The Spaceship Next Door (6 page)

“Where to?” Annie asked, as she threw her bike into the back of Violet’s incredibly unsexy hatchback.

“Your choice. Where do the youths gather?”

“The youths gather at the mall.”

“Then we shall hie to the mall.”

“Verily.”

The engine kicked to life with tremendous reluctance, and they were off, pulling out of the library’s modest parking area onto Main and then left, past the protestors, over the river and out of town.

“Think something’s up with Shippie,” Annie said, as Vi took them toward the highway.

“Something’s always up with Shippie.”

Shippie
was what the two of them called the spaceship, but only when they were alone. Annie tried using it on other people but nobody much cared for the nickname. The name was borrowed from Nessie, because there seemed to be a certain kinship between Sorrow Falls’s most famous visitor and Loch Ness’s most famous lake inhabitant. The ship was very real, while Nessie probably was not, but that didn’t seem like a huge distinction back when they were thirteen.

“Yeah, but this might be legit.”

“This isn’t from your friends on the roof, is it?”

“No. They had something too, but it wasn’t really something.”

“They’re still seeing canals on Mars, those people.”

Sometimes, Violet sounded uncomfortably like an adult, especially when she was judging the behavior of actual adults. In this case, she was referring to the erroneous sighting by various scientifically inclined persons in history of water-bearing canals on the surface of Mars. It was an optical illusion, which should have been obvious when the drawings of the canals were compared to one another.

Annie got the reference, because this was the sort of minutia one learned when hanging out with Violet, who was some kind of trivia savant.

“They’re enthusiastic is all. It’s good to be enthusiastic about something.”

Violet smiled.

“I guess. So what’s the thing?”

“I don’t know yet. A guy turned up this morning asking for Joanne. I went and talked to him.”

“You
talked
to him? Why’d you do that?”

“Dunno. He looked approachable. He didn’t have the kind of skeeve a lot of those guys have. Clean-cut, laptop, young.”

“Stop hitting on older men.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m serious.”

“I wasn’t hitting on him, he’s like thirty or something. He just didn’t look skeevy is what I mean. He looked like a normalish guy with a normalish understanding of the modern world. He wasn’t… what did you call them?”

“Ink-stained wretches.”

“Yes, he wasn’t like that. Except now I’m pretty sure he’s not a reporter.”

“All right, now you’re confusing me.”

“He never
said
he was a reporter. I talked to him about the story he was writing, and he talked back as if he was in fact writing a story, but he didn’t say
reporter
. And when he gave me his name he didn’t say anything about who he was writing for. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a reporter who didn’t give the name of his magazine or newspaper in the first thirty seconds. A lot of them say it before they even say their
own
names.”

“Maybe it’s a crummy paper and he’s embarrassed.”

“A writer for a crummy paper getting a tour of Shippie?”

“He’s getting a tour? Like, they’re letting him inside the fence?”

“That’s what my sources say.”

“Well, you’re right, that would indicate some prestige, if not his, then the company he’s attached to. He gave you his name?”

“Edgar Somerville. I looked him up, and either he gave me a fake name or the guy doesn’t have a byline in any major publication.”

Violet side-eyed her. “Uh-huh. What did you check?”

“The database in the library and the Internet.”

“Did you check the scientific journals?”

“Of course I did.”

“Government?”

“What, like position papers and bills?”

“Sure.”

“Those don’t really come with bylines.”

“Hmm. I guess you’ll have to go flirt with him some more.”

“I wasn’t flirting!”

Violet maneuvered the hatchback into highway traffic and stuck to the right-hand lane, both because the mall was only two exits down and because the car couldn’t hold at sixty-five MPH without screaming and rattling, and every car on the road was going faster than that.

“So if he’s not a reporter, what is he here for?” Vi asked.

“Not a clue, but like I said, he got to see the ship. Hardly anybody does that any more. Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman will have to fill me in tomorrow about his visit. I’m assuming they recorded the whole thing.”

