The Fellowship for Alien Detection Read Online Free

road, and so, in the meantime, she just wanted to get out of this classroom without having to try to explain herself to a bunch of immature kids—
    â€œEight of diamonds.”
    Unbelievable.
    â€œHaley,” Ms. DeNetto said enthusiastically, probably thinking Haley would rescue the tone of the presentations after Carl’s popcorn giggle fest.
    Haley sighed to the Fates. Fine . She slid out of her desk and started toward the front of the room.
    â€œHaley, aren’t you forgetting your notebook?”
    â€œNo,” said Haley.
    Some annoying classmates had already started snickering to one another.
    Haley reached the front of the room and felt a sudden surge of nerves. She felt her T-shirt sticking to her back, her jeans sticking to her shins, and her glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. There was a hot sensation on the back of her neck. She should have left her hair up! She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs seemed to hit a wall.
    What if they’re right? said the doubt demon. It might all be silly. It might all turn out to be nothing .
    Quiet! she snapped. Then she took a deep breath. You can do this , she told herself. Forget about how the fellowship SOUNDS. Just tell them about the story .
    Yes . The thought calmed her. The story she’d uncovered, the story that had won her the fellowship . . .
    Her classmates might be laughing now, but they wouldn’t be after Haley told them about the mystery of Suza Raines.

Chapter 2
    Greenhaven, CT, June 30, 2:24 p.m.
    Haley had uncovered the mystery of Suza Raines by accident.
    But if you were to read Hunting the Story , the collected essays, musings, and cocktail recommendations of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Garrett Conrad-Wayne, or better yet, happened to own a dog-eared copy that you kept in your backpack at all times like Haley did, then you knew the truth was something different:
    â€œMost people,” Haley could quote at any moment, using a mildly pompous British accent, “see the world as a presentation of events and moments, each of which is absolute. In other words, they perceive each thing as it is now and accept it for what it is. The journalist, on the other hand, sees the now and immediately peers through it, asking how and why each thing came to be. Instead of seeing merely what is, the journalist seeks to know what was, to understand why, and to dream of what could be.”
    Here Haley would often insert a burly chest cough, from years of good scotch whiskey and bad cigarettes, and also to crack a smile from Abby, before continuing: “This awareness by the journalist is the Sixth Sense for Story. In most cases, the answers are quickly found by consulting our own learned knowledge or referencing the world around us for context, but in these other cases, when the questions cannot be immediately answered, the Sixth Sense tingles. And when it tingles, the journalist knows that somewhere behind the surface lies a story waiting to be uncovered, and the hunt is on.”
    That was how it had begun for Haley, with a tingle in her mind, and this feeling just so happened to strike during some serious procrastination time on Facebook.
    Thinking back on it now, it had been so random: Haley had been sitting around one evening, in the middle of January, enthusiastically avoiding a set of comprehension questions about I Am the Cheese . She’d been scrolling through the babble of status updates when she peeked down one of those random rabbit holes that can open up online.
    First, an update had caught her eye from a mutual friend of hers and Abby’s, named Mia. Three photos appeared in a row on Mia’s wall. She was at a wedding. The first photo showed Mia with a microphone, her face beet red, hamming it up with two other girls doing karaoke. The second showed Mia standing in a group with the bride. And then in the third, she was by a sunny table of hors d’oeuvres, waving happily at the camera,