"You have an amazing room Morgan!" Jade finally spoke, breaking the painful silence as she seemed to nervously tuck her short blonde hair behind her ears. Her eyes darted around my giant sized room. A room I'd once imagined having friends over to, if this school year had been normal and smooth. Of course, that was not the case.
"What are you doing here? H-how did you know where I lived?"
"Aaron."
I didn't know how to respond to Jade's answer. Aaron... I hadn't spoken to Aaron or literally any of the humans, including Jade, at school ever since fall ball. For one, I became a complete laughing stock of the school with everyone gossiping about me "being eaten". And then there was the fall out of me hitting Aaron. After Aaron returned to school with a broken nose, the rest of the humans seemed to even avoid making eye contact with me, and yet, here Jade stood silently staring at me.
"Well... would you like to tell me what brought you here?"
"OMG... right to the point aren't we. Well... first of all I wanted to apologize to you for how everythings been since... you know... I don't know the full story of what went on with you and Aaron but if he did you wrong, I think it's pretty bada2s that you knocked him out,"
"I didn't knock him o-"
"Us girls need to support each other! From now on, if you ever need to beat up a guy, I promise I'll try my absolute best to knock em dead with you! Well... If they're human. Which I wanted to bring up the whole you dating that mysterious tan giant hunk Trent, unless you're really dating the other one, Logan, who I totally think is also cute but I totally don't think we could knock either of them out,"
"JADE! Chill... I didn't knock anyone out... I just hit Aaron, which I shouldn't have. I've learned my lesson though trust me... Doing everything one handed sucks," I added the last admission to hopefully remain light.
"Okay, so I have to tell you I'm kind of here on some serious business," Jade said, seeming more serious than I'd ever seen her. "So it's all over the news now that Trent had a human for a sister, which I was like, wow, that must be weird. But I guess you're used to that anyway seeing your dad, who is HUGE by the way! Like Oh M G, the biggest giant I've ever seen. But anyway, Aaron heard about Trent's little sister."
Jade had apparently finished part one of her speech but I didn't know what to say. LIke cool... Aaron knew about Trent's family going through h3ll... What did he have to do with it?
"Aaron didn't hear about it from the news. He heard about it from his dad. LIke, he heard his dad talking about it on the phone before it was even on the news."
"Wait, What?"
"Aaron really wants to talk to you, but he couldn't come here. I think he's afraid of your dad, which seeing how huge he is, I guess I can see that. Anyway, I'm here to help you sneak out so we can go meet Aaron and get the rest of the juice."
"Sneak out! Are you crazy! I can't sneak out. Joe would flip out!" I exclaimed in an exasperated tone.
"Oh no! Are you scared of him too?"
"No, not like that. I just mean I don't do that type of thing. Ever. I've already gotten into enough trouble this year. I can't push it more," I tried my best to explain.
Jade gave me a smirk before laying out my instructions. "You're going to go find your giant dad, tell him I'm coming to keep you company and sleep over in your room. Then you and I are getting out of this glorious house, we definitely should throw a party in, in the future, and we're going to go find Aaron and as I said, get the juice."
Just a few minutes later I found myself in the living room next to Joe. Joe looked tired, like he hadn't slept in days. I wondered how long he'd looked like this. Had he been this tired when we were at dinner with Trent's family, and I just hadn't noticed? Mother earth... Joe looked at me in anticipation of what I was about to say.
"Would it be okay if my friend who's here, Jade, stays the night? I know it's a school night but with everything going on, she just wanted to keep me company. And, she can stay in my room There's plenty of room,"
"Is Jade's family alright with her staying here?"
"Yep."
"Alright... Then I guess I'm okay with it as well."
"Really?" I replied before I could stop myself. I was hoping he would somehow sense I was up to no good and say no.
"I'm glad to see you with a friend," Joe replied with a grin filling his face.
"Hey, I have friends!" I defended myself, thinking of Logan and of course Trent.
"I meant a human friend."
I almost replied that I had human friends, but I realized the only other human friend of mine he'd met was Aaron, and that didn't exactly go well, so I held my tongue for once.
"Don't get me wrong Boss, I'm not opposed to you having giant friends, but I just figured it must be nice to have friends your own size as well," Joe explained.
"Yeah... it's nice. Um, and Jade is super nice. Super cool. Such a good person," I finished, finally done overqualified Jade as a friend, most likely more for my benefit than for Joes'.
