Only Alien on the Planet (3 page)

“Everybody likes Hally,” he said.

“She seemed to know everybody in the world.” To put it mildly.

“Last year, she was captain of the forensics squad,” he said.

“This year, she's editor of the senior class literary magazine. She's kind of your Woman of the People. The amazing thing is, she's genuine.”

I was kind of amazed that she'd noticed me at all. “Hally told me about the way you kind of watch over what's-his-name. 'Like a guardian angel,' I think she said.”

He laughed. He had a healthy laugh.

“Well, that's what she said. She said you once fought off a nasty mob of crazed first graders.”

The laugh settled into a comfortable chuckle. “Yeah, well—she'd pretty much pounded them herself before I ever got there.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Hally's a little hellion. If the same thing happened tomorrow, you can bet your life, she'd be right in the middle of it all over again, kicking the stuffing out of Tommy Quince.”

“Really,” I said, liking her better every minute.

“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “Don't get on her bad side.”

“Like, don't commit any social injustices while she's looking?”

“You got it.”

I lay back in the grass with my hands behind my head and my feet crossed, feeling good. “She said people think what's-his-name— Timmy? Scotty? She said they think he's autistic or something.”

“Smitty. He's not.” Caulder tossed a blade of grass away. “I've also heard people say he's an idiot savant,” he said. “But that's not true either.”

“So, what's true?” I asked him.

He leaned back in the grass and cocked his head to one side. “I really don't know,” he said finally—carefully.

The baseball came dropping down through the branches, not three feet from where we were sitting.

“Sorry,” Charlie panted, grabbed the ball, and was gone.

“He could talk if he wanted to,” Caulder said. “Smitty, I mean.”

I just looked at him.

“I've always had a feeling,” Caulder said.

“So, you're telling me, for seventeen years, he just hasn't felt like it.”

“Look,” he said. “His mother doesn't dress him. He dresses himself; he chooses his own clothes, same way you and I do. I mean, when you look at him, isn't it obvious he cares how he looks? He makes choices all the time—functional choices. His grades are perfect. You know what his SAT scores were? You know how close you can get to sixteen hundred and still be considered human? And his verbal was higher than his math. You can't do that if you're not at least marginally sapient. He writes papers. He's no way nonverbal. He just doesn't interact socially.”

I closed my eyes and thought about that face, that strange, empty face. All day, it had looked like he did nothing but dream, somewhere away inside of himself. It gave me the creeps.

“He's inside there,” Caulder went on quietly. “I've known him all my life. He's inside there.”

I thought about that. It reminded me of my grandmother, the way she was those last years in the nursing home. Her body was out of control and everybody just assumed that her mind was gone too. But I always wondered if she was trapped in there some-where…hearing everything, thinking her own thoughts…

“So, do you, like, hang around with him, or what?”

He tossed his head around a little. “As much as you can, I guess,” he said.

“And he's never said a word to you?”

“He's never so much as looked me straight in the eye.”

“Never?” I asked him, incredulous.

“Not one time in seventeen years.”

“
Really
. How could he live like that? What are his papers like? Have you ever read one?”

“A couple,” he told me. “And let me tell you, the guy's mind is incredible. Very erudite.
Very.
”

“Did Mr. Leviaton really have him write an exam for the faculty?”

Caulder grinned. “Yeah. He did.”

“That's amazing.” I put my hands behind my head and stared up through the leaves. “That's just amazing.”

“Yeah, well,” Caulder said. “It's just as amazing to me.” He smiled at me—a funny little mugging kind of a smile.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him. “Because I am.” I turned around and called the boys. I fixed Caulder with a stern look. “You have any money?” I asked him, because I've never believed in delicacy where money is concerned. “You want to share a pizza?”

“Can I bring my sisters?” he asked me. “They've been sitting back there on the porch all afternoon drooling over your brothers. That's why I came over here—they were making me sick.”

