Transmission

“It’s great,” Kevin said, but he couldn’t bring himself to smile.

“What’s wrong?” Luna asked. She shook her head. “Stupid question.”

Kevin went to sit back down, Luna joining him. How many times had they done their homework like that? This felt different, though, more serious.

“There are lawyers in the other room,” he said. “They’re saying that my mom might go to jail, and that we might have to sell the house.”

“What for?” Luna demanded, in the kind of indignant tone that said she was ready to fight them off, lawyers or not. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“They think I did,” Kevin said. “They think… I guess they think that I made all of this up to get attention, or to con them into giving me medical treatment, or something.”

“Then they’re idiots,” Luna declared, with the kind of iron-hard certainty that no one else around him seemed to have. “You gave them messages from another world. You told them all about a planet they would barely know anything about otherwise. You helped them find the meteorite thing, even if it was empty. It isn’t your fault that aliens are weird and send rocks to people as presents.”

That was a way of looking at it Kevin suspected that nobody other than Luna could manage. Even so, it felt good.

“So, you believe me?” he asked.

She nodded. “I believe you. I believe in you too. You’ll find a way to deal with this.”

“And you climbed over my fence just to tell me that?” Kevin asked.

Luna put a hand on his shoulder. “What are friends for? I like sneaking in. It’s fun. Besides, I need to take you somewhere.”

Kevin looked back at her in surprise.

“Where?” he asked.

She smiled wide.

“It’s a surprise.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kevin checked how he looked in the mirror before heading out. It wasn’t vanity; he wanted to make sure that there was no possible way anyone could recognize him. He had his hoodie pulled up over his head, dark glasses on to break up some of the lines of his face. It wasn’t great, but if he hunched in enough then he could almost convince himself that people wouldn’t be able to tell that it was him.

“It will have to do,” he said to himself.

His mother had left the house a few minutes before, out talking to more lawyers, or maybe trying to find another job, not that anyone wanted to hire the mother of the boy who’d lied. The doors were locked against the continued presence of the reporters out front, and would probably stay that way even after she got back.

“She’ll be mad if she finds out I did this,” Kevin said, but that was part of why he was wearing the disguise. He’d been sitting in the house too long, with no school because of his illness, no chance of going out because of both the reporters and his mother’s fear of what might happen. He was going crazy there, and he suspected that was only making things harder for his mother. He needed to get outside at least for a while.

His phone was full of messages from people he didn’t know. Some were questions, more were insults. One or two held threats, or promises that they would pay Kevin if only he would tell them his story.

Kevin wasn’t sure that he wanted to be careful then. He felt as though he might explode if he stayed hiding out for much longer. He looked out the back, trying to judge if he could get out of there the same way Luna had gotten in. A few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have had to worry about it.

Now, he thought about the tremors that came and went in his body, the moments of losing time and the dizzy spells. He fetched a stepladder from where his mother kept it in the garage, setting it up against the fence and using that to climb over, to a small path that ran between yards.

Kevin kept his head down as he went along, making sure that no one saw his face. Even though the part of town where he lived wasn’t a bad one, it was just a few blocks to a more industrial area, where factories stuck up like fenced-in boxes, and occasional rusted out machinery pointed to the businesses that hadn’t done so well.

“Come on,” Luna said, after they hopped the fence, setting off at a walk that took them through some of the abandoned buildings, past graffiti that looked as though it had been painted with someone’s eyes shut.

They came out closer to the center of town. Kevin kept his hood up, sure that even here, away from his house, people would spot him.

“We could go to the mall,” Luna suggested.

Kevin shook his head. “Too many people.”

“The square then,” Luna suggested.

Kevin nodded. There might be almost as many people there in the middle of town, but they would be moving on more, less likely to notice a kid keeping his head down. In the mall, security would probably think he was there to steal something, but out in the open, he and Luna could walk where they wanted without it being a problem.