Hank had always loved Brendan Nesbitt’s voice.
Not his singing voice—even from this far back in the auditorium, tucked out of sight behind a podium, Hank could hear how Brendan’s notes fell flat or rose sharp every few words or so.
But Brendan had a voice like a winding spring. When he spoke, he started slow and quiet, truncated his speech with “ums” and “ahs” before words burst out of him in a veritable flurry of chatter. The more you talked to him, the more you realized he liked talking to you, the more you realized that Brendan Nesbitt had thoughts worth voicing, a thousand questions worth asking.
This did seem like perfect casting, Hank had to admit. A nerdy lead with low confidence? That was Brendan, before you got to know him. And once you did get to know him, he was entirely protagonist material.
The first day after Dad left Eustace, Hank said not a word about the absent Chevy. He just went to school and laughed louder than usual, jostled the ballers more than ever. By the time he settled into his seat in Health class, his throat was hoarse from the effort.
Brendan Nesbitt wasn’t there yet. There was nothing lovely to look at. Hank stared at Brendan’s chair and failed to blink away black thoughts.
On Dad’s last night in town, he’d picked Hank up from practice and taken him out for ice cream.
“My ice cream smells funny.” The ice cream prank was a Vasquez family staple. Hank hadn’t expected Dad to fall for it, but Dad leaned closer to Hank’s cone, surprising Hank so much that he failed to deliver the punch line: the inevitable shoving of ice cream into Dad’s nose.
“Dad? Are you okay?”
“I will be. And you will be too, you know.” Dad didn’t finish his pistachio cone, so Hank finished it for him. Dad didn’t speak until they reached the parking lot. Then: “You’re growing up strong, young man.”
Hank looked at his big feet, aware that furious blushing wasn’t something strong young men were known for. When he looked up, a world-swallowing smile awaited him.
That must have been farewell, Hank realized now, from his island of a desk.
“Where are you, Hank?”
Hank started, lifted his eyes from Brendan’s chair. “What?”
High cheekbones colored. “Sorry, it’s just—you, um, looked sort of far away. As if your body is sitting right here in class, but your head is possibly somewhere else?”
“That’s … kind of a weird thing to say.” Hank’s heart thumped harder as he watched Brendan’s blush deepen. They’d hardly spoken since Brendan had delivered the blueprint. Brendan could not know that Hank had tacked it to the wall beside his bunk, that Brendan’s stars were the first thing he saw every morning.
I’m the weird one here.
“Yes, I have been known to say weird things. At times.”
“My brother says weird things all the time.”
“Oh! Milo? Did he like the blueprint?”
“Yeah.” Hank didn’t have the stomach to tell Brendan the platform was finished and now untouched, might soon be dismantled like the rest of their lives.
“I discovered that Milo’s in my cousin’s preschool. Isn’t he the boy—”
Hank braced himself for who doesn’t talk or with special needs or—
“—who builds bridges out of Popsicle sticks? Every time we pick up Nellie he’s constructing a masterpiece.”
“Yeah … Milo’s always making things. Messes, mostly.”
Brendan laughed, a sound too warm and heavy for hollow bones. “Well, artists make messes, too. Sometimes that’s all they make, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t art. There’s art in everything, really. In me, in you.”
“Really?”
“Really, Hank.”
The teacher finished writing the agenda on the board.
“Look—I’m sorry for bothering you. It’s just, sometimes I feel as if I’m in school but I’m not really in school? And I wish people would notice.”
“You weren’t bothering me at all.”
Brendan Nesbitt smiled, a little uncertainly, a little perfectly, and landed in his seat. Hank fixated on the pink blotches blooming beneath Brendan’s ears.
“Class, class!” called their teacher.
“Yes, yes!” they replied.
Tim poked Hank’s shoulder. He made a face in Brendan’s direction. Hank pretended not to see. That’s what people did in ninth grade. They pretended not to see each other.
Except for Brendan Nesbitt. He used his voice.
