CHAPTER 6

The thing with those hidden camera shows is that they usually make sense. There’s a storyline. Things happen. And then everything is revealed. Ha ha ha. The weird little girls at the door are introduced as actors. You find out what the boom was that freaked you out. Your sister shows you how she brought the fish back to life.

Oh, yes, ha ha ha, the joke’s on you. Cue much back-slapping and rolling of eyes from the gullible party.

And then life goes back to normal.

Yeah, so I’m kind of hoping life will go back to normal soon.

We get home just as the third sun is setting. Mum is busy putting the finishing touches on her Zen garden for the day, raking the gravel in soothing symmetrical lines. She tells us dinner is almost ready. While I want to avoid Molly, I can’t escape her at dinner. She busies herself with her evening ritual of measuring an exact portion of everything onto her plate (over the years, we’ve all become used to this, but tonight I have to admit I watch her carefully out of the corner of my eye). She seems distracted and I catch her doing that shut-eye thing that made our parents drag her along to the optometrist a few years ago, scared that there was something wrong with her vision. As it turned out, there wasn’t and, astonished, the optometrist declared her vision to be 40/20, or something like that. And each time she closes her eyes, when she opens them again, she always manages to stare directly at me.

I’m brushing my teeth in the bathroom when she barges in. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she says, coming to a halt.

‘Yes.’ I look at her in the mirror as she stands behind me. ‘Here I am. Brushing my teeth. Crazy, fun guy that I am.’ I spit in the sink noisily to show her what a great time I’m having. But when I stand upright again and check the mirror, she’s doing it again – the closed eyes thing. This time, when she opens her eyes once more, I stare at her in the mirror and I can see she knows she’s been caught out.

‘I …’ she begins, looking flustered, which is so unlike Molly it isn’t funny. ‘I … needed to move us again. It was my fault, you see. Today. I didn’t move us – you, I mean – enough. Fast enough. Or enough times. And the goldfish thing. Ugh, what a mess …’

I turn around now, frowning. ‘Move us? What do you mean?’

Molly looks even more flustered, her cheeks colouring. She raises her palms to cover the blush, as if surprised. ‘Nothing, nothing …’

‘No, tell me.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’ And, with this, she reverts to the Molly I know, hard and cool. ‘After all, you think we live on Morillius. Who am I to tell you otherwise? Oh, this is all too hard. Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing.’ She mumbles this last bit.

I frown harder now. ‘Um, what? And we do live on Morillius.’

Molly only looks away.

‘What? You’re the one being weird. Where else would we live but Morillius? That’s where everyone lives, right?’

‘Yes,’ Molly replies, her voice quite neutral. ‘That’s where everyone lives, Cooper. Everyone in the entire universe. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that I messed up. I shouldn’t have, but I messed up. Okay?’

She really does look a bit freaked out. ‘Um, okay,’ I tell her.

‘Now, go to sleep. You need your rest.’

I pause, thinking over our interaction. Our afternoon. Then, slowly, I put my toothbrush back in the cup on the sink. Molly is really beginning to scare me. I so want to keep my cool for the cameras (those ones that still haven’t shown up), but things keep getting weirder by the minute. I mean, all the stuff that went on this afternoon – not being able to come up with any decent explanations for that strange light, those two freaky little girls or the goldfish. I’m already starting to half believe some of the out-there things she’s told me. Now she’s suggesting we don’t even live on Morillius (I mean, come on) and apologising as well! I can’t remember the last time Molly apologised for something.

As I push past her, leaving the room, I avoid her gaze. There’s no doubt about it. That girl is really beginning to get to me. I have to work this thing out. And fast. Before I make an idiot of myself on national television.