Halifax (16 page)

It was impossible to tell weather Izzy noticed that Bobby had cleaned up and impossible to tell weather Bobby had cleaned up to impress Izzy, but they were both trying so hard
not
to make a big deal out of it that it was a good bet both things were true.

The alien and the alien enthusiast patrolled the streets of suburbia. Izzy was chewing on the end of a red liquorice stick as the two strolled among the trick-or-treaters. They looked very much like two undercover cops on the beat.

Izzy and Bobby stepped apart to let a trick-or-treater pass between them. He was dressed in a long black robe and wore a mask with a single huge eye on the front.

“Hey Sean,” Izzy said, as the trick-or-treater passed by.

“Hey Izzy,” came a voice from somewhere behind the eyeball.

“Friend of yours?” Bobby asked.

“No, he’s an alien. Political prisoner from Aly Farn in the Sombrero Galaxy.”

Bobby turned back to look at the trick-or-treater and the creature’s head turned one hundred and eighty degrees and it stared back at Bobby with its one big eye. Then it winked at him! Bobby stumbled, barely catching himself before he tripped and fell.

Bobby turned back to Izzy and began staring at her. He looked at her with a growing smile on his face, like he wanted to know whatever delicious secret it was she was keeping from him.

“What?” Izzy finally asked, furrowing her brow.

“Go ahead,” Bobby teased her. “Let your hair down. Go crazy. Do your alien thing. Let it all hang out. I want to see what you look like when you’re not wearing
your
screen.”

Izzy’s shoulders drooped. He had her. She would never hear the end of it until she showed him what he wanted to see. The real Izzy Halifax. The
alien
Izzy Halifax. As she intently looked into Bobby’s eyes, Izzy began to shake. Her entire body quivered. The fingers on her hands twisted and her head violently whipped from side to side. Unearthly moans rose from her contorted mouth as she wrapped her arms around herself and bent over in pain.

Bobby stood back. He was now a little frightened and probably sorry he had asked. His eyes grew wider as Izzy’s cries grew louder and he couldn’t help himself but to reach out to comfort her when she suddenly stood straight up and socked him hard in the arm.

“I’m not wearing a screen, moron!” she said, looking exactly the same as she had moments before. Same old Izzy. “This is what I look like. All aliens don’t look like…aliens. Most are actually really beautiful. Remember, to the rest of the universe,
you’re
the aliens.”

Izzy headed off down the sidewalk again, leaving a slightly stunned Bobby behind her. He took a moment to compose himself then rushed to catch up with her, trying hard to act like he wasn’t fazed at all by what she had just done and that he knew what she looked like all along.

Then he dropped a little surprise of his own. “My dad was abducted by aliens.”

Izzy almost choked on her liquorice. She had to cough to clear her throat.

“When I was ten,” Bobby continued. “He walked out the door one day and didn’t come back. Never saw him again.”

“And you think he was abducted by aliens?” Izzy asked. “It takes a lot of effort to travel through space. Believe it or not aliens have better things to do than kidnap earthlings and mutilate cows.”

“It’s okay. I know what I know. I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Izzy said reassuringly. “Creepy, yes. Crazy? No.”

Nora arrived at the Halloween Carnival without a costume and without enthusiasm. As she had for most of her life, she was playing a role, looking too cool to be concerned about anything other than her hair, her nails, and the boyfriend she was supposed to meet.

Suddenly Shana Rowen jumped out in front of her from the doorway of one of the shops. Nora screamed and stumbled backwards.

“Hey, it’s just me,” Shana said, confused at her fellow cheerleader’s intense reaction. Shana was normal now, or as normal as she may have ever been. She still possessed the unnatural enthusiasm inherent to head cheerleaders countrywide.

“Sorry. You surprised me,” said Nora.

“What are you doing tonight?” Shana asked.

“I’m meeting Andre at the haunted house.”

“Oh,
An-d-re
,” said Shana, stretching his name out into about fifty syllables. “He’s been so weird lately. In fact everyone’s been weird lately. You have no idea how many random students have come up to me asking if they can be cheerleaders. I think we went way overboard with our Outreach Program. It just encourages false hope.”