Brendan delivered lines in a mock New York accent. It was hard to tell what was going on. It seemed like an underclassman with a deep, bluesy undertone was telling Brendan’s character to feed her?
Brendan wouldn’t see Hank under the glare of those bright lights.
“I’m here, Carmella. Wanna tell me why so I can go?”
“Don’t tell me you have elsewhere to be. Orson’s at practice.” Carmella knew Hank’s routine as well as he did. “And I know your mom’ll be taking Milo trick-or-treating, because you’ll defend his honor in class but you won’t actually speak to him.”
Hank looked at his hands. He couldn’t really see the scars from Milo’s fingernails, but he could still feel them.
“And don’t worry. We aren’t here to ogle your better ex.” Carmella looked up from her phone. “Where is she?”
“ ‘She’ who?”
On cue, the door beside Hank burst open, revealing Platinum and—
Dark brown hair whipped by after the flash of white.
“Ana?” Hank blurted.
Ana didn’t hear him. Platinum led her away, zipping all the way down the aisle to the fore of the stage. Mr. Oldman started screeching at them.
“I already know Ana’s in the musical.”
“What good brothering. But that’s not it. Didn’t Ana say anything?”
Hank shook his head. They didn’t share car rides every day now that Hank sometimes rode with Orson and she sometimes rode with Brendan. But even if those trips that forced them to talk to each other in a confined space hadn’t been dwindling, Hank might not have had words for Ana. Not because he was angry with her. He wasn’t.
Of course he had seen Ana with Brendan and Platinum whenever his schedule failed him. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because Brendan didn’t matter anymore, and … well, at least Ana wasn’t alone.
Leave it to Brendan to be the brother Hank couldn’t be.
“Hank, look.” Carmella squeezed his arm.
Ana stood at center stage. The babble in the front rows quieted. Faces peeked out from the wings. Ana cleared her throat, closed her eyes—
“Gosh, she really can sing, can’t she?”
Ana sang the song of a character who clearly had small dreams, but dreams nonetheless. She wanted to cook like Betty Crocker. She wanted plastic coverings for her furniture. She wanted a twelve-inch television. It was charming and kind of beautiful, though the performance itself felt a little off.
Only Ana’s voice was invested. She sang well, but stood as stiff as a board with the usual lack of expression in her face—
Hank gasped.
When Ana stopped singing, a high note on the word “green,” there was some friendly applause. Mr. Oldman looked slightly mollified.
Hank’s chest constricted. “Her eyes were closed.”
When at last Mr. Oldman had tortured them enough for one evening, Hank watched Platinum throw an arm over his little sister’s shoulders. Brendan joined the pair of them, another arm around another shoulder. The trifecta climbed the aisle like an insect, six legs and tiny moving parts.
“Go on, Hank.” It should have taken a lot more than Carmella’s single phoneless hand to push him forward, but he let it be enough.
Hank Vasquez felt like both an adult and a child when he blocked his sister’s exit.
“You,” Platinum acknowledged.
“Platinum. Hey.” Hank fixed his eyes on her face, her hair, on anything but Brendan’s perfectly imperfect hand on her shoulder. He didn’t think about those fingers smoothing crinkles from Hank’s forehead, pitter-patting down Hank’s chest and—
The hand slid away.
“Hey,” Hank repeated, with teeth.
Platinum quirked an eyebrow. “Your boulder of a body is in our way.” She quirked the other one. “You need to talk to Brendan?”
“I’m right here, Arlene.”
Before Hank could stop himself, he looked.
Brendan’s eyes weren’t a storm or smoldering or whatever crap people liked to say in love stories, crap Hank used to try to understand. They were just eyes, and they just happened to belong to the only boy who’d ever held Hank naked. That was all.
“Actually … I wanna talk to Ana.”
“Okay,” Ana said. “Meet up with you guys later.”
“You heard her.” Platinum pulled Brendan away.
