The Fellowship for Alien Detection (3 page)

“My summer will be . . . a blooming garden of discovery,” Maddy began theatrically. Haley reached back and pulled off her hairband, letting her brown bangs fall in front of her eyes so that she wouldn't be caught glaring. There were many things about Maddy that could inspire spite and jealousy: how she overenunciated
t
's at the end of words and treated
l
's like they were made of ornately blown g-llll-ass, the big fuzzy boots that she wore when it was even a degree below fifty, the unspeakable way that she'd dumped their classmate Beckett, and how calm and poised she always seemed to be, in all situations: fluster-free.

But worst of all was her plan for the summer.

“First, I'll be planting fertile seeds of compassion at Habitat”—emphasis on
t
!—“for Humanity Camp. . . .”

That wasn't the part that bothered Haley, though it did sound fun.

“Then, I'll spend two weeks pruning and shaping my lll–ove for theater at Junior Shakespearean Society.”

Not that part, either . . .

“And then . . .” Maddy added a dramatic pause and even seemed to spend an extra second on Haley as her gaze swept across the room. “The fruits of a long sunny summer will ripen at Thorny Mountain Music Camp.”

That
part. Haley glanced over at her best friend, Abby Warren. Abby gave her a sympathetic shrug. Abby was also going to Thorny Mountain, which was up north in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. She and Maddy were the only two kids going from the whole school. Haley had applied, too, but she hadn't gotten in. It was frustrating. Thorny Mountain was fun, and Haley was good at the flute. It made no sense! She'd been twice in previous years.

But not only did Maddy get the thing that Haley wanted, she was also about to have the kind of summer that Haley was supposed to have, that you
needed
to have. Maddy was one of those kids who knew, like Haley did, that the summer after eighth grade was no time for goofing around, being a kid, and having fun. No matter what fuzzy old Mr. Kendrick, the school guidance counselor, said, you only had to do the math to know that you were on the clock: four summers—that was all that was left between now and when college applications were due. And college was the big time. You weren't just being compared to the little bubble of Greenhaven kids; it was going to be you against the whole wide world. You had to be prepared.

And grades weren't enough. You had to have
experiences
. That's why the Madison Blakes of the world had put together summers chock-full of high-protein college application goodness. And Haley had tried to do the same thing, only it hadn't worked out.

Maddy finished and Ms. DeNetto shuffled the cards again. “Jack of hearts.”

Two down. The class was more vocal in their relief. Anders and Marco high-fived behind her.

But no, no! Haley couldn't believe it. As if Madison Blake wasn't bad enough, the next reader was Bradley Hong. Of all the people . . . Haley felt a tingle of fizzy adrenaline reaching her fingertips. Her head felt spacey, like it was bobbing in the water. She cast an evil eye up at the gleeful Fates.
This isn't subtle at all, you know
. Inside, the doubt demon squirmed with delight.

“My summer will probably be life changing,” Bradley began in his quiet, painfully shy way. He stood in his eternal hunch, black hair a mess, gazing at the floor as he spoke. Haley liked Bradley. He was sweet, and definitely who you wanted to be paired with for a research project, and it wasn't his fault that what he was about to say might well make Haley barf.

“First I'll be at Camp Nucleus at MIT. . . .”

Not that.

“Then I'm, um, doing fencing camp.”

Or that.

“And then I go to New York for the
Daily Times
Junior Correspondent Fellowship.”

That. That was the one.

Above all else, it was Haley's dream to be a journalist, and JCF was the coolest, the
only
summer journalism program worth attending, anywhere, ever. This was the first year that they were old enough to apply, and if you won, you got to go to New York City for two whole weeks and work at the
Daily Times
as an intern for a real, actual, in-no-way-not-amazing journalist. And sure, you would spend a lot of time doing grunt research or fetching coffee (which in itself sounded somehow amazing), but also,
also
, your famous journalist mentor was required to read and edit no less than one original article by you, which would then be published in the
Times
online edition at the end of the program.

Haley had spent many moments during classes and meals, not to mention the hours orbiting the rim of sleep, imagining herself at the JCF. She could picture her first day: cresting the stairs at Fifty-third and Lexington in the hot July sun and staring up at the steel-lined, modern facade of the Daily Times Building. She would breathe in the air, and it would smell like hot dogs, and in her lungs and beneath the arches of her sweaty feet and in the beats of her heart she would feel the certainty of knowing that she was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing.

Each day of the fellowship, Haley would be ready, ears alert for when the quiet pearls of journalistic wisdom were dropped in her vicinity. She'd be prepared, too, just in case there was ever a murmur in the offices of a Garrett Conrad-Wayne sighting—yes,
the
Garrett Conrad-Wayne, he of the grizzled beard and the velvet prose and the dispatches from East Africa that did that thing where they spun you dizzy with beauty and heartbreak at the same time.

Because what if, just
what
and in addition
if
, Haley could get Mr. Conrad-Wayne to notice her, maybe by mentioning that she followed him on Facebook and just so happened to have read all of his articles? And what if he was like,
cool
, and then, what if someday, years later . . .

A story would come through that he was too busy to take. . . .

And he would remember that plucky Junior Correspondent. . . .

And then it would be Haley, descending through turbulent tropical skies to a remote island village on the edge of the world, with sweat stains on linen shirt, weight of digital SLR on neck, stained-edge notebook on lap, sticking to knees.

Haley could picture it all, a big future in a big world, that started this summer . . .

Happening to Bradley Hong! This was so wrong! Writing wasn't even Bradley's favorite subject! Though he was annoyingly good at it. But his real passion was physics!
Physics!

Meanwhile, Ms. DeNetto had chosen the next card. “Two of clubs.”

