12
“It’s too funny,” Teena said, half chidingly and half knowingly. “Leo, you predictably horny asshole. Of course you think instantly of High Point.”
Sarabeth sighed. Teena and Leo had probably been there together. Of course, they were more experienced. And of course, Sarabeth and Evan sat there uncomfortably, like when you watched an R-rated movie with your mom and the characters started getting naked and you tried to pretend like you didn’t care and like you didn’t ever think about sex, but you squirmed in your seat uncomfortably so your mom knew you did think about sex and were in fact thinking about it at that very moment. It was like that, but possibly worse.
“It is the right spot,” Evan said, a little shakily, the tone of someone who hadn’t been there.
“It’s always the right spot,” giggled Abe gleefully.
There were, however, bigger fish to broil, or sauté, or grill (frying wasn’t Sarabeth’s thing) than her own awkwardness. Sarabeth was driving up LaGrange to Archer Avenue, headed for the first time in her life to High Point, the best known and most uncreatively named make-out spot in all of Tinley Hills. These were not the circumstances she’d expected for her inaugural High Point visit. No, scratch that, she thought, it would take an alien invasion before any guy invited me to High Point. Even more laughably, she now had to lug around the silver motor home that Abe claimed he couldn’t drive himself because of an expired driver’s license. She thought he, like the rest of them, just didn’t want to be alone.
She hated that as soon as the words High Point were out, her mind went to an image of her and Leo alone, in a much different situation. It was probably a contact high or something, since Leo kept flicking his purple Bic for another hit, but her lips tingled, and she wondered what it would feel like to be up at High Point, just her and Leo. Sitting shoulder to shoulder. He’d offer her his pipe, and she’d take it, and the smoke would crackle its way down into her lungs, and she’d hold her breath and then melt down into her seat. As she exhaled, all her Sarabeth-ness would peel away to something new underneath. Something new, but there all along.
A two-lane highway shrouded by thick evergreen trees, Archer Avenue was dark and empty, dark and empty being the cliché theme for this whole night, post-alien landing. Everything was starting to feel pointless. Even if they got up to High Point and saw something, what were they going to do about it? They were four random classmates with mediocre—and, it turned out, probably detrimental—gun abilities, a pink van with a missing window, no strategy whatsoever, and now a weird old man who was romantically entwined with his silver camper.
Her mom was either dead or captured. Somehow, she felt confident her brother, Cameron, was still alive, thanks to her twin-dar. Knowing Cameron, he’d befriended the aliens and was now negotiating an intergalactic peace treaty.
“SB, think much?” Leo’s voice from the backseat jolted her from the alternate reality Sarabeth was crafting in her head. She turned around to look at Leo, whose eyebrows were raised cockily, his lips up in a half grin, and she couldn’t decide if she thought he was cute in spite of being totally irritating or totally irritating because she found him cute.
“Yeah, you’ve been sitting at this stop sign for, like, thirty seconds,” Teena said, looking at her nails like someone who couldn’t be more bored. Sarabeth had to hand it to her: Teena was admirably cool for someone who’d only recently nearly been de-skinned by flying green goblins.
“Don’t be scared, Legs,” Abe said, pulling out a little black gun. “I’m packing heat.” She turned, feeling her eyes go wide in her head as he stuck the gun in his mouth.
Sarabeth shrieked, hurling herself toward him in an effort to pull the gun away from him. Leo, Evan, and Teena all did the same. Their heads collided with a painful thunk! in the open space between the front and back seats.
“Hold on, I’ll share.” Abe pressed the trigger, and the gun shot a stream of clear liquid. Sarabeth looked closer and saw it was one of those water guns that Tinley Hills had banned years ago because they looked too realistic. “Gin. Made it myself.” He pulled another squirt gun, this one a more obvious pastel blue, from his other pocket. “Orange juice in here. Wanna drink?” Abe aimed both barrels into his mouth and squirted out his oddball cocktail.
As Abe tilted his head back and swallowed, rubbing his belly beneath the Ewok blanket, they all burst out laughing.
“You all sure you don’t want a drink?” Abe asked, pulling out a flask to refill the gin gun. “I don’t trust no one who can’t hold their alcohol.”
