Only Alien on the Planet Read online

  “The only thing is,” my mother said, “it's going to take a lot of effort, getting that place in working order. A lot of work. And it's not like we've got a lot of money lying around just now"— here, she sent my father a pointed look— “so your dad and I are going to have to be doing a lot of the work ourselves. Wiring and painting and stuff.” Then she looked at Dad like she wasn't real convinced about the thing she meant to say next.

  “And the point of all this?” James prompted.

  “The point is,” my father responded, “you guys are going to have to be pretty much on your own for the next few weeks.”

  “Maybe this isn't such a good idea,” Mom said to him.

  Dad looked at us. “Understand, it means we're going to be down there all day every day—and probably into the night, trying to get this thing going before we all starve…”

  “Are you suggesting that this is going to be a problem?” Charlie asked.

  Mom looked at him like he'd just proven her point. “You're going to be cooking for yourselves,” she said, ticking things off on her fingers, “doing the laundry, the unpacking, the housekeeping, fielding any problems that come up—and it means that you're going to have to get along, which may be harder than you think, considering the circumstances. And you're going to have to be responsible. Nobody's going to be here to pull you out of trouble, or yell at you for not doing your homework. Getting the picture?”

  “I do all my own laundry anyway,” James sniffed. Mom gave him one of her yeah, sure looks.

  “You taught us all about nutrition, Mom, remember,” Charlie said consolingly. “It's not like we're going to die of rickets or something.”

  “Yeah, well—one of the responsible adults in this house will get a lunch made for you people every morning before we leave for downtown. That'll be one halfway intelligent meal a day anyway. And you will be able to call us there once we have the phones in. But till then, you're going to be pretty much orphans.”

  Wonderful. Another great stride for my sense of inner peace and security.

  “Just remember,” my father said, “the sooner we get this building done, the sooner we'll be in business. The sooner we're in business, the sooner you can start asking us for money.”

  “We had a business back home,” I said. A little flicker of anger had come up from someplace way down under, a place that should have been shut up tighter than it evidently was.

  My mother looked at me. “That's true,” she said. “But we're here now. And we want to make this work.” She was still looking at me. “On every possible level. Things are a little different right now, I know. But you've got to keep in mind—nothing important has changed.”

  So Paul not living with us anymore wasn't important.

  “So, you guys going to support us in this?” Dad asked. “Can we depend on you?”

  My mom was studying us. Studying me. “Is this a realistic expectation?”

  James rolled his eyes. Charlie grinned.

  “Of course,” I lied, not looking at anybody in particular.

  “Fine,” she said. “James, you're in charge of laundry, since you're such an expert. Charlie, the kitchen. Ginny, you're in charge of making sure Charlie gets off that piano often enough to eat and sleep, okay? Okay? All right. I'm really proud of you guys. In advance. Thank you for being willing.”

  I hate being thanked for stuff I definitely cannot take credit for.

  “Now get out of here,” Dad said. “Your mom and I have to discuss finances.”

  The man knew how to clear a room; my parents' financial “discussions” were the stuff of legend. Great friends as they were, money had a way of heating the both of them up, and you never wanted to get caught in that cross fire.

  So we found ourselves sort of ganged together on the front stoop, dismally surveying the yard. We didn't have a whole lot of options. Things could have been worse; it was an absolutely gorgeous day, the lawn was nice, and the trees were of a respectable size. “Baseball,” Charlie said, brightening, and disappeared back into the house. He emerged a few moments later, triumphant, but “Lucky,” he informed us, “to have escaped with my life.”

  “You wanna play?” Charlie asked me. “Or you want to read?” He dangled a book in front of me most enticingly.

  “What a nice boy you are,” I said, snagging the book. James and Charlie jumped down onto the lawn and started tossing the baseball back and forth, pausing every so often to trade cheerful insults. I took the book over to the side and stretched out on the grass under one of the trees. I just lay there for a moment, the sun warm on my legs, and the grass cool under my arms. I sighed. It felt cleansing.

  “Science fiction?” somebody asked.

  I blinked into the sunlight and saw this boy leaning lazily over the side fence. I looked down at the cover of my book. “Yep,” I said.

  He straightened up. “I thought you'd be more into the classics.” He smiled at me.

  “Really,” I said. “And what would make you think that?”

  “Rumor,” he said. “My mother told me you were a very serious family.”

  “And how would your mother know?”

  “Your mother told her.”

  “Ahh,” I said, and I put the book down.

  “My name is Caulder,” he said. “We have some classes together.”

  “I'm Ginny,” I said, and I stood up.

  “May I come and sit?” he asked.

  I could hear the faint voices of my parents, discussing at each other.

  “Sure,” I said, and I sat back down on the grass.

  He came over the fence.

  “Caulder is your last name?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, standing there, squinting at the boys. “It's a family name. My whole name is Caulder McKay Pretiger.” He grinned down at me. “My family has a terrific sense of humor.” He sat. He was a kind of normal looking boy, with a wide mouth that seemed used to smiling and tousled brown hair that didn't say a thing about vanity. His eyes gave everything important away—there was mischief in them.