“Yes or your army boyfriend.”

“Sam? He won’t tell me anything. No, I take that back. If something happened, he won’t tell me anything. If nothing happened, he’ll say so.”

“How will you know the difference?”

“Oh, I’ll know.”

Vi laughed again.

Off the highway exit, she followed the generously large signs to the parking lot of the Oakdale Mall, which was surprisingly congested for a weekday afternoon.

S
ometime in the
past ten years, some intrepid marketer got the idea that the word ‘mall’ was a negative, so beginning with the shopping malls close to the downtown Boston area and radiating outward, the chain malls had been getting makeovers and new names.

In all fairness, the makeovers were sometimes quite impressive, in that they turned low-end strip malls into upscale centers with a higher quality of stores. The rebranding was a pretty effective way of signaling that change. Still, when it turned the Oakdale Mall into
The Oakdale Experience
, pretty much everyone laughed. Annie didn’t know one person who called it that without irony. Even tourists weren’t quite sure what to think.

Whoever was in charge of redesigning the mall did a fantastic job, though. What had been a large rectangular building surrounded by parking was turned into a rectangular parking area surrounded by shops, with a smaller rectangle of shops in the middle. From the air, it looked like an especially thick digital zero. This seemed like a catastrophic choice for a New England shopping center—who would shop at an outdoor plaza in the winter? —but it worked surprisingly well. The restaurants, movie theater and bowling alley made it the kind of place people went to spend the day rather than visit in order to shop, and that turned out to be an important distinction.

Annie didn’t have a lot of spending money at any given time, but she enjoyed going to the mall when circumstances conspired in her favor. A generation or two ago “the mall” might have been a place for someone of her age and/or economic level to go and “hang out”, and perhaps use a skateboard and harass angry white adults like in the music videos from the 90’s. (These videos looked as dated to her as the black-and-white films she watched with her mother. In fairness, everything pre-spaceship looked a
little
dated anyway, but these looked like especially quaint artifacts. Especially the clothing.) For her, hanging out at the mall, more often than not, meant figuring out who’d gotten a job where. It was basically the only place in the area that hired high-school-age kids on a consistent basis.

The Oakdale Mall (everyone still called it this) also benefited greatly from being the only shopping center of consequence within a twenty-mile radius of the spaceship. Sure, there were the authentic and semi-authentic shops on Main Street, but almost without exception those shops ended up being places to stop at briefly, and not to linger. Plus, one of the things that made Main so very authentic was a thorough lack of parking.

The typical activities arc of the Sorrow Falls tourist was, in order: see the spaceship; discover the ship was not all that interesting a thing to look at; visit Main; if lucky, find parking; shop for approximately forty minutes; hear something about ‘The Oakdale Experience’ and conclude incorrectly that it was perhaps—with a name like that—an amusement park; head to the mall; spend remainder of vacation there.

One would think the town of Sorrow Falls would be interested in encouraging people to stay, perhaps by building a mall of their own, but after three years the town’s attitude toward visitors was permanently affixed somewhere between blandly courteous and
get the hell off my lawn
. Just about any local, when asked, would tell a visitor, “You should really check out Oakdale!” and not think twice about it. They would even offer directions.

It was one of the only places Annie visited outside of Sorrow Falls on any kind of consistent basis. It was too far to bike, though, so she had to rely on people with cars. This was also one of the reasons she didn’t have a job there, although not the only one. She also didn’t want to be too far from the ship, for more or less the same reason Mr. Shoeman and the rest of the rooftop city people couldn’t bring themselves to leave. She didn’t want to be the one who gave up waiting on something to happen right before something happened.

She also didn’t want to be too far from her mom for too long at a time.