“Dude, you’re, like, my spirit animal.” Leo laughed.
The sun was still hidden, but pink was seeping into the dark blue sky. Feeling embarrassed, like Teena and Leo had read her High Point thoughts—and grateful that Evan was silent and probably thinking weird High Point thoughts himself—Sarabeth drove along the winding road that led gradually to the precipice of High Point. To call it a precipice was akin to calling the brown brick slab known as Tinley Hills Village Hall a notable landmark. High Point was only a precipice at all because it rose a couple of stories above the rest of pancake-flat Tinley Hills. (It should have been called Tinley Hill, since High Point was the only thing close to an elevation it had.) Making High Point seem like a bigger deal than it was were the signs that appeared along the road, alerting drivers to TAKE CAUTION ON INCLINE, even though they really should have read SERIOUSLY, JUST DRIVE LIKE YOU NORMALLY WOULD.
Near the top of the peak, the road widened, and Sarabeth pulled to the side and put the van in park. She’d walk the couple hundred feet uphill, to get a good view of everything.
Sarabeth jumped from the van before the rest of them, not out of eagerness to see the aliens again, but more because she needed a break from everyone. As someone used to spending her Saturday nights alone in her room, she wasn’t quite ready to be part of this messed-up Breakfast Club. But even as she traipsed a bit ahead, her long strides didn’t put everyone else very far behind her. Their ragtag group was filled to the brim with bravery, apparently. Either that, or the idea of remaining in the van with Abe, who was still drinking out of his squirt gun, scared them.
Evan had been right. Gaining some elevation did provide the best vantage point. Sarabeth could see the spaceship before she even reached the rim of High Point. Everyone else saw it, too, judging by the chorus of low gasps behind her.
The ship was huge and had landed just beyond Orland Ridge Mall, on an empty parcel of land that was going to be the future Shoppoplex. A purple glow emanated faintly around the ship’s behemoth hulking darkness. It was shaped like a giant Frisbee with a massive diamond pushed through its middle. Purple and green lights pulsed within it.
Around it was the town of Tinley Hills, neat and tidy, like a diorama of suburbia. Little square houses lined straight rectangular blocks, separated by even black strips of road. Nothing moved. It was like the whole town had stopped breathing. Or was bleeding, in the case of the sections of Tinley where the ship had laid waste to everything.
“There it is,” Leo said, right behind Sarabeth. “Puts the fucking Death Star to shame.”
“It makes the Death Star look like a koala bear,” Evan said, absentmindedly drawing circles in the dirt with his bat, his jaw hanging open and, Sarabeth noticed, quivering slightly. “How do they even get it off the ground?”
“I think it’s getting it back on the ground that’s the hard part,” Leo said. “Look at what got destroyed. See? They didn’t mean to demolish Teena’s or Walmart or anything. It was a shitty landing.”
He was right. The chaotic areas of Tinley Hills fell in a straight, diagonal line, and the ship’s trajectory was readily apparent from up here. Teena’s house was the first bump, then the ship must have lifted back up, crashed down again over Walmart and Kmart, and then bounced one last time over the Orland Hills Mall and onto the vacant Shoppoplex property.
“Don’t get me wrong, but my house being collateral damage doesn’t make me feel that much better. I still don’t get why the space station from hell had to land here,” Teena said, no longer as calm and collected as she’d been in the van. She paced back and forth, her steps sinking into soggy piles of dead leaves—the winter thaw took away fall’s satisfying crunch. “Or why we want to stand up here, looking at it and wetting our pants.”
“It helps because we found it, you know? We found it,” Leo said, getting excited, the way he sometimes did when he played something on the cello that he’d just made up. “We know where these douchebags are taking people. Friends and family are probably down there, at the worst welcome wagon ever. We at least know what our mission is, should we choose to accept it.”
As they stood in a circle, Sarabeth looked around, at Leo, and Evan, and Teena. They’d made it this far. That was big, wasn’t it? “Good work, everyone,” she said, feeling like maybe there was a reason she was here and part of this group.
