“Only people accused of a crime need an alibi,” I pointed out.
“Shhh,” Aidan chided.
It was surreal to think that the reporter was maybe fifty feet away from us but we were still watching him on a screen. Then the story jumped to a nearby diner, where he’d interviewed “local people” about what had happened. I didn’t recognize a single one of them.
“Kids today think they can say whatever they want,” an older woman said, shaking her head. “I don’t even blame the kids. It’s the parents. They let them get away with everything.”
An even older man sitting across from her said, “I figure that family owes the town the full cost of the search, if he was okay the whole time and now wants to lie about it.”
The report returned to our front yard, focusing on our front door.
“The child’s parents refused to comment,” the reporter said. “According to police spokesperson Julia Koblish, the investigation is ongoing, and whatever the story he told when he returned, they’re just happy this has ended up being much more a comedy than the tragedy it could have been.”
“Thanks, Adam,” the anchor said. “When you go to the acupuncturist, are you sure the needles are always clean? In her investigative report, Stacey Martinez goes undercover to see whether your pressure points are really safe. Stacey?”
Aidan closed the Channel 7 window and found the News story.
“That has to be Kelli McGillis’s mom,” he said when we were done reading the article again. “Figures.”
There wasn’t any way that we’d go back to sleep, so instead Aidan loaded up a two-player game and played me without complaint. When school started elsewhere, we began to get texts from our friends, all of them asking what was going on. I group-messaged Busby, Truman, and Tate and told them it was all a plot on my part to get out of school, mwahaha. Aidan was a little more serious with Glenn, telling him we were pretty much trapped inside, even though the camera crew was probably gone. (I pulled back the shade again; they were indeed gone.) Glenn asked for more of the scoop, to which Aidan replied, What scoop? You know what happened.
Glenn texted back: Totally. Got it.
Mom, Dad, and Julia from the police all checked up on us. Once the police were gone (“but still patrolling,” Mom assured us), Dad made pancakes and tried to pretend it was a holiday or something, where we all had the day off. The phone kept ringing, and Mom always checked the caller ID before answering.
Dad told us that Julia had said the question would be whether Channel 7 or other stations would be back for the six o’clock news. “Hopefully someone in Washington will tweet something stupid and the attention will move somewhere else,” Dad said.
It wasn’t that I wanted to go to school, but it was strange to be stuck inside our house. Even when Aidan had been missing, it wasn’t like we’d been confined indoors. The whole day, Mom and Dad kept the shades drawn, as if there might be reporters with telephoto lenses waiting for us to slip up. For all I knew, there were reporters with telephoto lenses outside.
I was reminded of the goldfish we’d had when I was in second grade. Just one goldfish in a simple bowl, it spent its day swimming around and around. We fed it twice a day, and that was the only interruption to its routine. It seemed happy enough. Every now and then, I’d be staring at it through the glass and it would stop and stare back. I always wondered whether it actually knew it was being watched. Did it know who I was, or was I just this color pattern that leaned in from time to time? It felt like my family was in the fishbowl now, but it was the opposite of the way it was with the goldfish. We were trapped, but had no idea for sure if we were being watched. We just acted like we were.
By lunchtime, we were all a little sick of each other. Nobody wanted to talk about why we were trapped, so we weren’t talking about anything worth saying. After lunch, Mom told us to do our homework, and when we said it was all done, since we’d thought we’d be going to school today, she told us we had to do something educational—which in the end meant watching something from the documentary section of Netflix. Aidan picked a series about the Battle of the Bulge. I didn’t argue.
The big excitement came around three o’clock when the doorbell rang again. Mom and Dad didn’t even want to go to the peephole to see who it was, just in case it was a reporter who would know we were home. (“The family is at home, hiding behind a door right now,” I imagined the reporter saying.) The doorbell rang again. Then there was knocking. Mom called the police, who got in touch with the squad car outside. There was a pause, and then Mom laughed.
“It’s only Glenn,” she told Dad.
We opened the door.
32
We went into the den, supposedly so Glenn could explain our homework assignments to us, but really, I suspected, so Glenn and Aidan could play a few games before Glenn had to go back home.
“I’m not really sure what the point is of me going around and getting this for you,” Glenn said as he unpacked his bag and handed us some assignments. “All the teachers were like, ‘This is what email is for, so we can send home assignments.’ But I guess your parents still think it’s the twentieth century or something.”
“Maybe they just like your personal touch,” Aidan joked, putting his assignments aside.
“Yeah, that must be it,” Glenn said, sitting down on the couch. After he did, I saw him reach to his pocket and adjust his phone.
Aidan sat down next to him and loaded up a game. Casually, he asked, “So how was school today? What are they saying?”
Glenn shrugged. “I dunno, dude. Kelli was all like, ‘My mom broke the story,’ and I said, like real loud, ‘Well, who wants a broken story, Kelli?’ Even Keegan laughed at that one.”
“Great,” Aidan mumbled.
Glenn didn’t notice Aidan was less than enthused—or if he did, he went on anyway. “Totally! I mean, you’re a bigger mystery now than ever before, because you’re, like, a famous mystery. Frances was saying she could imagine it on one of those programs like CSI. I mean, who do you want to be you in the movie version, right?”
“Let’s just play.”
For the first time I’d ever seen, Glenn tried to delay a game.
“Nah,” he said, shifting on the couch and looking down at his phone again. “I want you to tell me what happened.”
“Dude,” Aidan said, “we’ve been through that.”
“Yeah, but…I wasn’t paying attention. I mean, there was a lot going on, right? So, like, tell me again what you told me before, about how this whole unicorn thing is a cover story for what really happened. You got lost in the woods, right? Then, like, stumbled your way home and were all out of your mind and came up with the story about the fantasy world. That’s what you said.”