  “I heard something about you today,” I said, remembering suddenly. “What was it? Something Hally told me.”

  “Hally,” he said, and he seemed a little surprised.

  “I know what it was. It was about that guy in my homeroom—”

  “Smitty,” he supplied, no question.

  Now I guess I looked surprised.

  “It's my claim to fame,” he shrugged. I couldn't read his tone, but I imagined he sounded a little bored, maybe even a little disappointed. So I changed the subject.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “All my life,” he said. “And Smitty lives just on the other side.”

  “He lives over there?” I asked, staring. There was an immaculate, gray Cape Cod house on the far side of Pretiger's neat white picket fences. A large man in gray coveralls was standing in the driveway by the back of the house, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

  “Smitty has a driver's license,” Caulder said, almost dreamily. He had his eyes closed, holding his face up to the sun. My eyes popped open. “They'd let somebody like that drive?”

  Caulder looked at me and smiled. “Not really. So, how did your first day turn out?”

  I shrugged. “Hally was about the only person who really talked to me,” I said. “I'm her friend for life.”

  “Everybody likes Hally,” he said.

  “She seemed to know everybody in the world.” To put it mildly.

  “Last year, she was captain of the forensics squad,” he said.

  “This year, she's editor of the senior class literary magazine. She's kind of your Woman of the People. The amazing thing is, she's genuine.”

  I was kind of amazed that she'd noticed me at all. “Hally told me about the way you kind of watch over what's-his-name. 'Like a guardian angel,' I think she said.”

  He laughed. He had a healthy laugh.

  “Well, that's what she said. She said you once fought off a na
sty mob of crazed first graders.”

  The laugh settled into a comfortable chuckle. “Yeah, well—she'd pretty much pounded them herself before I ever got there.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Hally's a little hellion. If the same thing happened tomorrow, you can bet your life, she'd be right in the middle of it all over again, kicking the stuffing out of Tommy Quince.”

  “Really,” I said, liking her better every minute.

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning. “Don't get on her bad side.”

  “Like, don't commit any social injustices while she's looking?”

  “You got it.”

  I lay back in the grass with my hands behind my head and my feet crossed, feeling good. “She said people think what's-his-name— Timmy? Scotty? She said they think he's autistic or something.”

  “Smitty. He's not.” Caulder tossed a blade of grass away. “I've also heard people say he's an idiot savant,” he said. “But that's not true either.”

  “So, what's true?” I asked him.

  He leaned back in the grass and cocked his head to one side. “I really don't know,” he said finally—carefully.

  The baseball came dropping down through the branches, not three feet from where we were sitting.

  “Sorry,” Charlie panted, grabbed the ball, and was gone.

  “He could talk if he wanted to,” Caulder said. “Smitty, I mean.”

  I just looked at him.

  “I've always had a feeling,” Caulder said.

  “So, you're telling me, for seventeen years, he just hasn't felt like it.”

  “Look,” he said. “His mother doesn't dress him. He dresses himself; he chooses his own clothes, same way you and I do. I mean, when you look at him, isn't it obvious he cares how he looks? He makes choices all the time—functional choices. His grades are perfect. You know what his SAT scores were? You know how close you can get to sixteen hundred and still be considered human? And his verbal was higher than his math. You can't do that if you're not at least marginally sapient. He writes papers. He's no way nonverbal. He just doesn't interact socially.”

  I closed my eyes and thought about that face, that strange, empty face. All day, it had looked like he did nothing but dream, somewhere away inside of himself. It gave me the creeps.

  “He's inside there,” Caulder went on quietly. “I've known him all my life. He's inside there.”

  I thought about that. It reminded me of my grandmother, the way she was those last years in the nursing home. Her body was out of control and everybody just assumed that her mind was gone too. But I always wondered if she was trapped in there some-where…hearing everything, thinking her own thoughts…

  “So, do you, like, hang around with him, or what?”

  He tossed his head around a little. “As much as you can, I guess,” he said.

  “And he's never said a word to you?”

  “He's never so much as looked me straight in the eye.”

  “Never?” I asked him, incredulous.

  “Not one time in seventeen years.”

  “Really. How could he live like that? What are his papers like? Have you ever read one?”

  “A couple,” he told me. “And let me tell you, the guy's mind is incredible. Very erudite. Very.”

  “Did Mr. Leviaton really have him write an exam for the faculty?”

  Caulder grinned. “Yeah. He did.”

  “That's amazing.” I put my hands behind my head and stared up through the leaves. “That's just amazing.”

  “Yeah, well,” Caulder said. “It's just as amazing to me.” He smiled at me—a funny little mugging kind of a smile.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked him. “Because I am.” I turned around and called the boys. I fixed Caulder with a stern look. “You have any money?” I asked him, because I've never believed in delicacy where money is concerned. “You want to share a pizza?”

  “Can I bring my sisters?” he asked me. “They've been sitting back there on the porch all afternoon drooling over your brothers. That's why I came over here—they were making me sick.”

