First Day On Earth Read Online Free

The palm trees. The outlet stores. The scrub.
    We’d go somewhere cool, like Joshua Tree, or Angeles National Forest, or even the Grand Canyon once. We’d pitch a tent and eat adventure food. Beans in a can. Hot dogs. Trail mix.
    We’d lay our sleeping bags out on the hard ground and we’d look up at the stars.
    “That’s Hercules,” he would say. “The strongest man in the world.”
    “Because he was so big?”
    “Sure, but that’s not the only way a man can be strong. He can look weak and little and be stronger than a tough guy on the inside.”
    I imagined that my dad was like that. Even though he was slight on the outside, he seemed big to me.
    “There’s Cassiopeia — she hangs upside down half the year because she was so vain….”
    I thought of my mother. And her long blond hair. How she wore it loose around her shoulders. She was beautiful, but never vain. She used to be an actress when she was young. A child actor. She showed me the sitcom she was on for two years before it was canceled, and the toothpaste commercials she’d done.
    But no one wanted her when she got older. Except for my dad.
    “What about that star? Why is it moving?” I asked.
    My eyes were trailing a star that had suddenly emerged brightly and then started to move sideways.
    “Where?” my dad asked, and he leaned over to follow my finger pointing up at the night. “Is it a UFO?” I asked.
    “That’s a man-made satellite,” he said.
    “How do you know?”
    “There are so many satellites orbiting the earth now, that if anything was out there, close to us, I bet we’d know about it.”
    I watched the star as it moved away and then suddenly blinked out.
    The last time we went out there, it was the November before he left, and there was a meteor shower.
    We lay there staring at the sky blacker than anything, with the Milky Way stretching like an unconcerned spill. And the sky looked alive. The stars fell faster than the wishes I could make.
    I wish I had a better bike
.
    I wish I was three inches taller
.
    I wish I could grow a mustache
.
    I wish I could be in Mr. Jeter’s homeroom next year
.
    I wish I had a better video game system
.
    I wish
.
    I wish
.
    I wish
.
    Now I think that was childish. I shouldn’t have wished for anything dumb.
    I would have been better off wishing for better things.
    Like a heart for my dad.
    Like that he would never leave.
    Like to know how to make my mom feel better.
    I would even have added world peace in there while I was wishing.
    What I don’t know is whether I would have wished for them to leave me alone.

15.
     
    I have my head down, so I don’t notice at first. And pretty much every meeting goes the same. I just walked into the wrong room. Or it’s the wrong day. Or they changed the meeting room. Or it’s a spooky coincidence. This time, when the group leader asks someone to share, I hear something that sends chills down my spine.
    “My name is Devon and I am a contactee,” a little guy says.
    “Hi, Devon,” everyone says aloud.
    “I was first taken when I was a small child. The aliens were reptilian in nature. They told me that they had a right to probe me. It was their right….”
    I feel a little faint. Like I’m going to throw up. Not because what the little guy is saying is weird. But because it sounds so
right
.
    I want to run out of the room.
    But I don’t. I swallow some of the piss-poor coffee. It hits my stomach like a shot of battery acid. I clench. But the coffee helps.
    I sit and listen. It’s toward the end of the meeting. When Devon is done, Earl, the group leader, gives everyone tips forhandling the fact that they’ve been abducted. He says that he has been taken his whole life. Over and over again. That there’s a girl who he’s paired with and breeds with. He says that he’s never met her on Earth. And that she doesn’t speak English. She’s Swedish, or Finnish, or some kind of country like that. He knows that because she looks like Pippi