The Fellowship for Alien Detection Read Online Free Page A

with a big grin around a mouthful of food. Standing beside her at the table was a heavyset girl with a scowl and black-rimmed eyes and bright magenta hair.
    And it was this inadvertently photographed girl that caught Haley’s attention. Unlike Mia, who wore a flower-printed dress, this girl was in jeans and a maroon T-shirt. She had lots of jelly bracelets on her wrists, and her bangs were held back with thick black barrettes. Kind of a weird look for a wedding , Haley had thought.
    She’d then noticed the writing on the T-shirt. It read, “We Are the Missing.”
    Haley maybe thought it was a band. So this was some typical emo chick whose parents were lazy and let her get away with too much, like going to a wedding without dressing up.
    But . . . there was something more, and now, it was hard to remember exactly what. Had it just been the T-shirt? Or had it also been the look in the girl’s eyes, which seemed more tragic than just pouty. . . .
    Maybe it had been that look. Haley ran her cursor over the girl, saw she’d been tagged, and clicked on her name: Stephanie Raines.
    And that was just about the end of the line. Stephanie’s profile was locked off for friends only, so you couldn’t see anything.
    However, there was one photo on her wall that had been made visible to everyone. It showed a smiling girl, leaning on her bike in a driveway. She wore oval glasses, and her face was covered with freckles. She looked maybe a little younger than Haley.
    And the caption below it read: “Please help find my sister.”
    And then there was a link: www.wearethemissing.net
    It wasn’t a band name.
    Haley slid over the photo. The girl leaning on the bike was tagged Suza Raines. Her profile was locked off, too. She was a happy-looking girl, someone who seemed down-to-earth and fun. She didn’t look like a runaway, not that Haley really knew what that would look like. And she wondered: What had happened to this girl?
    And even at that point, it may still have been mostly about procrastination, but as Haley had opened a new browser tab to search for “We Are the Missing,” she’d felt the tingle growing. There was something here—she just knew it. And the feeling almost seemed dangerous. A voice in her head told her not to look any further, to go back to her schoolwork.
    Maybe that voice knew how Haley could fixate on something that interested her, and that there was no time for this, not with homework and after-school newspaper club and flute lessons and, at the time, those unfortunate Irish-step-classes-that-shall-not-be-talked-about, and of course that essay Haley wanted to get a head start on for the JCF application. But Haley had not been able to fight her Sixth Sense.
    The search results for We Are the Missing came up. It was a network of people claiming to have experienced alien visits. Their blogs and sites were full of wild claims, everything from having been taken aboard spaceships and turned briefly into animals, to accounts of being forced by near-maniacal extraterrestrials to go to drive-through windows and order hundreds of hamburgers, which they apparently had insatiable cravings for, and so on, but whatever these people claimed, the constant was that everyone reported experiencing missing time events—situations in which periods of time had passed that no one could account for—and some of them also claimed to have lost people: friends, family members, sisters . . . like Suza.
    And from there, Haley was gone. Homework, flute lessons, even that JCF essay, none of it stood a chance. Night after night, all winter and into spring, Haley had spent endless hours reading accounts of missing time and missing people, and all that research had led her to discover a pattern. Then, the advertisements on various websites led her to the Fellowship for Alien Detection, and finally, the theory she described in her application, based on the pattern