“That’s so unreal!”
“I know, right?” Aidan got out his books, then swung the locker shut. More balloons fell off. “Look,” he said to Glenn, “you have to keep what I told you between us. I mean, you can tell people that I wasn’t thinking straight when I told the police about the unicorns and everything. But the part about where I really went—that’s gotta be secret. The police are still trying to figure it out, and I just…well, I just don’t want everyone else to know, okay? You’re my best friend, so I don’t mind you knowing. But not everyone else. I just want life to be what it was, right?”
“Totally, totally,” Glenn said. “Your secret is safe with me. Nobody else needs to know.”
“Cool,” Aidan said. “Now tell me what you got up to yesterday.”
They started to walk to Glenn’s locker; since mine was in the other direction, I said “See ya” to them both. Aidan gave me a “Yeah, see ya” back. Glenn kept walking.
Busby found me a few steps before I got to my locker. She was breathless from running to get there.
“I just heard from Caleb who heard from Nick who said his dad heard from another dad that Aidan said he was sucked into another dimension while we were looking for him here—is that true?!?”
“Um, yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I mean, yes.”
If Busby was my test on whether I could pull off lying for Aidan, I was failing big-time. I decided to try again before she said anything else.
“I mean, the answer is yes, Aidan did say that, but no, he didn’t actually go into another world. It was a big mix-up. A total misunderstanding.”
“Oh,” Busby said, catching her breath. “That’s disappointing.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. It would have been much more fun if he’d actually met some unicorns.”
I couldn’t help but remember that I’d been the one to chime in about unicorns that night. If only I’d known it was the one thing about Aveinieu that would stick in people’s minds, I would have kept my mouth shut.
* * *
—
It became pretty easy for me to tell the people who’d heard from the people who hadn’t heard yet. Teachers didn’t seem to have heard anything. If they treated me any different from before Aidan’s disappearance, it was still with concern about how my family and I were doing. Students for the most part were sticking to Principal Kahler’s rule about not asking too many questions. Some kids acted like they’d already forgotten. But some—the ones, I assumed, who’d heard about the unicorns—were still giggling their way through the whisper network, looking at me with minimally disguised smiles. And if I was getting that, I could only imagine the way Aidan was being treated.
Glenn must have been sharing Aidan’s out-of-his-mind excuse, because by lunchtime, it felt like there were two whisper networks competing with each other. One was saying that Aidan was crazy because he thought he’d gone to a fantasy world. Another was saying Aidan had only been temporarily crazy, long enough to make up a fantasy story. Nobody was calling him a liar—not yet. Instead they were focused on when, exactly, he’d lost his mind.
I got updates about this from Busby, Tate, and Truman. They thought they were doing me a favor by telling me what everyone was saying…and who knows? Maybe they were doing me a favor. It probably would have been worse if I hadn’t known what was being said. But at the same time, it was frustrating, because there was no way for me to correct it. Once a story was out there, it could be turned into any other story a person wanted to tell. It was no longer Aidan’s, but Aidan was still getting all the attention for it.
I didn’t see him until pickup time at the end of the day. His locker no longer had any balloons or streamers on it. I didn’t know if he’d pulled them down or if someone else had. I didn’t want to ask.
I got there as he was bent over his book bag, so I couldn’t really see his face. Before I could ask him how his day was, Glenn came up behind me, saying, “Oh, man, that was so uncool. I hope you know that. It was so uncool.”
Aidan stood up straight, saw me, then looked at Glenn.
“It was uncool,” he said. “But no worries. I mean, whatever.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Seriously,” Glenn said, as if I hadn’t opened my mouth. “Keegan needs to chill out. Especially, like, in front of everyone else. I can’t believe he did that.”
“Did what?” I asked.
“It’s fine,” Aidan said. “I’m fine. People are going to be jerks about it—I get that. Hopefully they’ll move on to being jerks about something else soon.”
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I said. It sounded more like a whine than I wanted it to.
“It’s nothing,” Aidan said dismissively.
Strangely, it was Glenn who decided to fill me in.
“We had a sub in English,” he said, “which meant it basically turned into an out-of-control study hall. Keegan Ronson thought he was real funny, so he went to the closet in the classroom, poked his head in, then shouted, ‘Hey, Aidan—there’s a unicorn in here who wants to talk to you!’ And once he got a laugh, he poked his head back in, then came out and said something like, ‘Yeah, and there’s a dragon here who says she’s your girlfriend and you really need to reply to her texts.’ Which got a bigger laugh, even though most kids in class had no idea what he was talking about, and the substitute really didn’t know what he was talking about, but assumed it was, like, a reference to what we were reading in class. Which was kinda funny, since we’re reading Walk Two Moons. Which doesn’t, you know, have any dragons or unicorns in it.”
“I really don’t care,” Aidan said, closing his locker and heading for the exit.
“Yeah,” Glenn went on. “People are really stupid. Kelli McGillis, who’s always flirt-fighting with Keegan, was like, ‘I don’t think Aidan’s here—I think he attends Hogwarts now.’ And, like, a few kids laughed at that, but at that point a bunch of us were just like, hey, it’s time for everyone to shut up now. It was so uncool.”
Aidan was now ahead of us, out of the conversation.
“How did Aidan respond?” I asked Glenn.
“I thought he was going to joke right back at them, but he just kinda took it, you know? Didn’t laugh, but didn’t try to fight it either. It was like he was pretending none of it was happening. Which was cool, because there wasn’t more fuel for the fire, and with people like Keegan and Kelli, they tend to die out when there’s no more fuel.”