I Am Number Four (13 page)

“That isn’t all.”

Henri stands and snaps his fingers and the planets stop moving. He moves his face to within inches of Lorien, then cups his hands around his mouth and again breathes onto it. Hints of green and blue sweep across the ball and begin to fade almost immediately as the mist from Henri’s breath evaporates.

“What did you do?”

“Flash your hands on it,” he says.

I make them glow and when I hold them over the ball the green and blue come back, only this time they
stay as my hands shine upon it.

“It’s how Lorien looked the day before the invasion. Would you look how beautiful it all is? Sometimes even I forget.”

It
is
beautiful. Everything green and blue, plush and verdant. The vegetation seems to waver beneath gusts of wind that I can somehow feel. Slight ripples appear on the water. The planet is truly
alive
, flourishing. But then I turn my glow back off and it all fades away, back to shades of gray.

Henri points at a spot on the globe’s surface.

“Right here,” he says, “is where we took off from on the day of the invasion.” Then he moves his finger half an inch from the spot. “And right here is where the Loric Museum of Exploration used to be.”

I nod and look at the spot he is pointing to. More gray.

“What do museums have to do with anything?” I ask. I sit back in the chair. It’s hard to look at this without feeling sad.

He looks back at me. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you saw.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, urging him on.

“It was a huge museum, devoted entirely to the evolution of space travel. One of the wings of the building held early rockets that were thousands of years old. Rockets that used to run on a kind of fuel known only to Lorien,” he says, and stops, looking back to the small
glass orb hanging two feet above our kitchen table. “Now, if what you saw did in fact happen, if a second ship managed to take off and escape from Lorien during the height of the war, then it would have to have been housed at the space museum. There’s no other explanation for it. I’m still having a tough time believing that it would have worked, and even if it did, that it would have gotten very far.”

“So if it wouldn’t have gotten very far, then why are you still thinking about it?”

Henri shakes his head. “You know, I’m not really sure. Maybe because I’ve been wrong before. Maybe because I’m hoping I am wrong now. And, well, if it
had
made it anywhere, then it would have made it here, the closest life-sustaining planet aside from Mogadore. And that’s to assume that there was life on it in the first place, that it wasn’t just full of artifacts, or that it wasn’t just empty, meant to confuse the Mogadorians. But I think there had to have been at least one Loric manning the ship because, well, as I’m sure you know, ships of that nature couldn’t steer themselves.”

Another night of insomnia. I stand shirtless in front of the mirror, staring into it with both lights in my hands turned on. “I don’t know how much we can expect from here on out,” Henri said today. The light at Lorien’s core still burns, and the objects we brought from there still
work, so why would that magic have ended there? And what about the others: are they now running into the same problems? Are they without their Legacies?

I flex in front of the mirror, then punch the air, hoping that the mirror will break, or a thud will be heard on the door. But there is nothing. Just me looking like an idiot standing shirtless, shadowboxing with myself while Bernie Kosar watches from the bed. It’s nearly midnight and I’m not tired in the least. Bernie Kosar jumps off the bed, sits beside me, and watches my reflection. I smile at him and he wags his tail.

“How about you?” I ask Bernie Kosar. “Do you have any special powers? Are you a superdog? Should I put your cape back on so you can go flying through the air?”

His tail keeps wagging and he paws the ground while looking at me through the tops of his eyes. I lift him up and over my head and fly him around the room.

“Look! It’s Bernie Kosar, the magnificent superdog!”

He squirms under my grip, so I set him down. He plops on his side with his tail thumping against the mattress.

“Well, buddy, one of us should have superpowers. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be me. Unless we go back to the Dark Ages and I can supply the world with light. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’m useless.”

Bernie Kosar rolls onto his back and stares at me with big eyes, wanting me to rub his belly.

SAM IS AVOIDING ME. AT SCHOOL HE SEEMS TO
disappear when he sees me, or always makes sure we’re in a group. At the urging of Henri—who’s desperate to get his hands on Sam’s magazine after combing through everything that came up on the internet and finding nothing like Sam’s magazine—I decide to just go over to his place unannounced. Henri drops me off after we’ve trained for the day. Sam lives on the outskirts of Paradise in a small, modest house. There’s no answer when I knock so I try the door. It’s unlocked and I open it and walk through.

Brown shag carpet covers the floors, and family photographs from when Sam was very young hang on wood-paneled walls. Him, his mother, and a man who I assume is his father, who is wearing glasses every bit as thick as Sam’s. Then I look closer. They look like the exact same pair of glasses.

