Out There - Book One: Paradise Read online

Miss Fox stopped writing numbers on the board and every head swiveled to the door to see who had arrived. The principal, Mrs. Aguirre, was holding the door open. But instead of coming in all the way, she had left her body out in the hallway; just her head and shoulders poked into the room. She had an extra big smile on her face. (It was so big, in fact, that Sami imagined it growing a hair bigger and splitting the principal’s face in half.) Mrs. Aguirre wore glasses that had fire engine red frames. They were always slipping down to the end of her nose, and she was always pushing them back up again. Mrs. Aguirre pushed up her glasses and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt your class, Miss Fox.”

  “It’s fine, Mrs. Aguirre. Come in.”

  But Mrs. Aguirre stayed in the doorway, leaning in like a giant puppet. “Yes, well, I’m really sorry to interrupt your class.”

  Sami knew something odd was going on. All the kids did. They became very quiet, very still. Miss Fox put down her marker and took a step toward Mrs. Aguirre. “Really,” Miss Fox assured her, “it’s okay. We were just about finished anyway.”

  The giant principal puppet leaning in at the door nodded. “Good. That’s… good.” Now absolutely everything in the room stopped. All eyes were on the principal. She was still nodding, like one of those bobble-head dolls. “Yes, that’s very good. Well! I have a surprise for your class.” The kids came back to life, smiling and glancing at each other. Mrs. Aguirre pushed up her red glasses. “We have a new student. His name is Brian.”

  Mrs. Aguirre at last swung open the door and stepped aside.

  Standing in the doorway behind her was an alien.

  There was a moment of complete silence. Then Tim shouted, “Whoa, it’s an alien!” The kids erupted. Some jumped to their feet, some sprawled across their tables, some pointed, some grabbed their heads. Shouts of “Cool!” “Omigod!” and “Awesome!” filled the room.

  Sami stared at the creature in the doorway. Her mouth was half open and her mind was whizzing through all of the news shows on TV she had seen about the aliens. “Wow,” she said quietly. “They’re real.”

  Miss Fox’s mouth was open, too. She just stood there, looking at the alien boy. Then she glanced up at the principal. Mrs. Aguirre was still smiling her crazy smile. She pushed up her red glasses and said in a loud whisper, “Sorry. I didn’t know myself until minutes ago.”

  Miss Fox nodded, then suddenly seemed to wake up. She straightened her back, turned to the kids and in her sternest voice said, “Okay, people, that is enough! Tim, sit down immediately! Alejandro, leave your nose alone! Ming, come out from under that table! Everybody, quiet down. Now.” She stared at the kids with her I’m-not-kidding face, and in a few moments the room had settled down. Sort of. The kids could not sit completely still. After all, an alien was standing in the doorway to their classroom!

  Now it was Miss Fox’s turn to put on a big smile. She took a couple of steps toward the alien boy. The boy took a half of step back. Sami could see that he was scared. “It’s okay, Brian” said Miss Fox. “Come in. We’re very glad to have you in our class.” The alien boy glanced up at Mrs. Aguirre. She nodded at him and used her hands to motion that he should come inside.

  He stepped past the principal and over the threshold…and stood in the room. Miss Fox tucked her hands behind her back, bent forward and said, “I’m Miss Fox, Brian. I’ll be your teacher.” She waited for the alien to answer, but he just gazed at her. After a couple of moments she looked up at Mrs. Aguirre and whispered, “Does he speak English?”

  “Yes,” said the alien boy. Miss Fox’s head snapped down to look at him. “I speak your language very well,” he told her.

  She started nodding. “Good. That’s… good, Brian.”

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to what you were doing,” said the principal, obviously itching to leave.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Aguirre,” said Miss Fox. “We’ll be fine.” Mrs. Aguirre pushed up her glasses, nodded and disappeared. The door closed with a clump. Everyone in the classroom was still for a moment. The children were all staring at the alien boy, and the alien boy was slowly turning his eyes to look directly at each of the children.

