“So I’ve noticed.” Paula eyed him a moment more, and I could see the exact instant when she decided he was telling the truth. I was impressed that Grant could do such a thing, yet furious at him for duping Paula so completely. I couldn’t stand to see her fooled, and I hated the fact that I couldn’t contradict the story.
Paula folded her arms and tried one last attempt. How about the BB glove?” she asked.
Grant blinked uncomprehendingly. “Sorry,” he said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Can I take some time to walk her back?” I asked, changing the subject real fast.
He gripped me firmly on my itching shoulder, in that warm way he had, and said, “As long as you’re back in time for dinner.”
“Dinner?” said Paula incredulously. “He gives you dinner?”
I shrugged. “It’s kind of a three-meal plan.”
We walked back, taking the road that led to the washed-out bridge.
Paula laughed out loud. “Pesticides!” she said. “Spiders and pesticides! What a way to screw up a small town.” She turned to me. “He’s telling the truth, isn’t he?”
I couldn’t look at her. “Don’t ask me,” I said.
Soon the dead trees around us gave way to huge oaks outside the irradiated perimeter. “so this is what you’re doing all summer?”
“It’s not so bad,” I told her. “It keeps me out of trouble.”
“Looks like it keeps you in shape, too,” she said, poking my pectorals, which felt tight, and a bit sore. I assumed it was from all the exercise Grant had us do. I was kind of pleased that Paula noticed.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe next year I’ll go out for baseball again.”
She smiled at that.
We reached the broken bridge, then climbed down the slope to the dry creek bed and up the other side. “Do you think you can skip out on Camp Grant every once in a while?” she asked. “Because my parents want to have you over for dinner. They want to see with their own eyes what a menace to society you really are.”
“Oh, boy,” I said. “Maybe I should go out and get an earring just for the occasion.”
She laughed. Then I got a bit serious.
“Maybe,” I said, “you could really shock them, and tell them that . . . I wasn’t actually human.”
She laughed even louder. “Oh, they’ll love that. Dating outside of my species!”
We grinned dumbly at each other for a few seconds, I kissed her, and then she turned to go. She never knew how close I came to telling her the truth.
When I got back to the diner, the scratching session was over and Grant was out back, tending to the generator. I thought I was lucky that I didn’t have to face him right away. I was wrong. As I entered, that pall fell again, as if everyone had been talking about me while I was gone. Not even Wesley would look me in the face.
Billy Chambers was the first to say something.
“Lucky for you,” he said, “Grant knows how to unscrew a situation.” Clearly they had eavesdropped into everything that had gone on outside.
“She won’t come by here again,” I told him. “You don’t have to worry.”
Billy just shrugged as he sketched more of his graphite demons on a scrap of paper. “I didn’t know you were still going out with her.”
“Why, are you jealous?” I asked snidely. “You were the one who broke up with her, remember?”
Then it started coming at me in stereo. Roxanne spoke up.
“Y’know,” she said, “I see them together all the time. I saw them at the movies just the other day.”
Wesley leaped to my defense. “What’s wrong with going to the movies? Everyone goes to the movies.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I can take care of this myself.”
I looked around the room. There was uncertainty on everyone’s faces. They could tell a line was being drawn in the sand, and they didn’t know which side to stand on.
“If you’ve got a problem with me going out with Paula,” I told Billy and Roxanne, “then it’s your problem, not mine.”
Billy stood up. “It’s everyone’s problem,” he announced. “If she figures things out, she could blab it to the whole town.”
“She’s smart, but she’s not a mind reader. She won’t figure it out.” But even as I said it, I knew that this wasn’t what they were really getting at—and I got mad, because I realized what was coming next.
“We’re not supposed to be around them,” growled Billy. “And we’re definitely not supposed to be dating them.”
I gritted my teeth and spat my words at him: “Paula is not a them.”
“Whatever,” he said, glaring at me through his mottled gray eyes.
A sensible person would have backed off at that point, but I guess I wasn’t the sensible type. I wanted to make him as angry as he made me.
“You know, Billy,” I said. “There’s a picture that looks just like you hanging on a wall down the street.”
Billy snapped up his eyes to me. “Yeah, so?”
“So I guess you were last in line when they were handing out faces, huh, Billy-boy?”
A bunch of the others kids laughed. Billy’s under-average features got all sharp, and his lips stuck out in anger. “Are you calling me ugly, Miller?” he snarled.
I shrugged and grinned. “Face it, Billy, your parents didn’t exactly pick you out a set of designer genes, now, did they?”
More snickers. Billy’s pale, freckled face turned a deep crimson. “Well,” he said, “at least I don’t go dating something like Paula Quinn. But I guess you have a thing for inferiority.”
I lost it. I knew I would. He could say what he liked about me, but saying things about Paula—that was walking into a minefield. I dove on Billy, swinging with no mercy, and he fought just as furiously. Around us the kids all stood up and spread back, forming a little arena that always surrounds a good fight.
