TWO SECONDS LATER, WE’RE ALL on our feet.
Scrambling for the window.
Knocking into one another.
Just generally freaking out and making all sorts of noise.
We’re loud enough to wake up Kitty, who barrels into the room and starts barking like crazy despite the fact that he’s got no clue what’s going on.
And Kitty—well, he’s loud enough to wake up my parents.
I can hear them fumbling around upstairs. And then, a second later:
“Kitty! Kitty—SHHH!”
It’s my dad, hissing down the stairs to try to get Kitty to quit making a racket.
But trying to calm down Kitty once he’s got himself good and riled up is about as easy as stopping a meteor that’s just pierced our atmosphere from racing toward the ground. Really, there’s no point in even trying. The best course of action is to just get out of the way.
Meanwhile, the four of us—me, Dan, Mikaela, and John Henry Knox—are squeezed around the sink, craning our necks to better see out the window as that massive, UFO-shaped cumulonimbus sinks lower and lower toward the ground.
Just as it slips out of sight beneath the tops of the trees in my backyard, I hear my dad behind me.
“Ken?”
I turn, as do Dan and Mikaela and John Henry Knox, and see my dad in the kitchen doorway, his eyes bleary and his hair sticking up in about seventeen thousand different directions.
Oh, also, he’s wearing nothing but his underwear.
He leaps back through the doorway and around the corner as soon as the realization that I’m not alone lands in his sleep-foggy brain. There, safely out of sight, he calls out:
“Um. Hi! Hey! Good—good morning, everyone. Didn’t, ah, know you had friends over, Ken. Is—is everything all right down here?”
I glance back toward the window.
Still no cloud.
Meaning, of course, that everything is absolutely not all right down here.
But I’m not about to tell my dad what’s really going on.
Well, maybe I will have to tell him sooner or later—but I’m certainly not going to do it before the poor guy’s had his morning coffee and gotten some clothes on.
So I just say:
“Yep! Kitty’s ready for his morning walk. That’s all.”
Then I add:
“You can go back to bed.”
“Right,” says Dad. “Ah, yeah. I’ll—I’ll, ah, do that. See you kids later. Have fun!”
Dad heads back upstairs.
And as soon as he’s gone, I dart across the kitchen and over to the door.
I tug it open, then turn to Dan and Mikaela and John Henry Knox.
“Ready to track down a spaceship?” I ask them, hoping they say yes, because I’m not feeling so prepared myself.
But before they can answer, Kitty launches himself out the open door and down the porch steps. Two seconds later, he’s tearing up the street.
“He sure is,” says John Henry Knox.
“If only,” I say.
Then I rush out into the street after him.