A Different Kind (17 page)

We made it home without any serious incident. The loose change in my cup holder floated for some time, a sight that seriously freaked Jo out, but that was it.

I pulled into my driveway and parked. Jo and I sat there for a moment, the change still floating. Nickels, dimes, and a quarter twisted in the air. Jo’s eyes met mine and we got out of the car. I didn’t have to explain where I was going. Jo knew. Together we walked across the street to Logan’s. Just before I stepped onto his front step I noticed the same black sedan I’d been seeing lately parked on the side of the road. Again, I reminded myself that one of my neighbors probably got a new car. Still, something about that vehicle creeped me out. Maybe it was the tinted windows? What soccer mom drives around with tinted windows? Or maybe it was that it always seemed to be outside, regardless of the time of day, and it was never in front of any particular house. Whatever the reason, it gave me a bad feeling. But I had more important things to worry about.

The doorknocker rattled as we reached the front step. I rang the doorbell. The few minutes we waited for Logan to answer, I spent nervously tapping my fingers against the sides of my legs. The door swung open and I pushed my way inside before Logan even had a chance to say hello. Jo followed. Logan shut the door behind us.

“You okay?” he asked.

I spun around, but I didn’t have to answer.

Coins lifted from a small glass bowl in the entryway. They floated in the space between us. I watched Logan’s eyes widen through the frames of his glasses while pennies orbited around me.

“How do I make it stop?” I asked.

His lips parted, a speechless expression gracing his face. He shook his head. “When did this start?”

“Cheer practice,” Jo said. “Hailey made her mad and Payton practically twisted the earrings right out of her head. Then she knocked over this metal cart.”

“Did anyone know you did it?”

I rolled my eyes. “Telekinesis
isn’t real
; at least that’s what most people think. I can’t imagine anyone thinking I did it.” I watched a penny do a flip in the air. “But if stuff keeps going all zero gravity around me, people are going to figure it out eventually.”

“Right, well, you just…I don’t know, you just stop.”

“I tried that. It didn’t work.”

Logan sighed. “Okay, okay, let’s go sit down.”

Jo and I followed Logan into his living room, a trail of pennies floated behind me.

“All of this stuff is tied to your emotions,” he said, sitting down on the oversized tan couch. I sat down in an armchair across from him. “This started when you got mad at Hailey, right? You just have to relax.”

I sighed. “I’m not mad anymore though.”

“But you’re not relaxed.”

“No, I’m nervous as all hell, and freaking out.”

Logan’s lips thinned, and his eyebrows rose as if to say ”exactly my point.”

I sighed again, trying to calm down. I folded my hands in my lap and closed my eyes. I felt Logan’s hands cover mine. He gave me a comforting squeeze. I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. If Logan could control it, so could I.

I let the world fall away. My mind drifted. I thought about the Homecoming game and being at the top of a human pyramid. I remembered crossing my arms over my chest and taking a breath before letting myself fall. I could feel the whoosh of air around me as I dropped. I remembered those few seconds of weightlessness before my teammates caught me – those few seconds of freedom.

There was a pattering of clanks. When I opened my eyes the coins had fallen to the ground.

I smiled.

“There, see, you got it.” Logan smiled back.

“I don’t know about got it, but it’s better.”

His eyes never left my face. For a moment we stared at one another, and I felt this happy quiver run through me.

Jo cleared her throat. Logan and I both turned to see her sitting on the armrest of the couch. Logan let go of my hands.

“Okay,” she said. “So…is this going to keep happening? Cause that was kind of freaky.”

Logan looked at me. “No. If it starts to happen, just calm down and stop thinking about making things float.”

I nodded.

“What I don’t get,” Jo said, “is why aren’t there more reports of people doing stuff like that if the…
aliens
abduct people all the time?”

Logan shrugged. “As far as I know telekinesis is a power not everyone develops. Not sure why. I would guess the ones who do get it probably do make metal stuff move every now and then, but they don’t know they’re doing it so it stops. Payton saw Hailey’s earrings floating and knew she was doing it, and then being angry and nervous made her think about making other things move – so they did.”

“Kay, so just don’t think about it. That’s kind of the theme of my life right now. I can do that.” Even I could hear the bitter edge to my voice.

Logan cast me an apologetic look. “It’ll be okay.”