I hurled him back against the wall, then threw a jab at his nose, but he ducked at the last second. My fist hit the wall . . .
. . . and went through it.
I pulled my hand out with a cloud of sawdust. It wasn’t a plasterboard wall—it was wood. Seeing the hole in the wall sort of gave us both pause. My hand didn’t hurt, although I knew that it should have.
“That’ll be enough!” It was Grant. I turned to see him storming toward me across the floor.
Billy and I stared at each other with those don’t-turn-your-back sort of eyes.
“That could have been your head,” I told him.
The other kids looked at the hole and were impressed. I really didn’t want them to be impressed—my little antisocial fighting streak was more of an embarrassment to me than anything else.
Grant grabbed me solidly by the arm. “A word outside, Jason.” He pulled me out to the front porch, while behind me, I heard Wesley say, “Y’know, Billy, you gotta admit he’s right—you’re kind of like the dog-faced boy of Billington.”
“Aw, shut up.”
Grant was stern with me, but he held his temper on a tight leash. More than I could say for myself. “As your father’s son, I expect you to set an example,” he said.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means fighting with Billy Chambers is counterproductive.”
“But he said—”
“What he said was probably right,” concluded Grant.
I could feel my hands balling into fists at my side again. “Now you’re gonna tell me I can’t see Paula Quinn?”
Grant chose his words carefully. “It would be wise . . . ,” he said, “if you just let it go. In case you haven’t noticed, there are plenty of girls right here who like you.”
This was news to me, although I had to admit I wasn’t looking very hard. “Not interested,” I told him, “and besides, there’s nothing to worry about with Paula.”
“No? She found out about the glove, didn’t she?”
I looked down and kicked up some du
st. “I showed it to her before I knew anything—and if you hadn’t been so secretive about the whole thing, I might have kept it to myself.”
“The kids here follow your lead, Jason,” added Grant—which was also news to me. “What do you think is going to happen if you continue going out with her?”
“I think they’ll realize that while we’re waiting for this phantom invasion, we still have to live.”
Grant took a deep breath—I could feel his temper tugging at that leash. “You’re going to have to break away from her in a couple of weeks anyway,” he said. “No matter what.”
“Why?” I demanded, wondering what other news he was about to blindside us with.
He took a moment to think about his response and finally said, “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.” And so ended today’s ration of information.
Grant might have been put in charge of us, but he didn’t own me.
“No,” I said, and repeated it, just in case there was a part of the word he didn’t understand. “No, I won’t stop seeing Paula.” Then I turned my back on him and stormed off.
“Where are you going?” he yelled after me.
“Anywhere but here!” I shouted. “And if you have a problem with it, go tell my parents. Then maybe at least they’ll visit.”
–10–
NIGHT OF THE BECOMING
What happened next had to come eventually—we just pushed it a little, that’s all. The fact was, that no matter how high Grant chose to build his dam, the things he was keeping from us had to burst through.
After my fight with Billy Chambers and then with Grant, I refused to sit alone to stew about it. So I invited Paula over for dinner. She arrived at dusk.
“I guess Grant wasn’t cooking anything good tonight,” she said as she stepped in.
I shrugged. “Nothing like a home-cooked meal.”
She looked around at the house, which I had struggled hard to clean before her arrival. “Where are your parents?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” I told her. “It’s kind of just you and me.”
“But I thought you were inviting me over for dinner with them.”
“Don’t you think I can cook?”
She looked at me doubtfully and a bit apprehensively.
“What’s the problem?” I said. “It’s not like it’s a ‘romantic’ dinner or anything—I just thought it would be nice, to, y’know . . . eat.”
“Are your parents out of town?” she asked, always the investigator.
In town, but out to lunch was what I wanted to say. “They’re just out,” I said.
I pulled out a chair for her, figuring I might as well be a gentleman whether she liked it or not. Then I ran off into the kitchen to get the two plates I had already prepared.
There’s only so much you can do with frozen dinners. True, I had scooped their steaming contents out of the little black trays and onto our good china, then sculpted it so that it presented well—but Salisbury steak is Salisbury steak.
“Home-cooked?” she questioned.
“Well, how about home-nuked?”
I watched as she moved her fork around in her potatoes. There was something so wonderful about having put that meal together and then just sitting there with her. It made all of my troubled thoughts just slink into the closet and stay there. I didn’t have to think about it—I could pretend, just for a little while, that it didn’t exist, and I knew it would be like that for as long as she stayed.
But before either of us raised a fork to our mouths, the phone rang. I let the machine get it, and it turned out to be Wesley. I leaped from the table, knocking down my chair, and raced to the phone, terrified that he might blather something out loud that I’d never be able to explain to Paula.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” I said as I picked up the phone and shut down the machine.
“Jason,” he said, “I think we’re in trouble.” Wesley didn’t sound too good.
I glanced at Paula and smiled before I returned to the conversation. “What kind of trouble?” I asked.
“The worst” was his answer. “How do you feel?”
“The same as usual,” I said.