V
iolet found
a spot at the top corner of the plaza; right in front a fiberglass model of the ship. It was an impressive replica, built to scale, with enough detail to pass as the real thing when one was squinting. It sat in the middle of an extra-large sidewalk in front of the movie theater, which was appropriate: it was one of the models used in the movie version of the Sorrow Falls story, donated to the town by the filmmakers as thanks for their hospitality. Naturally, the town thought the replica was tacky and immediately donated it to Oakdale.

The two things Annie thought particularly funny about the replica: first, everyone assumed it was not to scale because they thought the actual ship was much bigger; second, there was a glass case around the ship and a velvet rope around the case, to prevent anybody from touching it, meaning even when fake versions of the ship were put together, nobody could put a hand on it.

This was the most ostentatious of the dozen-or-so things in the mall that were meant to connect the Experience with the slow invasion happening up-road. That list didn’t even include the gigantic souvenir shop.

“Hello, Shippie,” Annie said to the model as they got out of the car.

“Don’t talk to it, people will stare,” Vi said.

“Ignore the olds, skatergirl, let’s go smoke some cigs.”

“…what?”

“Never mind. C’mon, I think Rachel’s working at VS now.”

“
H
ey
, did you hear?”

Sometimes Annie liked to pretend she was a sociologist, and her job was to evaluate her own life. It was a kind of meta-distancing trick she pulled under certain circumstances, in which she saw herself interacting directly with the world while at the same time standing back and taking notes.

In the ninety-odd minutes it took to nearly complete a full circuit of the outer ring of shops—with one brief stopover at the ice cream shop at the inner building—Annie encountered over a dozen people she might call friends. Sociologist Annie’s notes listed them as
fellow tribal members
, with additional margin notes like
potential mate
and
competition
.

The standard greeting for this tribe would be
Hey, did you hear?
It was how they all said hello, and how they verified their tribal statuses. It was also the preamble to the transmission of vital social, political and legal issues concerning members of said tribe, which were of critical import to the entire unit.

None of it mattered, while at the same time all of it was terribly important. This was what Violet—who was a much more authentic sociologist, really—never entirely understood. It was true that in the proverbial Grand Scheme of Things, it wasn’t terribly important that Rachel broke up with Luke after hearing he made out with Lucy at Marko’s party—which she wasn’t even invited to! —and then got, like,
sick
drunk and passed out on the floor of Marko’s pool house, especially since that wasn’t half as Earth-shattering as the news that Tina was
completely
gay for Nona, except Nona was only pretending to be a lesbian to piss off her parents while Tina was pretending to be straight so as not to piss off
her
parents, which was
amazing
news except for the much more amazing story about Dougie shaving his
entire
head for no reason at
all
except Dougie is a dork who thinks he’s going to join the army, which is stupid because the army doesn’t let in dorks,
besides which
, the army wasn’t even all that cool, and oh, did you hear Rick thought he saw a vampire?
No joke!

“I have an important question,” Violet said, over two burgers and a shared milkshake. They were sitting in the dining area of the bowling alley, which was not at all like a typical New England bowling alley, for a number of reasons. First, the food was actually excellent. They had the best burger at the mall, only nobody knew it because when people wanted a burger they went to one of the two places that specialized in burgers. Second, it was 100% ten-pin bowling. Most of New England bowled a version called candlestick, which used narrow pins and shot-put sized balls. It was about a thousand times more frustrating than ten-pin, which meant it served an important regional purpose of teaching local children how to swear effectively.

“Hit me.”

“Do you
like
any of those people?”

Annie laughed.

“How long have you wanted to ask me that?”

“About as long as I’ve known you. Or since you started trying to indoctrinate me.”

“Ooh, indoctrination. That’s definitely what I’m doing. No, come on, I’m just trying to, I don’t know, insert you into the world a little.”

“I’m perfectly happy with my degree of insertion.”

In the ninety-odd minutes of their whirlwind shopping circuit (in which there was virtually no shopping) Violet had said approximately five words, and all five of them were
hi
. The people of Annie’s tribe knew her exactly well enough to understand that Vi was meant to be ignored, and that she preferred it that way.