If You Knew Then What I Know Now (6 page)

“You're welcome,” I say, curtsying like the women on TV.

Though we can't hear it from the house, my grandfather heaves and pulls on the giant machine shed door to close it. He and Garrett start marching up the gravel driveway toward the house.

My grandmother fidgets with her apron, her thumb rubs a stain near an embroidered leaf. “I expect you should change for dinner before your Grandpa gets here,” she says. Something on the stove is boiling over, steam pushing up on the pot lid, froth escaping and sizzling against an orange burner coil. She ignores it. We look at each other, a woman in her dress, a boy in his, one of us on each end of a perfectly set table for four. Here is a secret we both helped make, and in this moment we feel it dropping fully formed down into each of our bodies, whole and heavy, where it will sit forever. I'm too young to know exactly why we're keeping the secret, but I know we're not going to tell anybody what she's just let me do. “You better scoot,” she says.

The sun falls a bit lower behind the old barn. Silverware sparkles. My earring spoon isn't close enough to its knife but I can fix that later. “Okay,” I say, hurrying to the bedroom as the hem of my dress whispers against the carpet.

T
hat first night I couldn't help imagining myself the way I thought they saw me—their view from the sky with X-ray vision cutting through the roof. There I was in my queen-sized bed, thirteen years old, staring at the ceiling with my blankets bunched under my chin in pale fists. I had nowhere to look but up. On one side of my bed was the window, and even with the blinds twisted shut, I could still see about an inch of black, threatening sky. On the other side was my door, with the margin of light at the bottom where I felt sure, at any moment, I'd see the shadows of their footsteps creeping in to yank me out of my world. Despite being desperately tired, I couldn't close my eyes either. If I fell asleep, I was a goner.

It didn't seem possible to be so scared by something on TV, especially a show I watched every week with my mother. And while the mystery show did freak me out a little sometimes—like the one with the haunted bunk bed that left burn marks on your skin and even whispered
You're dead
—I still couldn't wait for a new episode every Wednesday night. My favorite part was when the host would appeal to us, the audience at home.
If you have any information regarding this case, please call the toll-free number on your screen
. Paper faces of suspects with penciled eyes and shaded mouths flashed up. I memorized them and, in my mind, held them up to all the faces I encountered in a day, wishing the school janitor, my mustached geometry teacher, or the grocery store bagger was a killer or thief I could identify and turn in.

But the show that night had been different. It was a special hour-long program about alien abductions, and at the beginning, I thought it was pretty ridiculous. How could the police arrest aliens? But as the stories unfolded, I started to become more and more afraid. Sitting Indian-style in front of the TV, I felt my teeth lock together and my eyes squeeze closed when the descriptions of the abductions got particularly horrible. Which was why I couldn't sleep. The aliens abducted some of the people on the show while they slept. And the part that had me most terrified was that the sleepers would actually wake up during their kidnappings. The aliens—silent, glowing and green—would surround their beds and the people would try to move or scream, but they had been paralyzed. Aliens had some eerie power over the body.

In the past, whenever I was frightened by scary movies or TV shows—or once, by a news alert that a serial child killer strangely named Michael Jackson was loose in our town—the only way I could sleep was to be with my parents in their bedroom. That arrangement began when I was very young, four
or five, and awful nightmares would send me to sleep in their bed. But to be thirteen years old, and about to ask my mother—the only one in the house still awake at this late hour—to sleep with me felt embarrassing. Even so, I flung off my blankets, and from my bedroom, followed the light to the living room where I knew I'd find her, TV still on, in the yellow glow of the lamp beside her, bent over my Game Boy.

“I'm not sure I'm going to be able to sleep tonight,” I said. I waited for her to look up from the game. Her thumbs worked the pink buttons furiously; she was trying to beat her record, which was the long number written on the yellow piece of paper taped to the coffee table beside her. I didn't play the Game Boy much, but she played it all the time, even taking it to work with her to play during breaks; she was obsessed with Tetris, a game where small jagged bricks inch down the screen, and the point is to fit them back together. It was a game about making order out of chaos, putting back together what rained down in pieces.

“Why not?” she asked.

I tried to swallow the sharp lump wedged in my throat. “I'm too scared.”

“Scared of what?” Her eyes flicked over the top her glasses just long enough to see me fidget in front of her. I wore an old T-shirt of my dad's that hung past my boxer shorts.

“Scared of the aliens,” I confessed.

She pushed a button and put the Game Boy down. “You do not need to be scared of aliens,” she said. “They aren't real.”

But she'd seen the same show, hadn't she? She heard the stories of the weird lights descending out of the sky on dark rural roads. She heard the Texas woman describe the cold metal instruments the aliens used to probe her body. She heard about the paralyzed people waking up under their abductors' stare. And most crucially, she saw the penciled sketches—how people who had never met all described the same alien face: menacing lightbulb-shaped heads with mirrored, insect eyes and thin coin slots for mouths. Just because the idea of alien abductions sounded unbelievable didn't mean I couldn't also accept them as real.

Sometimes I stood like a flamingo when I was nervous about something. I'd cross my arms over my chest, balance on one foot, and prop the other foot against the standing leg, in the notch above the knee. Then I'd tilt my head down on one side to avoid the eyes of the person I was talking to. As my mother returned to her game, I watched the reflection in her glasses of the bricks falling from the sky, and stood there like a flamingo, hoping she'd know what I needed without me having to ask.

