When the Sky Fell on Splendor(16)

“We just need to get back to the field,” Arthur murmured, as if he were part of an entirely separate conversation.

“Don’t use we,” Nick said. “I never agreed to this little investigation.”

Arthur bristled. “Fine, I’ll know more when I get back to the field. Until then, no one say anything about this, to anyone.”

Nick scoffed. “No problem. People in this town already got enough to say about my family without me running around screaming about aliens.”

“We need something more definite before we come forward with this.” Arthur was still on his own plane of existence. He leapt onto the mattress, then climbed into the hammock hung from the ceiling over it.

“I mean . . . my video’s pretty definitive,” Levi said, a little put out.

Arthur waved his hand. “It might tickle the whole Conspiracy Rabbit Hole YouTube Crowd, but it looks like a homemade video we put a shoddy aftereffect onto.”

“Which . . . is something we regularly do, with consistent online documentation,” I pointed out.

“But the video’s real!” Levi argued.

“You think the gah-damn FBI are going to investigate this video, find out it’s ours, and then scroll through our channel like”—Nick rubbed his chin thoughtfully—“Damn, Agent Cooper, aren’t we lucky these hicks in Asshole, Ohio, had a camera on them the night of this alien encounter? We make crap like this all the time, Levi. And post it online. No one’s going to believe us. I couldn’t even get Mrs. Spencer to believe I wasn’t the one who spray-painted the dick on the football field.”

“Nick,” Sofía said. “You were the one who spray-painted the dick on the football field.”

He threw his arms out to his sides. “But she didn’t know that!”

“Apparently, she did.” Sofía was the only one of us who seemed bent on slowly guiding Nick to the realization that he had a lying problem. So far she hadn’t had any luck.

Nick’s lies didn’t bother me. They were pretty much always in service of making us laugh, and aside from that, the Colasantis were the butt of a lot of jokes (a truck-driver mom who stopped leaving the house after the accident and filled her windows with horrifying antique carousel horses; an older sister who’d started dating one of her teachers two months after graduating), so I didn’t blame him for wanting to at least control the ridiculous things people said about him.

But Sofía was a Libra (one who thought astrology was just “something Forever 21 made up to sell nail decals”) with a strong sense of justice, and a lie was a lie in her eyes.

“Nick’s right,” Arthur said. “You can’t spend five years avoiding your whole town then expect them to believe you when you tell them something impossible.”

Levi frowned. “Or spend five years making Bigfoot Believers parodies and then expect your viewers to believe it when you show them the real deal.”

“And for that matter,” Nick said, “I’m beginning to think my ongoing ‘Phallus the Fields of Splendor’ project won’t help our credibility.”

Sofía shook her head. “Phallus the Fields of Splendor.”

“That sounds like a thrash metal album.” Arthur touched his chin in a way that usually meant he’d had an idea.

“Or a book of really horny poetry,” I added.

“It also reminds me of a beloved film,” Levi said. “Kevin Costner’s brilliant Field of Dicks.”

“Dude, that bruise on your head looks like a dick,” Nick said.

“It looks like Gary Busey,” Sofía disagreed. “Since when do you sleepwalk, by the way?”

“Since 9:34 AM today,” Levi answered.

“Think that’s weird?” Nick said. “When I got home and passed out I dreamed about pianos. Like, exclusively about pianos. Rooms full of them, hallways made of them that ended in little red kids’ pianos with German words written in freakin’ gold leaf on them. Pianos everywhere.”

“We need evidence,” Arthur said. He was staring out the window, eyes glinting as his mind spun plans. “We need to make contact.”

“Sun,” Nick said, holding up a fist. “Your current flight path, Icarus.” He took his other hand and slammed it right into his fist, making explosion sounds with his mouth.

“Tomorrow when I get off work,” Arthur said, ignoring him, “we’ll go to Jenkins Lane and see if we can figure out where that . . . thing went. Or I will.” He rolled his eyes at Nick.

Levi patted his camera like a puppy. “I’m there.”

Sofía sighed. “I’ll take a look. But only in a legal capacity, and just for as long as it takes to find the real explanation behind all this.”

“I’m not going near that place,” Nick said.

Arthur shrugged the sentiment away and fixed his sharp gaze on me. “Fran? You in?”

I didn’t like the way all of this somehow kept dredging up the past. I didn’t like that it reminded me how mercurial and brutal the universe could be, or that there was no limit on how many random horrors could slash through the same life, and I really, really didn’t like the look in Arthur’s eyes that told me he wasn’t thinking about any of that.