  He looked at Sami. She was amazed by those eyes. They were wide and shaped like half moons. They reminded Sami of eyes she had once carved into a pumpkin to make a Halloween Jack-O-Lantern. But it was not the shape of the alien’s eyes that really surprised her. It was the boy’s eyeballs. The colored part of each of his eyes—the iris—covered all of his eye. There was no white part at all, or at least Sami could not see any. One morning, when she had been waiting for the school bus, a coyote came trotting down the middle of the street. It had stopped for a moment to look directly at her, and its yellow eyes shone in the morning light. That is what she thought this alien's eyes looked like. Or maybe his big irises were the gold color of the wedding ring her mother kept locked in a box on the dresser. Sami wanted to keep looking at those shiny gold eyes, but then alien boy turned to look at Ellen, who still had her mouth open.

  When the alien boy turned his head, Sami could see the long, dark eyelashes he had around his golden eyes. Those eyelashes annoyed her immediately. She had always wanted nice eyelashes, and here was an alien who had the longest ones she had ever seen! She thought that was not fair. Then she noticed that eyelashes were the only hair she could see on him. He seemed to be bald, and had no eyebrows. She didn’t see any hair on his arms, either. But, she thought, maybe she was too far away to see hair on his arms.

  With no hair it was easy to see his ears. They were small, and to Sami they looked a little like the ears on Chuckie, the class hamster. Sami thought his nose looked a lot like a regular human person’s nose, except that it was thinner and smoother. His lips were also very thin and smooth. His skin looked pale, like cold milk, like he had never been out in the sunshine in his whole life.

  He was dressed the same way they were. He was wearing a shirt with drawings of little skateboards all over it, blue jeans, and sneakers. Like everyone else, Sami knew about the hands of the aliens, so she was eager to see them for herself. But the alien boy stood with his hands in his pockets.

  “Well, class,” said Miss Fox, “this is Brian, and I want you all to make him feel welcome.” She bent down to the alien boy. “And Brian, I’m sure you will get to know them and you’ll make many friends in here.” She straightened up again. “So, now we need to find you a seat.”

  Miss Fox began scanning the room for empty chairs. The rest of the kids, including Sami, looked around, too. Sami quickly saw that the only open place was next to her. She put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand, then leaned waaaay across the space beside her, trying to cover it up. But she leaned too far and her elbow slipped off of the table edge and she fell with a loud smack! onto the empty chair beside her. The rest of the kids laughed, and Sami came up rubbing her elbow and looking pretty sour.

  “Ah!” Miss Fox announced, “There’s a place over there, next to Samantha.” She pointed to the empty chair and motioned to the alien boy to go on over. “Go ahead, Brian.”

  Every head and eye turned to follow him as the alien boy walked between the tables. “This is so cool,” said Ravi. “Totally awesome,” agreed Tim. “Rats,” Sami muttered.

  You would think that Sami would be thrilled. Most of the kids in her class would have been thrilled to have the alien boy sit next to them. (Not Ming, of course, who was terrified. And now the alien was going to sit at her table! She immediately got busy scooping up her sparkly pencils, colored erasers, pencil sharpeners, and note pads and stuffing them into her backpack. If the alien went wild or something, Ming wanted to be ready for a quick escape.)

  But Sami was not thrilled either. She understood very well what sitting next to the alien boy would mean for her, namely, more teasing. Alejandro will say things like, “Shave ALL your hair off and you’ll be just like him!” Tim will find an opportunity to shove her into the alien boy, then laugh and announce, “Look, Sami wants to kiss him!” Ellen will wh
isper, “Eww, how can you sit by him?” Then Maribel will pull Ellen away, saying, “Don’t let Sami touch you. I bet she has alien germs now!” Sami had enough of that kind of stuff in her life already.

  The alien boy slowly, quietly sat down in the chair beside her.

  Sami was sitting right next to an alien. She could not help herself. Like everyone else in the room, she stared at him. Now that he was so close, Sami could see that he really did not have any hair on his arms, and that his skin was not just pale, but that it had a hint of blue in it.

  Everyone was looking at him, waiting. They were waiting for him to take his hands out of his pockets. Brian looked around the room at them. Then he took them out and folded them on the table in front of him, just the same way any human would do it. But not just the same. Sami and everyone in the room leaned forward to gawk at those folded alien hands. They looked like regular fingers, but instead of five fingers he had only four. Even weirder was the fact that instead of one thumb, he had two. One thumb on each side of the two regular fingers.

  Chapter 5

  “Think for yourself”