When I woke, Bug Town was dying. The slithery vines lashed around as if in agony, and the tentacled trees had begun to droop. When I crawled out of the car, the stalky yellow grass barely turned to look at me. And in the slow, dimming pulse of colors, I could see that their shark-black eyes had begun to film over.
As for the music, it had died away altogether. There was a profound relief in the silence, and a sadness too, I guess, though the sadness wouldn’t really hit until I understood fully the magnitude of our loss. Joan was gone—maybe dead—and the aliens had disappeared. The high school football team’s run at the state title had been derailed. The lunchroom seemed strangely empty.
That was later, of course. In the moment, I gave this no thought at all. My brow was tacky with blood, and my head felt as if someone had split it with an ax. It was all I could do to lurch off toward home. I made it maybe half a block before I collapsed in the street. I was still there when the police found me the next morning.
I spent the next night in the hospital, and the morning after that I really was home, headachy and exhausted. My parents couldn’t seem to decide whether to baby me or scold me, so they did both by turns, but the babying predominated. Privately, my father even told me that I’d acquitted myself admirably, though I couldn’t see much to admire about my complicity, however unintended, in Johnny Fabriano’s madness and all the damage it had wrought.
Good intentions, right?
A few days later I felt well enough to go back to school. Everyone was bursting with questions—for a week or so, I was suddenly the most popular girl at Milledgeville High—but Chatty Cathy had fallen silent at last. My grades plummeted that semester. I groped through a fog of guilt and sorrow. The solicitous looks of my teachers were almost unbearable. The last thing I wanted was kindness. I thought of almost nothing but Joan as I had seen her last, cradled in Tham’s arms, those strange lights playing on her face. And the blood. So much blood.
I made a comeback in the spring. The fog began to lift, my grades to improve. But Bug Town never recovered. I suppose the bank wrote off the unpaid mortgages. The neighborhood itself fell into ruin.
My father drove me through it—at my insistence and over my mother’s objections—a week or so after I went back to school. The place was no longer catching strange. It was hard to believe it ever had been. The yellow stalks of grass lay wilted on the earth, and the ropy vines had withered, leaving houses bearded in brown streamers. In places the streets were virtually impassable. The meaty trees had begun to collapse. We wound through them, crushing limp tentacles beneath our tires. We slipped in silence by the wreckage of Johnny’s treasured Merc, its nose crumpled, adding to the indignity Tham had already inflicted upon it. I guess the police must have towed it out of there eventually. I never heard. I did hear that all they ever found of Johnny was his bones. His funeral was sparsely attended. I was there. His mother—though she didn’t speak to me—looked perfectly healthy.
In retrospect, I suppose that the aliens must have opened some kind of portal from their home world, and that the things that grew there were seeping slowly out into ours. People don’t talk about it much these days, but occasionally you’ll hear someone speculate that Bug Town was the vanguard of a slow invasion and that its transformation presaged that of the entire planet—that Johnny was a hero who’d saved humanity from the ascension of triumphant alien overlords.
But Johnny Fabriano was no hero. I have no doubt that the aliens were fundamentally benign. I think they’d come to Milledgeville in search of a better life, that in transforming Bug Town they were simply making the neighborhood feel a little more like home. Maybe I’m naive, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that you shop at the A&P, picnic in the park, and send your kids to the local high school when you are bent on genocide. If they’d had any interest in crushing us, they could have done so without a second thought. They could open doorways between stars, tear the roofs off cars barehanded, and shoot death rays out of their fingers. Why mess around by taking out mortgages and renovating old houses?
In the end, I believe, they retreated in the face of Johnny’s madness. When they slammed that interstellar doorway behind them, they choked off the source of all that catching strange and Bug Town died.
I miss them. Miss Eloieth and Thteven and all the rest of them. I miss Tham, whose good intentions came to naught in the end. I miss Joan most of all. Not a day passes that I don’t wonder what happened to her.
I like to think they saved her. I like to think she’s free.
HELENA BELL
I’ve Come to Marry the Princess
Before Jack can apologize to Nancy, she has to believe that dragons exist.
Nancy’s mad at him because they were supposed to perform a skit at the talent show and he stood her up. They’ve been practicing it for two summers. It’s called “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess.” When Jack didn’t show, Nancy had to go onstage all by herself. He didn’t ditch her on purpose; his dragon egg was hatching and he needed to be there. Jack thinks Nancy would forgive him if he told her this, but she hasn’t given him the chance.
Nancy said her parents would give him a ride home at the end of camp this year, and he doesn’t know if the offer is still good. He hopes it is. It would give him a chance to apologize, the two of them sitting on the gray velvet bench seat of her mother’s station wagon, the baby dragon between them.
“I told you dragons were real,” Jack would say.
“Dragons eat people, you know.”
Jack arrived at camp six years and three weeks ago. His mother dropped him off at his cabin with his trunk, bookbag, and dragon egg. The trunk held three bathing suits, fourteen T-shirts, ten pairs of shorts, white socks, and underwear, each with Jack’s name written in black permanent marker in thick block letters. Inside the bookbag were five books from the Craven County Public School recommended summer reading list, a Walkman, various toiletries, an Uno deck, stationery, envelopes, stamps, and four bags of chocolate bars he’d stolen from his older brother, Robert. Robert was going to a different camp, in the mountains, and Jack knew Robert wouldn’t notice anything was missing until he got there.
Sometimes Jack still gets letters from Robert. Robert ends each one with a running tally of how many chocolate bars Jack owes him now. It’s in the millions. “Because of interest,” Robert says.
Jack also gets letters from his parents. They ask him questions about sailing and motorboating and archery and tell him to be good, they’ll be there to pick him up at the end of the summer. They never do. Every August Jack drags his belongings to a new cabin and different campers arrive. In the fall they learn to play instruments: harp, violin, piano. In the spring it’s always math camp, science camp, or historical reenactment. There are two weeks in the winter when adults fill the cabins. They play soccer and baseball, jump in the river, and stay up all night in the mess hall playing loud music. His counselor says next year they’re opening up a space camp, but he’s been saying that for a while now. Jack has had the same counselor each summer for seven years; he never remembers Jack’s name.
“This your first year?” he asks. “Don’t worry. You’re going to love it. It can be rough at first, but at the end of four weeks, no one ever wants to leave. You staying for one session or two? Most of us stay for two.”
In January and February the camp lets in high schoolers and college students to practice standardized tests: PSAT, LSAT, SAT, DAT, MCAT, PCAT, and VCAT. Jack wasn’t very good at them at first, but he’s been catching on. Before Nancy stopped talking to him, she lent him her Cosmo magazines for their quizzes. Nancy said there’s an art to multiple-choice questions. There’s always the right answer, the wrong answer that you want to pick anyway, the silly answer, and the answer that leads to the inevitable tragedy of human experience. If you read enough of them, you can figure out which one is which by the way they’re phrased, or the way they’re ordered. When in doubt, pick C, she says. Nancy said she hasn’t studied for a history test in three years because she knows exactly how to find out the key result of the Battle of New Orleans just by the way the teacher uses conjunctions. Jack told her there was no result. The war was over before the battle even started. He knew this because he had to pretend to die on a hill, his foot rotting from gangrene. Then the cook got mad at them because they stole too much cheese for special effects and they had to reenact treaty signings the next year. And the year after that and the year after. Jack hated it. All they did was stand around in wool coats and sweat.