Nora looked down the sidewalk where the shops of Main Street petered out and the houses began and saw Andre standing, arms crossed, impatiently waiting for her. He was wearing his satin Lexham basketball jacket embroidered with his name on it and looked every inch the BMOC he was.

“There’s Andre,” Nora said, standing a few feet apart from Shana, still nervous to be in her presence despite the fact that the girl was no longer the host of the Cambian virus. Nora would never look at Shana the same way again. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

Nora hurried away from Shana, but she wasn’t exactly rushing to get to Andre. The look on his face said it all. He wasn’t happy and that meant he wasn’t going to let her be happy. She greeted him with a kiss that was not reciprocated.

“You’re late,” Andre said sternly.

“Sorry.”

“Were you with your new friends? Were you with Farrell Halifax?”

“No.”

“Good. Come on, let’s go to the haunted house,” Andre said as he led her a few houses down the street.

“Do we really have to?” Nora asked. “You know I hate stuff like that.”

“I think tonight we’re going to do what I want to do,” Andre said as they stopped in front of the haunted house.

It was a large Victorian house with a wide and crumbling wrap-around porch. A cupola rose from the second story and the rusty rooster weather vane atop it creaked as it turned in the breeze. What was left of the mildew colored green paint on the house was peeling away and broken shutters hung cockeyed from the sides of blackened windows. The house looked as if it should have been condemned. Which was the entire point of a haunted house, of course.

As Nora and Andre walked up the broken and uneven front steps, a group of teenagers came running out the front door of the house. They were laughing nervously in that way you laugh when you’re scared of something that shouldn’t have scared you.

Nora stuck close to Andre as they reached the imposing oak front door. It immediately opened with a loud creak and an old man stepped out onto the porch to greet them. He wore a hooded robe that brushed the floor as he walked. His wrinkled hand reached out towards them and his long fingers beckoned them inside.

“Come in, come in,” the old man said in a raspy voice. He took two tickets from Andre and held the door as the young couple entered the dark house. He then closed the door behind them and remaining on the porch.

Two teenage boys dressed as zombies, with tattered clothing and kohl black eyes, came up the steps and presented their tickets to the old man.

“We’re closed,” the man told them. “Technical difficulties.”

As the disappointed teenagers left, the old man pulled a skeleton key from his robes—and locked the front door.

Images of aliens and cheerleaders and mathematical equations flashed across the huge screens of the Garage. Holograms of planets hung in the air, computers churned away, lights blinked like Christmas tree bulbs across consoles and all manner of equipment churned and grinded and rattled the room around Farrell. He sat in the middle of it all, looking from screen to screen, studying everything, searching for patterns or clues or answers, totally lost in concentration.

Farrell held Rom’s Rubik’s Cube in his hand, turning it absent-mindedly, causing the screens to flick from one image to another. The largest of the screens was tuned to the satellite television feed and cable channels came into focus on the screen, from a Home Cooking show to a Western to a Sci-Fi movie, each appearing for a moment then dissolving in pixilated fuzz as Farrell twisted another section of the cube.

Rom entered the Garage, still in his bird attack costume, still dejected and dragging his empty trick-or-treating bag behind him. Rom stopped and looked at all the activity and at Farrell, who didn’t even look up to acknowledge Rom’s presence. The young boy pulled the Rubik’s Cube out of Farrell’s hands and in seconds maneuvered its slices to solve the puzzle in record time, each side a solid color.

The large screen came into focus and
Sports Center
appeared on it. The ESPN feed from the satellite was back and all was right in the world again.

Rom sat in a chair next to Farrell at Rom’s own workstation. Toys of every sort, or modified toys, were strewn across the table in front of them. Farrell still didn’t look at Rom. He was lost in his own thoughts. Rom sighed loudly.

“My first chance to go trick-or-treating and nobody will take me.
Nobody
,” Rom said, laying his arms across the table and resting his head down, hoping Farrell would notice him. “Izzy doesn’t care about me and Bobby is not the brother I thought he was going to be. And no one is nice to me at school. Especially cranky old Mrs. O’Brien, who is completely going to outlive me, and all those girls who look at me like I’m some kind of alien. Which, of course, I am.”

