“Miss Hayden?”
But once again Joan had drifted off.
Tham made some weird whistling sound deep in his throat.
“Please, Sam,” Mrs. Guest said. “I think we’re all expecting to hear from Miss Hayden.”
Silence. People stared at their desktops. Joan, however, seemed unfazed. She’d propped her elbow on her desk, her chin on the heel of her hand.
“Perhaps you need to see the nurse, Miss Hayden?”
A subdued ripple of nervous laughter greeted this not-very-funny witticism. Mrs. Guest silenced it with a glare.
“Miss Hayden—” she began, but Tham interrupted her, emitting a long, damp series of clicks and whistles. Joan visibly shook herself in response, and a strange expression—half wonder, half fear—crossed her face. I saw this, I say; I did not imagine it. She shook herself in response and met Mrs. Guest’s gaze with an almost physical force. Mrs. Guest shuddered and recoiled. This too I saw; this too I did not imagine.
“The knight has been lulled into sleep, Mrs. Guest,” Joan said, firmly, as you might speak to a disobedient child. “He has been enchanted into nightmare by a fairy in the guise of a beautiful woman, and though he may wake upon the cold hill’s side, he shall never truly wake again, because one does not wake from a fairy’s enchantment.”
Eloieth let out a long mournful whistle when Joan finished, and then she and Tham both turned away. Silence gripped the classroom. Mrs. Guest swallowed. “I think that’s enough for today,” she said. “If you’ll turn to page 74 and answer the discussion questions, we’ll take up ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ tomorrow”—and she retreated to her desk and sat very still and pale until the bell rang for second period.
I didn’t see Joan for the rest of the day—English was the only class we had together—but when the final bell rang I gathered my books and ran to meet her for the walk home. She wasn’t waiting for me at the picnic tables on the east side of campus—and she’d been waiting there every day as long as we’d been in high school. I didn’t stick around. I knew she wouldn’t be coming. I knew what had happened even before I really knew it, if that makes sense, so I wasn’t surprised when I came around the building and saw her sliding into Johnny’s Merc. I called out to her, but she didn’t wait. She didn’t even turn around.
The shouting match next door went on longer than usual that evening, and though I stayed awake until well after midnight, Joan never showed up at my window. I didn’t see her until we walked to school the next morning—and then only briefly, because we hadn’t gone a block before Johnny’s Merc rolled up to the sidewalk and he reached over to crank down the window.
“Anybody want a ride to school?” he asked.
“I do,” Joan said brightly, opening the door. The interior of the car gleamed, every bit as glossy as the exterior—the lavender dash, the chrome-framed gauges on the instrument panel. The radio was pumping out Chuck Berry, “Maybellene.” Johnny flashed that reckless grin at Joan. I might as well have been wallpaper. So when Johnny said, “Coming, Nancy?” I shook my head and turned away.
“I’ll walk.”
“Suit yourself,” Johnny said, and Joan wound up the window as they pulled away from the curb. She hadn’t even said goodbye.
I put my head down and hurried on alone.
By the time we’d moved on to Idylls of the King in Mrs. Guest’s class—we were reading the part where Vivien imprisons Merlin in the tree—that faraway look in Joan’s eyes had faded. There were no more weird incidents with Tham. And she had rededicated herself to infuriating her father by dating Johnny Fabriano.
That was all anyone could talk about. Five years after his premature departure from high school, tales of Johnny’s exploits lingered. Among other things, he was said to have raided the school at midnight to steal a carbon copy of Mr. Dunnigan’s chem final; fought a legendary bruiser named Otis (now serving time in the state pen) to a blood-spitting draw; and invited Master Sergeant Ashton, the Junior ROTC teacher, who had stormed the beach at Okinawa, to go fuck himself. So every eye was upon her when Joan stepped out of Johnny’s flame-bedizened ride. Mr. Hayden soon put a stop to that—he started driving her to school himself—but I knew that Joan was still seeing Johnny on the sly. More than once I woke to the guttural rumble of his car in a neighboring street and knew that she’d availed herself of her arboreal exit.
She certainly wasn’t using it to visit me, so I didn’t see much of Joan for a while. I walked to school and back alone, we couldn’t talk during English, and while she still ate lunch at our table, half a dozen other girls did too. It was hardly the place for confidences. Aside from a chance encounter in the girls’ bathroom—and even that was fleeting—we might have been little more than casual acquaintances.
“Do you still think about it?” I asked as we stood in front of the rusty mirrors.
“Think about what?” she said.
“Bug Town.”
She didn’t answer right away. When she did, she said, “Sometimes it seems like it’s the only thing I can think about.”
Then a gaggle of chattery sophomores burst through the door.
Of course, Joan wasn’t the only point of interest that fall. As October deepened, the town turned its attention to high school football. Tham was enjoying a record-breaking season, sometimes piling up more than two hundred yards a game, and his quarterback, an alien kid named Thteven (Steven) who ran a little on the small side at 6′10″, was throwing the ball with the kind of pinpoint accuracy you didn’t usually see outside the NFL. The Bears often bested their opponents by forty points or more, and they could have doubled those numbers if Coach Pack hadn’t routinely pulled Tham and Thteven out of the game at halftime. It didn’t seem sporting to keep running up the score, he told the Milledgeville Courier.
The aliens attended every game. The adults kept to sections C and D, but their kids stood in the spirit section and stomped in enthusiasm, occasionally ramming a taloned foot right through the metal risers. And you often ran into them at the concession stand. They were especially fond of chili dogs, ordering them by the dozen—with mustard and onions—and sucking them whole into those flappy mouths, like sucking Ping-Pong balls into the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. Their table manners were generally atrocious, though I always assumed that by their own standards they were probably perfectly acceptable. They wore formfitting knee-length pants—perhaps out of deference to human sensibilities, perhaps not—but otherwise went naked and barefoot.
Their first few days at Milledgeville High they were constantly being sent home for violating the dress code. But when a delegation of alien parents arrived to ask that the principal exempt their children, he capitulated—maybe because he was sitting across his desk from a party of large green monsters from outer space, and maybe because modesty wasn’t really an issue, since no one could tell the male and female aliens apart except by their human names, and even then, who could really say for sure? Maybe they had three sexes, or six, or none at all. They were a weird bunch, taken all together. They were aliens.
But they sure had improved Milledgeville’s lousy football team. The homecoming game—the usual rout—ended around eight. The dance got underway an hour later. Everybody boogied to “Gum Drop,” the aliens in a herky-jerky rhythm that seemed to have nothing to do with that of the song, the humans (most of them) on beat; but when the DJ spun “Take Me Back,” the alien kids surrendered the floor to their human counterparts. I heard this all secondhand, of course. I wasn’t there—plain old Nancy had no date—just as I wasn’t there to see what happened in the parking lot outside. I heard Joan’s account that night, and I would later hear Johnny Fabriano’s version of events. But I never knew Joan to lie, so I’m confident of that part of the story. My understanding of Tham’s motives, on the other hand—to the extent that he had motives and they can be understood—is the product of pure conjecture, and it may be that I’m too rooted in a human perspective to speculate with any accuracy.