Somehow those few words did ease my anxiety.

“I called Nikki earlier,” Jo said. “It’s cool if we all meet up tomorrow. She sounded a little surprised when I said we wanted to see Frank, but I didn’t want to tell her much over the phone.”

Logan nodded.

“What about those pictures?” I asked. I didn’t want Frank to be our only hope. “Did you show them to your mom?”

Logan frowned. “Yeah, but she wouldn’t help me. Look, you have to understand, Payton, my mom likes you. She doesn’t want any of this to happen to you, but she’s more worried about me.  She’s afraid that when they…come back for you, that we’re going to be hanging out or something, or maybe I’ll try to stop them and get taken too. Actually,” Logan sighed, “she told me that I’m not supposed to see you anymore.”

My heart dropped like a stone plopping, unskipped, into a lake.

“Don’t worry. I don’t care what she says. I told you we’d figure something out and we will.”

T
hat night I couldn’t sleep. The same nightmare played on repeat in my mind. I was running through the forest. All the trees were on fire. I’d emerge from the woods to find myself in Logan’s backyard. I‘d run toward his house, but, before I could reach the back door, a bright light would appear. I’d find myself frozen in place. The light scaled the side of his house, illuminating the white rose bushes that climbed a trellis beneath Logan’s bedroom window. The light poured through his window, and within it Logan would emerge. Listlessly, he’d float through the light and into the dark sky. I’d scream.

Then I’d wake. When I’d finally calm down enough to fall back asleep the dream would start again. After the third time I sat up.

The metal-framed photo on my night stand of Jo, Hailey, and me hovered in the air. My cheerleading medals lifted away from where they hung on the wall. I took a deep breath, and they fell back into their rightful places.

Beside me Jo was hogging the covers and sound asleep. I got out of bed. My mind didn’t want to rest so I went downstairs into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. As I sat at the kitchen table, images of my dream flashed through my mind. As my nerves grew I could hear the silverware shaking in the drawers. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply; the rattling slowed but didn’t stop.

Across the room I saw the green flashing light of my cell phone. I’d plugged it in to charge while Jo and I had worked on homework in the kitchen. I thought about how Logan had calmed me down earlier. I thought about how his number was in my phone. The silverware continued to shake in the drawers. I got up and grabbed my phone. I called Logan with complete disregard to the late hour.

I think part of me just needed to hear his voice because as soon as he answered with a sleepy hello, the silverware stopped rattling.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just couldn’t sleep. I had a bad dream.”

Logan sighed. “About them?”

“Yeah.”

“I have them too sometimes. I was too young when we came here to really remember ever seeing them in person, but somehow they still end up in my nightmares. You wanna talk about your dream?”

I thought for a moment. “Not really, no.”

Logan was silent, but I pictured him nodding in understanding.

“What do you think about skydiving?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Skydiving, what do you think about it?”

“I don’t really, I guess,” I replied with a laugh. “Why?”

“Before I fell asleep I was watching this show on it. I’ve never been, but it looked fun.”

I smiled. “Logan, are you trying to distract me from my creepy nightmare with random conversation?”

“Is it working?”

I laughed again. “Yeah, I guess so…and I think I’d like skydiving.”

We were up for the next hour talking about all sorts of things. Logan told me he liked to draw, and I told him I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body. We talked about traveling too. Logan couldn’t wait to go to college and get out of the state. He really had gotten into Stanford, but he felt bad leaving his mom all alone, so he’d applied to a few schools in state as well. Our conversation was random, and it kept my mind off anything alien related for a little while. Eventually I made my way back up to my room and fell asleep with ease.

CHAPTER

21

F
rank’s bedroom was painted black. An
X-files
poster hung over his bed. On another wall a cork board hung, covered with sketches and notes that were slowly climbing onto the wall like a creeping vine. His sole window was covered with tinfoil, making his desk and ceiling lamps the only sources of light in the room, and a large metal filing cabinet towered beside his desk, covered in gold magnets.

Jo, Logan, and I followed Nikki inside.

Frank sat at his desk. He wore a Led Zeppelin tee, and some sort of alien related website was open on his laptop.

“Close the door, Nik,” Frank said.

Nervously I watched the redhead shut the sticker-covered white door.