So the six of us—three Pretigers and three Christiansons—all went out for pizza. And we had a great time. James talked engineering and Charlie talked music, and you could tell Caulder's sisters were just going to
love
living next door to us. And I wasn't exactly unhappy about the idea of being neighbors with Caulder.

So innocently can strange events begin.

W
hy didn't you
tell
me you lived next door to the Pretigers?” Hally asked me at lunch the next day.

“I didn't know,” I said. I opened the little Tupperware dish of sliced peaches my mother had sent in my lunch. “Why didn't you tell
me? “

She leaned her chin on her hand and played around with her straw, dropping milk into her creamed corn, drip by drip.

“Want some?” I asked her, presenting my dish.

She nodded, and fished up a slip of peach with her spoon. “I've had a crush on Caulder Pretiger since first grade,” she said, and the peach disappeared.

“I wonder why,” I said, grinning.

She scowled at me, and then licked the spoon daintily. I offered her free access to the rest of my peaches. “You guys will probably get along just great,” she said, not ungracefully, but with an edge of regret.

“We already do,” I said, anticipating the look she gave me, and I grinned again. But then mercy got the best of me. “I have the feeling,” I reassured her, “it's going to be a very platonic relationship.”

She squinched up her face and shook the spoon at me. “Just make sure it
stays
that way.”

A Ding-Dong. My mother had put a
Ding-Dong
in my lunch. Or maybe it was my dad making the lunches this morning.

“Actually,” I said, peeling off the wrapper, “I've been thinking I ought to fall in love with Pete Zabriski.”

She groaned.

“What? He's got the most wonderful eyes on the planet.
What? “

“Are you actually serious?”

“Well, I mean—I just thought it would be fun. You know. And he's cute.”

“He
is
cute,” she allowed. “But guys like that never hang out with SADs.”

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Scholastic and Academic Development program. Otherwise known as ultra honors.” She rolled her eyes.

“This has some relevance to me?” I asked. “Because I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You're in all SADs classes,” she said. “Could you be honors and not know it?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “Not with my math grades”

“Math,” she agreed, grimacing. “I'm definitely a poet.”

“Maybe it's all a mistake,” I said, but I was thinking about my SAT scores, and all the tests my mother'd had run on us up at the university before we moved out here. Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. There've been whole years my mother's kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of
that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie—who is an actual musical genius—will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I—I know a little bit about a lot of things.

I can tell you the chemical composition of the stuff you stick in your hair; how long it would take you, at just under the speed of light, to get to Alpha Centauri—and how old your body would be when you finally got there; the middle name of the third president of the United States; the amount of the present budget deficit; the author of the
Brothers Karamazov
; and how many feet there are in a line of trochaic heptameter.
The Little Girl Who Had to Know Why,
Paul used to call me. But even my mother couldn't reconcile me and math.

“I don't think they make that kind of mistake,” Hally concluded. “Anyway—whether you're SADs or not, you're hanging around with SADs—me, for example—and that's death for dating. See, a smart woman tends to act on your typical eighteen-year-old male like instant kryptonite. But, not to worry—mother tells me something mystical happens at graduation and suddenly male people who never pulled a grade above a C in their lives automatically become smarter than anything that wears a skirt. Maybe after that happens, we can date who we want.”

“Well, like I say—I just thought it would be kind of fun,” I sighed. “I mean, I never really expected him to take me out. I just thought it was so romantic that he plays the French horn. Whenever I hear the sound of a horn, I always get these visions of autumnal mists wafting through the Black Forest…”

“Oh, fine,” she said, and she rolled her eyes again. “Give me your garbage, please. I believe it's time for me to take a trip to the can.”

As dysfunctional as Smitty Tibbs was supposed to be, you'd expect him to walk around like some kind of robot or zombie something—but that couldn't have been further from the truth. His movement was very normal, almost graceful. But he was moving through a world that didn't seem to admit the existence of any other human being.