Ana insisted on the monochromatic hoodies and baggy jeans, but someone had lent her silver earrings. Sunglasses, the same pair Hank had given her last month, held her bangs back from her face. The cut splitting her eyebrow had healed to jagged white.
Ana’s eyes were just eyes, too.
“Yeah …?”
When they were kids, she always had to have the first and last words. Ana won every tug-of-war, every backseat slapping match.
“You’re staring, weirdo.”
“I know you are, but what am I,” he replied, in their old singsong.
Ana used to be the one person he could be an asshole around without feeling like one. Ana knew life wasn’t about being nice. Being siblings sometimes meant fighting tooth and nail over the last Pop-Tart, meant slamming doors.
Hank paused. “I wasn’t smiling, was I?”
“Not unless smiling looks like dying these days.”
“I just … you sounded awesome, Ana. Like, really. Really great.” Hank was trying to figure out what was so embarrassing about being nice to her, why it was so hard not to feel exposed in the room of empty chairs. Why was it so hard to talk to his sister when they used to arm wrestle?
“Hank. Is that all?”
He made himself look at her. “And, um, you’re looking better and I’m just proud of you, okay?”
Her posture softened. “I thought you were going to tell me off.”
Hank shook his head. “No.” His eyes flitted to the earrings again. Were they Brendan’s? Brendan had a cartilage piercing in his right ear. “I thought it would really bother me. A month ago, yeah. But I’m just. You know. Glad you’re okay.”
“I didn’t say I was okay.” At first he thought this was Ana’s familiar bite, but the only teeth now were hers, pressing into her lower lip.
In junior high, Ana had bitten her lips so persistently they bled.
Hank remembered her dabbing them with tissue the way a lot of her friends did for the sake of lipstick. Ana had developed a bad habit of peeling her lips away with her fingernails. This started after Dad left, but everyone knew not to draw that comparison in front of her. Ana said she didn’t miss him.
Dad had given Hank ice cream. He’d given Ana no good-bye at all.
She became extraordinary at quitting things.
This went hand in hand with tearing out her eyebrows. She pretended it was on purpose when Hank made an asshole comment about it, but though her new friends were plucking small hairs, none of them lost theirs entirely. Ana was nearly crying rather than biting when Hank joked that her face was a desert nothing could grow on.
Last Christmas, Hank took a page from Ana’s book and stormed into Mom’s room to steal back his clothes (all the girls thought it was cool to wear boys’ jerseys). He caught Ana in gym shorts with a long column of safety pins clipped to her thighs, blood beading her all over.
She begged him not to freak out, tried to bicker him out of telling: “You dumbass, it’s no big deal, come on, Hank, don’t be stupid about it!”
Hank had walked straight to the kitchen and was stupid about it, and Mom had driven Ana to the hospital.
Hank gestured at the empty, gaping auditorium. “Maybe you’re not okay. But you just belted your heart out. And people cheered for you and stuff. So I don’t really get a say in who your friends are, if they make you feel better.”
“This is the most you’ve said to me …”
“Since Luz. I know.”
“No.” Ana sized him up. “Since waaaay before that.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Hank coughed. “Do you need a ride? Orson can—”
“Brendan will give me one.”
“Okay. You really did sound terrific.”
“Who says ‘terrific’ anymore, dumbass?” A wry, real smile.
“Guess I do, BanAna.”
A thought, unbidden: We may be missing children. But at least we’re missing together.
Hank told Orson he’d see him later, then jogged to Moreno Park directly after school. Four miles stood between Eustace High and the edge of the canyon, and running in the afternoon sunbake with a backpack on wasn’t exactly a breeze. By the time Hank slowed near the picnic tables, his legs were rubbery and his heart was full of needles. The sun remained high enough to tighten his skin, surrounding him in a husk of himself.
Autumn came slowly if at all to Eustace, but the crusted grasses lining the court parking lot were crisper than they’d been last month, on the night Tim broke Hank in two.
The lot was empty.
