Valenti. Wait. Did this have something to do with the sheriff?
"Okay, somebody better start explaining right now," Isabel declared. "You can't just toss out the name Valenti and not-"
"Oh, come on," Michael interrupted. "Don't try to act all innocent. You used your powers to flip the Guffman mascot into the trash. Did you think we wouldn't notice?"
Isabel felt her stomach tighten. Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt, guys, she thought. Thanks for having a little faith in me.
"Well, I guess I should tell you now that I also used my powers to put invisible shields over all the toilet seats, and I made Mr. Tollifson's boxers turn into silk panties," Isabel shot back. "What am I, like, nine years old?"
Max gave her his don't-try-to-get-anything-by-big-brother look. "Look, Iz, I felt power being used-I felt the drain on my energy, and so did Michael. And I know neither of us flipped the stupid mascot."
"Well, I didn't feel anything. You're getting all flipped out over nothing." She gave a tight little smile. "Flipped out. Get it?" She started to push her way between Maria and Michael. She wasn't going to stand here and let them all yell at her for no reason.
Michael grabbed her by the elbow. "You can't just ignore this."
Isabel jerked her arm away. She shot a glance over at Alex. He still hadn't opened his mouth to defend her. If you couldn't count on a guy who was all gooey over you to back you up… She glared at him.
"Don't you have something to say?" she challenged.
"I can hardly talk. I'm still traumatized by the image of Mr. Tollifson in silk panties," Alex said. "But if you say you didn't do it, that's good enough for me."
"Me too," Maria added quickly.
"You guys don't know the stuff she's pulled," Max said. "Remember last year when Ms. Shaffer's car ended up on the roof of the gym?"
"Yeah!" Alex cried. "That was great!"
"That was Isabel," Max said, frowning. "Flipping the mascot is exactly her style."
Max remembered every stupid thing Isabel had done in her whole life. Sometimes she thought he had a computer file on her or something. In another second he was going to be bringing up the time she bit Laura Burns in the fourth grade.
"Do you think I'm stupid?" she yelled. "Do you think I don't remember how close Valenti got to finding us? Do you think I'd risk everything to… to… Do you think I want Valenti…" Isabel pulled in a long, shaky breath. She felt tears sting her eyes, and she blinked them away. She wasn't going to do this. She wasn't. She wasn't going to let just the thought of Valenti turn her into a pathetic, quivering mess.
"Hey, Iz…" Michael reached for her hand and gently stroked it. "I thought I felt power being used, but maybe my foot fell asleep or something. That could have been the prickly feeling I felt. I shouldn't have just assumed it was you."
Isabel gave a tiny nod. For Michael that was a pretty big apology.
"It's okay, Isabel," Liz put in. "We didn't mean to get you all upset. We shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. Right, Max?"
Everybody looked at Max.
"Right, Max?" Liz repeated.
Max sighed. "I'm sorry, Izzy. I know I felt power. But it was wrong to jump all over you without even asking you what happened."
One thing Isabel had to say for Max-when he was wrong, he admitted he was wrong.
"Okay, I feel the need for a group hug," Michael announced.
Alex pretended to wipe his eyes. "I love you guys."
"I would love you all a lot more if you would stop assuming I'm always going to be the one doing something stupid," Isabel muttered. They were supposed to be her best friends, and this is the kind of trust she got?
Didn't they have a clue how careful she had been lately? Careful could be her middle name. Careful could be her favorite perfume. Careful could be the name of her favorite song. How come they didn't know that?
Sure, she used to be pretty out of control. She used to use her power whenever she felt like it. Just because it was fun. But that was before they found out about Project Clean Slate, before they knew Valenti was an alien hunter.
She would have to be crazy to use her power now. It would be like sending Valenti an invitation to come and get her. Isabel suddenly wished she had worn her heavier coat. Thinking about Valenti always made her feel cold all over.
"Max, can you think of any explanation for what you felt?" Liz asked. "Some kind of electrical current or, I don't know, some change in the weather?"
It would have been nice if Liz had asked those questions before everyone started accusing me, Isabel thought.
Max shook his head. "Power has a really distinct feeling. It's not something I could confuse with anything else."
"Could there be another alien in Roswell?" Maria asked.
Isabel choked back a hysterical burst of laughter. "I wish," she muttered. When she was a kid, she used to hope there were other aliens. Maybe a girl who would be her best friend. But she had never gotten even the tiniest hint that there was anyone else like herself.
And when they realized how they'd gotten here, when they realized that their parents' ship had crashed, they'd known the truth. She and Max and Michael were alone. They were totally on their own.
At least until Alex, Liz, and Maria found out the truth about them.
"If there were others on Earth, they would have felt our power. They would have contacted us," Max explained.
"It's not something you can keep a secret from another alien," Michael agreed. "We feel each other's emotions. It just happens. It's not something we can control."
"And we've never felt anyone but the three of us," Isabel murmured.
"I only felt the sensation of power use for a second. I must have been wrong. I must have felt something else," Max said.
But Isabel noticed that the little wrinkle had appeared between his eyebrows, the way it always did when he was worried.
UFO H2O. Translation: bottled water with an alien on the label. Man, tourists will buy anything, Michael thought. He used the label gun to stick prices on all the bottles. He had to hand it to his boss, Kristen Pettit. Kristen said the alienophiles would pay $6.99 for water, and she was right.
Space Supplies really raked in the bucks. At the back it was just a regular convenience store where the locals could buy milk and soda and stuff. But the front of the store was crammed with overpriced junk the touristas couldn't seem to resist-stuff like alien-head toothbrushes, glow-in-the-dark alien jewelry, boxing alien puppets, and coffee mugs that said things like, Six Ways to Tell If Your Coworker Is an Alien.
Michael figured he could be a millionaire in about a week if he told everyone the truth about himself. He could probably sell a single hair from his head for a thousand bucks. And nose hair; forget about it. He could probably even sell the lint from his belly button.
Of course there was a little problem with this get-rich-instantaneously scheme. If he told anyone that he was an alien, he'd probably end up dead. Or in a cage somewhere being studied by a team of scientists. Come see the world's biggest millionaire alien lab rat. Yeah, right.
The little alien-face wind chime on the front door jangled. Michael didn't bother turning around. He knew the customer would find him soon enough. Michael geared up to answer the four billion questions about the Roswell Incident every tourist seemed to have.
He should just record a little speech: "Welcome to Space Supplies. Let me give you a short history of the Roswell Incident! We're all right proud of it around here. See, back in the forties a spaceship crashed right outside town. Well, actually more like seventy-five miles out of town, but we don't like to tell folks that because it might limit the amount of money we could suck out of tourists' pockets. Anyhoo, there are citizens, a few still living in town today, who claim to have seen the ship and the bodies of several alien beings. Why aren't the ship and those little alien bodies in our own UFO museum? Well, I'll tell you. The government covered the whole thing up. They told everyone all they had seen was a weather balloon. And-"