The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (5 page)

And suddenly there were no more dead coyotes on the road. I was going to prom with Sophie Gilkey. I wasn't sure whom the Gods of Dating were messing with more—me or Sophie. Someday she would without a doubt look back on going with me as a hastily made rebound decision, but right now—in my truck—she was
smiling.

I couldn't tell if the grin was because she was happy to go with me or because she was simply relieved to be attending, but whatever it was, I'd take it.

“You realize you're going ninety-six miles per hour, right?” she said.

I looked down at the speedometer—she was right. My car had never gone above
fifty
before. I took my foot off the gas and eased on the brake. I could smell burning metal. Prom. Sophie Gilkey. The impossible had happened.

ROSWELL—3 MILES.

It took us thirty minutes of driving through the flat, repetitive neighborhoods of Roswell—a grid of one-story houses and straw-colored lawns—until we found a mechanic who said he could fix Sophie's motorcycle in time for us to make the return trip to Gordo that evening.

The mechanic was a dirty, scrawny man named Dusty who
was drinking a Rolling Rock when we found him. He had greasy overalls on and a golf-ball-sized Adam's apple that leaped around as he spoke.

“If you give me two hours, I can fix the bike,” he said.

“Is there any way you could get it done faster?” said Sophie.

“You're lucky I'm doing it for you at
all
,” said Dusty. “I was about to close up shop and hit the pipe. Yeah, the crack pipe, you don't have to ask. We've all got our vices.”

“Two hours will be fine,” I said.

“Is there somewhere we can go in the meantime?” said Sophie.

“Coffee shops and the like close down early,” said Dusty. “Lotsa people hang out in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, but I'm not allowed to go there anymore, personally. Got a little rowdy too many times, and they got my picture on the wall behind the counter. Decent photograph, though, my hair looks good. If I was your age, I'd head out into the desert and suck down a few beers. Lotsa stars out there to look at.”

“I've never drunk before,” I said under my breath to Sophie.

“You've never drunk before?” said Sophie. “How did you avoid it at parties?”

“I was never invited to parties, so pretty easily.”

“Never drank?” said Dusty. “Man, I started boozin' when I was six months old. Mama used to put Four Roses in my sippy cup to get me to go to sleep. Easiest way to drink, if you ask me, sippy cup.”

My reason for abstaining from alcohol throughout high school had been logical. I had thought that even recreational
drinking would screw up my academic career, and therefore my chances of getting out of Gordo.

But now that high school was a couple of weeks from being truly over and I hadn't gotten into the college I'd been working toward my entire life, I wondered, what had been the
point
of not partying? What had it earned me? If I didn't find a way off the wait list, next year I'd probably be living in an abandoned building with vagrants and prostitutes and runaway convicts anyway. Might as well get a head start on it now.

“Where could we get beer?” said Sophie.

“You can buy it from me if you want,” said Dusty, opening up a small refrigerator that had shelves packed with bottles of Rolling Rock. “Ten dollars a bottle.”

“Ten dollars a bottle?”

“Where else are you going to get it, bein' in high school and stranded out here like you are?”

“I have five dollars,” said Sophie, pulling a crumpled bill from her pocket. “What do you have?”

I checked my wallet. “Ten.”

Dusty grabbed the money.

“Fifteen dollars means one and a half beers coming right up,” he said, taking a bottle out of the fridge and handing it to Sophie.

“Where's the half?” I said.

Dusty shoved the bottle he had been drinking from into my hand.

“There's your half,” he said. “But I suggest you wipe off the top. I've been battling a
nasty
case of tooth funk. My dentist doesn't
even know what it is—he looked at it under a microscope and the closest thing he could think of was the Ebola virus, but he said that normally kills you in a few days, and I've been living with this for
years.
So I figure I'm good. Now be careful out there in the desert. Lotsa biting snakes and angry animals and stuff that's even weirder than that.”

“Like what?”

Dusty smiled, showing his fungus-colored gums. “Stuff that ain't from here,” he said.

What happened over the next hour or so is a strange combination of that first, intoxicating half beer of my life and deep emotional trauma.

Here's what took place. Sophie and I walked into the desert, drinking our beers, making sure to keep sight of the lights of Roswell on the horizon so we didn't get lost.

We got involved in a heavy discussion about whether a rhinoceros or a small dinosaur would win in a cage fight. I picked small dinosaur. She said rhinoceros, which I thought was ridiculous because I figured the rhino would be at a natural disadvantage since it had to be on all fours, while the dinosaur could use its sharp claws to strike down on the rhino. Sophie pointed out that I hadn't specified what
kind
of dino I was picturing, and that when I said
small dinosaur
, she pictured a single small raptor. Thinking about it that way, I agreed that a rhino would probably have the upper hand. Armored hide, heavy body mass. Made sense. Sophie won that argument.

We finished our one and a half beers and placed the bottles at the base of a twisting cholla cactus. Initially I felt bad about littering, but then I saw a case of empties lying on the other side of the cactus, which made me feel better. This was clearly a party cactus, accustomed to alcoholic beverages.

The combination of walking and drinking gave us headaches at about the same time. We felt dizzy, so we looked for somewhere to lie down. I wasn't expecting Sophie to be as lightweight a drinker as I was, but she said she had never been much of a wild woman, despite her motorcycle and her appealing I-hate-high-school image. She'd had a few beers at random parties, and that was it. It was hard to run great distances through mud with a hangover, she explained.

We walked until we found a flat rock that was big enough for us to rest on, and that was how we ended up on our backs, side by side, staring up at the stars, waiting for our mutual nausea to pass.

“How do you feel?” said Sophie.

“Spinny,” I said. “How many stars do you see?”

“A billion.”

“I'm seeing two billion. Guess that means I'm having double vision.”

