“What if you’re the only one?” I asked.
Aidan sighed. “Then no one will ever really believe me, I guess. I know I have to get used to that. But it would definitely make it better if there was someone else. Then I’d know for sure.”
“For sure that you’d been there?”
“For sure that it really exists.”
30
Aunt Brandi texted me for an update. I didn’t know what to tell her.
The day sucked like you said it would, I started.
Then I added,
Aidan is sticking to his story.
She texted back, What he says is what matters. What everyone else says is much less important.
I wanted that to be true, but I wasn’t sure. We had to live with everyone else. There was no way around that.
* * *
—
Mom and Dad decided to order pizza for dinner. Dad called it in. Then they both forgot, and when the doorbell rang, they jumped and panicked.
“Who could that be?” Mom asked. “It better not be Wendy McGillis.”
“It’s the pizza,” I said. “Remember?”
Dad laughed. Mom didn’t.
But I noticed that when Dad opened the door to get the pizza, he didn’t open it all the way.
It was like he was afraid to let anyone see inside.
* * *
—
I was hoping to ask Aidan more questions—about maddoxes, about Cordelia, about anything he was willing to tell me. But when I got back to our room after brushing my teeth, he was already asleep. Or at least pretending to be.
The phone was ringing, and kept ringing all night.
I guess we got used to it enough to stay asleep.
31
“Boys. Wake up.”
It was Mom’s voice and it wasn’t time to wake up yet. I looked at my clock. I was confused.
“What’s going on?” Aidan asked, his voice still sleep-choked.
I rubbed my eyes, tried to focus on Mom and Dad standing in the middle of our room.
“Julia from the police department is downstairs with two officers,” Mom explained. “She’s going to help us. There’s a television van outside, and a reporter who’s setting up in the front yard. We are not answering the door or making any comment—Julia is going to handle all that for us. You two are going to have to stay home today, and you’re going to need to listen to us very carefully. Under no circumstances are you to open the door or answer the phone or even look out the window. The shades are drawn and the doors are locked, and they need to stay that way. Julia says it’s just the morning news, and the reporter should be gone within an hour. She also says we’re lucky there’s only one station here. That means the story isn’t being picked up too widely.”
“How did they find out?” Aidan asked.
Mom looked at Dad, as if he was the only one who had the answer.
“There was a story in the News this morning,” he said. “Written by Wendy McGillis. I believe she’s a mom at your school.”
Aidan was sitting up now, his feet on the floor.
“Can I see it?” he asked.
Dad hesitated, but Mom nodded and he took out his phone. I sat down next to Aidan on his bed so I could see too.
It was from one of the city papers nearby, known for its big headlines and small amounts of truth.
THE BOY WHO CRIED UNICORN
Local town searched everywhere for missing boy.
Now he says he was off in another world.
They didn’t name Aidan, but anyone who’d been paying attention last week would have remembered who he was. We’d been all over the news…and now the news was all over us. Some of the details from the police report were in the article, as well as a big “shame on you for reporting rumors about a minor” from Sergeant Jones and a few quotes from “local parents” who were glad Aidan was home but “distressed” that they had been “lied to” and “misled.”
“We thought he might be dead,” one parent was quoted in the last line of the article. “But he was probably just taking a vacation.”
Nobody, it seemed, believed the vacation had actually taken place in Aveinieu. They thought Aidan had pulled a prank, and was making fun of them with his story.
“This isn’t good,” Aidan said when he was done reading.
“No, it isn’t,” Dad said, taking back his phone.
The doorbell rang. Once. Twice.
None of us moved.
It was only when there wasn’t a third ring that Mom said, “You guys should go back to bed. Dad and I will be with the police downstairs. I’ll call Denise and ask her to have Glenn pick up your homework.”
Mom and Dad left, closing the door behind them.
“What channel is it?” Aidan asked me. Then, when I gave him my best How am I supposed to know? look, he gestured to the window and said, “Peek out from the side and see what channel it says on the van.”
It was useless to tell him that was exactly what Mom had just told us not to do. I went over to the window, pulled the shade out a little, and looked out.
“Channel Seven,” I reported.
Aidan opened his laptop. “Okay. Got it.”
I put the shade back and sat back beside him.
There was suddenly a buzzing in the room—both of our phones vibrating at once. Aidan reached for his and showed me it was a text from Brandi.
Those jerks, she wrote. Don’t they remember the whole point of the boy who cried wolf is that in the end he was TELLING THE TRUTH?
The message was just for me and Aidan. My parents weren’t on it.
Aidan texted her back a wolf emoji.
On his laptop, someone was doing the weather report in front of a map that made America look like it was tie-dyed. Then there were some commercials.
“At least you’re not the biggest story,” I said.
After the commercial, we were back in the newsroom. The anchor mentioned our town, then, “Live with the story…Adam Goldman. What have you found out, Adam?”
“There are lots of questions swirling around this town,” the reporter said from our front yard. “And they all come down to the fabulous story a twelve-year-old boy told. Last week, life came to a standstill for local residents as they desperately searched for him. Now they’ve learned that his alibi is something out of a fantasy novel.”