Sometimes you'd hear people talking about him—
Who got the highest grade on the test? The Alien did.
Or,
Is this creamed corn going to kill me? I don't know—The Alien is eating it.
Stuff like that. It really was like he was living halfway in some other dimension, but I hated to hear that kind of talk; it kind of put the cap on his isolation. Not that he seemed to care.

I think he must have been kind of a challenge to my sense of reality, because I couldn't stop watching him. Maybe I thought, sooner or later, I was going to pick up on something that everybody else had missed. But Hally and Caulder were right. Watching Smitty Tibbs was a like taking a little trip into the twilight zone. After a while, I had to make myself stop. It was really starting to bother me.

That's when Caulder decided he wanted to introduce us.

Oh, yes. Please. I could just see it: “Smitty—this is my friend Ginny—Ginny, Smitty—” and then what? “Nice to meet you?” Sure. Conversation with The Alien. One very big, creepy silence. No, no, no. Aliens are all right at a nice, objective distance; the idea of having him any closer gave me chills.

The thing about me is—essentially, I'm a coward.

I am. I can't stand weird stuff, anything that's not normal—mental illness and death and hospitals and pain and suffering and scary movies and people who need you and going into the basement alone at night (which Paul used to recommend I do, voluntarily, as a kind of self-therapy).

I'm a coward, and I've faced it, and I've learned to accept it. And I'm okay with that, as long as nothing happens so I have to start feeling ashamed about it, or guilty.

I don't think my parents know this about me. Or else, they must just refuse to accept the truth, because they keep treating me like I'm this mature, kind, generous, well-adjusted, generally courageous person. Or maybe it's just that they buy into all that Goethe stuff about shaping people with your expectations—thank you, German philosophy.

But the other thing is, I just hate it when people are disappointed in me. I knew exactly what my parents would expect once they'd heard about Smitty: they'd expect me to do the decent thing. They'd expect me to befriend the kid. They'd probably want me to take him to the park every Saturday afternoon or something. Then they'd finally have to face the truth about their daughter, and they would definitely be disappointed, big time.

Because I wasn't going to do any of that. Not for a million bucks. I didn't want to go over to Smitty's house, I didn't want to take a walk in his moccasins, I didn't want to get involved with him, and I really didn't need anybody trying to shame me into it.

As to my folks, the solution was simple: I just didn't tell them about it. But Caulder was another thing altogether—Caulder, who
was getting to be about the best friend I ever had, besides my family; Caulder, who had been almost single-handedly making the world a bearable place for me. I really didn't want him thinking less of me; I
really
wanted him to see that there were things I was good at. But he wouldn't let up on me. “Come on, Ginny. Just
meet
him.” The pressure was terrible.

And who could I talk to about it, I ask you? Who would you go to for relief from your shame and your guilt? Once I would have gone straight to Paul;
he
never had unrealistic expectations about me.
He
always tried to see my side of things. But that was before he'd gone brother
emeritus
, available only by phone. You'd think you could trust all your brothers to be that understanding, wouldn't you?

Of
course
you would.

Practically speaking, I knew I wasn't going to get any satisfaction out of Charlie; he's too sickeningly philanthropic. But James— James is like me, short on nobility, long on personal comfort. So I took a chance—on one of those long, solitary, parentless evenings, I opened my heart to my brother, James. I was being very honest and humble, and I should have known better.

“Selfish,” James commented, before I had even finished. “So, you're scared of the guy.” James has this annoying habit of going straight for the bottom line. “What—is he dangerous or something?”

“I never said he was dangerous.” But then I added hopefully, “I guess he
could
be.”

“Does he drool?”

My mouth dropped open. “Are you disgusting?” I said to him.

“Well, does he?”

“
No.
Of course not.”

“Some people do,” Charlie reminded us. “They can't help it.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” I said stiffly. “But that is
not
the point.”

“The point is,” James said, slipping down into the couch and putting his feet up on the coffee table, “you can't stand the thought of taking any kind of responsibility that's going to pull you outside of your little shell. You're scared to get close to the guy.”