Untaken (2 page)

Gracie

he only thing on TV was the news, and the only thing on the news was the invasion.

Who needs the news
, I thought to myself as I padded through the house,
when you can walk right out the back door and see it for yourself?

The wood boards of the porch were hot beneath my bare feet, and it took my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the sun’s glare. Sure enough, when I squinted up at the blue summer sky, all those big, silver ships still hung there, like clouds that never moved. The sun reflected off the metal, causing a shimmer that was too bright to look at for long—not that I wanted to. When I rubbed my eyes, the shapes of the craft still floated within the blackness inside my head, like they’d invaded my own mind the same way they’d invaded the skies.

Even though it was another blistering day, goose bumps covered my skin, and I rubbed my arms as my gaze drifted back to the more reassuring sight of the orderly wooden houses and lawns of my neighborhood.

No one had seen the ships coming; they just showed up one day. At first, no one went to work. They all wanted to stay home to see what would happen, even though the TV guys said we had to carry on as normal. People rushed to the grocery store and bought up all the milk and the bread. “Just like when there’s a winter storm,” dad had grumbled. “They planning on fixing our alien overlords a PB&J?”

In our neighborhood, all the houses have these big porches, but people rarely sat on them. Why have a big porch if you’re not going to sit outside? That’s what I always thought. Our own porch had a rocker made of scratchy wicker, and a little table beside it, just big enough for a can of soda and my tablet, and that was where I planned to spend today.

The familiar clatter of Gilda loading the dishwasher rang out from the kitchen, so I scooted down an inch so she wouldn’t see the top of my head over the back of the chair.

Last week, I’d pulled a patio chair out onto the lawn to try and get a tan while I read, but I’d fallen asleep in the chair and woke up burned red like a clam shack special, and the goofy wicker pattern of the chair back pressed into my face.

Mom had gone crazy. “Do you want to get skin cancer?” she’d yelled at me. “Not to mention ruin your complexion. You only get one face, you know. Why do your father and I work ourselves ragged looking after you kids when you never take the least bit of care of yourselves?”

I knew that if Gilda saw me she’d tell me to come inside. She was even more scared of mom yelling than I was. I guess that’s fair. It’s not like Mom could fire her kid, but Gilda didn’t have that security.

Safe under the porch’s shade, I rocked myself slowly to and fro, picking at one of the peeling spots on my arm, the dead skin coming off like tissue paper on the world’s worst birthday gift.

The chair had been painted white and I liked to pick the paint off that, too. On days I sat outside on the deck, paint chips would litter the floor in a circle around where I sat: my own private summer snow storm. I used my foot to sweep the latest flurry off into the begonias, along with the skin, so Mom wouldn’t see the mess when she came home.

It was bad enough I was risking death by instant skin cancer going outside again when she’d said I had to stay indoors, but she’d be doubly mad if she saw I’d plucked a new bare spot on the chair—which was a valuable antique, according to her—and
triply
mad if she guessed I’d spent all day online again.

She’d seen some TV program about “the dangers of the internet” a couple of months back, and ever since then, she’d keep coming over to see what I was doing every time I opened my tablet.

I could just imagine her now. “You waste an awful lot of time on that computer, Gracie. A girl your age should be out making friends. I think I’ll have a word with Ashley Ellis’s mother, see if we can get you on the summer swim team with her.”

I basically hated Ashley Ellis, and had no interest in busting a lung swimming laps at the sport center all summer, but she was the sort of kid my mum approved of. Good grades, polite, popular… no “after school special” internet addiction for her.

Mom didn’t need to worry anyway. I wasn’t planning to hack into the Pentagon: just liked to play games and chat with other nerds like me. I knew Mom wanted me to go out and spend time with the kids from my school—the kids from the nice families, at least—but they wanted nothing to do with me. I couldn’t figure out what it was I’d done wrong, and I tried not to let it bother me that much, but it does get to a person. When groups of girls who’d been to my sleepover parties and trips to the Cape since I was five years old suddenly formed into giggling, whispering huddles when I walked by, well… I guessed all the girls in my class were starting to get crazy over boys and parties and stuff that I wasn’t interested in.

When we were little, it didn’t matter if I was a brain in class, and had frizzy mouse-colored hair and didn’t know which bands were cool, but now that we were getting older—“becoming young ladies,” my mom would say—stuff like that was important.

Online, I had a whole bunch of people right there who I could talk with on any topic I could think of.

It was the internet that provided the best news about the Space Men, too. That’s where I’d first heard about there being a million more ships out in space, beyond the ones you could actually see in the sky.

You can believe the TV news didn’t tell us
that
.

People were freaked out enough as it was.

The first few weeks after the Space Men came,
everyone
was out on their porches, staring up into the sky and drinking iced-tea, with their TVs turned up loud so they didn’t miss anything, and all the cool indoor air leaking out the open front windows, so the air conditioning units roared and dribbled and blew fuses.

