I wait until noon to text Brian. He and Emily are late risers. In fact, the entire Aoki family is on a different schedule from us. Late to bed, late to rise. Maybe because we used to be farmers, we’re always up with the sun.
Yo, meet me? I text him.
Yo, yep is the reply. We don’t really need more than that.
We meet where we usually do, at the back of the old drive-in behind the huge plaster screen. On weekends the place is used for a swap meet, but during the week it’s empty. Brian and I have been hanging out there since we were kids. We rode regular banana seat bikes and BMXes until we turned fourteen and got cheap scramblers. For the past three years, we’ve been tearing up the dirt like pros.
Ha. No.
One time, we set up a ramp using some raw lumber and concrete blocks we found on the side of the road and dragged to the drive-in. Without any training or practice whatsoever, Brian attempted to jump off the ramp. I never saw so much blood pour out of one nose. His face connected with the concrete like it was a cream-filled doughnut. Splat.
The Aokis moved into the stone house at the very end of our rural road when Brian was a baby and his sister, Emily, was barely a toddler. As the only boys on the entire street, we became fast friends as soon as we could talk. Em hung out with us too, but she was kind of an honorary guy, plus she could drive before us so that gave her bonus points.
“Yo,” Brian calls to me when he rides up to the movie screen. He’s wearing cutoff cargo pants and a black T-shirt that billows out over his stomach. Brian has always been conscious of his weight. His dad got diabetes when he was forty and he’s been hammering at Brian ever since to lose weight and eat right.
Please. Those cargo pants are stuffed with Almond Joys, not grapefruit.
Well, Almond Joys and weed. He takes a couple of quick puffs off a joint and offers it to me. I shake my head and he shrugs, taking another toke. “Your loss.”
“Did you ride with that thing lit?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I laugh. “Dude.”
“I’m super skilled.”
“Sure. It’s how you got a D in every class—”
He punctuates the air with the joint. “Not true. I got a C in history.”
History at our high school is a joke. No one has ever failed. Even the worst student—and arguably that was Brian—never got anything less than a C-minus. We’re entering our senior year with dueling crappy averages, me because I’m bored out of my mind and Brian because, well, he’s not dumb but he’d rather smoke dope than study.
“What are we doing today?” he asks, shading his eyes with his hand as his gaze roams the empty drive-in. The place is filled with leftovers from a bygone era: metal rods planted in the dry earth, bent and crushed by wind and rain and probably me and Brian when we were younger; dead speakers, the type that clipped to car windows, used to hang by their wires but disappeared a few years ago. The snack bar is the last original structure still intact, and that’s only because the swap meet organizers need a designated smoking area.
“I dunno. What do you wanna do?”
“Lake?”
“What, to swim?” At best, my pudgy stoner friend might float, but there’s no way he’s going to exercise on his own.
“Swim? Dude, please.” He sucks in another drag from the joint and holds it in his lungs. “Just hang,” he ekes out before exhaling the smoke. The sweet smell of it immediately evaporates into the dusty air.
“Hang?” I know what he wants to do at the lake: stare at the girl lifeguard he has a crush on. “Like, get a tan? Is that what you wanna do? Or maybe rent a boat? No!” I snap my fingers. “Paddleboard.” I mime rowing with an invisible oar, wiping my brow of imagined sweat.
“Fuck you, Jones.”
“Go on, say it.”
“What.”
“Say her name. Go on.” I poke his chest with two fingers. “Mir. An. Da.” I poke him again, and his butt slips off the seat of the dirt bike. I lean in and whisper in his ear, “You know you want her.”
His cheeks purple with embarrassment. “You’re a douche.” He holds up the joint, pinches off the end between his fingernails, and tucks it into the front pocket of his cargo shorts. “Don’t ask. You’re not getting any.”
I shrug. “Don’t care.” Jeez, so he likes a girl.
And I guess because of their shared DNA or whatever, I’m suddenly thinking of Emily.
Brian’s sister has their mom’s heart-shaped face with cheeks that dimple when she smiles; auburn hair she keeps in a ponytail most of the time; curves hidden under Levis and an Eagles sweatshirt. A few of us guys know she’s got a killer bod, but she’s constantly in motion. Field hockey in the fall, dive team in the winter, softball in spring. Em’s a team player, even when the team is just me and Brian.
Me and Em have fooled around a little bit. But that’s over now.
Miranda, now, she’s something else. She’s so far out of Brian’s league, she might as well be on another planet. I mean, she’s a lifeguard! Totally in shape, one of the most popular girls in school since kindergarten, stellar grades. Her shiny black hair—let’s call it sleek—and high cheekbones make her more like a model and less like a real person.
Any normal guy—like me—would know his place with a girl like Miranda. But Brian . . . I love the guy, but he’s not normal. He actually believes he might get a chance to hook up.
Not helping to dispel this illusion? Emily was on the dive team with her. So she knows Brian’s name is actually not Toad, which is what most girls call him.
“Anyway, gotta go. Things to do,” I say, and sling my leg over my bike.
