The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother) Read online

  “I told your parents I could stay, help out. Call in sick from work for a few days, or work from here. But they don’t see any reason for me to be here. They think they can handle it on their own. I think they’re wrong, but I respect that I don’t get a vote. Still, they can’t stop me from telling you to call me—anytime, any hour. I will drop anything to come back here for you and Aidan. Because you know what, Lucas?”

  “What?” I asked.

  Aunt Brandi sighed again. “There’s nothing we can do about it…but I guarantee you, tomorrow’s really going to suck.”

  27

  “It might only be a few parents who’ve heard,” Mom said as we pulled into the school driveway the next morning. “I doubt any of the kids will know. I mean, why would the parents tell their kids?”

  Dad stayed quiet.

  * * *

  —

  For a brief moment when we got into school, I thought Mom might have actually been right. A lot of kids were looking at us, but they weren’t laughing at us. It was almost like Friday all over again. People were curious…but that was about it.

  Or at least that’s what I thought until I started to see the whispering. One kid telling another kid something, and then both of them looking in our direction in a way that was much less curious and much more judgmental.

  “Dude!” Glenn called out as soon as he saw us come in. “What’s going on?”

  “Hey!” Aidan said, stretching to reach a carefree, offhand tone—in other words, stretching to sound like himself. “Sorry I couldn’t text you back last night. Things were totally bonkers.”

  “I figured. I know my mom talked to your mom—can you believe that crazy story going around? I mean, what’s up with that?”

  Glenn wasn’t being quiet with his question. I felt like the whole hallway had heard it.

  Aidan tried to keep the same hey-dude tone he usually used with Glenn when he said, “I have no idea what’s up with that.”

  Glenn laughed. “I mean, right? Unicorns? Why in the world would the police think you said you were off with unicorns?”

  I wanted to interrupt. I wanted to ask, Why are you asking him this in public? Why can’t you wait?

  “Look, dude,” Aidan said. “Do you want to hear the truth?”

  “Totally,” Glenn replied.

  Aidan took a deep breath. We were at his locker now, so we all stopped. Only a few of the balloons from Friday were still there, and they’d shrunk over the weekend. The streamers didn’t stream as bright. Usually I would have kept walking to my own locker—but not now. I wanted to hear what Aidan had to say, in no small part because I was sure I’d be quizzed about it later by other people, including our parents.

  “Okay,” Aidan said, “it’s like this: You know how I told you I didn’t have much to eat when I was away, and how I was sick and everything? Well, by the time I got back to my house, I was a little out of my mind. Or maybe a lot out of my mind. It’s amazing I found my way home at all. And once I did…the police asked me where I’d been, and I just told them this thing that was more like a dream than reality. I mean, unicorns and green skies and everything. It wasn’t until I caught up on my sleep and got some food that I started to make any kind of sense. It’s, like, so stupid that the police wrote down what I was saying, and it’s even stupider that other people heard about it.”

  “Oh, man,” Glenn said, shaking his hand. “You’re right. It’s so stupid.”

  Aidan surprised me then by turning to me and asking, “Didn’t I seem out of my mind that night?”

  No, I thought. You seemed to know exactly what you were saying.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Completely out of your mind.”

  “They said you were found in the attic?” Glenn said.

  “Yup,” Aidan said, opening his locker. “I have no memory of how I got there.”

  “That’s so unreal!”

  “I know, right?” Aidan got out his books, then swung the locker shut. More balloons fell off. “Look,” he said to Glenn, “you have to keep what I told you between us. I mean, you can tell people that I wasn’t thinking straight when I told the police about the unicorns and everything. But the part about where I really went—that’s gotta be secret. The police are still trying to figure it out, and I just…well, I just don’t want everyone else to know, okay? You’re my best friend, so I don’t mind you knowing. But not everyone else. I just want life to be what it was, right?”

  “Totally, totally,” Glenn said. “Your secret is safe with me. Nobody else needs to know.”

  “Cool,” Aidan said. “Now tell me what you got up to yesterday.”

  They started to walk to Glenn’s locker; since mine was in the other direction, I said “See ya” to them both. Aidan gave me a “Yeah, see ya” back. Glenn kept walking.

  Busby found me a few steps before I got to my locker. She was breathless from running to get there.

  “I just heard from Caleb who heard from Nick who said his dad heard from another dad that Aidan said he was sucked into another dimension while we were looking for him here—is that true?!?”

  “Um, yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I mean, yes.”

  If Busby was my test on whether I could pull off lying for Aidan, I was failing big-time. I decided to try again before she said anything else.

  “I mean, the answer is yes, Aidan did say that, but no, he didn’t actually go into another world. It was a big mix-up. A total misunderstanding.”

  “Oh,” Busby said, catching her breath. “That’s disappointing.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. It would have been much more fun if he’d actually met some unicorns.”

  I couldn’t help but remember that I’d been the one to chime in about unicorns that night. If only I’d known it was the one thing about Aveinieu that would stick in people’s minds, I would have kept my mouth shut.

  * * *

  —

  It became pretty easy for me to tell the people who’d heard from the people who hadn’t heard yet. Teachers didn’t seem to have heard anything. If they treated me any different from before Aidan’s disappearance, it was still with concern about how my family and I were doing. Students for the most part were sticking to Principal Kahler’s rule about not asking too many questions. Some kids acted like they’d already forgotten. But some—the ones, I assumed, who’d heard about the unicorns—were still giggling their way through the whisper network, looking at me with minimally disguised smiles. And if I was getting that, I could only imagine the way Aidan was being treated.

