What I know for sure is that Joan had been forbidden to attend both the game and the dance. But Joan was not going to be denied the night out. She couldn’t attend the game. Some Pentecostal ally of her father would betray her. And she couldn’t attend the dance because the chaperones wouldn’t admit someone Johnny’s age (and especially not Johnny himself). But she could make it a special night, and when she slipped out the window around 8:30, that’s just what she intended to do. Apparently Johnny had the same idea. His car was idling a block over, and when she slid in beside him, he had a corsage waiting. They were going to celebrate homecoming on their own, he said, and if his hand lingered when he pinned the flower to her breast, she attributed it to his clumsy fingers.
Johnny’d also bought a couple of bottles of sweet wine. Joan had never tasted the stuff, but she wasn’t going to decline another opportunity to defy her father. Besides, it turned out she liked the giddy feeling it gave her, the devil-may-care release from the inhibitions that her Pentecostal childhood had instilled within her. She was pleasantly buzzed by the time they pulled into the school parking lot—a destination Joan had insisted on over Johnny’s objections. “Let’s go to the dance,” she’d said, giggling, and when Johnny pointed out that they couldn’t go to the dance, she leaned over and planted a lingering kiss on the tender spot just behind his ear. “We can get close,” she whispered, an enticingly ambiguous statement, which is how they wound up parked in the darkest corner of the high school parking lot. The radio was playing the Four Aces, “Melody of Love,” when Johnny leaned in to kiss her, and Joan later told me how she remembered the music and the taste of the sweet wine on his lips. It wasn’t the first time they had kissed, but it was the first time it really seemed to matter, and she surrendered herself to it.
Johnny slid one hand up Joan’s ribs to caress her breast. When she didn’t protest, when indeed she seemed to lean into him, he let the other hand drift down to push its way between her thighs.
This wasn’t what Joan wanted. It never had been. But Johnny’d been intending to claim this prize for more than a month now, so when Joan protested, murmuring, “No, Johnny,” he simply ignored her. He was tugging at her panties when she said it again—“No, Johnny!”—and by the time she said it a third time, he’d nearly wormed a finger inside them.
Joan gasped. She tried to thrust Johnny away, but he pushed her back against the seat, bearing down with all his weight. He held her there, panting, and that’s when she realized he was fumbling with the buttons on his jeans. That’s when she began to scream in earnest.
At the far end of the parking lot, inside the gym, the DJ had just dropped the needle on “See You Later, Alligator.” The teenagers from outer space took the floor. Their human peers joined them. The chaperones glanced at their watches—they would be shutting the party down at eleven—and looked out over the dance floor. Nobody was listening for screams from the parking lot, and if they had been, they wouldn’t have heard anything over the racket of Bill Haley & His Comets.
Johnny had managed to undo his pants by then.
Joan screamed louder.
And then—this is the part that puzzles me, this the reason that I wish he’d given me his point of view—Tham appeared in the shadows. I still wonder what he was doing out there. None of the aliens smoked, so he hadn’t stepped out to sneak a butt. Nor did they drink, so he wasn’t outside to sneak one of those either. And he certainly wasn’t walking home—Bug Town lay in the opposite direction. Yet there Tham was, and what I keep thinking about, even now, is that time in English when he whistled Joan out of her stupor. Had he communicated the answer to Mrs. Guest’s question as well? It certainly wasn’t the kind of answer Joan would have provided on her own, after all. Which makes me wonder if there might have been some connection between them, some conduit for alien… telepathy, for lack of a better word, that had been laid down during Joan’s visit to Bug Town. What I wonder is if he knew that Joan was in distress and came to rescue her.
Good intentions, right? And all the damage they can do.
But the damage didn’t come till later. In that moment, there in the dark parking lot, those good intentions paid off in a big way. I’m forever thankful to Tham for what he did next. Joan later told me that she was still fighting, still clawing, still screaming. But Johnny was on the verge of overpowering her. He’d just clamped a hand over her mouth to shut her up when Tham’s three massive talons, eight inches each, punctured the roof of Johnny’s beloved ‘49 Merc where it curved down to meet the windshield. Johnny cursed and scrambled back against the steering wheel, tugging at his trousers. Joan shoved herself in the other direction and slammed up against the door.
Tham meanwhile had closed his grip around the metal edge of the roof. He yanked it once, and then a second time, and then—it was like he’d taken hold of the pull tab on a can of peaches—he just peeled back the top of that Merc and flung it to the pavement. In the crashing instant that followed, Joan told me that she was aware of only three things: Johnny screaming in fury, the pale radiance of the moon filling up the car like water, and the monstrous silhouette of Tham’s massive, asymmetrical head peering down at her against a field of stars. She reacted instinctively, shrieking as Tham reached inside the passenger cabin, fished her out, and set her gently on her feet beside the car. Johnny meanwhile had exited the driver’s-side door, the tire iron he kept under the seat in hand. What he saw as he rounded the hood—a seven-foot-tall monster wearing knee-length trousers and a Milledgeville High letter jacket—stopped him cold. The tire iron clanged to the pavement. He stumbled, grappling for the hood of the car to hold himself upright.
By this time Joan had stopped screaming.
In the stillness, she could hear the thump of “Love Bug” from the high school gym.
Joan reached up and took one of Tham’s long talons in her hand.
“This isn’t over!” Johnny yelled as they turned away. “This isn’t over, you bitch, you hear me!”—but Joan didn’t bother looking back. She’d never felt safer in her life. Tham walked her home. Somewhere along the way she unpinned Johnny’s crushed corsage and cast it into the shadows beside the sidewalk. And when they reached her house, she marched straight up the walk and rang the bell. Mr. Hayden staggered back into the living room when he opened the door and saw his daughter standing there hand in hand with a towering alien from outer space.
“Hello, Daddy,” she said sweetly. “I want you to meet my boyfriend—Sam.”
Whether Tham thought he was her boyfriend or not is also a matter of conjecture. But from that night on, there was something between them, and the consequences of that relationship would eventually ripple outward to engulf us all. But that was later.
The immediate consequences were more predictable.
Mrs. Hayden, who’d walked to the door behind her husband, screamed. And when Mr. Hayden started spewing his typical self-righteous bilge, Joan ignored him. She pushed past him, leading Tham by the talon, and introduced him to her mother. “Nithe to meet you, Mthth Hayden,” Tham said, flecking her with viscous extraterrestrial spittle. When Mrs. Hayden just blanched by way of reply, her eyes bulging, Joan took him to the kitchen, poured them both a glass of milk, and served up a platter of her mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. They chatted for fifteen minutes—innocuous gossip about schoolmates and teachers—before Tham took his leave. On his way out, he extended his talons to Joan’s father (predictably, Mr. Hayden refused to shake) and nodded to her mother. He probably would have smiled if he could have.