 

The alien abduction show aired in October, a month into my seventh-grade year, and only a few months after we'd moved into our new house during the summer. Our old house was much smaller, with all three bedrooms and both bathrooms huddled together. In the new one, my bedroom was the last door at the end of a long hallway, and especially on that alien
night, it seemed as if I were teetering at the very edge of the house, alone. We'd moved to a brand-new subdivision where every house had just been built on cleared lots. None of the yards had trees, only half had grass. And behind our back yard, empty fields stretched for miles—perfect landing pads for UFOs.

The morning after watching the alien show, as both my mother and I yawned during breakfast—she couldn't sleep in her sleeping bag on my floor because I couldn't stop tossing in my loud, squeaking bed—I thought I could survive this awful fear as long as I was never alone again; every abductee had been alone when they were taken. Unless the aliens were equipped to abduct whole families at a time, or entire classrooms of seventh graders, which the show last night didn't go into, it seemed possible to protect myself by always being in the presence of people.

As soon as I arrived at school, I headed for the library like I did every morning before class. I walked the stacks of books, strolled from A to Z as my finger slid along the slick plastic spines. I could judge books by their covers, so I was looking for unexpected colors or fancy embossed letters, something new. There was a blue book that I'd always liked looking at, though never enough to actually read, and I pulled it down to spread open the cover. The plastic protector cracked and hissed, the sound felt loud. The library was quiet, of course, but suddenly it was too quiet, because there was no one else around. Usually that silence and order was exactly the opposite of the crowded
hallways where locker doors slammed and kids jostled your shoulders. That silence had always been a comfort; but that day, to be hidden behind the tall shelves was certain danger.

I returned to the hall and meandered the maze of the building. I passed the boys who roamed in packs with their hands in pockets and the girls who stood in secretive groups and pointed at each other's skirts. My first class was Biology, and it wasn't until I sat down in my desk, the teacher shuffling papers behind hers, that I remembered what went on in there. Behind me, at tall black countertops, just a few weeks before, we had dissected frogs. In my mind, that's what the abduction was like: my cold body splayed in a metal baking pan and split open with sewing pins. Our poor frogs were stiff and rubbery, and their organs, once we peeled back the skin, were slippery and bloated. We poked them with our scalpels, identified a list of parts, and if one of us (me) was too squeamish to touch something like the gallbladder, our teacher stomped across the classroom, grabbed our tray, and pinched the little round organ with her naked fingers to prove it was that easy.

At school that year, even before my alien abduction fear arrived overnight, I sometimes felt as if I were a specimen like those dissected frogs. Seventh grade seemed like the year when we were all noticing each other's bodies. I'd overheard girls discussing boys' bodies, deciding who had the nicest-looking legs or arms, and once, in music class after careful deliberation
with the two top contenders standing side by side, the best butt. (I was so skinny, they told me, that I didn't even have one.) Of course the boys noticed bodies too: the girls. I watched their eyes as they moved over the females; sometimes I imagined that the girls could actually feel the boys' eyeballs skimming over their skin like a wet finger.

I settled into the easy pattern of teachers droning and bells ringing, and felt most comfortable in class. In the halls, the other seventh graders passed and nudged me out of their way, hollered over my head, which was business as usual. But still I wondered if my fear covered my skin like sunburn, the way it felt.

Then, at lunch, everywhere I looked in the cafeteria made me think of autopsies. All the gleaming trays of knives and forks lined up like medical implements, the pans of sickly-yellow noodles and brilliant red baked cherry crisp, conveyor belts and meat slicers. Because I couldn't go sit in the library like I normally did, I sat down at one end of a long table full of other seventh-grade boys; I pretended I was one of them by laughing when they laughed—a strategy I'd been working on already. I'd gone to school with all of them since kindergarten, but that year, I was uneasy around them because they always talked about sex, which I dreaded because they all seemed to have much more experience than I did—which was none. In fact, it was a couple of weeks before, the last time the lunch ladies served that cherry crisp dessert, that one of them reached
across the table and shoved his thumb into the steaming red stuff on my tray. He drew his hand back, licked his thumb, and announced to the table that he had just popped my cherry. “Now you can stop walking around like you've got something stuck up your ass,” he said. Staring down at the hole torn out of my dessert, I sat frozen and unable to speak. The boys around me laughed.

After lunch was suddenly the worst hour of my whole day: fifth period, gym, when at the end of class, we were required to shower—to stand in an echoing, tiled room under nozzles that poked out of the wall. Like every other day that year, as much as I wanted to look at the other boys in the shower—I was noticing bodies too—I kept my eyes pointed to the floor. I knew looking was dangerous, though I couldn't help noticing the details of their bodies that made me want to hide mine. Armpit hair, long muscles in their legs, acne bumps on their shoulders, dark fuzz on their chins.

But that day, in the shower, I realized I really was a specimen worth examining because there was no one in that room who looked like me. In sixth grade, there had been three of us—the short boys shoved to the front row of group pictures and picked last for sports teams. But in seventh grade, I was the last of my kind with the smooth, small, white body. If aliens wanted to study humans, then I was so weird that they would have to abduct me. It seemed inevitable, guaranteed. They were going to take me onto their spaceship and pull me apart.