Hank stooped to catch his breath. He chugged water from his bottle, stretched his legs and arms, and sat at the nearest table. From the side zip pocket of his track jacket he pulled a slip of bent cardboard.
He still couldn’t see any UFOs on the card, and the corners had softened to cotton. He could make out Henry Flowers’s name and number, but he didn’t think he’d have to call. He probably couldn’t bring himself to anyhow.
Hank waited.
Within twenty minutes, Henry Flowers’s janky old Winnebago grumbled into the lot and screeched to a halt across five parking spots. Moments later the door smacked open. Henry appeared, his baby-bird-fluff hair escaping bobby pins that fought to restrain it. Today he wore another Hawaiian shirt, pants that were at least five inches too short for him, and a pair of loafers that his big toes had poked holes through.
He stepped out of the RV, hawked a loogie large enough to cure the desert drought, and then busied himself with something near the back wheels.
By the time Hank meandered over, Henry Flowers, Extraterrestrial Expert, had pulled two long telescope tubes, a duffel bag, and a remote control from the recesses of a storage compartment.
“Hey, Mr. Flowers?”
His reaction was almost cartoonish. The old man went temporarily airborne like a startled cat and smacked his head against the hatch door. Hank caught it before it could slam on him.
Henry Flowers scurried backward, pulling a hunting knife from his back pocket.
“Whoa! Hi! It’s just me, Hank? You’re stalking my family?”
Henry Flowers stared. Finally, he coughed and tucked the knife away.
“Christ on a cracker. Thought it was the hippo ballet! I didn’t hear you coming, Hank Vasquez.” He eyeballed Hank’s hands. “Didn’t even see you, neither, which has gotta be some sort of miracle. What with you being about as big as a grizzly. I’ve seen grizzlies, so believe me, I know.”
Hank frowned. “But … didn’t you follow me here?”
“What? Is that what you thought? You thought you were luring me here?” Henry Flowers shoved the telescopes under his arms. “That’s a little dumb, kid.”
“Because you—last time …” Hank hadn’t been back to the courts, but he and Orson had passed by every day at this hour. More than once Hank had espied the bumper-stickered RV in the lot. “You’re watching us. You told me that!”
“Pah! That was last month!” Henry Flowers snorted. “Honestly, son, you and your kin ain’t all that entertaining. An awful lot of moping, not enough fighting spirit.”
Hank thought of Ana, alive onstage, and silently disagreed.
“And you want my advice? Talk to your brother; little tyke misses you.”
Hank thought of Milo screaming, and silently disagreed.
“Last time we met, boy, we were in the honeymoon phase. Now if I wanna watch a soap opera, I’ll stop by Doris’s Diner in the afternoon. She’s usually got one on.”
“Then why are you still hanging around?”
Henry hesitated. “Truth is, there are lots of other things to keep a guy like me busy near a pit like this. Things you can’t even imagine, if you aren’t in the know. Anyhow. Help me with this, would ya?”
Hank picked up the bag and remote control, hands hardly shaking, and shadowed Henry as he hobbled out of the lot and onto the grass. “What do you mean? What other things? Are there other, um, aliens here?”
“Like I’d tell you, when you could be one of ’em!” Henry set the tubes down on a picnic table and beckoned Hank to do the same. “But today I really am here for ornithology. You know there are actual roadrunners out here? And yellow-billed cuckoos and gila woodpeckers, if you’re lucky. You know what all these birds have in common?”
“… feathers?”
“They never, ever cry about teenage drama.”
Hank watched Henry produce a camera the size of a tortoise from the duffel bag.
“Well, you can skedaddle now. Go and loom somewhere else.”
“I … can I please talk to you, Mr. Flowers?”
Henry kept producing lenses, screwing them onto the camera. It grew longer and longer. “You wanna ask me about the birds?”
“Not about the birds.”
It was again like flipping a switch.
“Ha!” Henry puffed up proudly. “I knew it! Come to talk to me about your alien infestation at last, eh?”
