The Dark Side of Nowhere (8 page)

I glanced down at myself, to realized that I was an unqualified mess. I was still wearing the same pants and wrinkled shirt from the day before, and my tangled hair must have looked like it was harboring a fugitive tornado.

I sighed, too tired to feel the appropriate level of embarrassment. “I'm not really this gross,” I explained. “There have just been some problems at home. My head was somewhere else, I guess.”

She took off her baseball cap and slipped it on my head. “Here,” she said tenderly. “You need it more than I do.” Then she tossed me a smile and headed off to class.

It took me only an instant to realize what she had done. Most of the guys on teams, they give their girlfriends their caps or jerseys or whatever—but I wasn't on a sports team, which meant I didn't have anything to give to Paula. So she had given her cap to me, and she'd done it in a way that was easy and didn't make either of us feel self-conscious about it. I didn't know if
there were any other guys in school who dared to wear their girlfriend's accessories, but I, for one, was pretty pleased to have this particular Billington Bullet's cap on my head.

“Paula,” I called to her before she went into her classroom. I wanted to tell her the whole thing. Everything I knew about myself. I wanted to share my amazement with her, and somehow make her a part of this, too. But with all the nerve I'd developed lately, I didn't have the nerve to tell her.

“Thanks, Paula,” I said. “You're great.”

O
n my way home, I spotted Wesley in Banzai Burger, sitting alone, scarfing a Triple-Patty Deluxe. That was the way Wes dealt with problems—he ate them alive, and for a guy so skinny, he could sure put it away. I went in and sat down next to him.

“You're gonna blimp out if you keep eating like that,” I said, pointing at the ketchup-oozing burger clamped between his fingers. There were two empty wrappers already on the table.

“My parents always said I got a black hole in my stomach. Now I figure, they might have been telling the truth.” He took a healthy bite, almost getting one of his fingers. He glanced up, clearly noticing Paula's cap on my head, but didn't say anything about it.

“How'd your parents tell you?” I asked him.

“We played twenty questions,” he answered, then took another bite of his burger and spoke through a mouthful of food. “Y'know, Ralphy Sherman always said there were aliens in town.”

I smirked. “Yeah, and Ralphy Sherman also says he was Elvis in a previous life. This time I think it was just a lucky guess.”

Wesley swallowed such a huge bite that I could see his throat bulge, and then he forced up a shrug. “So, we're alien—so? What's the big deal?”

But it
was
a big deal. You could tell by the way he inhaled the rest of that hamburger. It got me thinking about that black-hole theory, too.

“Wes,” I said, “this is a
good
thing.”

He wiped the ketchup from his face and examined me, trying to see how sure I was. “You think so?”

“Of course it is. We've got something that no one else has. We're special. We're
better
.”

Wes slurped his soda. “You know, your dad's in charge,” he said. “My parents say he walked right into the church and took over. Grant just stepped down.”

I was thrilled to hear it but tried not to overstate my enthusiasm. “So was Grant mad?”

Wesley shrugged. “He got put in charge of us, which is what he wanted, so I guess he's okay with it.” He
pushed his fourth burger at me. “Take it—I'll puke if I have another one.”

Wesley watched me eat for a few moments and then said, “The new weeklies sure won't be any fun.”

I turned to him, wondering what he could possibly be talking about.

“What weeklies? Don't you mean monthlies?”

“Didn't you hear? Your father okayed it this morning.”

I put down the burger. “I've been at school. Enlighten me.”

Wesley looked around, to make sure no one else was eavesdropping, as if anyone would believe what they heard anyway. Then he leaned across the table and spoke in a strained whisper. “The shots we've been getting keep us looking like we do,” he said, “but they weren't designed to be used on teenagers, on account of our bodies are changing and stuff. Anyway, that's why Ethan died. He kind of got allergic to being human.”

It was the first hint I had gotten of what really happened to Ethan, but I didn't want Wes to know it hit me that hard. I swallowed, then pulled away Wes's Coke and took a big gulp, to keep down what I had just eaten.