I creep down the hallway until I find the door that must be to Sam’s bedroom; a sign reading
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
hangs from a tack. The door is open a crack and I peer inside. The room is very clean, everything consciously put in a place. His twin bed is made, has a black comforter with the planet Saturn repeated across it. Matching pillowcases. The walls are covered with posters. There are two NASA ones, the movie poster from
Alien
, a movie poster from
Star Wars
, and one that is a blacklight poster of a green alien head surrounded by dark felt. In the center of the room, hanging from clear thread, is the solar system, all nine planets and the sun. It makes me think of what Henri showed me earlier in the week. I think that Sam would lose his mind if he were to see the same thing. And then I see Sam, hunched over a small oak desk, with headphones on. I push the door open and he looks over his shoulder. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and without them his eyes look very small and beady, almost cartoonlike.

“What’s up?” I ask casually, as if I’m at his house every day.

He looks shocked and scared and he frantically pulls the headphones off to reach in one of the drawers. I look at his desk and see that he’s reading a copy of
They Walk Among Us.
When I look back up he is pointing a gun at me.

“Whoa,” I say, instinctively lifting my hands in front of me. “What’s going on?”

He stands up. His hands are shaking. The gun is pointed at my chest. I think that he’s lost his mind.

“Tell me what you are,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw what you did in those woods. You’re not human.” I was afraid of this, that he saw more than I had hoped.

“This is crazy, Sam! I got into a fight. I’ve been doing martial arts for years.”

“Your hands lit up like flashlights. You could throw people around like they were nothing. That’s not normal.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I say, my hands still in front of me. “Look at them. Do you see any lights? I told you, they were gloves that Kevin was wearing.”

“I asked Kevin! He said he wasn’t wearing gloves!”

“Do you really think he would tell you the truth after what happened? Put the gun down.”

“Tell me! What are you?”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, I’m an alien, Sam. I’m from a planet hundreds of millions of miles away. I have superpowers. Is that what you want to hear?”

He stares at me, his hands still shaking.

“Do you realize how stupid that sounds? Quit being crazy and put the gun down.”

“Is what you just said true?”

“That you’re being stupid? Yes, it’s true. You’re too obsessed with this stuff. You see aliens and alien conspiracies in every part of your life, including in your only friend. Now quit pointing that damn gun at me.”

He stares at me, and I can tell he’s thinking about what I said. I drop my hands. Then he sighs and lowers the gun. “I’m sorry,” he says.

I take a deep, nervous breath. “You should be. What the hell were you thinking?”

“It wasn’t actually loaded.”

“You should have told me that earlier,” I say. “Why do you want so badly to believe in this stuff?”

He shakes his head and puts the gun back in the drawer. I take a minute to calm myself down and try to act casual, like what just happened is no big deal.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Just more alien stuff. Maybe I should cool it a bit.”

“Or just read it as fiction instead of fact,” I say. “The stuff must be pretty convincing, though. Can I see it?”

He hands me the latest copy of
They Walk Among Us
and I sit tentatively on the edge of his bed. I think he’s calmed down enough to not spring a gun on me again at least. Again, it is a bad photocopy, the print slightly unaligned with the paper. It isn’t very thick—eight pages, twelve at the most, printed on legal-sized
sheets. The date at the top reads
DECEMBER
. It must be the newest issue.

“This is weird stuff, Sam Goode,” I say.

He smiles. “Weird people like weird stuff.”

“Where do you get this?” I ask.

“I subscribe to it.”

“I know, but how?”

Sam shrugs. “I don’t know. It just started arriving one day.”

“Are you subscribed to some other magazine? Perhaps they pulled your contact info from there.”

“I went to a convention once. I think I signed up for some contest or something while I was there. I can’t remember. I’ve always assumed that’s where they got my address.”

I scan the cover. There’s no website listed anywhere on it, and I didn’t expect there to be, considering that Henri has already searched the internet high and low. I read the headline of the top story:

IS YOUR NEIGHBOR AN ALIEN?

TEN FAILSAFE WAYS TO TELL!

In the middle of the article there’s a picture of a man holding a bag of trash in one hand and the lid to the trash can in the other. He is standing at the end of the driveway and we’re to assume he’s in the process of
dropping the bag into the can. Though the whole publication is in black-and-white, there is a certain glow to the man’s eyes. It’s a horrible image—as though somebody took a picture of an unsuspecting neighbor and then drew around his eyes with a crayon. It makes me laugh.

“What?” Sam asks.

“This is a terrible picture. It looks like something from
Godzilla
.”