Leo held up his hand for a high-five. Evan took him up on it first, then Teena, and then Sarabeth. Then Evan high-fived Sarabeth and Teena, too. Teena turned to Sarabeth, high-fiving Sarabeth in one of the most awkward uses of the gesture ever witnessed, and not just because of their height difference. As Sarabeth’s and Teena’s hands touched, Leo enveloped them in a hug and guided them toward Evan, who joined the hug, too. It felt nice. Calming. Warm. Safe. My first group hug, Sarabeth thought.
Proving to herself that she could ruin any moment, Sarabeth couldn’t resist looking over Leo’s shoulder to the ship beyond, and the quiet landscape around it. Why was everything so still? She understood the Tinley Hills abductions—she’d witnessed one, with that family. But up here, it felt like the whole world had gone silent and still. What if no one was anywhere? Something like this would normally merit some military helicopters, tanks, the Army evacuating people, or at least it did in the movies.
It was with that thought that her eyes landed on something just beyond the ship. Hundreds of cars, stacked one on top of the other on tall metal spears, like olives for a cocktail.
Sarabeth drew back from the group hug, suddenly cold. She pointed at the sickening sculpture. “Guys, look,” she said as everyone took a few steps away from each other and stared at the scene.
“Do you think people were in their cars when they were … skewered?” Evan asked.
Leo grimaced. “For their sake, I hope they were captured,” he said. “Unless being captured by them is worse than being killed by them.”
Sarabeth shuddered as another chill zigzagged down her body.
“Guys, do you think anyone is left?” she asked softly. “Like, anywhere?”
“Well, Abe is in the van,” Leo said, but even he didn’t have the energy to give the line the usual joking edge.
“I thought we’d see someone from up here,” Sarabeth said. “But we’re it.”
She could almost hear Leo, Evan, and Teena’s spirits deflating, and felt bad for being the cause. No wonder you don’t have any friends, Sarabeth, she told herself. What was the point of being hopeless in a hopeless situation? She wanted the high-fives back, silly as they seemed.
“Wait, I have an idea. Aren’t there stand-up binoculars up here?” she asked, directing the question toward the High Point experts, Teena and Leo.
“Binoculars? Why would anyone need binoculars when they’re getting busy?” Teena said, rolling her eyes. The bitchiness was reassuring.
“Charming, Teena. There are,” Leo said, a little sheepishly. “Just past that tree stand there. They’re fifty cents, though.” He fished some change from his pocket and dropped a few warm quarters into Sarabeth’s cool hand.
Her fingers closing around the change, Sarabeth made her way up the hill a bit more, where two sets of standing binoculars faced the ship and town. She dropped in Leo’s money and peered through the viewfinder, hoping to see something that she could get excited about.
As she focused the lenses and trained them on the ship, she saw something that made her feel like they stood a chance. A long shot of a chance, but a chance nonetheless.
“We shouldn’t give up hope!” Sarabeth yelled back toward the group, still looking down at the ship. “The ship may be big, but it’s not all space-age technology.” She felt a grin spread across her face behind the cold metal of the binoculars. It wasn’t what she saw, so much as what she felt that made her feel a little optimistic.
She peered back at the group, who’d gathered around her. “For as intimidating as the ship is”—she peeked back, wondering how many people were imprisoned in the ship—“it has a front door. And it’s open. There are guards, maybe twelve aliens, and who knows what on the other side. But here’s the thing. We have an opportunity to save the world.”
Leo stepped closer, gesturing to have a look through the lenses. “I’ll take it,” he said.
“Yeah, we did make it this far,” Evan added.
“Great, I’m so glad you’re all pumped up,” Teena said, turning away to glance at the ship. She gnawed on the inside of her lip. “But take it from a real cheerleader that a team without a playbook isn’t going to win.”
Sarabeth bristled at Teena’s cynicism but let it roll off her. “Well, there’s one other thing that might help, but I don’t know. I mean, I could be way off base—I probably am way off base. But the ship is like a wheel, with spokes coming out of a central hub, that diamond in the center. I think that’s the power source. The only power source. It’s a dumb design. If we could get inside, we might be able to shut it all down.”
“Like a self-destruct button?” Evan said.
“More like a self-delusion button,” Teena sighed.