“So?”

“So,” said Wes, “they want to make sure it doesn't happen to us. They've changed the formula and broken
it into four doses. Now we have to get treatments once a week instead of once a month.”

I thought about it. “If my father said it was the right thing to do, then it probably is,” I announced to Wes. Getting poked in the arm on a regular basis was not my idea of fun, but there were worse things. “I mean, this whole thing that's happened to us—when you think about it, it's kind of like winning the lottery. That's got to be worth a few extra trips to Doc Fuller's.”

Wesley grinned slightly. “You got this thing figured out pretty good, don't you? I wish I could be like you.”

I shrugged. “You are like me,” I reminded him. Whatever that meant.

E
xplosive genetic dischelation. That's what happened to Ethan. It was a fancy way of saying that in addition to generating body odor and pubic hair, his adolescent body suddenly rejected his human genes. It was messy; it was painful—it was a hormonal thing. At least that's how my father explained it, again in that casual fishing-trip voice, as if we were talking about scaling trout. I realized that he was in his own state of shock and that it might last a good long time. Perhaps he had to live in shock to get through this.

It was dusk when Dad got home that night. He found me out in the garage alone, running my fingers
along the half-finished cabinets in there. I had been there for ten minutes or so, feeling where the wood was rough and where it was smooth. Finding all the edges that were incomplete. When Dad opened the door, catching me, I turned red, as if I'd been caught doing something wrong.

“I thought you'd be off with Grant,” he said.

I shrugged. “I thought you didn't like Grant.”

He shook his head. “No room for that sort of thing anymore. Grant volunteered to teach you kids. To train you. He'll do a good job, so I gave him my blessing.”

He stepped deeper into the garage and rubbed his own hands across his smooth, well-crafted furniture, then looked at his tool chest for a few moments. Then he slowly lowered the lid, as if he were closing a casket.

“I suppose it was time for all of us to stop playing,” he said. Funny, because I always thought of what he did as work. I thought about the invasion and wondered who'd need hand-crafted furniture anymore once ships began dropping from the sky. The thought was so absurd, it made me laugh out loud.

Dad took a good look at me, as though he were looking for cracks.

“Where'd you get the cap?” he asked, and it occurred to me that I hadn't told him about Paula. Not that I would have told him under normal circumstances, but now it seemed I had more reasons to keep it to myself.

“I robbed the Little League coach at gunpoint,” I told him with a shrug.

To which he responded, “Didn't I tell you to give that gun to your mother?”

We both grinned at each other's twisted sense of humor. I guess it relieved the tension enough for him not to care where I really got it.

We went to the kitchen and cooked up some frozen dinners—which had always been a criminal offense in Mom's book. Mom, however, had apparently changed her tune, because the only sign that she had even been home was a note on the table and a freezer full of Hearty-Man turkey and Salisbury steak.

“She's got a lot of work ahead of her,” said Dad as we ate. I had already eaten one dinner but sat with him to eat another. “Since we don't know how long we have, she has to prepare a strategy for the arrival.”

“I never thought of Mom as being strategic,” I said.

Dad laughed. “She had to be a master of strategy to deal with you.”

I laughed as well, but there was something about the way he said that, that bothered me. After a few moments I realized what it was. He said it in the past tense. She
had
to be a master of strategy to deal with me. As if she wasn't going to be dealing with me anymore.

He explained to me all about Ethan's unpleasant
end as he scooped up peas and stuffing—it's amazing the things you can talk about while eating. Then, when the meal was done, he looked up from his empty plastic tray. “Are you okay with all of this, son?” he asked. It was kind of a lame thing to ask, considering. I mean, if I wasn't okay with it, what difference would it have made?

“Are you kidding?” I told him. “It's an adventure; it's great.”

He smiled. “Grant was right,” he said. “You're going to do very well for yourself.”

He left a few minutes later to return to his new duties as a Fearless Leader. I didn't see him or Mom again for days.

“A
strong, solid move.”

