It was that—those two words—that were my undoing. He was still in there, my dad. My number one fan. Begging to be heard. For me to take him seriously.
I didn’t know if I could, but I owed it to him—didn’t I?—to at least try.
“So you’re trying to say that I’m . . . I’m still sixteen?” Just saying the words sounded beyond insane, and I hated that I felt like I was indulging his delusions. “That I’ve been . . . what . . . stuck in some alien spacecraft for the past five years . . . and they just . . . put me back here? Why, Dad? Why would they do that? Why would they keep me all that time and then just . . . send me home?”
Something about my questions, or maybe about the fact that I wasn’t running the other way, set my dad in motion then. Like snap! and he was pulling me toward the back of the trailer. Nancy followed us, not nearly as leery as I was about my dad’s sanity. I wished I could be as trusting as her, maybe then my heart wouldn’t be trying to beat its way out of my chest at that very moment. Maybe my eyes wouldn’t be stinging with frustration and fear that my old man had cracked.
When he flipped the switch inside the only bedroom, the one I’d assumed he slept in, I realized I’d assumed entirely wrong. There was no sleeping going on in that room.
It was full-on crazy-town in there. Like the X-Files had thrown up in there.
“Look, I don’t know why they do the things they do,” he was saying, but all I could think was What the holy hell is going on here? Was my dad part of some alien conspiracy cult? Because I was looking at four walls that were plastered in what could only be described as star charts and maps, and photos of blips in the night sky that I assumed were supposed to be alien spacecrafts, and drawings of beings with skinny bodies and oversize heads and eyes, and more photos and drawings; and across them were pieces of string connecting one thing to another in a way that seemed to make no real sense at all. And in one far corner, just above a desk that was as cluttered as the walls, with books and more maps and a computer that had newspaper clippings taped to it, was a series of missing-person fliers and milk carton cutouts.
There was one, in the very center of them all, that I recognized all too well: my own.
They’d used my sophomore class picture, the one where I was wearing Cat’s silver sweater and was quasi-hung over because Cat had decided that we should try shots of tequila the night before, when her parents had gone to the symphony. After watching her throw back three of them, I’d finally let her convince me to try one, and I’d nearly thrown it up before finally gagging it down.
Yet somehow she’d managed to talk me into four more. Cat had always been like that—persuasive.
None of that showed in the black-and-white image that stared back at me now. “You have got to be kidding me,” I finally managed.
My dad cleared his throat, and I was glad he had the grace at least to be a little uncomfortable about bringing me to his cracked-out shrine to martians. “Please, try to have an open mind about this.”
I shrugged a “Fine, go ahead” shrug. But inside I was thinking, He’d better make his point soon, because he is losing me.
Fast.
No one could ever accuse my dad of doing anything half-assed, and that included this alien conspiracy thing. He’d definitely done his homework on the matter. He’d taken his ideas—his theories—and run with them. And apparently he wasn’t alone. I’d sat in stunned silence while he’d pulled up website after website, showing me, basically trying to prove to me, that there were others out there in our situation. That was how he kept putting it, like calling it “our situation” somehow recruited me to his way of thinking.
There were blogs and support groups, and a lot of them posted under pseudonyms and code names.
My dad’s was Supernova16.
He told me about people who had flashbacks and some, like me, who were missing chunks of time . . . and still others who’d seen the flashes of light themselves.
He quizzed me then, asking me questions interrogation style. Things like “Have you had any weird dreams or flashbacks since you’ve been back?” and “What do you think of when I say the word spaceship?” or my personal favorite “When the dentist was polishing your teeth, did you have any ‘unusual’ reactions to his drill?”
“No,” I insisted to his last question, but I knew by the determined set of his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed that he wasn’t buying it. Like he thought I might be holding something back. And I felt sick, because the more he dug in, the more I realized just how warped his thinking really was.
He held up a picture of some kind of creature with a freakishly large head and huge, pupil-less eyes and a short, squat body. He held up one after another, like they were flash cards, flipping through them almost too fast for me to process. Some looked kind of like insects, with long grasshopperish arms, and others were gray skinned and sickly, with giant-brained heads. “Do any of these make you uncomfortable?”
I shook my head because uncomfortable definitely wasn’t the word that came to mind. All they really made me was sad about what the heck my dad had been going through all these years that had led him to this.
I let him keep going because I’d promised him I would, and then he asked me the weirdest question of all. “Did you see them, Kyr? Did you see any fireflies that night?”
That one made me falter. “Fireflies?” I asked, wondering where he was going with this line of questioning. Aside from TV or movies, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually seen a firefly in real life at all. I mean, I knew they were bugs and that they glowed, like little insects with lanterns in their butts. But that was as far as my knowledge went. “No. Why would I? What do fireflies have to do with anything? Why are you even asking me that? All I saw was . . . that light . . . and then you were screaming, and then . . .”