“Well—”
“I knew it! So here’s the thing, Hank Vasquez. I’ll strike you a deal: you explain what exactly happened in that house of yours, and tell me where that alien’s hiding inside it—and don’t pretend he isn’t!—and I’ll take him off your hands for you. Got it?”
Hank stood up. “Luz. I mean, he’s—I mean it. It’s gone. Gone for months.”
Henry Flowers clapped his hands together. “Aha! So he does exist, doesn’t he?”
Hank squirmed. “You already knew that.”
“I did! I’m an expert! But damned if I thought you’d ever admit to it.” Henry patted Hank’s shoulder. “So start talking.”
Hank couldn’t sing like Ana. “Mr. Flowers, I actually came here to ask about your missing child.”
If aliens set Mr. Flowers’s eyes afire, this question put him right out. The gleam in his gaze flickered to dark. “I told you. I’m not interested in soap operas.”
“Please.” Hank took a deep breath. “Can’t you tell me about her?”
“Don’t you have enough to be miserable about?” It seemed a genuine question, with no malice in it. “Why would you care what some old kook says?”
“I’ve been thinking about missing people, I guess.”
Henry Flowers let out the smallest of sighs, a tiny stream of air through his front teeth. “My daughter ran into this thing, this extraterrestrial, in a ravine. Do you know the Rio Grande Gorge? We were rafting there.”
Hank had been there. All of the Vasquezes had, with Dad. It was where Milo first professed his love for bridges.
“We were always in some park or another. This RV? She’s nothing new. This RV was home. Didn’t give my daughter much of a traditional upbringing. Didn’t send her to public school.”
“Because they were trying to brainwash her?”
“Don’t be an arse; teachers work themselves to the goddamn bone. My mother taught grammar school, eons ago, like yours. That’s not my conspiracy theory, kid.”
“Sorry.”
“But me and my girl, we were free spirits. All the clichés: open road and camping under the stars and desert storytelling with strangers. I thought she was happy growing up like that, but you know, I never asked her. That’s the trouble, ain’t it?” Henry Flowers placed a hand on Hank’s shoulder. “You don’t think of the important questions until there’s no one left to put them to.”
Hank had never asked Dad what he thought of gay kids. Had never asked whether Dad would still love him if he quit basketball. Never asked Dad if loving someone could make you less of someone yourself.
“I don’t wanna go into the details. I have a lot of work to do. But one day she met this thing, and it took her over. And then she was gone.”
He began fiddling with his lenses again.
“Milo always thought that Luz might be Dad,” Hank blurted. “That maybe Dad came back as … as glowing freaking termites. I never ever believed it.” Hank closed his eyes. “But I dunno. Maybe I wanted to.”
“Son, I can talk for hours about missing children. I can talk about milk cartons and search parties and billboards and the way people you’d never expect to care are the ones who stay up nights drinking coffee with you, because hell if you’re gonna get any sleep. I can tell you a thousand damn stories about my missing child. But all you need to know is that it probably doesn’t feel so different from what you’ve been through. Except no one bothers with search parties when it’s a dad who goes missing, eh?”
Hank shook his head. “They really don’t.”
“Ain’t that an awful thing? People just accept it, when a parent runs away?”
Suddenly Henry Flowers seemed like the sanest person Hank had spoken to in years. Hank found himself really, truly laughing. “It really is. Really awful.”
“Buck up, son. Let me know if you wanna have another real conversation. And keep an eye out for anything strange or suspicious, all right?”
“There’s going to be a lot of strange and suspicious things around. It’s Halloween.”
“Nah.” Henry tapped his nose. “The suspicious things are the things you don’t see. Keep that in mind.”
“Mr. Flowers, I really mean it—Luz isn’t around anymore. He—it. The alien. It abandoned us.”
“Don’t be so certain.” Henry shook his head. “You’d be surprised at how much of a person is left behind after they go missing.”