I suddenly had an image of Grandpop in his cracked leather chair, narrowing his eyes at the far end of his pipe. “Exactly when did the existence of an alternate universe become a mundane thought? It doesn’t seem normal not to put up a fuss.” And then moving his narrowed gaze to me as if he suspected I had the answer.
I did have the answer later, after years of thinking about it. The aliens had a special ability to influence the way we felt about them, to manipulate our emotions. Those vorpals. It was why they inspired only fascination and not fear. Hundreds of them had positioned themselves in the most concentrated parts of our country, thousands had gotten themselves into the most important areas of the world. They were courting governments and the public alike. Their vorpals made everyone love them, even while they remained mysterious to us.
Or did we love them because they remained mysterious?
I turned back to the kitchen and said over the escalating noise, “We’re not going to do it.”
Cole’s head snapped up and he hit me with a glare as cold as creek water. It went straight to my heart. At least now I knew his true feelings on the subject—he was in, no matter what he had to pretend about. And he wouldn’t take to me screwing it all up.
The silence pressed in on me. I let my own silence press back. Then I said, “We’ll do it like this: Cole’s in love with me . . .” I gave him a searching look. He dropped his gaze to the scuffed floorboards. “And I want him too. But the reason we can’t have each other is that I’m from the Other Place.”
The rep had a real smile after all, a smug sort of smirk that left something gnawing at my stomach.
We packed up the house in a week. My sisters said good-bye to every shelf, window, and baseboard, as if they believed the new town house in Chicago wouldn’t have such things. I cared more about Grandpop’s junkers and spent a couple days mourning with each one in turn. Friday, my parents went off to auction animals and furniture, and to trade information with the other families who were moving too. I couldn’t take one more snicker from Willer or any of my other friends about my upcoming metamorphosis, so I stayed home. I sat in the empty room where Hayden had slept the summer I was fourteen, the summer before Grandpop had gotten cancer. I thought of the time Hayden had come in to find me reading on his bed.
“Is the Other Place really like this?” I’d showed him the book cover of Dylan’s stories: two boys running through the forest toward a palace in a clearing, on the verge of discovery. The stories within told of strange creatures that grew and shrank at will, of a Girl Queen who glowed with magic, of trees that formed doorways into secret spaces. “Is it so like a fairy tale?”
Hayden’s face darkened. The little bedroom was full of his presence, and I thought I might be sensing his vorpal, the way you sense rather than hear the sound of a cat’s tail brushing over floorboards. I wished he would sit on the bed next to me and then he did. “You’ve become enamored with us,” he said. “But what you know of us is only what you’ve invented. Only an illusion.”
I leaned against him, and this time I knew my own vorpal was there too, right alongside his. “The illusion is the part we like best.”
They scrubbed me from the web, every last image of me, my entire online profile. It depressed me that it was so easy to do. I’d never had a solo in any choir competition, never been named queen at the county fair. I was the one turning away from the camera while everyone showed off blue ribbons at the poultry show, the girl huddled under a sweatshirt at the Friday night bonfire. It was easy to convince people to crop me from their online photos, to delete me from their social media pages. Afterward it felt like not existing. I couldn’t even walk into a store and buy a pop. Cole would have to come in with me so the system could scan his image and charge the Coke to his online account.
They messed with Cole’s profile too, changing his name from Colburn and adding photos of him as a doting older brother and protector of small animals. His new outfits were a farce of a farm boy’s wardrobe—white Tshirts and blue jeans thin enough you could almost see through them. Soft boots that laced halfway to the knee and were good only for padding through coffeehouses and carpeted lofts.
I wore black, always black, a ghost in negative.
We drove out to Chicago to meet our producer, who came packaged with a songwriter barely older than me and Cole. The songwriter had played the bass in a high-concept band that had fizzled out a year ago when it was revealed that the members weren’t actually dying of a solar allergy.
“His concept’s dead,” the producer told us by way of introduction, “but his songs are hot. Melodic as heck.”
The songwriter seemed self-conscious only about not having been the front man. “The bass is the gateway that links the guitar with the drums,” he said in his defense.