“What’s your problem, Teena? It’s just a guess, but it’s something. Better than guns that don’t work,” Sarabeth sniped back, pulling herself up to her full five-eleven and feeling like a different person from the slightly slouched girl who’d tried to shrink into her new sweater on Teena’s doorstep earlier that night.
“Yeah, let up, Teena. We probably could have saved that family if you hadn’t insisted on fighting the aliens,” Leo said, stepping between the girls.
“Whatever, Leo,” Teena fired back, starting toward the van. “You’re only here because you’re in need of new vagina.”
Sarabeth blushed beet-red, realizing that she was the new vagina. Did that make Teena the old vagina? “You’re only good for firing off your gun and your mouth,” Sarabeth said, but too quietly.
“You’d be dead if it weren’t for me,” Teena growled. When she reached the van, she grabbed her guns from the front seat, then started down the hill. “Whatever. I don’t need you people. You losers. I hope you all have a good time blowing up a spaceship with a baseball bat!”
Teena stalked toward the trees. A distressed Evan looked from Leo and Sarabeth to Teena’s small retreating figure. “She can’t be out there alone,” he said, before taking off behind her. Sarabeth and Leo were alone on High Point. And it sucked, because Sarabeth knew Evan was right. They couldn’t split up, not now, no matter what.
“Well, this is the weirdest set of circumstances that’s brought me up here with a girl,” Leo said lightly, kicking his foot anxiously against the ground. “Though there was this one time I was seeing this chick obsessed with leprechauns, and it was St. Patrick’s Day .… ”
Sarabeth ignored this. She knew Leo went out with a lot of girls; sometimes in string ensemble, she’d hear him on his phone in the corner, making plans in a low, sexy voice. “Evan’s right,” she said, cutting him off. “We need her. She may be a bitch, but she’s the only bitch we’ve got.”
Leo peered once more at the ship below. “Check it out, it’s glowing,” he said. Sarabeth cast a sidelong glance at the ship, which was illuminated by a deeper purple light than before. Suddenly, a pulsing bright purple lit the sky, and a surge of energy practically burned the horizon. A laser beam shot out from the ship and headed straight for them. Sarabeth and Leo ran, jumping in the van and starting it just as the surge singed the earth below.
In the backseat, Abe shook out of a deep sleep. “Is it the commies?”
Sarabeth slammed on the gas pedal, and the van rumbled down the hill. Teena and Evan were straight ahead. Teena was having trouble negotiating the hill in her boots, and Evan was just steps behind her.
Evan turned and must have instantly recognized the terror in Sarabeth’s eyes. Leo pushed open the door, even as the van skidded along the tree line. “Get in, get in, get in now!” he yelled, reaching out for Evan, who grabbed Leo’s arm with one hand and scooped up Teena with his other arm. Pushing off the ground with one foot, Evan launched himself and Teena into the van. They toppled in, sending Abe sprawling on the floor of the backseat with them. Sarabeth swung a hard right, and the van careened into a ditch along the road. The trees they’d just sped by burst into flames.
She didn’t let up on the gas the whole way down the hill, until the smell of burnt earth grew faint in her nostrils. Then she slammed on the brakes dramatically at the intersection of 183rd and Edgar Road, stopping at the center of what had been the Tinley Hills’s busiest intersection.
“Nice driving, Legs,” Abe said, looking up at her from where he lay on the floor.
No one laughed, or spoke. Almost dying kind of took the words right out of your mouth.
“This isn’t working for me,” Sarabeth finally said in a strong, sure voice. “Look, I don’t know if I’m right. I don’t know if we stand a chance against these things. But we have to try to find out who they’ve got on that ship, and the only way we’ll survive for more than a second is if we stick together. This is do or die. Or do and then run and hide. But either way, we’re all we’ve got. So let’s make a pact right now that we try to calm our hormones, forget our cliques, and stop with the petty personal grievances. Because I don’t know about you all, but I don’t want to die.” She wondered where her oratory capabilities had come from. Probably Cameron.
She didn’t say it, but she thought, Because I think I just got a life.
Teena was the first to speak, even though she was still taking shallow, nervous breaths. “She’s right,” she said. And she extended a hand that Sarabeth shook.
Sarabeth might have been making a deal with the devil, but going to hell still seemed safer than staying on Earth.