Nikki and Jo sat down on the edge of Frank’s bed. Logan kicked a beanbag chair, then decided to stand. I hovered for a moment before finding a place beside Jo. Classes that day had flown by, and we’d skipped cheer practice to come here, but suddenly I felt maybe that wasn’t the best idea. I wanted Frank to be able to help me, but his knowledge of aliens teetered on crazy.

“I’m glad you came to talk to me before it’s too late.”

“Frank, don’t freak her out,” Nikki said.

I turned to her. “He’s not.”

Jo had filled Nikki in on why we were there. She’d told her I was abducted, but left out a lot of the details. She didn’t know about Logan or that we could bend metal with our minds. I figured it was probably safer that way – for everyone.

“Look, Payton, I’m a believer too, but…I mean, do you really think you were abducted?”

“Jeez, Nik,” Frank interrupted. “She’s been through a
traumatic
experience; don’t give her grief.”

“Alright, sorry,” Nikki said, holding her hands up in mock defense. “If you guys all believe it, then I do too.”

I could tell she was trying to be supportive, and I couldn’t blame her for having her doubts. I smiled and Frank nodded.

“When were you taken?” he asked, leaning forward in his rolling chair.

“The first time was over a month ago.”

“And the second?”

“Saturday night.”

Frank nodded again.

“Why do they abduct people?” Jo asked.

I remembered what Logan’s mom had said about the Greys’ sucking the life force out of people. The thought made me shiver. I’d never told Jo that part.

“They enslave them,” Frank said. He leaned back in his chair. “There are theories that billions of years ago their world was much like ours, but the stronger aliens enslaved the weaker ones. War broke out and they destroyed most of their own natural resources.

“My friend Mark thinks they unleashed chemical warfare on each other, which made them all sterile. It’s suspected that more than half their planet is a barren wasteland. Now they live together in a capital city where they use humans to make up for the resources they destroyed and slowly re-build their planet. They protect their fragile population and live forever by sucking out the souls of human beings. All the while they experiment on people to try to undo the damage that made them all unable to reproduce.”

Jo, Nikki, and I looked at Frank with wide eyes, but beside me Logan sighed and rolled his.

“Okay, look,” Logan said. “You know what’s going on, and you must know why we’re here.”

“Of course. You don’t want them to take your friend again because if they take her again she won’t come back.”

“Right, so we know they keep finding her because of the chip in her head; is there any way we can just disable it?”

“You could try one of these magnets.” Frank used both hands to pry one of the gold magnets off his filing cabinet. He tossed it to me. “I’ve heard they used to work for smaller implants, like the ones they put in your ears. Not sure if it’ll work on the ones they stick in your brain.”

I flipped the chunk of metal around in my hand. “What do I do with it?”

“Put it in a headband; tape it to your head. Just wear it over the spot for a few days.”

“And what if I don’t just have a chip in my ear, but in my brain?”

“You probably do if they’ve taken you twice. Only way I know to disable those for sure is to stick them in the microwave or hit them with a hammer. I don’t think either of those options is going to work for you though. If you don’t want to be transmitting signals back to the Greys, you have to have it removed…and then I’d nuke it
and
hit it with a hammer.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to remove one?” I asked with a nervous giggle. “Would you?”

Frank was silent for a moment. “I may know of a way. There’s a guy, but he doesn’t do anything for free.”

“What guy?” Logan asked.

“He works at New Liberty Medical Center. He could remove it.”

This hopeful, fluttering feeling rushed through me. “What does he charge?”

“A lot. But he’s also been known to make deals from time to time. You wouldn’t have anything from your encounter you could trade him, would you?”

“Like what?”

“He’s been gathering information on the Greys for a long time. Anything that would tell him more about them. Did you scratch one, get a tissue sample beneath your nails maybe, or if you got a picture of one of ‘em, or their ship?”

“How would I have gotten any of that while I was being sucked up in their freaky light beam…wait….”

I pulled out my cell phone and opened the short video I’d taken from inside the crashed ship. I glanced at Logan. He gave a short nod, then I handed it to Frank.

“Something like this?”

His eyes went wide as he took my phone. “This is real?”

“It’s from inside their ship.” Not the exact one that abducted me, but Frank didn’t need to know about the crashed ship in Moody’s Woods.

Frank smiled. He twirled around in his chair and began typing. A message screen popped up on his laptop screen. He started rooting around in one of the drawers of the filing cabinet. Then pulled out a black USB cord and plugged it into my phone.

