A lot of people just split, like our neighbors, the Majewskis. Packed up their camper on the afternoon of the sixth day with everything they could fit and hit the road, joining a mass exodus to somewhere else, because anywhere else seemed safer for some reason. Thousands of people took off for the mountains…or the desert…or the swamps. You know, somewhere else.
The Majewskis’ somewhere else was Disney World. They weren’t the only ones. Disney set attendance records during those ten days before the EMP strike.
Daddy asked Mr. Majewski, “So why Disney World?”
And Mr. Majewski said, “Well, the kids have never been.”
His kids were both in college.
Catherine, who had come home from her freshman year at Baylor the day before, asked, “Where are you guys going?”
“Nowhere,” I said. And I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was still living in denial, pretending all this crazy alien stuff would work out, I didn’t know how, maybe with the signing of some intergalactic peace treaty. Or maybe they’d dropped by to take a couple of soil samples and go home. Or maybe they were here on vacation, like the Majewskis going to Disney World.
“You need to get out,” she said. “They’ll hit the cities first.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “They’d never dream of taking out the Magic Kingdom.”
“How would you rather die?” she snapped. “Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?”
Good question.
Daddy said the world was dividing into two camps: runners and nesters. Runners headed for the hills—or Thunder Mountain. Nesters boarded up the windows, stocked up on the canned goods and ammunition, and kept the TV tuned to CNN 24/7.
There were no messages from our galactic party crashers during those first ten days. No light shows. No landing on the South Lawn or bug-eyed, butt-headed dudes in silver jumpsuits demanding to be taken to our leader. No bright, spinning tops blaring the universal language of music. And no answer when we sent our message. Something like, “Hello, welcome to Earth. Hope you enjoy your stay. Please don’t kill us.”
Nobody knew what to do. We figured the government sort of did. The government had a plan for everything, so we assumed they had a plan for E.T. showing up uninvited and unannounced, like the weird cousin nobody in the family likes to talk about.
Some people nested. Some people ran. Some got married. Some got divorced. Some made babies. Some killed themselves. We walked around like zombies, blank-faced and robotic, unable to absorb the magnitude of what was happening.
It’s hard to believe now, but my family, like the vast majority of people, went about our daily lives as if the most monumentally mind-blowing thing in human history wasn’t happening right over our heads. Mom and Dad went to work, Sammy went to day care, and I went to school and soccer practice. It was so normal, it was damn weird. By the end of Day One, everybody over the age of two had seen the mothership up close a thousand times, this big grayish-green glowing hulk about the size of Manhattan circling 250 miles above the Earth. NASA announced its plan to pull a space shuttle out of mothballs to attempt contact.
Well, that’s good, we thought. This silence is deafening. Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It’s rude.
On Day Three, I went out with a guy named Mitchell Phelps. Well, technically we went outside. The date was in my backyard because of the curfew. He hit the drive-through at Starbucks on his way over, and we sat on the back patio sipping our drinks and pretending we didn’t see Dad’s shadow passing back and forth as he paced the living room. Mitchell had moved into town a few days before the Arrival. He sat behind me in World Lit, and I made the mistake of loaning him my highlighter. So the next thing I know he’s asking me out, because if a girl loans you a highlighter she must think you’re hot. I don’t know why I went out with him. He wasn’t that cute and he wasn’t that interesting beyond the whole New Kid aura, and he definitely wasn’t Ben Parish. Nobody was—except Ben Parish—and that was the whole problem.
By the third day, you either talked about the Others all the time or you tried not to talk about them at all. I fell into the second category.
Mitchell was in the first.
“What if they’re us?” he asked.
It didn’t take long after the Arrival for all the conspiracy nuts to start buzzing about classified government projects or the secret plan to manufacture an alien crisis in order to take away our liberties. I thought that’s where he was going and groaned.
“What?” he said. “I don’t mean us us. I mean, what if they’re us from the future?”
“And it’s like The Terminator, right?” I said, rolling my eyes. “They’ve come to stop the uprising of the machines. Or maybe they are the machines. Maybe it’s Skynet.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, acting like I was serious. “It’s the grandfather paradox.”
“What is? And what the hell is the grandfather paradox?” He said it like he assumed I knew what the grandfather paradox was, because, if I didn’t know, then I was a moron. I hate when people do that.
“They—I mean we—can’t go back in time and change anything. If you went back in time and killed your grandfather before you were born, then you wouldn’t be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather.”
“Why would you want to kill your grandfather?” I twisted the straw in my strawberry Frappuccino to produce that unique straw-in-a-lid squeak.
“The point is that just showing up changes history,” he said. Like I was the one who brought up time travel.
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“What else is there to talk about?” His eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. Mitchell had very bushy eyebrows. It was one of the first things I noticed about him. He also chewed his fingernails. That was the second thing I noticed. Cuticle care can tell you a lot about a person.
I pulled out my phone and texted Lizbeth:
help me
“Are you scared?” he asked. Trying to get my attention. Or for some reassurance. He was looking at me very intently.
I shook my head. “Just bored.” A lie. Of course I was scared. I knew I was being mean, but I couldn’t help it. For some reason I can’t explain, I was mad at him. Maybe I was really mad at myself for saying yes to a date with a guy I wasn’t actually interested in. Or maybe I was mad at him for not being Ben Parish, which wasn’t his fault. But still.
help u do wat?
“I don’t care what we talk about,” he said. He was looking toward the rose bed, swirling the dregs of his coffee, his knee popping up and down so violently under the table that my cup jiggled.
mitchell. I didn’t think I needed to say any more.
“Who are you texting?”
told u not to go out w him
“Nobody you know,” I said. dont know why i did
“We can go somewhere else,” he said. “You want to go to a movie?”
“There’s a curfew,” I reminded him. No one was allowed on the streets after nine except military and emergency vehicles.
lol to make ben jealous
“Are you pissed or something?”
“No,” I said. “I told you what I was.”
He pursed his lips in frustration. He didn’t know what to say.
“I was just trying to figure out who they might be,” he said.
“You and everybody else on the planet,” I said. “Nobody actually knows, and they won’t tell us, so everybody sits around guessing and theorizing, and it’s all kind of pointless. Maybe they’re spacefaring micemen from Planet Cheese and they’ve come for our provolone.”
bp doesnt know i exist
“You know,” he said, “it’s kind of rude, texting while I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
He was right. I slipped the phone into my pocket. What’s happening to me? I wondered. The old Cassie never would have done that. Already the Others were changing me into someone different, but I wanted to pretend nothing had changed, especially me.
“Did you hear?” he asked, going right back to the topic that I said bored me. “They’re building a landing site.”
I had heard. In Death Valley. That’s right: Death Valley.
“Personally, I don’t think it’s a very smart idea,” he said. “Rolling out the welcome mat.”
“Why not?”
“It’s been three days. Three days and they’ve refused all contact. If they’re friendly, why wouldn’t they say hello already?”
“Maybe they’re just shy.” Twisting my hair around my finger, tugging on it gently to produce that semipleasant pain.
“Like being the new kid,” he said, the new kid.
That can’t be easy, being the new kid. I felt like I should apologize for being rude. “I was kind of mean before,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”
He gave me a confused look. He was talking about the aliens, not himself, and then I said something about me, which was about neither.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I heard you don’t date much.”
Ouch.
“What else did you hear?” One of those questions you don’t want to know the answer to, but still have to ask.