Sam looks at it. Then he shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “It could be real. Like you said, I see aliens everywhere, and in everything.”

“But I thought aliens looked like that,” I say, and nod to the blacklight poster on his wall.

“I don’t think all of them do,” he says. “Like you said, you’re an alien with superpowers and you don’t look like that.”

We both laugh, and I wonder how I’m going to get myself out of that one. Hopefully Sam never finds out I was telling him the truth. Part of me wants to tell him, though—about me, about Henri, about Lorien—and I wonder what his reaction would be. Would he believe me?

I flip the paper open to look for the publishing page that all newspapers and magazines have. There isn’t one here, only more stories and theories.

“There isn’t a publisher info page.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how magazines and newspapers always have that page listing staff, editors, writers, where it’s being printed, and all that? You know, ‘For questions, contact so and so.’ All publications have them, but this doesn’t.”

“They have to protect their anonymity,” Sam says.

“From what?”

“Aliens,” he says, and smiles, as though acknowledging the absurdity of it.

“Do you have last month’s issue?”

He grabs it from his closet. I quickly flip through it, hoping that the Mogadorian article is in this one and not an earlier month. And then I find it on page 4.

I read the article three times. I was hoping there might be more to it than what Sam already said, but
no such luck. And there is no Ninth Galaxy. I wonder where they got that from. I flip through the new issue twice. There is no mention of the Mogadorians. My first thought is that there was nothing left to report, that more news failed to present itself. But I don’t believe that’s the case. My second thought is that the Mogadorians read the issue and then fixed the problem, whatever the problem was.

“Do you mind if I borrow this?” I ask, holding up last month’s issue.

He nods. “But be careful with it.”

Three hours later, at eight o’clock, Sam’s mother still isn’t home. I ask Sam where she is and he shrugs as though he doesn’t know and her absence is nothing new. Mostly we just play video games and watch TV and for dinner we eat microwavable meals. The whole time I’m there he doesn’t once wear his glasses, which is odd since I’ve never seen him without them before. Even when we ran the mile in gym class, he kept them on. I grab them from the top of his dresser and put them on. The world becomes an instant blur and they give me a headache almost immediately.

I look at Sam. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back against his bed, with a book of aliens in his lap.

“Jesus, is your vision really this bad?” I ask.

He looks up at me. “They were my dad’s.”

I take them off.

“Do you even need glasses, Sam?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

“So why do you wear them?”

“They were my dad’s.”

I put them back on. “Wow, I don’t see how you can even walk straight with these on.”

“My eyes are used to them.”

“You know these will screw up your vision if you continue wearing them, right?”

“Then I’ll be able to see what my dad saw.”

I take them off and put them back where I found them. I don’t really understand why Sam wears them. For sentimental reasons? Does he really think it’s worth it?

“Where is your dad, Sam?”

He looks up at me.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“He disappeared when I was seven.”

“You don’t know where he went?”

He sighs, drops his head, and resumes reading. Obviously he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Do you believe in any of this stuff?” he asks after a few minutes of silence.

“Aliens?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, I believe in aliens.”

“Do you think they really abduct people?”

“I have no idea. I guess we can’t rule it out. Do you believe they do?”

He nods. “Most days. But sometimes the idea just seems stupid.”

“I can understand that.”

He looks up at me. “I think my dad was abducted,” he says.

He tenses the second the words leave his mouth and a look of vulnerability crosses his face. It makes me believe that he has shared his theory before, with someone whose response was less than kind.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he just disappeared. He went to the store to buy milk and bread, and he never came back. His truck was parked right outside the store but nobody there had seen him. He just vanished, and his glasses were on the sidewalk beside his truck.” He pauses for a second. “I was worried you were here to abduct me.”

It’s a hard theory to believe. How could nobody have seen his father abducted if the incident occurred in the middle of town? Perhaps his dad had reason to leave and he plotted his own disappearance. It’s not hard to make yourself disappear; Henri and I have been doing it for ten years now. But all of a sudden Sam’s interest in aliens makes perfect sense. Perhaps Sam just
wants to see the world as his dad did, but maybe part of him truly believes that his dad’s final sight is captured in the glasses, somehow etched into the lenses. Maybe he thinks that with persistence one day he’ll eventually come to see it as well, and that his dad’s last vision will confirm what is already in his head. Or maybe he believes that if he searches long enough he’ll finally come across an article that proves his father was abducted, and not only that, but that he can be saved.

And who am I to say that he won’t one day find that proof?

“I believe you,” I say. “I think alien abductions are very possible.”