The Dark Side of Nowhere (14 page)

Ethan dropped his brain out of light speed and looked at me. “I thought I was dead,” he told me. “I thought I was an angel. Pretty stupid, huh?”

I looked at him closely. He was still spectacular to behold, but the image didn't fill me with awe the way it had when I first saw him. After a while, having him around just became . . . normal. It's kind of amazing the things we let become commonplace.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? I was terrified! If I hadn't thought I was already dead, I would have died of a coronary. But my parents were there to clue me in, so after a while I was okay.”

“Do you . . . miss it?” I asked. “Do you miss the way you were?”

“I don't think about it,” he answered. “We can do that, you know. Make ourselves not think about things, or feel things that are . . . well . . .”

“Counterproductive?” I suggested.

“Yeah.”

He looked down at the pages before him, figuring I was
probably done, but I knew I still hadn't found what I really wanted to ask. I wasn't exactly the Great Communicator—in fact, when it came to putting thoughts and feelings into words, I was on par with Wesley. Still, I knew that if I beat around the bush long enough, I'd scare up the way to say it. It only took a minute or two until it finally came to me.

“But—you're still
you!
” I said. “You look different, but it's still you!”

He stared at me with his piercing eyes, as if I had no clue. “Yeah, so? Why shouldn't I be me?”

“Because it's
human
.”

He glared at me, taking it as an insult. “Not even close,” he said.

I could have pushed it, but I realize he'd already shut the thought out and bolted his mind behind it.

I looked down at Paula's cap, which I was fiddling with like rosary beads. Ethan noticed.

“I know what you're problem is,” he said. “You've still got curveballs on the brain.”

“Did your superior mind figure that one out?”

Ethan, I suppose, was the right person to be talking to when it came to girls. He'd been dating since the rest of us just whispered about girls behind their backs. Of course, Ethan was more known for his spectacular breakups than for actually going out with girls. Even here in the
compound, he was up to his old tricks. Now that he was alive again, Roxanne had tried to pick up their relationship where they had left off, but Ethan snipped
that
fuse real quick. It hit her particularly hard, since it was probably the first time she had ever tried to date a nonhuman. She cried all the way back to the barracks and then went out to melt holes in things. Billy Chambers, of course, swooped in like a vulture, and the rest was history.

Ethan regarded me for a few moments, then smiled slyly. A sly smile on that strange face seemed doubly diabolical.

“You know, we could probably make Paula look like
us
,” he said.

It caught me off guard. “Huh?”

“Sure we can—if they made us look human, I'll bet it works both ways. Get Doc Fuller to whip up a serum that wraps our DNA around hers, and
voilá
—problem solved.”

Problem solved? What Ethan was suggesting was probably possible, and yet I knew it was wrong. Even if, by some stroke of amazing luck, Paula consented to it, it would still be wrong. No, it wasn't the solution—it was just a clever way of hiding the problem.

“Whadaya say?” asked Ethan. “I could talk to Grant about it—he's got a soft spot for me. He says I remind him of his brother.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I told Ethan. If anything, hearing him suggest it made my decision easier to make.

“Then you've gotta dump her,” said Ethan, which was easy for him to say—he'd dumped Roxanne like she was a piece of junk mail on his doorstep, and it didn't disturb his microseconds of sleep in the least.

But Paula wasn't Roxanne. Roxanne had been fake even before she found out she really
was
fake. Paula, however, was brutally, painfully real. Saying good-bye to her, and all that went with her, was too difficult to manage.

“Could you teach me how?” I asked Ethan.

He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “What's to teach? You look into her eyes, tell her you like her as a friend, and it's
Sayonara, señorita
.”

I heaved a heavy sigh. This was perhaps the easiest of all the things that lay ahead of me. If I couldn't handle this, how could I handle anything? How could I lead Grant's brigade? Did they know what a sniveling weakling I was?

“Don't worry about it,” offered Ethan. “In two more months, you're going to look at her and find her totally repulsive. Believe me, I know.”

I
left to do the deed the next day.

It was late afternoon when I approached the compound gate. The gate was never locked, but there was
always someone on guard to keep track of all comings and goings. It was a job assigned to an adult, just in case some quick talking and diplomacy was needed to turn away an unwanted visitor.

Today's guard was Pastor Bob, who used to preach long-winded sermons on love, peace, and everlasting flames. I wondered what he did these days.

The week before, as we'd been setting fence posts in concrete together, I had asked him, “Do they have preachers where we come from?”

He had frowned in thought and answered, “Of a sort.”

Then I had asked him if he still believed the things he'd spent the last twenty years preaching. I don't think he liked the question.

“We make adjustments,” he had said, which would have been fine if he were a tailor, hemming my pants. I wondered how much of those beliefs had to be adjusted to make room for our new world order. I wondered if mine ever could—because in spite of my years dozing through sermons and Sunday school, I had developed some rudimentary moral compass, demagnetized though it might have been.

Now, as I approached Pastor Bob at the gate, he looked worried, as though I might once again step on his spiritual hemline. When I showed him my training
glove and told him that I was just going out for some target practice, his shoulders dropped in relief, and he was more than happy to pass me through.

As soon as the compound was out of view, I hid my glove beneath some bushes, slipped on Paula's cap, and headed toward her house to fulfill my mission of pain.

“Y
ou're back!” said Paula, greeting me at the door. I could tell how glad she was to see me, but there was a touch of discomfort in her voice. A hurt that she was trying to hide. “How's your aunt?” she asked.

“Oh, better,” I said, almost forgetting the lie I had told her. “I'm sorry I didn't call—I forgot my phone charger.”

“It's okay,” she said, though it really wasn't. “We said we wouldn't cling, right? You don't have to call me every five minutes.”

