The Dark Side of Nowhere (9 page)

“Why are they coming at all?” asked one kid. He was a sixth grader named Ford, but everyone called him Ferrari. “Why are we invading?”

Grant looked at him curiously, as if it should have been obvious. “Because we can,” he said, and then added, “Because this world deserves better.”

The kids around me sat a bit taller, as if trying to feel high and mighty.

“So what's going to happen to the others when the ships get here?” Ferrari asked.

Grant evaded that question like a stealth bomber evading radar. “Look around at your friends here,” he instructed. “Fill your minds with them, and with your parents. As for everyone else, they're not your concern now. That will all work itself out.”

And it was that simple.

Grant had a gift for making something true merely by speaking it. It was as if he had waved his hand and instantly, magically, freed us from responsibility.
The rest of the world was not our concern
. They were all people we had never seen, lives that never crossed our paths—and as for those people we did know, they would be forgotten.
Replaced by the powerful vision of a new destiny.

It's incredible the things you'll let yourself think—the things you'll let yourself
do
, when the right person gives you permission.

Almost like a reflex, I reached up and adjusted my cap as I began to consider where Paula fit into all of this. Well, if I was as smart as Grant said, then I'd find a way to make it work out. But for now I tried to put it as far out of my mind as I could. Focusing on the game, I slid my queen across the board in a brilliant, devastating move.

“Mr. Grant?” It was a girl's voice this time. I turned to see Amy, Ethan's kid sister, raising her hand. She was the youngest one Grant had brought into the group, having just turned ten. “Mr. Grant,” she said, “when the others come, are they going to be horrible? Are they gonna look like monsters?”

Grant reached out his hand, beckoning her closer. He, like everyone else, had been particularly gentle with her since her brother died. She tentatively came forward.

“You don't have to worry about that, Amy,” he said with a tender authority to quiet any fears the girl had. He reached out and touched her fine blond hair. “They're very beautiful.”

“Beautiful to who?” I dared to ask. All the attention turned to me. “A snake is beautiful to another snake. A rat is beautiful to another rat.”

He looked at me sharply and carefully weighed his answer.

“If rat knew the difference, it would choose to be human. If a human knew the difference, it would choose to be one of us.” He let his answer resonate through another peal of thunder, and then put me in checkmate in three moves.

I
don't know when I actually started thinking of myself as one of us instead of one of them—“us” being our little church group and “them” being everyone else. That kind of thinking grows inside you too slow to see, but too fast to stop—like the roots of a tree. I heard a story once about how a tree root burst through the metal side of a swimming pool, filling its water with cloudy mud. When something starts to grow deep, it grows strong.

It wasn't just Grant anymore, or our parents. In that first week, we had already started to cling together, looking out for each other—protecting each other. Isolating ourselves from the rest of town.

We are magnificent,
Grant had said in his profound way.
We are above and beyond all others
. Deep down everyone wants to believe something like that, so going along with it felt like something natural, no matter how unnatural all the rest felt.

We visited the Old Town diner again the next day, and the day after that—it was quickly becoming an afternoon clubhouse for us in these last few days of the school year. And each afternoon, Grant fed us before he sent us off to our homes.

In just five days, home had come to mean an empty place, filled with an uncanny silence that remained even when I turned on my stereo and blasted the TV. The truth is, I no longer felt like myself. The dull routine that had ruled my life was gone—but there was only so much jumping for joy that I could do until that got boring too.

Every evening I saw Paula. No matter how exhausted I felt, I would meet her at the mall or Banzai Burger or the batting cages—anyplace we could go to be together. We would talk about pointless things, and that was okay, since the important part was just talking. Every once in while she would start bringing up that picture of Billy Chambers, or the message written in that house in Old Town, or my glove, which I should never have shown her. I would always find a smooth way of changing the subject, and she would let me. It was nice to know that she was more interested in me than in the mystery.

I wondered how much more interested she would be in me if she knew what I knew. Still, I couldn't tell her and refused to think about the day I would have to.
Leading a double life isn't so hard to do when you live it day to day, pretending tomorrow will take care of itself.

O
n the last night of school, everyone turned out for a dance at the gym. Grant was there in his security guard capacity, keeping the peace and keeping an eye on me. I was the only one of us dancing with a girl from the outside. I was the only one of us dancing, period. The others all sat together like they were in their own glass bubble, talking and laughing as though the rest of the party didn't exist.

“Come sit with us,” they had all urged me when I first arrived. They even had a seat at their table saved for me. I felt drawn to them and wanted to take my place there, but there wasn't a chair for Paula.

“Not much for dancing, are you?” Paula said during the second song. She sensed that my heart wasn't in it but misread the reason. Since we'd promised each other that we'd never become one of those pathetically clinging couples, I went out for some much-needed air while she gave some mercy dances to a few dateless guys on the sidelines.

Outside I found Wesley sitting alone on the steps, staring out like a depressive zombie. He held a glass of punch in his hand but didn't seem to be drinking it.

“Why don't you go dance?” I asked him.

“Nah, I got three left feet,” he answered, which for all I knew could have been true.

“So I gave my mom my report card today, and she didn't even look at it, like it didn't even matter to her anymore. And I can't remember the last time I saw my dad. What do you think our parents do all day?”

I shrugged. “Wild parties,” I told him. “They're guzzling margaritas and doing the limbo.” I loosened my tie and took a deep breath. “I don't have a clue.”

