I closed the laptop.
The night I “met” SmallvilleGuy online, two years ago, I had gone to the Strange Skies site for a reason. I’d seen something a week earlier that I didn’t understand and couldn’t let go.
It happened during the overnight drive portion of our then-latest move. My dad and I had been the only ones awake. Kansas was flat and boring, but I was staring out the window all the same. “Stop,” I’d told him as we were passing a field, and he’d pulled the SUV over, probably thinking I needed to go to the bathroom.
But that wasn’t it. There were a few spotlights from the city we’d just driven through playing out over the fields, and one of them had illuminated a large . . . tower . . . made of giant stones, piled one on top of the other. I had the door open as soon as we stopped.
“Lois, wait,” Dad said, but I kept moving. He jogged to catch me, saying, “Stay behind me,” so he either wanted a closer look too or knew I wouldn’t stop until I got one. He never said which.
The structure was eerie, almost teetering, the hunks of stone stretching precariously high into the air above us. We approached it together, both too drawn to the weirdness of it to be cautious, when something slammed into the top, and the rocks flew out into the air, hurtling as if they were going to rain down on me and my dad. I screamed so loud that my throat ached remembering it. Dad threw himself over me, knocking us both to the ground—
But then nothing. No impact. Nothing but the impression of movement and wind around us, the rocks flying around and around and then up and up, until we couldn’t see the stones anymore. Until it was as if the rock tower had never existed. I could swear—would swear, if anyone ever asked me, even though Dad had been clear I was never to speak of it again—that I saw a form, a body, a person directing those rocks, then streaking away into the sky. But it was dark, and whatever I’d seen had been moving fast. Too fast to be sure about.
There were posters on Strange Skies who reported things that weren’t so far from what I’d witnessed. Things that should have been impossible.
So I created my SkepticGirl1 account and shared my eyewitness report.
Posted by SkepticGirl1 at 11:13 p.m.: I know how this story will sound, but it seems like if anyone will understand or believe me or have an explanation, then it might be someone here. Driving outside Kansas City last night with my family, I think I saw someone who could fly. No, that might give the wrong impression. Crazy as it is, I believe that I saw someone flying. Through the air. Actually flying . . .
I told the whole story, including everything except details that would identify my father. His security clearance alone would have the posters at Strange Skies swooning, and this wasn’t about him. It was about what we’d seen. What I now knew might exist out there in the world, not talked about in the open. I ended my post with: So, am I crazy or did this happen to me? Did I really see this?
SmallvilleGuy had reached out to me right away via private message on the boards, almost as soon as I had posted, and said he went to high school in a small town in Kansas and that he knew I was telling the truth. Because he was confirming what I’d seen, he also said he couldn’t tell me exactly how he knew or who he was. There were others on the boards who made nonsense claims about aliens in the middle of the night and spaceship experiments. I didn’t buy into those. Of course. That was why I’d chosen the username I had.
But SmallvilleGuy’s reassurance and other reports on the boards seemed legit. I was convinced: the reason Dad didn’t want me to talk about what we’d experienced to Mom or Lucy or anyone (even him) had nothing to do with keeping people from thinking we were crazy.
It was because we had seen something real, something we weren’t supposed to.
And my dad—even with his top secret clearance—hadn’t known how to explain it either.
CHAPTER 4
I went to breakfast with a mission the next morning. After dinner the night before, Lucy had blown me off, so determined to spend the evening playing on her holoset that she’d already done her homework. That equaled no love for letting me see it.
But today, the curved shell was, as usual, sitting beside her plate of toast and turkey bacon. It was hot pink. When she’d unwrapped the present at Christmas last year, she’d seen the color and done her trademark nose wrinkle. She’d wanted Worlds War Three; my parents had been steered to Unicorn University as a more appropriate game for a young girl. After some justified ranting and raving, she calmed down enough to try it out. Based on how much she used it, the galaxy of unicorns was apparently more interesting than she’d thought.
I put toast on my plate with one hand, then reached out and snagged the holoset as I sat down across from her.
“Lois!” she protested.