Gene Doucette - The Spaceship Next Door

Plus, the happy consequence was that Violet got the use of the car, which meant Annie got the use of the car. As long as that continued to be true, Annie wasn’t going to ask any hard questions.

It took Annie about ten minutes to close down the library for the afternoon. The building was theoretically large enough for someone to hide inside of one of the stacks without being detected, but they would have to want to do it. Otherwise, it was impossible for this to happen by accident, because the library carried sound incredibly well. It was something only a few people realized, for the obvious reason that most people were trying to be quiet while inside. Once Annie walked from end to end loudly declaring her intention to bolt the door for the remainder of the day, only the deaf would have failed to hear her.

“Where to?” Annie asked, as she threw her bike into the back of Violet’s incredibly unsexy hatchback.

“Your choice. Where do the youths gather?”

“The youths gather at the mall.”

“Then we shall hie to the mall.”

“Verily.”

The engine kicked to life with tremendous reluctance, and they were off, pulling out of the library’s modest parking area onto Main and then left, past the protestors, over the river and out of town.

“Think something’s up with Shippie,” Annie said, as Vi took them toward the highway.

“Something’s always up with Shippie.”

Shippie was what the two of them called the spaceship, but only when they were alone. Annie tried using it on other people but nobody much cared for the nickname. The name was borrowed from Nessie, because there seemed to be a certain kinship between Sorrow Falls’s most famous visitor and Loch Ness’s most famous lake inhabitant. The ship was very real, while Nessie probably was not, but that didn’t seem like a huge distinction back when they were thirteen.

“Yeah, but this might be legit.”

“This isn’t from your friends on the roof, is it?”

“No. They had something too, but it wasn’t really something.”

“They’re still seeing canals on Mars, those people.”

Sometimes, Violet sounded uncomfortably like an adult, especially when she was judging the behavior of actual adults. In this case, she was referring to the erroneous sighting by various scientifically inclined persons in history of water-bearing canals on the surface of Mars. It was an optical illusion, which should have been obvious when the drawings of the canals were compared to one another.

Annie got the reference, because this was the sort of minutia one learned when hanging out with Violet, who was some kind of trivia savant.

“They’re enthusiastic is all. It’s good to be enthusiastic about something.”

Violet smiled.

“I guess. So what’s the thing?”

“I don’t know yet. A guy turned up this morning asking for Joanne. I went and talked to him.”

“You talked to him? Why’d you do that?”

“Dunno. He looked approachable. He didn’t have the kind of skeeve a lot of those guys have. Clean-cut, laptop, young.”

“Stop hitting on older men.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m serious.”

“I wasn’t hitting on him, he’s like thirty or something. He just didn’t look skeevy is what I mean. He looked like a normalish guy with a normalish understanding of the modern world. He wasn’t… what did you call them?”

“Ink-stained wretches.”

“Yes, he wasn’t like that. Except now I’m pretty sure he’s not a reporter.”

“All right, now you’re confusing me.”

“He never said he was a reporter. I talked to him about the story he was writing, and he talked back as if he was in fact writing a story, but he didn’t say reporter . And when he gave me his name he didn’t say anything about who he was writing for. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a reporter who didn’t give the name of his magazine or newspaper in the first thirty seconds. A lot of them say it before they even say their own names.”

“Maybe it’s a crummy paper and he’s embarrassed.”

“A writer for a crummy paper getting a tour of Shippie?”

“He’s getting a tour? Like, they’re letting him inside the fence?”

“That’s what my sources say.”

“Well, you’re right, that would indicate some prestige, if not his, then the company he’s attached to. He gave you his name?”

“Edgar Somerville. I looked him up, and either he gave me a fake name or the guy doesn’t have a byline in any major publication.”

Violet side-eyed her. “Uh-huh. What did you check?”

“The database in the library and the Internet.”

“Did you check the scientific journals?”

“Of course I did.”

“Government?”

“What, like position papers and bills?”

“Sure.”

“Those don’t really come with bylines.”

“Hmm. I guess you’ll have to go flirt with him some more.”

“I wasn’t flirting!”

Violet maneuvered the hatchback into highway traffic and stuck to the right-hand lane, both because the mall was only two exits down and because the car couldn’t hold at sixty-five MPH without screaming and rattling, and every car on the road was going faster than that.

“So if he’s not a reporter, what is he here for?” Vi asked.

“Not a clue, but like I said, he got to see the ship. Hardly anybody does that any more. Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman will have to fill me in tomorrow about his visit. I’m assuming they recorded the whole thing.”

“Yes or your army boyfriend.”

“Sam? He won’t tell me anything. No, I take that back. If something happened, he won’t tell me anything. If nothing happened, he’ll say so.”

“How will you know the difference?”

“Oh, I’ll know.”

Vi laughed again.

Off the highway exit, she followed the generously large signs to the parking lot of the Oakdale Mall, which was surprisingly congested for a weekday afternoon.

SOMETIME IN THE past ten years, some intrepid marketer got the idea that the word ‘mall’ was a negative, so beginning with the shopping malls close to the downtown Boston area and radiating outward, the chain malls had been getting makeovers and new names.

In all fairness, the makeovers were sometimes quite impressive, in that they turned low-end strip malls into upscale centers with a higher quality of stores. The rebranding was a pretty effective way of signaling that change. Still, when it turned the Oakdale Mall into The Oakdale Experience , pretty much everyone laughed. Annie didn’t know one person who called it that without irony. Even tourists weren’t quite sure what to think.

Whoever was in charge of redesigning the mall did a fantastic job, though. What had been a large rectangular building surrounded by parking was turned into a rectangular parking area surrounded by shops, with a smaller rectangle of shops in the middle. From the air, it looked like an especially thick digital zero. This seemed like a catastrophic choice for a New England shopping center—who would shop at an outdoor plaza in the winter? —but it worked surprisingly well. The restaurants, movie theater and bowling alley made it the kind of place people went to spend the day rather than visit in order to shop, and that turned out to be an important distinction.

Annie didn’t have a lot of spending money at any given time, but she enjoyed going to the mall when circumstances conspired in her favor. A generation or two ago “the mall” might have been a place for someone of her age and/or economic level to go and “hang out”, and perhaps use a skateboard and harass angry white adults like in the music videos from the 90’s. (These videos looked as dated to her as the black-and-white films she watched with her mother. In fairness, everything pre-spaceship looked a little dated anyway, but these looked like especially quaint artifacts. Especially the clothing.) For her, hanging out at the mall, more often than not, meant figuring out who’d gotten a job where. It was basically the only place in the area that hired high-school-age kids on a consistent basis.