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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Samis avoiding me. At school he seems to disappear when he sees me, or always makes sure we're in a group. At the urging of Henri-who's desperate to get his hands on Sam's magazine after combing through everything that came up on the internet and finding nothing like Sam's magazine-I decide to just go over to his place una
Brown shag carpet covers the floors, and family photographs from when Sam was very young hang on wood-paneled walls. Him, his mother, and a man who I assume is his father, who is wearing glasses every bit as thick as Sam's. Then I look closer. They look like the exact same pair of glasses.
I creep down the hallway until I find the door that must be to Sam's bedroom; a sign reading ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK hangs from a tack. The door is open a crack and I peer inside. The room is very clean, everything consciously put in a place. His twin bed is made, has a black comforter with the planet Saturn repeated across it. Matching pillowcases. The walls are covered with posters. There are two NASA ones, the movie poster from Alien, a movie poster from Star Wars, and one that is a blacklight poster of a green alien head surrounded by dark felt. In the center of the room, hanging from clear thread, is the solar system, all nine planets and the sun. It makes me think of what Henri showed me earlier in the week. I think that Sam would lose his mind if he were to see the same thing. And then I see Sam, hunched over a small oak desk, with headphones on. I push the door open and he looks over his shoulder. He isn't wearing his glasses, and without them his eyes look very small and beady, almost cartoonlike.
"What's up?" I ask casually, as if I'm at his house every day.
He looks shocked and scared and he frantically pulls the headphones off to reach in one of the drawers. I look at his desk and see that he's reading a copy of They Walk Among Us. When I look back up he is pointing a gun at me.
"Whoa," I say, instinctively lifting my hands in front of me. "What's going on?"
He stands up. His hands are shaking. The gun is pointed at my chest. I think that he's lost his mind.
"Tell me what you are," he says.
"What are you talking about?"
"I saw what you did in those woods. You're not human." I was afraid of this, that he saw more than I had hoped.
"This is crazy, Sam! I got into a fight. I've been doing martial arts for years."
"Your hands lit up like flashlights. You could throw people around like they were nothing. That's not normal."
"Don't be stupid," I say, my hands still in front of me. "Look at them. Do you see any lights? I told you, they were gloves that Kevin was wearing."
"I asked Kevin! He said he wasn't wearing gloves!"
"Do you really think he would tell you the truth after what happened? Put the gun down."
"Tell me! What are you?"
I roll my eyes. "Yes, I'm an alien, Sam. I'm from a planet hundreds of millions of miles away. I have superpowers. Is that what you want to hear?"
He stares at me, his hands still shaking.
"Do you realize how stupid that sounds? Quit being crazy and put the gun down."
"Is what you just said true?"
"That you're being stupid? Yes, it's true. You're too obsessed with this stuff. You see aliens and alien conspiracies in every part of your life, including in your only friend. Now quit pointing that damn gun at me."
He stares at me, and I can tell he's thinking about what I said. I drop my hands. Then he sighs and lowers the gun. "I'm sorry," he says.
I take a deep, nervous breath. "You should be. What the hell were you thinking?"
"It wasn't actually loaded."
"You should have told me that earlier," I say. "Why do you want so badly to believe in this stuff?"
He shakes his head and puts the gun back in the drawer. I take a minute to calm myself down and try to act casual, like what just happened is no big deal.
"What are you reading?" I ask.
He shrugs. "Just more alien stuff. Maybe I should cool it a bit."
"Or just read it as fiction instead of fact," I say. "The stuff must be pretty convincing, though. Can I see it?"
He hands me the latest copy of They Walk Among Us and I sit tentatively on the edge of his bed. I think he's calmed down enough to not spring a gun on me again at least. Again, it is a bad photocopy, the print slightly unaligned with the paper. It isn't very thick-eight pages, twelve at the most, printed on legal-sized sheets. The date at the top reads DECEMBER. It must be the newest issue.
"This is weird stuff, Sam Goode," I say.
He smiles. "Weird people like weird stuff."
"Where do you get this?" I ask.
"I subscribe to it."
"I know, but how?"
Sam shrugs. "I don't know. It just started arriving one day."
"Are you subscribed to some other magazine? Perhaps they pulled your contact info from there."
"I went to a convention once. I think I signed up for some contest or something while I was there. I can't remember. I've always assumed that's where they got my address."
I scan the cover. There's no website listed anywhere on it, and I didn't expect there to be, considering that Henri has already searched the internet high and low. I read the headline of the top story:
IS YOUR NEIGHBOR AN ALIEN?
In the middle of the article there's a picture of a man holding a bag of trash in one hand and the lid to the trash can in the other. He is standing at the end of the driveway and we're to assume he's in the process of dropping the bag into the can. Though the whole publication is in black-and-white, there is a certain glow to the man's eyes. It's a horrible image-as though somebody took a picture of an unsuspecting neighbor and then drew around his eyes with a crayon. It makes me laugh.
"What?" Sam asks.
"This is a terrible picture. It looks like something from Godzilla."
Sam looks at it. Then he shrugs. "I du
"But I thought aliens looked like that," I say, and nod to the blacklight poster on his wall.
"I don't think all of them do," he says. "Like you said, you're an alien with superpowers and you don't look like that."
We both laugh, and I wonder how I'm going to get myself out of that one. Hopefully Sam never finds out I was telling him the truth. Part of me wants to tell him, though-about me, about Henri, about Lorien-and I wonder what his reaction would be. Would he believe me?
I flip the paper open to look for the publishing page that all newspapers and magazines have. There isn't one here, only more stories and theories.
"There isn't a publisher info page."
"What do you mean?"
"You know how magazines and newspapers always have that page listing staff, editors, writers, where it's being printed, and all that? You know, 'For questions, contact so and so.' All publications have them, but this doesn't."
"They have to protect their anonymity," Sam says.
"From what?"
"Aliens," he says, and smiles, as though acknowledging the absurdity of it.
"Do you have last month's issue?"
He grabs it from his closet. I quickly flip through it, hoping that the Mogadorian article is in this one and not an earlier month. And then I find it on page 4.