“Just be a good friend to her, Nance,” he said. “God knows she needs one, living in that house.”
Around 1 a.m., Joan woke me with a handful of pebbles at my window. This came as no surprise. Sneaking out was routine business to Joan. Just shimmy down the big oak tree outside her window, and clamber back up it whenever she’d accomplished whatever mischief she had to accomplish.
“So what’s he like?” I whispered the minute I had her installed in my bedroom, and when she responded, “Dreamy, Nance. He’s just dreamy,” my heart fell. “Dreamy” was not good. “Dreamy” had the potential for disaster. But what could I do? Discouraging her would merely encourage her, and encouraging her would do the same. It was an impossible hand to play, and I opted then, as I had opted so many times in the past, not to play it at all. I opted for neutrality. It was as close as I could come to fulfilling my father’s injunction to be a good friend to Joan.
So what I said was, “Dreamy?”
With conviction: “Dreamy. He’s not like other boys, Nancy. He’s not like you think.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody understands him. Everybody thinks he’s some… cheap hood”—this last she practically spat—“but he’s not at all. Why, did you know he takes care of his mother? His father’s dead, and she’s not well, and he does just everything for her, and nobody understands what a good heart he has. And he’s so gentle and soft-spoken and he wants to know all about me. He’s really interested in me, not just in, you know—” She broke off, blushing.
Sure, that’s what you think, I didn’t say. What I thought was that Johnny was just smoother than the usual high school Lothario who tried to get his hand—or worse—up Joan’s skirt. He was twenty-one. He knew how to play the long game. Like I said, he had an agenda of his own. Have you ever known a man who didn’t?
“Did you kiss him?”
“Just once. Right before we pulled up to the house. His lips are so soft. You wouldn’t think that, the way he looks, would you?”
I wouldn’t. But I didn’t say that either. Instead I asked where they had gone.
Joan looked down. She was quiet for a long time, and when she met my gaze at last, I saw that she was afraid. “We went to Bug Town,” she said.
Which brings me back to the aliens—the bugs, as people called them, though as I said at the beginning of this story, that was just lazy thinking, because they didn’t really look anything like bugs. And maybe their appearance isn’t all you’re curious about. Maybe you want to know where they came from and why and what they planned to do.
But I don’t have answers to any of that.
They just started drifting into town by twos and threes and buying up the decaying houses over in the east end. Who can say why? They were aliens, after all, and their motives were as inscrutable as Joan’s were self-evident.
Their appearance, on the other hand—there was no mystery about that. They were monstrous things to look at: olive-green, seven-foot giants, their squarish heads bifurcated by a big, ropy artery that clove their skulls into disproportionate lobes. It wound down between their lidless black eyes—shark-black, and as empty of expression—and split into frills of bony, close-knit flesh that almost looked like baleen. Their mouths, nestled between those frills, were the most disturbing feature of alclass="underline" three slavering flaps of tissue that dilated open to reveal jagged yellow teeth. All this set atop a massive torso armored in bone, with thick arms and legs and large, three-taloned hands.
And strong.
My freshman year, the first year the aliens showed up at Milledgeville High, Coach Pack recruited three or four of them for the football team. Where he found uniforms to fit them, I have no idea. Perhaps he had them custom-made. In any case, the aliens were lethally effective on the gridiron, and we would win the state championship two years running, despite the virulent protests of our rivals. Yet the aliens—I won’t call them bugs—were essentially gentle creatures, even shy. They kept to themselves and they listened attentively to our teachers. They contributed to class in moist, lisping whispers. They took copious notes.
Their handwriting was beautiful.
But Bug Town? I knew nothing about Bug Town that I haven’t already told you. I was as curious as anybody else about the place—but not curious enough to risk “catching strange,” so part of me stood in admiration of Joan for daring to go there in the first place. Another part was furious with her, knowing how much she’d risked to defy her father and her father’s god.
But whatever her motivations, Joan had little to say about Bug Town.
When I asked her about it, her gaze grew distant, as though she were looking straight through me to some faraway horizon, and when she answered me, her voice was a hollow whisper. I knew then that she’d been touched by strangeness, but I did not yet perceive how deep the wound ran or how unbearable its consequences would be—not merely for her and Johnny Fabriano, but for us all.
I began to get an inkling of that—but nothing more—the next day at school.
There were two aliens in our first-period English class. I can’t tell you their real names. I can’t reproduce their slobbery, whistling language, and certainly not on the page. But when the aliens moved to Milledgeville, they’d taken human names as well. So you’d see “Jim” at the hardware store, sighting down two-by-fours to make sure they hadn’t warped, or “Susan” at the A&P, inquiring about the freshness of the tomatoes. None of them had quite mastered English pronunciation—I expect their weird, dilating mouths precluded mastery—but they could make themselves understood well enough to get along. “Thim” got unbowed two-by-fours, “Thuthan” fresh tomatoes. And the two aliens in our English class, “Eloieth” (Eloise) and “Tham” (Sam—also the star fullback for the Milledgeville Bears), got straight A’s. The semester wasn’t even two weeks old and they’d already displaced me as Mrs. Guest’s favorite student.
Eloieth and Tham—yes I’m going to call them that, not to mock them, but to keep their intrinsic strangeness front and center—were the kind of students who read their assignments days in advance, sat in the front row, and shot their talons up the minute Mrs. Guest asked a question. But Mrs. Guest didn’t always call on the kids with their hands up. She had an eye for the doodler and the daydreamer, and just as you were drifting off into some pleasant fantasy or other, she’d bludgeon you with a question—which is what happened to Joan that morning. This in itself wasn’t surprising. Joan was an indifferent student at best, if only because her father expected more of her, and she was an inveterate daydreamer. But when Mrs. Guest fired that morning’s question in her direction, Joan seemed to have drifted not into some idle fancy but into a deep hypnotic state.
She didn’t respond, didn’t so much as stir.
Only when Mrs. Guest repeated the question—pointedly, and at volume—did Joan look up, a puzzled look on her face. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Guest.”
“What are you sorry for, Miss Hayden?”
“I didn’t hear you, that’s all. If you could repeat the question, maybe…” Joan trailed off into silence.
“Yes, why don’t I repeat myself? Surely I have nothing better to do. In stanza nine, Keats writes,
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill’s side.
What do you think he means, Miss Hayden?”
Miss Hayden had no reply on the matter of meaning. The moment stretched. You could hear nothing but the tick of the round schoolroom clock on the wall.