The Summer Experiment (2 page)

Frog Hill

Most people in the little town of Allagash didn't believe the story of the 1976 abductions. Some felt it wasn't good publicity for the town, that it might frighten away our tourists. Besides, there were worse things to worry about, such as if we could get a permit to use fireworks at the big Fourth of July celebration. That's why I was surprised the next day when everyone was talking about the strange lights.

At the post office, Lila Jandreau asked if I'd seen them.

“Nope,” I said. I paid for the book of stamps my mom needed and then hurried out. I didn't want to hear how amazingly weird and altogether astonishing they were.

At the grocery store, Bill Flagg asked the same thing. Did you see those wild lights? Did you see how they zipped around and then just disappeared?
Did
you
see, did you see, did you see?
I was sick of being asked. Even old Mr. Finley, who has cataracts in both eyes, saw the lights. And so did his dog, Mutt, which is why I'd heard him barking last night.

The
Bangor
Daily
News
bragged about it: STRANGE LIGHTS SEEN OVER NORTHERN MAINE. HUNDREDS WITNESS THE SIGHTINGS. Well, count me out of the hundreds. Apparently, I'm doomed to suffer a life of boredom in the sticks at the end of the road. We don't even get any serial killers this far north. It's just too far for them to travel.

For the next week, it was like living in Crazy Town. There were all kinds of sightings by just about everyone. Mr. Cramer at the gas station. Faye Hafford at the library. Chad Putnam, who drives the UPS truck. Wayne McBridy, who manages Allagash Canoe Rentals. Darlene Dumond at the River Café. Vernon and Sylvia Martin, who own the tree farm. UFOs for sure, everyone said. Cigar-shaped, dish-shaped, ball-shaped, kidney-shaped, you name it.

However, the
Bangor
Daily
News
now quoted someone at an Air Force base in Vermont to put the mystery to rest. “We have determined that the sightings in northern Maine over the past few days are caused by the reentry of rocket debris into Earth's atmosphere.”

While most people didn't believe that, they
did
believe, like Grandpa, that the Air Force was up to no good. My dad and Uncle Horace agreed. Secret tests for planes or maybe helicopters. However, a few UFO fans such as Mrs. Cramer and Josh Turner were certain that aliens had visited Allagash again. To me, it didn't matter what the lights were. I just wanted to see them for myself. How else could I come to my own conclusions?

That's why I was happy to run into Sheriff Mallory at the post office. Sheriff Mallory is pretty wise and he sort of put things in place for me.

“Remember, Roberta,” the sheriff said. “No matter what you see, hear, or read, everything has a logical explanation. Don't let folks fool you with all these sightings. I'm out there on patrol almost every night, and I've yet to see anything strange in the sky. I've seen the Space Station many times. Jupiter. Airplanes and shooting stars. It can all be explained.”

That helped me a lot. But what finally brought me peace was that my best friend, Marilee Evans, also didn't see anything extraterrestrial. Either that, or she was pretending so that I wouldn't feel so, well,
alienated
. Marilee and I have been best friends for almost a year, ever since her mom moved back home to Allagash after her divorce from Marilee's father. We bonded the first day we met, when I taught her how to pronounce
Allagash
. It's “Al-UH-gash,” and not “ALL-uh-gash,” with two “ls,” the way some tourists say it.

“You could write a story for the school paper,” said Marilee. “You know, how people have claimed to see UFOs for thousands of years. There are ancient caves around the world with drawings of spacecraft and creatures wearing helmets.”

Marilee and I are about the smartest girls in our class. Well, not
about
the smartest, we truly are. I was just being modest. In science class, we're awesome. Our big dream is to win the Maine State Science Fair if we can just come up with an amazing project. And guess what? I'm blond! I don't know who started this “blonds are dumb” notion in the first place. Maybe a dark-haired boy like my brother, Johnny. I have long blond hair and I'm amazingly smart. You might say I'm narcissistic. But then, I can tell you without using Google who Narcissus was. I think this is why Johnny torments me. He calls me a science geek. But he's jealous since he has to work hard to get Cs when all I get are As. I can get an A with my eyes closed, which is what they were right then. Marilee and I were lying on the two gigantic rocks that we had claimed as our own on the bank of the river. They were almost the size of my bed and flat enough that we could stretch out while we found shapes in the clouds and discussed our boring lives.