Farrell ignored Rom and instead began poking at Rom’s tinker toy force field with the plate of cookies beneath it. He examined it closely.

“I don’t like it here,” Rom continued. “And I especially don’t like the fact that no one cares what I think…
or even listens to me
!”

Rom’s complaining had no effect on Farrell. He continued to look at the force field. He prodded it with the end of a pencil and watched as sparks crackled across its surface.

Rom angrily pushed a blinking blue button on the workstation and deactivated the force field. A beam of light lowered around the tinker toys and he reached in and grabbed one of the peanut butter cookies held within. He took a bite of one, crumbs falling on the lapels of his suit, and stared at Farrell, desperate to get his brother’s attention, but still Farrell ignored him.

A beautiful girl with long black hair sauntered down the sidewalk, her hips swinging back and forth as she teetered on four-inch high, strappy black heels that matched the very short and very sexy black cat costume she was wearing—or barely wearing. A cute cat’s tail bobbed up and down as she walked, beckoning Bobby to look, whether he wanted to or not. But he wanted to look. He really did. He smiled in appreciation at the girl’s many attributes as she walked by at a seductively slow pace.

“Hey, Logan,” Izzy said to the girl. “Make sure you reactivate your screen tomorrow. You can’t walk around looking like that.”

Bobby turned and watched the sexy girl sashay off, looking at her in a whole new way now. “Alien? Can’t be.”

“Totally,” Izzy said. “And
he
can be a real problem.”

Bobby shook off the thoughts he was having about Catgirl and inched a little closer to Izzy as they walked. “So tell me about you. I assume you could be living a nice life on some other planet some place with your handsome two headed alien boyfriend or something. Why do you do this?”

“Because I saw what happened to our planet and I don’t want that to happen to your planet. And because I owe Farrell. He sort of…saved me.”

“From what?” Bobby asked. “Jail? You were one of these prisoners?”

Izzy stopped walking and looked down at the sidewalk for a long moment, scraping her boots back and forth along the pavement. She finally looked up and moved her hair out of her eyes, looking at Bobby straight on, a shy person gaining courage. “You know how I said I was sensitive? I mean, I’m really sensitive. Like cosmically sensitive. And where I come from that’s a very bad thing. People like me were considered…crazy. I was in what you might call an insane asylum. Farrell got me out. Being sensitive is actually useful for what we do here. So see? I know you’re not crazy. Because I know crazy.”

Bobby was uncharacteristically speechless. Whatever mushy soft interior he had hidden deep inside his soul was somehow touched by Izzy’s vulnerability. A hairline fracture had appeared across his tough veneer. It looked like he was going to reach out to Izzy, to hold her and comfort her. His hand slowly moved towards Izzy’s face as his own face softened. Izzy softened, too. She could feel his empathy. It was soothing and unexpected, but entirely welcome. In a split second, though, it was gone.

Bobby suddenly pointed to a small boy wearing a skeleton mask. He was being accosted by a big eyed, pointy headed, green alien, straight out of
Close Encounters
. The alien grabbed the bag of candy the child had been clutching, snatching it out of his little hands, and ran off through the surrounding front yards, leaving the crying boy behind.

“Alien crime!” Bobby shouted. “Right there! Right in front of us! I’m on it!” Bobby shot off after the escaping alien, tearing across a well-manicured lawn and leaping over a small white, picket fence before Izzy could stop him.

“No, Bobby! Wait!” she yelled after him before realizing she was going to have to follow. She ran to catch up. The crying crime victim followed behind her as fast as he could.

Nora stood back for a moment and let Andre take the lead into the foyer of the haunted house. Appropriately scary music, complete with mournful moans, played over hidden speakers. The requisite plastic spiders hung from the ceiling and lights flickered on and off. As with most haunted houses, it wasn’t about what you could see. It was about what you couldn’t see. It was what might jump out at you at any moment, sending your heart rate soaring. It was the thrill factor.

“Can’t we do something else?” Nora asked as she stepped gingerly forward, following Andre. “I don’t want to be here.”

“Maybe you should do something because I want to do it,” Andre said without looking at her. “That’s not much to ask.”