Carl Powell sauntered up. At least he and Haley had no summer aspirations in common. While Carl read about basketball camp, working at the movie theater, and how there would be free popcorn for his boys, and a few lucky girls, if you knew what he meant (Haley never really knew what Carl meant), Haley just gazed out the window into the lazy June afternoon.

The air was faded tan, the fat green leaves of the maple trees swaying lazily in a hot, pollen-coated breeze. It was so June, so the-last-day-of-school, the world ripe with possibility, but . . . Haley wasn't going to New York this summer, or Thorny Mountain.

In fact, she'd be spending six of the eight weeks of vacation right here in Greenhaven with the Parks and Recreation Department, where she'd worked for the last three summers, and where life-changing opportunities included fishing trash and worse out of the filters at the town pool, planting flowers around town hall, and then pulling weeds and shoveling pet leavings and trying to keep those once-promising blossoms from wilting in the long, hot sun, day after day, running in place, time slipping by.

And yet . . .

All that said, the summer wasn't necessarily a total loss, because for those remaining two weeks of summer, there was something that Haley was doing. And when Haley could put aside her disappointment about the
Times
and Thorny Mountain, she was able to remember that this other thing was a
big
thing. Well, maybe. It might also be nothing. Haley didn't know yet, and that was the main reason for her blank page.

It was also the reason why she didn't want to get called on right now. It was one thing to go up in front of the class and talk about things like the JCF, or Thorny Mountain, or State Select Soccer or whatever because everybody knew what those things were, and they all sounded serious and legitimate. Haley's other thing might well be amazing. It was potentially bigger than anything anyone else was doing, but the problem was, it didn't sound like it from the description. In fact, it sounded kinda crazy. Haley knew this, and so she'd tried to keep it secret, but thanks to chatty parents and nosy teachers, there were no secrets in middle school.

She'd already heard the jokes, from kids like Kaz and Dawn and Carl. And she'd heard the rumblings from parents and from her relatives: What kind of summer opportunity focused on extraterrestrials? How could that at all be serious?

Yep, these were the joys of winning the Fellowship for Alien Detection. And yet, Haley knew that what she'd discovered, the theory that had led to her winning that fellowship, was actually very serious, mind-blowingly serious, at least, again . . . maybe. She wouldn't know until next week, when she got out on the road, and so, in the meantime, she just wanted to get out of this classroom without having to try to explain herself to a bunch of immature kids—

“Eight of diamonds.”

Unbelievable.

“Haley,” Ms. DeNetto said enthusiastically, probably thinking Haley would rescue the tone of the presentations after Carl's popcorn giggle fest.

Haley sighed to the Fates.
Fine
. She slid out of her desk and started toward the front of the room.

“Haley, aren't you forgetting your notebook?”

“No,” said Haley.

Some annoying classmates had already started snickering to one another.

Haley reached the front of the room and felt a sudden surge of nerves. She felt her T-shirt sticking to her back, her jeans sticking to her shins, and her glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. There was a hot sensation on the back of her neck. She should have left her hair up! She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs seemed to hit a wall.

What if they're right?
said the doubt demon.
It might all be silly. It might all turn out to be nothing
.

Quiet!
she snapped. Then she took a deep breath.
You can do this
, she told herself.
Forget about how the fellowship SOUNDS. Just tell them about the story
.

Yes
. The thought calmed her. The story she'd uncovered, the story that had won her the fellowship . . .

Her classmates might be laughing now, but they wouldn't be after Haley told them about the mystery of Suza Raines.

Greenhaven, CT, June 30, 2:24 p.m.

Haley had uncovered the mystery of Suza Raines by accident.

But if you were to read
Hunting the Story
, the collected essays, musings, and cocktail recommendations of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Garrett Conrad-Wayne, or better yet, happened to own a dog-eared copy that you kept in your backpack at all times like Haley did, then you knew the truth was something different:

“Most people,”
Haley could quote at any moment, using a mildly pompous British accent,
“see the world as a presentation of events and moments, each of which is absolute. In other words, they perceive each thing as it is now and accept it for what it is. The journalist, on the other hand, sees the now and immediately peers through it, asking how and why each thing came to be. Instead of seeing merely what is, the journalist seeks to know what was, to understand why, and to dream of what could be.”

Here Haley would often insert a burly chest cough, from years of good scotch whiskey and bad cigarettes, and also to crack a smile from Abby, before continuing:
“This awareness by the journalist is the Sixth Sense for Story. In most cases, the answers are quickly found by consulting our own learned knowledge or referencing the world around us for context, but in these other cases, when the questions cannot be immediately answered, the Sixth Sense tingles. And when it tingles, the journalist knows that somewhere behind the surface lies a story waiting to be uncovered, and the hunt is on.”

That was how it had begun for Haley, with a tingle in her mind, and this feeling just so happened to strike during some serious procrastination time on Facebook.

Thinking back on it now, it had been so random: Haley had been sitting around one evening, in the middle of January, enthusiastically avoiding a set of comprehension questions about
I Am the Cheese
. She'd been scrolling through the babble of status updates when she peeked down one of those random rabbit holes that can open up online.

First, an update had caught her eye from a mutual friend of hers and Abby's, named Mia. Three photos appeared in a row on Mia's wall. She was at a wedding. The first photo showed Mia with a microphone, her face beet red, hamming it up with two other girls doing karaoke. The second showed Mia standing in a group with the bride. And then in the third, she was by a sunny table of hors d'oeuvres, waving happily at the camera, with a big grin around a mouthful of food. Standing beside her at the table was a heavyset girl with a scowl and black-rimmed eyes and bright magenta hair.