“Thanks. My dad and I used to play a lot.”

On the third day of my new life, Grant and I played chess in the little abandoned diner in Old Town. Around us were the other members of our little after-school club. The place had been filthy when we arrived, but Grant had set us to the task of cleaning up what we could. Twenty years of grime comes clean pretty quick when more than two dozen kids are working at it. At the time, I had thought we came to this place as a matter of convenience. We had been doing drills behind the barn with our training gloves, which was now a daily activity, when
dark clouds began looming over the hills. Before the storm let loose, Grant had brought us here. By now I should have known that nothing he did was random.

“You've been anticipating my moves,” said Grant, pensively stroking his beard. “How intuitive of you.”

That one caught me by surprise. No one had ever accused me of having intuition. It distracted me enough to make a lousy move.

“I'm not intuitive, just observant,” I told him.

“Even better,” he said. “Being observant means knowing
why
your intuition tells you something.” Then he leaped his knight over a row of pawns and captured my king's rook. “Of course, nobody's perfect,” he added.

With the diner clean, the other kids busied themselves discussing form and style in the use of their gloves. A few tables over, Billy Chambers, who was a half-decent artist, drew pencil renderings of what we might really look like, but most of his sketches had lobster claws and fangs that were vicious enough to make the younger kids grow pale in mortal terror. So now he was depicting us as Smurfs, which wasn't too thrilling a thought, either. He kept bringing his drawings over to Grant, who would just look at them, chuckle, and say, “Keep trying,” although he would never suggest what Billy ought to do differently.

Over at the table next to us, Wesley was talking to a few fifth graders, the youngest kids in the group, trying
to explain genetic chelation to them, as if he had it all figured out.

“You know those little cocktail weenies?” Wesley was saying. “The ones with dough wrapped around them?”

“Pigs in a blanket,” responded one of his astute pupils.

“Yeah, pigs in a blanket. Well, imagine that every cell in our body is a pig in a blanket. Billions and billions of them, all wrapped up like that. Well, we gotta make sure those pigs don't pop out of their blankets all at once—”

“Or else we'll just be a bunch of weenies,” offered the astute pupil. Everyone but Wesley laughed.

“You're missing the point,” he said, and tried using chocolate-covered peanuts as an analogy.

Without thinking about it, I reached over and touched my arm, where I had received my new and improved treatment the afternoon before. All the kids had gotten them, right here in Old Town. Smilin' Doc Fuller made a house call to an abandoned house Grant had brought us to. While we waited, Grant had suggested we clean the place up, just as we cleaned the diner today. The new treatment didn't make me feel sick, but I did feel something. My fingers and toes tingled all night My back was itchy, and I could feel my neck hairs standing on end. I could feel those neck hairs now, but maybe that was just because I was here, face to face with Grant.

Lightning struck silently outside, and Grant captured my queen's knight. “You're losing focus on the game. What's on your mind?” Thunder pealed in the distance.

“You seem to know everything,” I told him. “You tell me.”

“It's not that I know everything,” he said. “I'm just observant. Like you.”

“So what do you observe about me?” I asked.

He fiddled with the knight he had taken as he looked at me and said, “You're good at a great many things, but you don't let on. You could get straight A's but you wouldn't give your teachers the satisfaction. The truth is, you have more brain power than you know what to do with.”

I looked down to the chessboard and made a half-decent move. “Do you always have to talk like you're looking into a crystal ball?” I asked him.

He laughed. Lightning struck again, far away. “I call it as I see it.” He waited a moment, as thunder rolled deep and ominous.

By now, Wesley had leaned over from the other table, mesmerized, as if Grant were talking about him. More of the attention of the room had focused on our game and our conversation. That fact was not lost on Grant.

“I'll tell you a secret,” he said to me, as the others leaned in closer to hear. “It's not just you—it's everyone
here. All their lives, they've been better and brighter than the other kids in Billington, even if they've never known it. That's your starting point, and you'll only grow once the ships arrive.”