Her dog, Mookie, was growling and snarling like a hell-hound as I stepped into the house.

Mr. and Mrs. Quinn peered out of the living room. “Hello, Jason,” said Mrs. Quinn over the snarls. “You should have called—we would have had you over for dinner.”

“Next time,” I said, knowing full well there would be no next time.

The dog began to howl between snarls, and it finally
occurred to me that it no longer understood my scent.

“Stop that, Mookie!” said Mrs. Quinn.

Mr. Quinn came over and shook my hand in that father-of-the-girlfriend sort of way. “Jason, I've been meaning to ask you—is your family involved with that retreat they're building in the woods?”

I should have been ready for the question, because Paula had warned me about her father. He was an optometrist who dreamed of being a private eye. I realized I was about to be scrutinized beneath one of his finely ground lenses. “We've been away,” I said, dodging the question.

“Dad, I told you, it's just a summer camp, okay?” I saw it myself.” Paula grabbed her backpack and tried to shepherd me out of the door.

“I'm just curious,” said Mr. Quinn. He might have pushed harder, but Mookie let loose a barking conniption that distracted him long enough for Paula to drag me out.

“Wait a minute—where are we going?”

“It's bingo night,” she informed me as we headed toward the street.

“You play bingo?”

“No, but I babysit for people who do. I figured you'd rather walk with me than be interrogated by my dad.” And then she grinned. “Although the thought of leaving you there had crossed my mind.”

I grinned as well, but the smile fell away as I remember what I had come here to do. As we walked in the deepening twilight, I kept playing over and over in my head what I was going to say, how I was going to say it, and how I could keep from hating myself. All the while, she kept stealing glances at me, considering my face.

“What is it?” I asked, as if I didn't know.

“I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, but you look . . . different, somehow.”

It was now or never. I took her cap off my head, clutched it in my hands, and prepared to hand it back to her, with my sincerest apologies for being an asshole.

“It's your hair,” she said. “That's what's different. It looks sort of brighter . . . thicker. What did you do to it?”

“Not much . . . ,” I said.

She reached out and touched it. “It feels so soft. New shampoo?”

“Uh . . . special treatment.”

“I like it.”

This was unbearable. Without another thought, I launched into my planned speech. “Paula . . . y'see . . . while I was gone I—”

“While you were gone, something really weird happened,” she announced. “I've been dying to tell you about it.”

I stuttered for a moment in the wake of my false start. “Wh-what happened?” I asked.

“I was in the mall,” she began, “looking for clothes, when who do I see across the aisle but Ethan's parents. Turns out they're buying clothes too.”

“Yeah, so?”

“They're buying them in the Young Men's department.”

I swallowed hard and played dumb. “Yeah, so?”

“So,” said Paula, “I hear them talking. He wants to buy one pair of jeans, but she shakes her head and says, ‘They're too tight for Ethan.'” Paula looked at me with raised eyebrows. “So what do you think of that?”

I slipped my hands into my pockets and picked up the pace. I felt myself beginning to drop into a deep, dark pit. “I think they must have gone nuts,” I told her. “I mean if your kid died like that, wouldn't you?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn't go shopping for summer fashions.” She stopped and grabbed me by the arm. “Brace yourself, Jason—
I think Ethan might be alive!
”

“Don't be dumb,” I said. “I was at the funeral.”

“Did you check in the coffin?”

“Don't be sick!”

“All I'm saying is that if you didn't see him, then you can't be sure.”

She stopped at a picket fence and opened the gate.
“I'm gonna find out what's going on if it takes all summer.”

I followed her to the front door. “Maybe you don't want to.”

She looked at me and shook her head. “What are you afraid of?”

We stepped into a house that smelled of potpourri and Lemon Pledge. The living room was filled with antique furniture, and knickknacks arranged so perfectly they could have been glued in place. There was a foldout fence that blocked off the immaculate living room from the lethal hands of the toddler who had full run of the rest of the house.

“It's so nice of you to watch him for me, Priscilla,” said the old woman who answered the door. “He's with me for a week, don'cha know. Still, I need my bingo to keep me sane.” When she saw me come in behind Paula, she squinted at me dubiously and said, “Is this your brother?”

“A friend,” she responded, “and it's Paula.”

The woman nodded me a quick and scattered hello, then hurried off, muttering about her misplaced glasses.

The toddler looked up at me, said, “Ga-ga,” then threw a truck at my feet.

“You don't have to stay,” Paula said.

Still holding her cap in my hands, I said, “I won't stay
for long, but there's something we need to talk about—I mean
really
need to talk about.”

I guess my tone of voice finally got through to her. She shooed away the toddler, who continued to drop toys on me. “Something serious?”

I shrugged sadly. “Kind of.”

From the next room came the sound of a drawer slamming. “Priscilla, dear, could you help me find my glasses?”

Paula turned and shouted, “Just a minute, Mrs. Pohl.”

My brain did a violent and unexpected double take.

“Did you say . . .
Mrs. Pohl?
”

Paula steered herself for whatever blow I was about to deliver. “So what do you have to tell me?”

But breaking up with Paula had suddenly slipped far from my mind as I realized who this old woman must be.

There are some moments in your life when all the forces that shape and define your being come into perfect focus and suddenly everything about your life just falls into place.

This was not one of those moments.

“Excuse me,” I said, and made a beeline for the kitchen.

I
n the brightly lit kitchen, the elderly woman rummaged through cabinets and drawers, searching for glasses that she probably needed glasses to find. I had to ask her the question. Even though I knew it was like poking myself in the eye, just to see if it would hurt, I had to ask.

“Are you related to J.J. Pohl?”

She stopped in mid-rummage and turned her farsighted eyes to me. “J.J. was my son,” she said. “How do you know of him?”