“Me too. My shoulders keep peeling like a sunburn, and my joints keep aching.”
“Yeah, so?” I knew the symptoms of the new treatment as well as he did. If I could stand it, then so could he.
“But there’s something else I didn’t notice before. . . .” His voice was sounding real thick now, as if he were crying. “Jason, my hair is falling out.”
“What? No! What?”
Paula looked up at me. I smiled at her again, then ducked into the kitchen.
“What are you talking about? Your hair looked fine today.”
“Not the hair on my head, but the other places—my chest, under my arms. Even those little hairs on my knuckles.”
“You gotta be kidding me!” I glanced out to Paula, who was listening to my side of the conversation, trying to fill in what Wesley might be saying. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk now,” I told him.
“Then don’t talk; listen. Listen to everything I say, and don’t shut me up until I’m done.”
“Okay, then talk.”
He cleared his throat. “I figured there had to be a reason why our parents were leaving us alone—and I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. That’s when I noticed the thing about the hair. Then I got to thinking about this whole mission of theirs. If they have to take up where they left off twenty years ago, then it means it’s like we were never born. I don’t think we were ever supposed to be born.”
I heard him breathe heavily on the other end a few times. I could feel his fear across the phone line. “Jason, I think they’re killing us.”
I let his words hit me—I let them bounce around, weighed them with both fear and logic, and compared them against my own observations. And I came to the conclusion that Wesley’s little equation must have spat out the wrong answer.
“No, it can’t be,” I told him. “I mean, why would Grant be spending so much time and energy training us?”
“To keep us busy?” suggested Wesley. “To keep us out of the way?”
“No, Wes, that would be—it would be counterproductive. They wouldn’t do that.”
“Well, we think they might,” Wesley said.
“We?”
“I talked to some of the others when we left Old Town today, and showed them my hair problem. They were all scared like me.”
I paced back and forth, and dared to touch my own eyebrows. A few short hairs came off on my fingertips, and I tried to tell myself that it didn’t mean anything. “But my father’s in charge!” I whispered, trying to keep Paula from hearing. “If he’s calling the shots, then nothing bad will happen to us.”
“How much do you trust your father?” Wesley asked.
That was one answer I didn’t even have to think about. No matter how many lies he had told me—no matter what he had done to hide the truth, in my whole life he had never done anything to hurt me.
“Something’s missing,” I told him. “You’re jumping to conclusions. You’ll start a panic!”
But it was too late to stop that. There was a knock on the door, and I told Wesley to hold on. It was Ford-called-Ferrari. He was a regular at my “slumber party.” In fact, there were over a dozen regulars now, every night. I don’t know why they all decided to come to my house, but each night, more and more kids just showed up with their sleeping bags and pillows—although they usually didn’t start showing up until later.
“Jason, I’m really scared,” he said as he barged his way in. “We gotta do something before it’s too late!”
I shushed him, and when he turned to see Paula, he said, “Uh-oh.”
Paula, who must have heard fragments of my talk with Wesley, had now heard this little dramatic excerpt as well.
“What’s been going on around here?”
“Church stuff, okay?” I offered.
Whe
n Paula looked around, I could tell she noticed sleeping bags that were shoved into various corners of the living room, not hidden as well as I thought. She turned to me and didn’t even ask. She just waited for me to answer.
I opened my mouth, fishing for a truth I could get away with, but there was another knock on the door. It was little Amy. By the look on her face, I could tell she had been crying. As I looked out of the window, I saw a few more kids coming. Some on bikes, some just running, and all gripping their training gloves like security blankets.
I picked up the phone again. “Wesley, how many kids did you talk to?”
“Most of them,” he answered. “All of them.”
I brushed my fingers nervously through my hair, the way my father did. “Okay, okay, I want you to find everyone and get them to my house now!” Although it seemed that most of them were already on their way.
The screen door opened, and more kids came in. “Hi! You remember Paula,” I said before they could open their mouths and say a word. They all just filed in silently when they saw her, trying lamely to hide their training gloves.
“Looks like the campers aren’t as happy as you thought,” she said.
I started to get mad, but I refused to take it out on her.
“I guess I really have to take care of this,” I said apologetically.
“Why didn’t you tell me there were more of those gloves around?” she said, her suspicion climbing.
I couldn’t stand her looking at me like that, so I grabbed my own glove down from the shelf and held it out to her. “Here, you want one?” I said in my frustration. “Go ahead, take it.”
But, of course, she didn’t. We both knew it wasn’t a glove she wanted.
“Paula,” I said, “I promise, as soon as I know what this is all about, I will tell you everything.” I meant what I said, and I didn’t care if the other kids heard.
She reluctantly accepted my promise. “I don’t like this ‘camp’ of yours,” she said, then shoved a whole Salisbury steak into her mouth and left, chewing.
Once she was gone, I sat everyone down and tried to calm their fears, but as more and more arrived, the gathering began to feel like a wake. The house was filled with an oppressive air of misery and terror.