A Different Kind (4 page)

CHAPTER

6

L
ogan’s words echoed through my head the rest of the day. I couldn’t help but connect them to my dreams.
I was asking if you believe in aliens
, he’d said. Aliens – how absurd was that? Like tiny green men from space came down, abducted me, and implanted something in my skull, as if my life were some SciFi movie. I laughed aloud at the thought, but a tiny part of me was saying,
They’re not green; they’re grey.

“Something funny, Miss Carlson?”

My head shot up. I’d been so lost in thought that I’d completely zoned out of Mr. Richardson’s lecture.

“No, sorry.”

He stared at me for another moment, then turned back to the board and continued his history lesson. I did my best to at least try to pay attention to the rest of my classes.

Cheer practice was short that day, which was good because my head hadn’t been into it. Thoughts swarmed within my skull like biblical locusts consuming any rational thought and leaving behind paranoia. I reminded myself that aliens do not exist. They do not exist, they do not make crop circles, and they certainly do not abduct people. God, was that really what I was thinking, that I’d been abducted?

“Payton?”

“What?” My head snapped to Jo and Hailey.

We’d just left the locker room and were walking to the parking lot. They stared at me with concerned expressions.

“What is up with you?” Hailey asked. “You’ve been zoned all day.”

I sighed. “Sorry, I’m just out of it I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Hailey said.

“Everything okay?” Jo asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine, really.”

Jo didn’t seem convinced, but after a moment she let it go, and I was sucked into a conversation with Hailey. She distracted me with gossip for a little while, but my thoughts about aliens still remained.

By the time I fell asleep that night, I wondered if maybe I had been abducted by aliens. Had they ripped me from my bedroom window and taken me to their spaceship? Had Logan seen it all from his bedroom window? Was that why he stared at me like I was some science project every time I walked by, or did I just have a bad dream and a neighbor with a crush that made me uncomfortable?

I tried to convince myself that it was the latter as I pulled the blankets to my chin, but when the dreams returned again that night, it was hard not to think that aliens really did exist.

T
he next day I wasted no time finding Logan. I waited outside our English room until I spotted him walking down the hall.  When he neared I stepped in his way, forcing him to stop.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

Logan shook his head and let out a short laugh. “I thought I was a freak and you didn’t want to talk to me?” He tried to walk past me, but I blocked him again.

“That was yesterday. Today, I want to know why you asked me about aliens.”

Logan’s face tightened; he narrowed his eyes. I thought he was going to tell me to screw off.

Instead he said, “If you want to know then meet me at my house after school.”

Logan started to walk away as I thought over his request. “Wait,” I said. He stopped, turning back to me. “I can’t. I have practice.”

He shrugged. “Then come after practice.”

The thought that I’d been abducted by aliens was absurd. The thought that Logan could do anything to help me was even more absurd. But as much as I tried I couldn’t shake those thoughts; they stayed with me through practice and along my drive home. They stayed with me as I threw my school bag onto the living room sofa and walked out the front door.

I made my way across the street, looking in both directions for anyone who might gossip about me going over to the Reeds’. There was no one around. I did notice the same black sedan I’d seen days earlier. This time it was parked farther down the street.
How odd.

I scanned the street once more before knocking on the door. The seconds that ticked by while I waited seemed endlessly long. Finally, the door swung inward. Logan stood inside. He gestured for me to come in and I followed him, shutting the door behind me.

“This way,” Logan said as we rounded a corner and came to a staircase. I followed him upstairs.

We walked down the hall and into Logan’s bedroom. He had a large room with wood paneled walls and a full bed. He strolled across the room and sat at his desk while I hovered by the door. My arms crossed, and my eyes scanned the space around me. Posters, all with some kind of science or outer space theme, covered the walls and ceiling.

“So, what are you, some conspiracy theorist obsessed with
The X-files
or something?” I tilted my head back to look at a circular star chart tacked to the ceiling.

“Not exactly.” Logan laughed.

“Right, so how are you supposed to help me again?”

“I never said I could help you.”

I let out a loud huff. “Well, you do know something, right? Because if this is all just a waste of time….”

“Jesus, you are so….”

“So…what?”

He sighed. “Do you always talk to people like that?”

I crossed my arms. “Like what?”

He rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “Guess that’s a yes then.”

“All I want to know is….” Images of my dream, my memory – whatever it was – sped through my mind. I had to close my eyes and take a breath before I could speak next. “Why did you ask me about aliens?”

Something about Logan’s features softened, and he leaned forward in his chair, causing its seat to squeak. “You remember some of it, don’t you?”

I squeezed my arms tighter across my chest.

“Been dreaming about bright lights, dark eyes, that kind of thing?”

My eyes narrowed, and my stomach rolled. “How do you know that?” I snapped.

 “Any scars you don’t know how you got? Or been having weird headaches?”

