The Lights In the Sky

Chapter 17

I practically lived in the library that next week. It's cliché, I know. Guy doesn't know what's happening to him, so he spends a lot of time researching in the library. I mean, it's actually an outdated thing, you know? With the Internet and everything. I probably could have just used my phone to do the same thing. But I wanted to be out of the house, away from the place where things were happening. When I was home, Mom and Dad were just screaming at each other downstairs. The only sound that ever interrupted that was Tabitha's laughter, which sometimes came down the hall from her room. One evening, when Dad was accusing Mom of being too hard on him and Mom was accusing Dad of being Catholic, Tabitha started giggling louder than I ever heard. I poked my head around her doorway and she was just sitting there on the floor with Pooh Bear; he was leaning up against her dresser and she was nearly in stitches from laughing so hard next to her bed. She didn't see me standing there, but I got chills when I looked at the stuffed animal. Black, lifeless button eyes were staring back at me and for a brief second, I was floating into them, out into the dark sky, the world at my back.

Anyway, on top of not wanting to be home, I couldn't exactly trust the Internet when it came to stories like mine. Most searches returned Photoshopped alien pictures or videos with stunningly bad CGI. The books seemed more honest, more reliable.

There was just the one thing that I couldn't get over. No matter what I read, it bothered me. Despite the similarities, floating out of bed and staring up into bright lights, the deer and the...well, the other stuff...it never fit. These people would describe the things that took them and it was never even close. Short little men with bulbous, gray heads and empty eyes. Even the idea that they were men and not women, as if a civilization advanced enough for interplanetary space travel wouldn't allow women on board. I couldn't see any discernible shape in the things that visited me at night. Some of these people who were taken, they could even name the number of fingers these abductors had. Mine were just shapes, always shifting and moving; sure, they had the general outline of a human body, but even that morphed in and out of recognition.

I came to a conclusion that, despite its implications, actually made me feel better. I usually try not to curse around adults, but there's really only one word that can tell you what I realized: it was all bullshit. Pardon my language. And I don't mean any disrespect to the people who claim to be taken, either. But it's not them. Not my them. And do you want to know why that made me feel better?

Because I was special, wasn't I?

I think I've talked to you before about football, right? About how it's not something I'm really passionate about? Everybody around here has to have a sport. If you don't have a sport, you're either known for being a nerd or you become a stoner. That may seem harsh, and I definitely don't think it's fair, but it is true. Nerds aren't bad people. Neither are stoners. They just have different interests. But I always found that if you did what was expected, nobody really noticed you. And if nobody really noticed you, nobody really gave you a hard time ever. Does that make sense? Don't get me wrong: there is something exciting about walking out onto the field and hearing people shouting and the lights coming down on you and everybody holding their breath every time you make a move. But it wasn't something I was passionate about. It was more like a responsibility.

The feeling I got when I was in the library, reading all those stories, even if they weren't real, was different. It was passion and responsibility. The way my heart would race and my skin would crawl, it was more adrenaline than I ever had on the field. That doesn't make sense to a lot of people and I wouldn't expect it to. Just sitting there in a room with stale air and no noise and low lights. Unmoving except for your eyes. Processing everything mentally. It was my sanctuary, though. My church in a way that real church never was. The things they taught me in school became pointless. I took notes and I took tests and sometimes I even passed them, but it was all just a hindrance to what I wanted to do.