, I regretted checking it almost the moment I did.
Can we please talk? the text from my dad read.
I’d never, in my entire life, ever avoided my dad before. I mean, yeah, maybe once or twice, when I didn’t want to go to practice or that one time when I got detention for texting in class. Or the times when I didn’t want to talk about which college I should go to.
But never like this. Never wh
en I was afraid of hurting his feelings because I was sure he’d lost his freaking mind.
Suddenly I had a glimpse into what my mom must’ve gone through, and I hated it. I hated her for giving up on him, and hated myself for being on the brink of doing the same thing.
There was a first time for everything, I thought, ignoring his message. I knew I couldn’t put him off forever, but I wasn’t yet ready for another round of Kyra Meets ET.
The worst part was, there were parts of his story that made sense. Maybe that would explain why I still had a bruise on my shin, or the reason I’d been wearing the same clothes when I woke up behind the Gas ’n’ Sip, or how my phone was still charged. Or maybe I was starting to sound as whacked out as he did.
Why on earth would aliens have a charger for a Motorola Razr?
Every explanation left me more confused. More lost.
And more alone.
When the text from Tyler came in, I almost didn’t notice it because I’d been ignoring messages from my dad for hours. But when I finally saw who it was, I let myself forget all about unchanged dental records and crazy dads and prying moms, and everything else that had turned my day to total crap.
After what had happened in front of his house yesterday, I’d worried he might not want to be my friend anymore. And Tyler was pretty much the only friend I had. I couldn’t bear the idea of losing him before we even got a chance to really know each other.
I left you something. To make up for this morning.
This morning? I wondered. What about this morning?
But I was already leaping from my bed to find out what he meant.
When I opened my window, I leaned all the way out, thinking that maybe he’d meant another chalk drawing on the road. But even as dusk fell I could see the road was the same as before.
And then I saw the small gift bag beneath my window.
Without going outside, I lowered myself far enough that my fingers brushed the top of it and snagged it before pulling myself back inside. When I closed the window, I sank to the floor and peeked into the bag.