My eyes widened and I bit my lip. I was on the verge of tears, but I wasn’t going to let myself cry. I uncrossed my arms and sat across from Logan at the edge of his bed. My dreams suddenly felt incredibly real. I didn’t care how he knew what he was about to tell me. I needed answers.

“What happened to me? I feel like I’m going crazy.”

Logan shrugged. “That’s usually a symptom too.”

“A symptom of what?” I yelled.

“Being abducted.”

A brittle burst of a laugh escaped my lips. He had to be joking. It sounded ridiculous, but his face was serious. He wasn’t kidding. Dread filled me, turning my insides to Jell-O.

“Aliens don’t exist,” I said, my voice weaker than I intended.

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here.”

I bit my lip but refused to admit it out loud. Saying it would make it real. Brightness flashed behind my eyes again. Images of black eyes and grey creatures in a halo of light flooded my mind. I remembered that weightless feeling and felt sick. Suddenly my whole body was shaking. Then I felt a cool touch on my arm. I jerked away and swung out.

“Whoa, hey. It’s just me,” Logan said.

I blinked, forcing the memories away, and realized Logan was now standing before me.

“You kind of zoned out for a minute. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I snapped. I took a few breaths to regain some composure. “So what? Some creatures from outer space sucked me through my bedroom window with their freaky floating light beam and took me up to their spaceship?”

Logan sat back down in his desk chair. “Pretty much, yeah.”

I shook my head. “How do you know any of this?”

“We are neighbors; I can see your bedroom window from mine. Which I’m sure you know because you always keep the blinds drawn.”

Abruptly I stood. My fingers coiled at my side. “You saw those things take me, and you just watched.”

Logan’s brow knitted together. “I’m not sure what exactly you wanted
me
to do?”

I let out a huff of breath and paced the room. I needed to move, needed space. Logan was right; there wasn’t anything he could have done. I just felt as if I’d been taken advantage of, and I was angry no one had tried to stop it. I was angry I couldn’t stop it. After I’d released some energy, I stopped pacing and turned back to Logan.

“Why? What did they do….” I gulped. “What do they do to people?” I said unable to ask,
What did they do to me?

All color drained from Logan’s face. I think he saw the fear in my eyes because he looked away. He didn’t say anything for a while. His silence scared me. Feeling woozy, I sat back down on the edge of the bed.

“Different things,” he said in a low voice.

For a moment when I looked at him, light reflected off his glasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes. When he sat back, moving out of the light, he had this faraway expression. Logan shook his head, snapping out of his daze.

“Most likely they just tagged you,” he said.

“Tagged?”

“Yeah, like how we tag and track animals to study their migration patterns. Been having any headaches?”

I nodded, but my mind was barely keeping up. This was too much to take in at once.

Logan looked at me thoughtfully. “Do you have any…other symptoms?”

“Like what?”

Logan shrugged. Somehow I felt his question had been more important than he let on. He stood up.

“Mind if I….” he pointed to my ear, and though I was hesitant, I pulled my hair back. A chilly finger ran over the skin behind my ear, and Logan’s hot breath made me twitch. “Yeah, they bugged you,” he said, then sat back down.

My eyes were wide. “What?” I realized then that’s why I’d been feeling shocks behind my ear.

“It transmits signals about the places we go, hormone levels, stuff like that, so they can study us.”

“Well, I want it out.”

Logan laughed. “That thing’s buried deep in your brain; it’s not coming out.”

Feeling uneasy, I rubbed the skin behind my ear.

“Look, you’re creeped out; I get it, but be grateful. Taggings are non-invasive for the most part.”

“Right, except the part where they stuck something in my brain that’s now giving me headaches and shocking me.”

“They could have done a lot worse, trust me…and those shocks should go away. The device will tune itself to your body, but it takes time…eventually it will be like it never happened.”

I ran my hands through my hair and sighed. Part of me still couldn’t believe this was real, but somehow I knew it was. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about any of this. These memories terrified me, but Logan was suggesting I go on with my life like normal. I wasn’t sure I could do that.

“You really think it’ll be like it never happened?” I asked.

He nodded, and I took a deep breath.

I didn’t want to think about aliens. I didn’t want to be afraid. I wanted to put this all behind me. It was my senior year. I should have been focusing on cheerleading, and Ian, and the Homecoming dance – not aliens. If there wasn’t anything else I could do about it, what good did being upset do? I took a breath and decided that was exactly what I would do. I would put it behind me – still, there was one question that Logan hadn’t answered.

“How do you know this stuff anyway?”

Logan shrugged but didn’t answer. For some reason his silence sent an icy jolt down my spine.
Is he hiding something? Why won’t he tell me?

“Right, conspiracy theories and X-files, gotcha,” I said, but the way he had talked about aliens sounded like his knowledge came from somewhere other than some ‘90s sci-fi series.

He seemed like he knew what he was talking about, but if he had firsthand experience with these things he wasn’t talking, and honestly I didn’t want to ask.