in the attic, and he made a lock for the trap door himself.”
“He must really like to read.”
“Do the Assateague ponies like to poop on the dunes? Yeah, he really likes to read. And he doesn’t like SCOD or anyone else telling him what to read, either.”
“What do you like to read, Arnold?”
He acted like he hadn’t heard. “I mean, you should be careful, Miss Gloria.”
“It’s just Gloria, Arnold.”
“You should be careful, anyhow. It’s not actually against the law for my dad to have all those books, though he’d probably get fired from his job if anyone found out. But if they catch you keeping stickerless books in a school library—”
Gloria smiled. “I know. They’d make me drink hemlock.”
“Hemlock?”
“The poison they made Socrates drink for corrupting the youth, dear. I told him to watch what he said, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Arnold smiled uncertainly.
“But you don’t need to worry about me,” Gloria added. “I don’t show those books to everyone.”
Arnold thought for a second. “Who do you show them to?”
“So far? Just you.”
Arnold frowned. “Why me?”
“Because I know you’ll appreciate them.” She held out the novel Arnold had been looking at. “Here. I saved it for you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No need for thanks, dear. And I have a present for you.” She held out the potted spider plant Arnold had noticed earlier. “Just take it straight home and put it where it can get plenty of light all day.”
“Thanks,” Arnold said again. He touched the leaves and they crossed over themselves primly, like a woman crossing her legs under her skirt.
“You’re welcome,” Gloria said. “Oh, and please tell your big sister to come in and introduce herself. Alison’s her name, right?”
CHAPTER 2
While Arnold sneaked out the emergency exit in hopes of avoiding the bullies who had chased him into the library earlier in the day, Alison had to run her own gauntlet walking home from school. She didn’t have to worry about the likes of Matt Walters or Jared Nichols lying in wait—they were the ones who should be worrying about her, if they laid a hand on her kid brother again—but she did have to worry about running into Barry Freed. The balding old hippie was tall and stringy and smelly, and somehow he was always in her path even if she took the long way home, around the trailer park.
Home was already in sight when he stepped out suddenly from the alley between the Value-Mart and the Church of Christ. Alison stifled a scream. It wouldn’t do to let Barry know she was afraid of him, especially if the rumors were true and he really was an old pervert.
“It’s all a lie, you know,” he said, his wandering, cloudy right eye seeming to linger where it shouldn’t, on her chest, before rolling up to the blank gray sky.
I’m annoyed, not afraid, Alison told herself, and tried to make her voice show it. “Can we talk about this some other time? I have to get home, Mr. Freed.”
His good eye focused on her face and began to tear up. “That’s what they want. For you to go home and do your homework like a good little girl, be an obedient cog in their machine.”
Alison had inherited her father’s sharp tongue. “A cog can’t be obedient, Mr. Freed. It’s just a piece of metal.”
“And you might as well be just a piece of metal, if you do what they want all the time.”‘
“Who are they, Mr. Freed?”
Alison regretted asking the question immediately, but it was too late. The old hippie leaned in and breathed sour breath in her face. The stink his clothes gave off showed why all the kids in town called him Barry Peed. “They, them. The President, the FBI, the CIA. J. Edgar Hoover—”
“Is dead, Mr. Freed. A long time ago.”
“That’s what they want you to think.” There was no point arguing with him. Not when he still called the High Satrap “the president,” which hadn’t been his official title in, like, forty years. Dad said that poor Mr. Freed was delusional, which meant there was no talking him out of the crazy stuff he believed in. On the other hand, plenty of people believed crazy stuff, and nobody thought any worse of them as long as they didn’t go to the bathroom in their clothes.
He tilted his head back, and Alison clapped her hands over her ears a moment too late—he had already started his infamous imitation of the most famous moment in history. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant step for—what in God’s name is that?” Alison unblocked her ears and tried to edge around Mr. Freed, who was talking in his normal cracked voice. “I mean, does that even sound plausible to you? The government goes to all that trouble and expense to put a man on the moon, and the High Ones choose that very moment to show up and announce their presence to the world?”
“You’re spitting, Mr. Freed. And you’re not making any sense.” Not that that ever stopped him. “They’ve explained a million times how that was the best way they could be sure of reaching everyone at the same time, since, like, a billion people were watching the moon landing on TV, and what better way to show everyone they were friendly than picking up all three Apollo astronauts and putting them down on the South Lawn of the White House an hour later—”
“Ha!” They were starting to attract an audience. Alison hoped the cops would show up soon. When Mr. Freed got too worked up, a sheriff’s deputy usually came to get him and let him sleep it off in a nice warm cell. But no cops were in sight.
“Tell it like it is, Barry!” someone yelled, just to rile him up.
Alison ground her teeth. That was just mean. It was really no better than that rotten Matt picking on Arnold just because he was a brainiac and had a hard time making friends.
“You bet I’ll tell it like it is!” The old hippie had jumped up on the Birches’ white picket fence, which teetered dangerously beneath his weight. “There ARE no High Ones! It’s all a lie! There’s no such thing as big blue starfish, or little green men, either! They faked the moon landing just to make people think there could be aliens, so they’d have an excuse to crush the Movement. Then they got everyone hooked on their mind-control devices, which they have the chutzpah to claim are ‘neural readers’ that are an educational gift from the imaginary aliens!”
That hit a little too close to home. Alison seized the chance to slink away. Her house was just the other side of Maddox Boulevard, the main road to the beaches on Assateague Island. In bleak autumn weather like this, of course, no one was heading out that way, and all the ice cream shops and tourist traps that gave the town a holiday feel in the summer were closed. A lot of the lifelong islanders, the “from-heres,” depended on beachgoers for their living but also resented all the noise and crowding they brought. Alison didn’t mind the summer crowds at all. When all those people came down from Baltimore and Washington, Chincoteague almost
