I wanted to ask Glenn if he thought it really had died out, or whether people were going to keep making stupid, uncool comments. But we were out the door now and at the curb, where both my mom and dad were waiting, this time in separate cars. Aidan went into Mom’s car without saying bye to me or Glenn; she was taking him to the therapist’s office. I said bye to Glenn, who grunted a goodbye to me in response. Then I got into Dad’s car.
“Right on time,” he said as I put on my seat belt and he pulled away from the school. “How’d it go today?”
“We made it through,” I replied.
“That bad, huh?” he asked, looking at me all concerned.
“No, it was fine,” I said.
“Were kids mean to Aidan?”
“You’d have to ask Aidan.”
“Well, how about you?”
“Everyone was fine with me. Totally fine.”
“Did your friends hear about what Aidan said?”
“Yup. A lot of people mentioned unicorns.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“No, but I think it could have been worse. It’s a joke—that’s all. People think it’s weird or funny. Aidan told Glenn that he was in a daze or something when he said it. Glenn seemed to believe that.”
Dad took that in for a moment and then said, “That’s interesting. Aidan didn’t insist it was true?”
“He’s not dumb, Dad. He knows that no one’s going to believe he was missing in a make-believe world.”
“And which story do you believe?”
It didn’t seem fair for him to be asking me this. But still I gave Dad the most honest answer I could think of, which was: “I think it’s complicated.”
He nodded. “That it is.”
“What do you believe?” I asked.
Dad hesitated for a moment, then said, “I don’t believe in fantasy worlds, Lucas. I just don’t. Or can’t. So I guess that means I don’t believe what Aidan is saying about Aveinieu. But unlike a lot of people, including your mother, at the end of the day I don’t really care where Aidan was for those six days, as long as he wasn’t hurt and no one else is being hurt. If Aidan was hiding somewhere else the whole time, then felt he needed to come up with an incredible story in order to justify what he put us through…I’m genuinely okay with that. We all make mistakes, and I suspect Aidan made a big one. Even though we were all so scared, nobody was hurt. Life goes on. And I’m hoping that Aidan’s life will go on too, and eventually it won’t matter to anyone where he was. We’ll forget it ever happened.”
“I don’t care either,” I said.
“Good.” Dad looked at me. “But, Lucas? If he does tell you something about where he was, you need to tell us, okay? We’ll never let him know you told us. We just need to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”
I didn’t want to spy on Aidan for my parents. But at the same time, I knew if I told my father I wasn’t going to do it, he’d think I already knew something and wasn’t telling.
Dad went on. “I keep wondering if Aveinieu is from a book or a movie or a game. It’s not like Aidan to make up fantasy worlds in his head. It’s not like he reads that many fantasy novels, right?”
“Right,” I said. Aidan pretty much only read books set during World War II.
“He had to have gotten the story from somewhere. It’s not the kind he’d invent all by himself.”
Doesn’t that make it more believable? I wanted to ask. But I knew better than to say that.
When we got home, I went to Aidan’s bookshelf, to make sure I was right about what he read. There wasn’t any C. S. Lewis or Garth Nix or Holly Black. There was a lot of Alan Gratz and Deborah Hopkinson instead. I took out each of the books I didn’t know and read the back covers, to see if any resembled the stories Aidan had told me about Aveinieu. I searched for green skies and unicorns, boarses and maddoxes. I couldn’t find a single one.
Eventually I put all the books back on the shelf and started my homework. I was on the floor surrounded by textbooks when Aidan returned from his appointment with the psychiatrist.
“How’d it go?” I asked, looking up from my math book.
Aidan dropped his book bag on the floor and headed for his bed. “It was okay, I guess.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I didn’t want to talk about what happened. And he said that was fine, if I didn’t mind him asking questions about before. I said I was okay with that, so he asked me all about Mom and Dad, and about sharing a room with you, and about whether I ever felt the need to run away.”
“What did you answer?”
“I told him the truth: I’ve never had any desire to run away. I tried once or twice when I was little, I think, but that was just for attention, and I didn’t really mean it. I told him I was happy here.”
“But you would’ve stayed there?”
“What?”
“What you said the other night, that you wished you hadn’t had to leave Aveinieu. If you’re happy here, why would you want to stay there?”
Aidan leaned forward, clutching a pillow in his lap. “Because it was incredible! Because I was doing something nobody else had ever gotten a chance to do, not like that. I felt…”
“Different?” I offered.
“No. Important. I felt important. I was making a hundred new discoveries every day.”
“But you can discover things here too.”
“Yeah, but they’re things a lot of people have already discovered. If I discover something in a book, someone else had to know it already in order to write it down. If Mom or Dad tells me something, then they have to know it first. In Aveinieu, I was the first person from my part of the world to see everything. I was seeing things no book has ever been written about and no one else in my life has ever been through.”
“Did you tell Dr. Jennings that?”
Aidan leaned back against the wall, crossing his legs on his bed. “No. He didn’t ask. I told him, ‘Look, I know everyone thinks something’s wrong with me. But nothing’s wrong with me. I’m back. I’ll play along.’ ”
“Play along?”
“You know what I mean. If people don’t want me to talk about Aveinieu, I’m fine with saying I was out of my mind, totally blabbering. I’d never planned to tell anyone. I was happier keeping it to myself.”