Brian rolls his eyes at me. “Things to do? What, you got a job now?”
We both know the “job” I had last year is gone. The farm barely had a summer stand then, eking out a few bucks selling fresh eggs and sweet corn to the neighbors. But the chickens were eaten last fall (sorry, chickens) and the corn is dead.
I stare at the patch of earth under my bike’s front tire. Hard. Dry. Empty. Three long months stretch out before me. Jesus, what do I have to look forward to this summer? Smoking weed and riding dirt bikes with Brian? Watching him make a fool out of himself as he lusts after Miranda? Sounds like a path to loserdom. Like father, like son.
“I could get you a job,” Brian says. “Making deliveries,” he adds, lowering his voice and glancing furtively around the drive-in.
I know that look. “Dude, I’m not gonna be a weed guy.”
“I said you’d make deliveries. Who said anything about dope?”
I sit back on my bike and cross my arms over my chest. Am I that desperate for cash? We’ve been living on Mom’s income for a long time, but how much longer I don’t know. Granddad’s farm and house are paid off, thank god, but I’m savvy enough about finances to know there are taxes and other crap that have to be paid each month. I often heard Mom and Dad arguing late at night, about how Dad needed to contribute more and take responsibility and face facts. That’s one of Mom’s favorite phrases, as in “Face facts, DJ, this farm can’t run itself.” Or, “Face facts, Matty, you’ll crack your head open if you don’t wear a helmet.”
I wonder if she’s telling herself, Face facts, Lorna, that jerk is gone and he’s not coming back.
But that’s a good thing. Isn’t it?
I hear the flick of a lighter and look up to see Brian with a brand-new joint, a little on the skinny side but it’ll do. He doesn’t light it himself but hands both the Bic and the joint to me.
“You kinda look like you need it,” he says.
I don’t hesitate. I fire it up, take two quick tokes, and hold the smoke in my lungs for as long as I can. Finally I give it back and exhale.
“So . . . the lake?” I ask Brian.
My friend shakes his head. “Nah, this is good.”
I tilt my face up to the sky and feel the sun warm my cheeks. Yeah, this is good.
It doesn’t take long for every muscle in my body to turn to jelly and for my head to feel like it’s filled with helium, expanding farther and farther out into the Universe. Fleeting bits of memories, of Dad and me, of other summers, pop into my brain.
“Have you ever thought about what’s out there, Junior? All the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy?” my dad asked me often when I was a kid. Strictly speaking, I’m not a Junior, since he’s David James and I’m David Matthew, but I didn’t care. Not then. We’d be sitting outside on a hot summer night, and he’d point up to the sky, index finger tracing the outline of the Big Dipper from the North Star. He’d explain the difference between constellations and asterisms and how Pluto was booted from planet to star and then upgraded back to dwarf planet.
When the willow trees went bare in late fall, we could see the field from the porch. Mom wouldn’t let us spend too much time over there. “If your father could live in that field, he’d do it in a heartbeat, Matty,” she’d say with a nervous smile. “Now don’t you get caught up in it too.”
My father would laugh and wave her away. “He won’t, Lorna, he won’t.” But as soon as she was gone, he’d whisper, “It’s a part of our history. The Jones family history. It’s special. I’m special. We’re special.”
Special. My dad was born to be something great, to do something great. He knew that because on the night he was born, a spaceship landed in the field next to his house. It landed at the exact moment of his birth. Coincidence?
No such thing as coincidences. Not where the Universe is concerned.
In 1965, in our rural Pennsylvania town, a spaceship landed, or so locals said. It crashed at two in the morning in the field next to the Jones Family Farm, in one of the cornfields Granddad Jones owned at the time. He didn’t see it land but he felt it—the whole town felt it. Some people reported seeing a fireball in the sky just before the ground shook, while others said they felt electricity in the air like nothing they’d ever felt before. Clocks stopped. Watches went dead. Refrigerators and oven doors opened and closed; lights turned on and off.
My grandfather, who wasn’t known for his curiosity, nevertheless tossed a blanket over his wife, who’d just given birth to her first son, and ran outside without another word. When he came back an hour later, his face was gray and his clothes were covered in soot. He calmly picked up his wailing newborn, whispered in his ear, and immediately the baby stopped crying. My grandmother never knew what he’d said.
The field burned the rest of the night while firemen from the whole county valiantly fought the blaze. The next morning, as the sun rose over the farm, there was a clamor in the field. Hundreds of Granddad’s neighbors surrounded what appeared to be a huge metal cone, dented into the earth like it had been pounded in by a giant hand. At the base of it were etched weird hieroglyphics no one had ever seen before, which isn’t saying too much since the town is relatively remote. The local press took photos and interviewed witnesses.
The excitement, said those who were there, was palpable. Finally something to put the small town on the map! Whether you believed it was an alien ship or a piece of a Russian spacecraft, it was remarkable that anything had happened in our town.
That was December 9, 1965.
On December 10, the military arrived and took it all away.