"Great, glad to hear it. You two have fun, and don't stay up too late."
And like that Jade's master plan began.
______________________________________________________________________
By the time I returned to my room Jade had unloaded her backpack full of tools and items that perplexed me. First she had scaled the side of my dresser to get down to the floor instead of the walkways, using what appeared to be human rock climbing materials. Then she went behind the giant sized dresser and using a light beam with a laser mechanism, created hole in the wall that appeared to be a tunnel almost identical to the one I'd seen in River's room.
It didn't take long for Jade and I to find ourselves in Jade's little black car, on the way toward the human side of town. I felt absolutely sick for going through with this. Joe had been so quick to trust. If he happened to go in my room before we returned he'd be very worried. Especially since Jade even made me leave my phone at home, in case it could be tracked. I truly felt like I was on the run.
We finally made it to the human side of town where everything seemed to shrink down. The nature in the human side of town was what I was used to seeing growing up. It was "imported nature" that was all imported from Earth. The trees were smaller, the grass was shorter, and the flowers were small enough for us to pick. This was how all nature on Earth was apparently. However on New Earth, we had a mixture of both Earth plants and resources, and New Earth's massive plants and nature.
The houses and buildings all looked like the houses and buildings I was used to seeing growing up. Everywhere I looked everything was human sized. It was... nice.
Jade led me to a playground that was surely meant for elementary schoolers. However, it was dark and this playground was completely empty aside from one human sat on a barely moving swing in the middle of the structure. It was a human I'd recognize anywhere. Our eyes met and I was happy to see he no longer needed a splint across his nose. I guess his injury heeled quicker than my hand, for I still had another two weeks bandaged up. Yes, on the swing sat Aaron.
"Morgan," Aaron said my name by way of greeting.
"Hi,"
"I'm glad you're here," he replied before Jade cut in.
"Alright fighters, I'm glad to see we're being lovers tonight. Let's do this!"
"Jade... chill," Aaron said in warning toward Jade.
The three of us climbed into a dome like portion of the play structure where we all sat criss-cross applesauce in a circle ready to, as Jade would say, spill the juice.
Finally Aaron started. "So I'm assuming Jade told you about what I heard. I hate to admit it but I'm pretty sure my father, along with a number of both humans and giant parents have worked together to orchestrate this."
"Kidnapping River? That's crazy! We have to call the police!"
"We can't. The police are in on it."
"What?!" I exclaimed, feeling my heart rate rise.
"My father has been anti-integration for as long as he's lived on New Earth, and apparently there are members of the police force in on whatever he's doing. I mean, being anti-integration doesn't necessarily make him bad if you ask me, but how it's escalated does. He is part of a group of people who very strongly believe Humans should eliminate giants."
"Eliminate?"
"Kill them... all of them."
"WHAT! But t-thats,"
"Crazy. Yeah sister, you're right about that. I don't particularly like being around giants, but this was their planet afterall. Killing them all would surely turn into one of those crazy alien invasion earth movies, but we'd be the alien invaders," Jade added.
"From what I can gather, something in my fathers life caused him to truly snap when it came to giants. I think it happened before I was adopted. When I've heard my mom and him talk about it he mentions how giants have taken everything from him. So anyway, ever since this school year started, my dad has been obsessed with outlawing adoptions between giants and humans. It's weird too, like a few months before school started something just snapped in him and he's been obsessed with repealing the laws."
I gulped hearing this information. The timeline Aaron had laid out may have seemed random to him, but it didn't seem quite as random to me. A few months prior to this school year starting I could think of a pretty monumental event that had happened in my life... It was when my mother... d@mnit. My mother had passed, which gave Joe sole custody of me.
"My dad has also spoken a lot about you," Aaron revealed, giving me a serious look.
"Really? What's he saying?"
"Everytime he talks on the phone about some big plan he's making, he always makes a point at highlighting how he needs others to extract all of the human children, except for you Morgan. He is always saying that he will handle Morgan."
"Handle me how? What?"
"I don't know, but I don't think he'd hurt you. Whenever he's asked about you it's been very curious. Like the line of questioning is beyond how my mom or him ask about any of my other girl... friends."
"What does he ask?" I inquired.
"It's not important now... What's important is I'm one hundred percent sure my dad knew about Trent's sister going missing."
"But if we can't go to the police about it, then what are we going to do?" I finally asked.
"We're going to go rescue her."