“I guess I could write a story,” I said. I was wearing my favorite T-shirt, which has Luke Skywalker's face just behind his X-wing starfighter. It belonged to my mom when she was a little girl. Johnny says I live in the past, but Luke Skywalker is eternal.

“By the way,” said Marilee. “I think Henry is up to no good. I saw him yesterday sneaking into his mother's greenhouse, all secret-like.”

This would be Henry Horton Harris Helmsby. A lot of the kids call him just Henry, but I secretly nicknamed him “the Four Hs of the Apocalypse.” He is what is you call a nemesis, an enemy that's tough to beat.
My
nemesis. Of the two science projects that I masterminded in the past, before Marilee moved to Allagash, I'd lost to “4 Hs” both times. That can lower your confidence and self-esteem. Even mine. But at least Henry lives next door to Marilee, which is good since she can keep an eye on him.

“We can outsmart Henry,” I said. “But it won't be easy.”

“He's such an egghead,” Marilee said.

“Actually, Marilee, his head is shaped more like a cucumber than an egg.” It was true. I figured Henry had such a big brain filling up the top of his head that he needed a lot of space below so that the brain could send down long roots. For brain nourishment, that is.

“He's up to something big all right,” said Marilee. Just before school ended and Mrs. Dionne, our teacher, passed out forms for the science fair, Marilee and I decided to be partners, which is allowed. But HHHH is much too vain to let anyone be his partner, unless it was Luther Burbank or Gregor Mendel. Henry is a genius who always works alone. We needed to keep a close watch on him for sure.

“Let's start asking around,” I said. “Quietly though, so Henry doesn't know we're on to him.”

“You really think we can beat him?” Marilee asked.

“Sure we can,” I said. “But we need a big project. Maybe we could interview those four men in Vermont by phone. You know, the ones who say they were abducted here in 1976.” I figured that could be interesting. But I was still disappointed that I hadn't seen the strange lights for myself.

“Maybe,” said Marilee, and the “maybe” trailed off as she said it. I could tell she was drifting to sleep, which she often does when we lie on our river rocks and talk. It's easy to fall asleep to the sound of the red-winged blackbirds that nest in the bushes nearby and the gentle lapping of the river against the bank.

“
Wake
up!
” I shouted, and Marilee almost rolled off her rock. I can be dramatic at times, or so I've been told.

“What in the world?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

“If the UFOs won't come to us,” I said, “then we'll go to the UFOs.”

“Explain this, please, before my brain explodes.”

“We'll camp out,” I said. “We can't go all the way to Eagle Lake where the Allagash Abductions took place. But we can pitch our tent on the hill behind Frog Pond. It's only a quarter mile from the house.”

“But it's so spooky out there,” said Marilee. “And froggy.”

“All the better for a sighting,” I said. “Come on, everyone knows UFOs never land in the middle of Times Square, or at the Super Bowl. It has to be spooky and…froggy.”

“Still,” said Marilee. “Honestly, Robbie, I don't really believe in them. My mom says it's all hogwash. And that the Air Force always has secrets. And that rocket debris really does burn as it falls back to earth. Why don't we rent a movie instead. What about
Cowboys
and
Aliens
?”

Marilee is taller than me, with dark brown hair that ends just below her ears. She's really cute and also smart, which I previously mentioned. But she's a big chicken. The Gutless Girl, I call her. The Spineless Wonder.

“Come on, Marilee,” I begged. “We can bring a cooler of sodas and some sandwiches and chips and candy bars.”

“Well,” she said. “I guess I can ask my mom.”