  So the six of us—three Pretigers and three Christiansons—all went out for pizza. And we had a great time. James talked engineering and Charlie talked music, and you could tell Caulder's sisters were just going to love living next door to us. And I wasn't exactly unhappy about the idea of being neighbors with Caulder.

  So innocently can strange events begin.

  chapter 2

  Why didn't you tell me you lived next door to the Pretigers?” Hally asked me at lunch the next day.

  “I didn't know,” I said. I opened the little Tupperware dish of sliced peaches my mother had sent in my lunch. “Why didn't you tell me? “

  She leaned her chin on her hand and played around with her straw, dropping milk into her creamed corn, drip by drip.

  “Want some?” I asked her, presenting my dish.

  She nodded, and fished up a slip of peach with her spoon. “I've had a crush on Caulder Pretiger since first grade,” she said, and the peach disappeared.

  “I wonder why,” I said, grinning.

  She scowled at me, and then licked the spoon daintily. I offered her free access to the rest of my peaches. “You guys will probably get along just great,” she said, not ungracefully, but with an edge of regret.

  “We already do,” I said, anticipating the look she gave me, and I grinned again. But then mercy got the best of me. “I have the feeling,” I reassured her, “it's going to be a very platonic relationship.”

  She squinched up her face and shook the spoon at me. “Just make sure it stays that way.”

  A Ding-Dong. My mother had put a Ding-Dong in my lunch. Or maybe it was my dad making the lunches this morning.

  “Actually,” I said, peeling off the wrapper, “I've been thinking I ought to fall in love with Pete Zabriski.”

  She groaned.

  “What? He's got the most wonderful eyes on the planet. What? “

  “Are you actually serious?”

  “Well, I mean—I just thought it would be fun. You know. And he's cute.”

  “He is cute,” she allowed. “But guys like that never hang out with SADs.”

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  “Scholastic and Academic Development program. Otherwise known as ultra honors.” She rolled her eyes.

  “This has some relevance to me?” I asked. “Because I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “You're in all SADs classes,” she said. “Could you be honors and not know it?”

  “I don't think so,” I said. “Not with my math grades”

  “Math,” she agreed, grimacing. “I'm definitely a poet.”

  “Maybe it's all a mistake,” I said, but I was thinking about my SAT scores, and all the tests my mother'd had run on us up at the university before we moved out here. Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. There've been whole years my mother's kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie—who is an actual musical genius—will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I—I know a little bit about a lot of things.

  I can tell you the chemical composition of the stuff you stick in your hair; how long it would take you, at just under the speed of light, to get to Alpha Centauri—and how old your body would be when you finally got there; the middle name of the third president of the United States; the amount of the present budget deficit; the author of the Brothers Karamazov ; and how many feet there are in a line of trochaic heptameter. The Little Girl Who Had to Know Why, Paul used to call me. But even my mother couldn't reconcile me and math.

  “I don't think they make that kind of mistake,” Hally concluded. “Anyway—whether you're SADs or not, you're hanging around with SADs—me, for example—and that's death for dating. See, a smart woman tends to act on your typical eighteen-year-old male like instant
kryptonite. But, not to worry—mother tells me something mystical happens at graduation and suddenly male people who never pulled a grade above a C in their lives automatically become smarter than anything that wears a skirt. Maybe after that happens, we can date who we want.”

  “Well, like I say—I just thought it would be kind of fun,” I sighed. “I mean, I never really expected him to take me out. I just thought it was so romantic that he plays the French horn. Whenever I hear the sound of a horn, I always get these visions of autumnal mists wafting through the Black Forest…”

  “Oh, fine,” she said, and she rolled her eyes again. “Give me your garbage, please. I believe it's time for me to take a trip to the can.”

  As dysfunctional as Smitty Tibbs was supposed to be, you'd expect him to walk around like some kind of robot or zombie something—but that couldn't have been further from the truth. His movement was very normal, almost graceful. But he was moving through a world that didn't seem to admit the existence of any other human being.

  Sometimes you'd hear people talking about him—Who got the highest grade on the test? The Alien did. Or, Is this creamed corn going to kill me? I don't know—The Alien is eating it. Stuff like that. It really was like he was living halfway in some other dimension, but I hated to hear that kind of talk; it kind of put the cap on his isolation. Not that he seemed to care.

  I think he must have been kind of a challenge to my sense of reality, because I couldn't stop watching him. Maybe I thought, sooner or later, I was going to pick up on something that everybody else had missed. But Hally and Caulder were right. Watching Smitty Tibbs was a like taking a little trip into the twilight zone. After a while, I had to make myself stop. It was really starting to bother me.

  That's when Caulder decided he wanted to introduce us.

  Oh, yes. Please. I could just see it: “Smitty—this is my friend Ginny—Ginny, Smitty—” and then what? “Nice to meet you?” Sure. Conversation with The Alien. One very big, creepy silence. No, no, no. Aliens are all right at a nice, objective distance; the idea of having him any closer gave me chills.