Today, I had the street to myself again. Somewhere far away, a dog barked, but it was so hot that even the birds and darting dragonflies had abandoned the huge sweeps of lawn and overflowing flower beds. Most of the grownups had gone back to work, and the other kids were at the beach or the pool or the kind of summer camp my mom was always trying to make me go to, which cost five hundred dollars a day and made a kid “well-rounded.” Whatever that meant.

My eyelids kept sliding shut. I was determined not to fall asleep and waste another afternoon having weird nightmares. It was bad enough when I was awake; the whole summer so far had seemed like a dream, what with the Space Men arriving and the endless, heavy heat laying over everything like a blanket.

I was just dropping off in spite of myself when a crew of landscapers, with bright bandanas tied round their heads to keep the sweat out of their eyes, pulled their truck up outside the Novaks and started hauling mowers out onto the road.

One of them—the youngest one—grinned at me and said something to the other two in Spanish. I hunched down behind my computer, feeling goofy, pretending like I was reading something important, when I hadn’t even turned it on yet. Even something as simple as turning on my tablet seemed hard in this syrupy heat.

The landscapers didn’t seem to care though.

They probably thought I was a snob, sitting here on my big porch while they dragged bags of lawn food about in the sun. I was fuzzy-headed with heat just looking at them.

The grass clippings stuck in their sweat and made me want to scratch in sympathy.

The younger guy was showing off, hefting two big sacks at a time onto his shoulders, and after a while, the older guys leaned on the truck, passing a cigarette back and forth, watching him.

Every now and then, they’d glance at the sky, but they didn’t look scared. They frowned at those ships the same way they frowned at the parched lawn: another annoying fact of life we just had to deal with.

The stiffness in my shoulders relaxed. If grownup guys like the landscapers thought it was safe to be out here, it surely was. Maybe those ships were just watching us the same way we were watching them. If they wanted to mess with us, wouldn’t they have done it by now?

The Space Men couldn’t or didn’t want to talk to us, although the Scientists tried and tried to make them. They’d just hung there in the sky all through April, May, and now June.

Dad had been working from home to start with, but yesterday he’d gone back to his office. That was another sign things were still okay. If Dad returned to work, surely nothing bad was happening.

“Gotta keep you kids in allowance money,” he’d said as mom watched him scoop the rat’s nest of papers off the kitchen table where he’d been working all summer. She hadn’t said a thing, just scrubbed at the halos of coffee mug rings that marked the edge of where dad’s encampment had been, with a tight little frown making her pretty face look sour. It was scary when Mom yelled, but even worse when she was silent.

She’d still been in a bad mood this morning, and I’d hidden out in my room until she’d left, Mikey whining again because she was making him walk to the T station instead of taking the car.

I kind of agreed with how mom felt. I didn’t see why Dad couldn’t keep working from home, either. I knew it didn’t make sense. I mean, if anything did happen, it would happen whether Dad was here or in Boston, but I just felt calmer knowing he was there at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and leaning his chair back on its two rear legs like we weren’t allowed to do.

“It’ll be the weekend before you know it,” he’d told me as I hugged him goodbye this morning. He put on this phony French accent that made me squirm with embarrassment and grin in spite of it. “End what does Madam want me to cook up for ‘er on Saturday?”

“ ‘Samedi’ is Saturday in French.” I rolled my eyes. Dad always cooked the Saturday meal.

“Madam is busting my balls,” he’d said, still in his phony accent.

“A roast,” I’d told him, hoping Mom hadn’t heard him swearing. I knew a roast would make the house hotter than it already was, but I didn’t care. Dad made the best roasts ever, with garlic stuffed right into the meat. When he cooked, he put on his favorite album, an oldie by this dude, David Bowie, and he’d dance around the room to it, with me standing on his feet. Mom would tell him to turn it down, but he’d always inch the dial back up again as soon as she left the room. She didn’t care much for what she called “modern music,” and in a way, I felt glad. Those Saturdays were our time, mine and Dad’s.

Mom worked at Tufts University, and during the summer vacation she often had free time to spend with us. She’d take my little brothers to row on the Charles, or even into town to play on the Common, or see Myrtle the turtle at the aquarium. Mikey was crazy about sea animals, and I bet he would have lived by that turtle tank if he could have, but I stayed home when she’d let me.

I knew Mom felt bad that I was spending so much time by myself lately, and that’s why she kept asking me out on little kid trips. “I used to have the best summers when I was your age,” she’d told me yesterday, while Mikey smeared up the glass on the jellyfish tanks at the aquarium. “The whole gang would go out to the beach and the movies and parties all summer long.” She’d said it with a puzzled look on her face, not understanding why any daughter of hers was a teenage loser, I guessed. “Maybe you’ll make friends next year. There might be some new kids starting school. You’re a bright, perfectly nice, young girl. You’ve no cause to be anti-social.”