“Hey, that’s kind of my personal information.”

Frank glanced at me. “Not going to go through your text messages or anything. But I
need
to save this vid so I can show it to my guy. I’ve got my comp set up with a secure line. It encrypts files as it sends them, and then you have to unencrypt them when you get them. Way safer than making phone calls. Too many people listen in on that shit.”

A moment later a black box popped up on his screen.

Frank smiled when he turned back to us. “He said he’d do it for free.”

“When?”

Frank spun around and typed. “Be at the hospital next Friday at two.”

“Next Friday!” I nearly leapt off the bed. “That’s a week away; these things could come back for me before then.”

“Hey now, this guy’s a real doctor. That’s a good thing, right, you don’t want some wack job prodding around in your brain, but that also means he has a real job. You gotta work around his hours. Especially if he’s doing this for free.”

“How can he do this if he’s a real doctor?” Logan asked. His eyes narrowed on Frank.

“All he wants is this video and to keep the chip. Research.”

“Right.” Logan didn’t look convinced.

“
I
s all that stuff Frank said about the aliens true?” Jo asked on the ride home.

In the rearview mirror I saw Logan roll his eyes. “Frank doesn’t really know anything; he just has a bunch of wild theories.”

“So they don’t…eat people’s souls.”

The reflection of Logan’s eyes flashed to me. He was silent for a long moment. “No,” he said, but his mother had already told me otherwise.

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“Wait until next Friday,” Logan said. “I’ll try looking some stuff up online, but people put up all kinds of bullshit on the internet, especially when it comes to this stuff. Just…don’t worry; you’ll be safe until then.”

Jo twisted in her seat to face Logan. “What about that magnet thing he gave Payton?”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Logan shrug. “Strong enough magnets can mess with some radio signals. There might be something to it. Seriously though, between now and Friday just relax.”

I nodded, but I also wondered if the reason Logan was telling me to chill was because there wasn’t anything to worry about, or because he didn’t want me to waste the last few days I had left on earth being freaked out. Regardless of his reason, I felt this sudden need to make the next week of my life memorable.

We pulled into my driveway. The garage door was open and Mom’s BMW was parked with her trunk open. A large pumpkin sat inside and black fabric draped over her bumper.

“Right, Halloween party,” I said.

“You’re throwing a party?” Logan asked.

“No, her mom is,” Jo said. “We’re both invited.” She turned to me. “And I’m supposed to help you carve pumpkins tonight. Your mom mentioned it this morning. You were in the shower; I forgot to tell you.”

My eyebrows rose. “She’s actually carving pumpkins?”

Jo shrugged. “I can’t stay though. My dad doesn’t get off work for another hour, and my mom’s home. I think I’m going to talk to her. Maybe it’ll be easier if it’s just her and me, you know.”

My heart ached for Jo. I silently prayed that things with her parents would smooth over.

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll go fine. Call me later, kay?”

“I will.”

The three of us exited my car and Jo walked across the street, casting me a smile over her shoulder. Once she disappeared from sight I turned to Logan and realized I didn’t want my time with him to end.

“So, I kind of hate pumpkin guts. Wanna help?”

Logan smiled. “Sure.”

That made me feel warm inside. My heart raced as we walked toward the door. However, we only made it a few steps. I heard the car pull up and looked over my shoulder. Logan’s mom must have just gotten off work. She pulled her silver sedan behind my Toyota, put it in park, and left the motor running as she got out.

“Logan,” was all she said as she stood in my driveway. She crossed her arms, creating creases in her purple scrubs.

Logan sighed, then cast me an apologetic look. “Sorry, I’ll see you tomorrow.” With hunched shoulders he walked away and got in his mom’s car.

I guessed she was serious about not wanting Logan to hang out with me. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally. Mrs. Reed always seemed to like me; she just worried about the Greys’ getting Logan when they eventually came for me. But I couldn’t help feeling like she didn’t like me.

Inside newspapers covered the kitchen counter, and Mom held a scary sharp knife in her hand. She wore the apron Grandma bought her for Christmas a few years ago. There wasn’t a single stain on it. I didn’t think she’d ever worn it before. Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she seemed to be analyzing the two orange vegetables before her.
Are pumpkins vegetables?