All of our parents were no doubt layered in deep secret meetings in the guise of barbeques and bridge parties. Whatever occupied their days and nights now completely mystified me, and it occurred to me that my parents had never mystified me before. There were lots of kids I knew whose parents had office jobs. When you asked them about their parents' work, they would say things like “Oh, my dad's in distribution” or “My mom's a manager,” but when you asked them what their parents actually did all day, no one really knew. At least with my parents, I could see the cause and effect of their labors. Mom busted her butt to keep our home and lives in working order, no matter how badly I sabotaged those efforts. Dad spun wood into cash, with the skill of his hands. It was all right there for me to see—but now that simplicity was gone. Thinking about it made my back itch and neck hairs stand on end again.

“Jason, can I ask you something?

“Sure, go ahead.”

Wes cleared his throat. “Do you think I'm smart?”

It was too serious a question to give a snide response. “You're okay,” I said to him. “You get good grades. Yeah, you're smart.”

“I do get good grades,” he reminded himself, “and I could do better if I really wanted to.”

I had to admit he was right. No matter what ridiculous things Wesley said or did, he did have that innate intelligence Grant was talking about. Common sense and wisdom seemed to be the real culprits in Wesley's case. He had about as much wisdom as a lampshade.

“So I'm smart, and you're smart—we're all smart,” he said. “And Grant says we're better than everyone else. But the thing is . . . why don't I feel ‘better'?”

I wanted to toss my hair back contemptuously and shrug off the question, but it was too big to dismiss with a shrug. I knew how he felt.

“We have to get used to being different,” I suggested. “Then when we see what the differences are, maybe then we'll feel”—I felt the word crowding my brain, and I had to spit it out—“superior.”

Wesley thought about it. I could almost see how the word was swelling in his brain too. Like a big, thick root.

“You know, I do kind of feel that way when we're all
together, like when we're doing target practice and even when we're just hanging out with Grant.”

I nodded, and thought of the days and weeks ahead. “I think that we're all gonna be spending a lot more time together.”

Wesley watched me closely, using me as a barometer for how he was supposed to feel. “And that's a good thing, right?”

I thought about that. Wesley and I were both only-children. To suddenly be in the company of what amounted to two dozen or so brothers and sisters didn't feel bad at all. It was the times alone when everything felt uncertain. The less time alone, the better.

“It's a very good thing,” I told him, and making him believe it made me believe it even more.

T
he thing about collision courses is that if you could see them coming, you'd avoid the collision—but that would require having well-functioning radar, and my own personal radar dish was swinging back and forth so quickly, I wouldn't have noticed an ocean liner plowing down the driveway.

So naturally, when Paula came waltzing into the diner in Old Town, I was about as speechless as a mime in shackles.

It was a week after school had let out for the summer—
about three weeks into my new life. The time had gone by so quickly, I could almost feel the whiplash. We were all getting used to the routine now. Our parents left at dawn and didn't come home until after we were asleep—sometimes they stayed at friends' homes rather than come home. Same on weekends. As for us, we would spend our nights sleeping over at each other's homes to keep from being alone with our thoughts.

During the days, Grant kept our hands and minds filled with glove training and with renovating Old Town. One of the parents even hooked up a generator while we weren't looking, giving the diner electricity.

Grant's training was both grueling and exhilarating, from marathon skill sessions with our gloves, to exotic mental exercises aimed at sharpening our minds to a lethal edge.

But on Thursday afternoon, a week after the end of school, we weren't quite practicing our skills. We were sitting in the diner, in two rows, scratching each other's backs.

It turns out the itching that had kept me awake the first night after our new treatment never quite went away, and it wasn't just me—so lately one of the joys of our afternoons had become our communal back scratch.

Since Paula had gotten herself a summer job at the community pool, I figured I wouldn't have to explain to
her what I did with most of my days. But I guess she got Thursdays off.

“Looks like fun—is there room for one more?”

I recognized the voice instantly, and as I turned, I felt like an armadillo on the interstate. It was bad enough that she had come here, but what made it worse was that Grant was anal about putting us in boy-girl order for the back scratch, and I happened to be scratching Roxanne. In the
Handbook of Boyfriends and Girlfriends
, this particular scenario was probably on the page labeled “Crash and Burn.” The only saving grace was that I was still wearing Paula's cap. Call me sentimental, but I always put it on first thing in the morning and didn't take it off until I went to bed.

Until that point, we were all making idle conversation about the little captions of information that Grant gave us on everything from the history of the known universe to what interplanetary toilets looked like. But the second Paula made her appearance, conversation stopped dead. What eyes didn't turn to her purposely turned away, and a pall fell over the room like a dense layer of fog. It was like in one of those bad westerns when the villain bursts in through the swinging doors of the saloon.

I got up and approached her, feeling about as uncomfortable and awkward as a being could get, human or otherwise.

“Hey,” I said, “you're . . . here.”

Grant, on the other hand, was lizard-smooth. “Miss Quinn!” he said, acting pleased to see her. “Come sit down—I'm sure Jason would love to scratch your back.”

In a usual crowd, that would have dragged forth at least a half dozen snickers, but this was not your usual crowd. Everyone just silently waited to see what happened next. There was no welcome mat at this party.

“That's okay—we'll go outside,” I told Grant. Then I took her hand and led her out.

Once we were outside, and out of view of the scratching mob, I tried to make small talk, but Paula wasn't buying.

“So you never come to Old Town, huh?”

“I didn't before,” I answered honestly. “but I guess it kind of grows on you.”

“Yeah, like athlete's foot.”

“So how did you know I was here?” I asked.

“I didn't. I was coming to get that picture that looks like Billy, and then I heard voices,” she said with a smirk. “Somehow I knew it wasn't ghosts.”

My shoulders started itching something crazy, and I thought to ask Paula to scratch them for me, but somehow I didn't think it was appropriate at the time.