“HA…hehhhhhh…”

“I like your laugh.”

“People think it's weird.”

“It sounds a little like what would happen if you shot a blimp with a rifle—this loud
bang
followed by a long
wheeeeeeze.
”

Sophie whacked me in the chest.

“Gagh,”
I rasped, trying to catch my breath in the wake of the blow.

“Whoa,”
she said. “Sorry. That was supposed to be more of a playful hit.”

“It's okay,” I exhaled, seeing spots of light. “I'm thin, so I think my lungs are close to the surface. How did you learn to
hit
like that?”

“Kickboxing class. I was toning my arms for prom.”

“It's working,” I said. “I think you'd beat both the dinosaur and the rhino together in a cage match. In ancient times, you would have been the toast of the Colosseum. Y'know, if they had dinosaurs then.”

“Sophius Maximus of Carthage.”

“Sophius Aurelius of the Praetorian Guard.”

“HA…hehhhhhhh…”

I had almost finished catching my breath when Sophie rolled over on the rock and kissed me, and it was gone again.

The gesture was inexplicable. One moment I was recovering from a blow that had left me dazed and emasculated, and the next moment was the best of my life. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just tried to copy her lip movements and maintain consciousness—it wouldn't have looked very dashing to faint from the profundity of the moment and fall off the rock. I closed my eyes so she wouldn't see them rolling back into my head.

The only thing that went through my mind was that Sophie smelled like a sugar apple, which is a fruit from South America
my parents had recently been bringing home from the local organic food market. They're strange-looking things, like hard artichokes. Maybe her family had been eating them too. Looking back, I wish that wasn't what I was thinking about during my first kiss, but I guess the brain always does what it wants.

Then the kiss was over, and she was staring at me from one inch away.

“What was that for?” I said.

“To apologize for punching you. And also to see if you're a good kisser, which is important in a prom date.”

“Am I?”

“You're a natural.”

“You know my reputation.”

“
HA…hehhhhh.
Yeah, it's all the girls talk about. I guess I'm just another in your list of conquests.”

“Not to interrupt the mood, but can I tell you something?”

“What?”

“I think I'm still seeing lights from when you hit me.”

“That's weird. I see lights too, if you're talking about those ones near the Big Dipper.”

Sophie pointed at a group of dots in the sky. There were six total, spaced in two parallel sets, all of them moving together.

“Why would
you
be able to see lights if you were the one who hit
me
?” I said.

“That is an excellent question.”

“Maybe the beer had some kind of drug in it.”

“Dusty did say he enjoyed crack cocaine.”

“
Are the lights getting closer?” I said. “It seems like they're getting closer.”

The lights grew larger.

“That
really
doesn't look right,” said Sophie.

“We should head back.”

“We should
absolutely
head back.”

We climbed off the rock and began hustling toward Roswell, but the town was just a speck in the distance. I looked over my shoulder, and the glowing dots were not only
closer
but
brighter
, as if the object behind us had flicked on a set of stadium spotlights. The lights warmed the back of my neck, which confirmed my growing suspicion that this was bad.

I grabbed Sophie's fingers.
“Run.”

“I can run faster if you let go of my hand,” she said, jerking her arm away. She was right—as soon as she was free of me, she went into another gear and was
gone
, and I saw how it was entirely possible for her to have won all those mud runs. She was a jackrabbit, zigzagging around cacti, leaping crevasses in the ground, sprinting out hundreds of feet in front of me in just a few seconds.

Which was how the thing chasing us got her alone.

The sensation of heat on the back of my neck went from warm to
scalding
, and then—
BOOM
—an explosion of sound knocked me to the desert ground. I felt an object accelerate above and I covered my head, but the object passed quickly, because it wasn't interested in me.

“Bennett,”
I heard Sophie yell.

I was on the ground, half deaf, slightly drunk, and the length of a football field from Sophie, when the UFO came to a stop.

At first, to my eyes, it didn't seem like much of a UFO at all—it looked more like a dog-catching wagon the size of a small boat, hovering ten or so feet off the ground. Painted on its side in neon blue were stick figures that reminded me of the man and woman symbols found on the doors of restaurant bathrooms, and where there would have been wheels on a normal wagon, there was a set of white, glowing skids.

Because the UFO was hovering low, Sophie was staring straight
at
it rather than
up
at it, which a million movies had told me was the typical way that the soon-to-be-abducted confronted UFOs.

For a moment, neither Sophie nor the UFO did anything. She knew she couldn't escape, and the UFO seemed to be waiting to see what she was going to do.

A small cannon emerged from the side of the van. There was a murmuring sound, and the cannon shot a cloud of red and pink confetti in front of Sophie.

She looked at the confetti a beat, then dropped to the ground and began rolling in it like a feline in the throes of a catnip binge.

“So…good…,” I heard her moan, rubbing the confetti on her face, grinning and laughing like a crazy person.
“HA…hehhhhhhh. HA…hehhhhhh…”

The UFO descended to the ground, barely scattering the dirt beneath its landing rails. A door opened on the side of the ship—
though there were no clouds of gas or any dramatic light emitting from it, another tenet of UFOs I thought was pretty standard-issue—and two creatures nonchalantly hopped out, carrying a cage.

The creatures weren't anything I could have anticipated—no big black eyes and skinny limbs like in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, no muscles and dreadlocks like in
Predator.
Though one was larger than the other, they were clearly of the same species, and both were wearing white lab coats and seemed to be carrying clipboards. They looked like screwed-up Vikings, for lack of a better comparison. Blunted horns grew out of their skulls, above foreheads that were shiny and golden. Their bulbous noses sat slightly off center in the middle of their faces, beneath tiny eyes. They had thick bodies with heavy red fur sprouting out from under their lab coats, and their feet were swollen and exposed.