***

So that's how two perfectly sane—and did I mention very intelligent?—girls, one with long blond hair and one with shorter brown hair, packed up junk food and sleeping bags and pillows and flashlights and went camping on the hill behind Frog Pond. It was just after we'd had our supper, or what Marilee calls “dinner” since she lived in Boston until her parents got divorced. My dad helped us load it all onto the back of his pickup truck. We jumped on too, just to keep stuff from flying off in the wind. And then, as Tina bounced on the seat beside him, Dad drove us through the meadow, which was a mass of red clover and yellow buttercups, all the way to Frog Hill.

“Remember now,” he said, as he helped me unfold my two-person tent. “If you get scared, use your flashlights to walk home. That path can be tricky.”

Kids are tough in the country. We spend a lot of time without our parents even knowing where we are. We're either four-wheeling on the mountain or fishing or picking berries. But I knew my dad was wondering if Marilee, having spent her first years in a big city like Boston, could handle a night on Frog Hill. That's why he and my mom refer to us as the country mouse and the city mouse.

“We'll be careful,” I said, and winked at Dad. Marilee didn't notice. She was unrolling our sleeping bags inside the tent.

“And if you meet any little green men,” said Dad, “please don't bring them home. It'll upset the cat.”

“They aren't green anymore, Dad,” I said. “They look like large-eyed bugs.”

“Please stop!” said Marilee. But she smiled, and I knew she was just pretending to be scared.

We watched as Dad's pickup truck bounced across the meadow and disappeared from sight.

“My mom isn't happy about this,” said Marilee, “but she says if your parents think it's okay, it's probably okay.” She wrapped a bandana around her hair to discourage blackflies, the scourge of the North Woods.

“Of course, it's okay,” I said, and uncapped a bottle of soda pop. “Johnny and I have been camping up here alone since we were knee-high to a grasshopper.”

“I hope there are no grasshoppers in the tent,” said Marilee. Sometimes, she really is a city girl, but I've toughened her up a lot.

***

The sun was sinking. It was a soft June evening, and we sat outside the tent and talked our heads off about everything from school to our favorite books and movies. In many ways, when you're a kid in such isolated country, it's pretty much the same world our parents and grandparents grew up in. I mean, sure I sometimes wonder what it would be like to take the subway to school each day instead of riding my bike along a country road lined with daisies. Or what it would be like to walk down to a museum instead of to Cramer's Gas & Movie Rentals to rent a movie now that the Cramers have “gone Hollywood,” as Grandpa puts it. But in other ways, it's the same world as in Los Angeles or Moscow because of the Internet. When you go on Facebook to talk to a new friend, you're just another kid on the planet Earth.

The sky was now a dark blue with pink fingers at the edges. All the frogs in the pond were talking back and forth. Stars were winking on. Just then I heard a twig snap, the way it does when someone or some
thing
steps on it.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Marilee. I felt her fingers clutch my arm.

“Who's there?” she asked, more a whisper than a shout. The only reply belonged to a hoot owl that
hoo-hoo-hooted
from a distant perch.

“Must have been a deer,” I said. “Or maybe a cone fell from a pine tree. Maine
is
the Pine Cone State, you know.”

“But it sounded like
walking
,” Marilee insisted.

“A deer walks,” I said. “Haven't you noticed that it has four hooves?”

We waited a couple more minutes. When nothing else cracked or snapped or hooted, we went back to our talk. I knew it was just a matter of time until we got around to what boys we would date when our moms said we were old enough.

“I'd like to go on a date with Billy Ferguson one day,” I said. Billy was a couple years older than me and Johnny's best friend. I had never confessed this to Marilee before. But it was a special night, and special nights are made for telling secrets.

“He's cute all right,” said Marilee. “So is Johnny. See that?” She pointed up. “Shooting star.”

I had seen it too, a silver thread disappearing in seconds beyond the mountain. But excuse me? My brother
cute
? Catch me as I pass out.

“Make a wish,” I said. I watched as Marilee crossed her fingers and stared up at the sky where the star had just fallen. “Can I guess what you wished for?”

“Sure,” she said, and smiled at me. I was so glad to have her as a friend. If it weren't for Marilee Evans, my boring life would be unbearable.

“That your mom and dad would get back together?” I asked. She knew I knew. We had talked about this many times in the months we'd been friends.