  Glenn must have been sharing Aidan’s out-of-his-mind excuse, because by lunchtime, it felt like there were two whisper networks competing with each other. One was saying that Aidan was crazy because he thought he’d gone to a fantasy world. Another was saying Aidan had only been temporarily crazy, long enough to make up a fantasy story. Nobody was calling him a liar—not yet. Instead they were focused on when, exactly, he’d lost his mind.

  I got updates about this from Busby, Tate, and Truman. They thought they were doing me a favor by telling me what everyone was saying…and who knows? Maybe they were doing me a favor. It probably would have been worse if I hadn’t known what was being said. But at the same time, it was frustrating, because there was no way for me to correct it. Once a story was out there, it could be turned into any other story a person wanted to tell. It was no longer Aidan’s, but Aidan was still getting all the attention for it.

  I didn’t see him until pickup time at the end of the day. His locker no longer had any balloons or streamers on it. I didn’t know if he’d pulled them down or if someone else had. I didn’t want to ask.

  I got there as he was bent over his book bag, so I couldn’t really see his face. Before I could ask him how his day was, Glenn came up behind me, saying, “Oh, man, that was so uncool. I hope you know that.
It was so uncool.”

  Aidan stood up straight, saw me, then looked at Glenn.

  “It was uncool,” he said. “But no worries. I mean, whatever.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Seriously,” Glenn said, as if I hadn’t opened my mouth. “Keegan needs to chill out. Especially, like, in front of everyone else. I can’t believe he did that.”

  “Did what?” I asked.

  “It’s fine,” Aidan said. “I’m fine. People are going to be jerks about it—I get that. Hopefully they’ll move on to being jerks about something else soon.”

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I said. It sounded more like a whine than I wanted it to.

  “It’s nothing,” Aidan said dismissively.

  Strangely, it was Glenn who decided to fill me in.

  “We had a sub in English,” he said, “which meant it basically turned into an out-of-control study hall. Keegan Ronson thought he was real funny, so he went to the closet in the classroom, poked his head in, then shouted, ‘Hey, Aidan—there’s a unicorn in here who wants to talk to you!’ And once he got a laugh, he poked his head back in, then came out and said something like, ‘Yeah, and there’s a dragon here who says she’s your girlfriend and you really need to reply to her texts.’ Which got a bigger laugh, even though most kids in class had no idea what he was talking about, and the substitute really didn’t know what he was talking about, but assumed it was, like, a reference to what we were reading in class. Which was kinda funny, since we’re reading Walk Two Moons. Which doesn’t, you know, have any dragons or unicorns in it.”

  “I really don’t care,” Aidan said, closing his locker and heading for the exit.

  “Yeah,” Glenn went on. “People are really stupid. Kelli McGillis, who’s always flirt-fighting with Keegan, was like, ‘I don’t think Aidan’s here—I think he attends Hogwarts now.’ And, like, a few kids laughed at that, but at that point a bunch of us were just like, hey, it’s time for everyone to shut up now. It was so uncool.”

  Aidan was now ahead of us, out of the conversation.

  “How did Aidan respond?” I asked Glenn.

  “I thought he was going to joke right back at them, but he just kinda took it, you know? Didn’t laugh, but didn’t try to fight it either. It was like he was pretending none of it was happening. Which was cool, because there wasn’t more fuel for the fire, and with people like Keegan and Kelli, they tend to die out when there’s no more fuel.”

  I wanted to ask Glenn if he thought it really had died out, or whether people were going to keep making stupid, uncool comments. But we were out the door now and at the curb, where both my mom and dad were waiting, this time in separate cars. Aidan went into Mom’s car without saying bye to me or Glenn; she was taking him to the therapist’s office. I said bye to Glenn, who grunted a goodbye to me in response. Then I got into Dad’s car.

  “Right on time,” he said as I put on my seat belt and he pulled away from the school. “How’d it go today?”

  “We made it through,” I replied.

  “That bad, huh?” he asked, looking at me all concerned.

  “No, it was fine,” I said.

  “Were kids mean to Aidan?”

  “You’d have to ask Aidan.”

  “Well, how about you?”

  “Everyone was fine with me. Totally fine.”

  “Did your friends hear about what Aidan said?”

  “Yup. A lot of people mentioned unicorns.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, but I think it could have been worse. It’s a joke—that’s all. People think it’s weird or funny. Aidan told Glenn that he was in a daze or something when he said it. Glenn seemed to believe that.”

  Dad took that in for a moment and then said, “That’s interesting. Aidan didn’t insist it was true?”

  “He’s not dumb, Dad. He knows that no one’s going to believe he was missing in a make-believe world.”

  “And which story do you believe?”

  It didn’t seem fair for him to be asking me this. But still I gave Dad the most honest answer I could think of, which was: “I think it’s complicated.”

  He nodded. “That it is.”

  “What do you believe?” I asked.

  Dad hesitated for a moment, then said, “I don’t believe in fantasy worlds, Lucas. I just don’t. Or can’t. So I guess that means I don’t believe what Aidan is saying about Aveinieu. But unlike a lot of people, including your mother, at the end of the day I don’t really care where Aidan was for those six days, as long as he wasn’t hurt and no one else is being hurt. If Aidan was hiding somewhere else the whole time, then felt he needed to come up with an incredible story in order to justify what he put us through…I’m genuinely okay with that. We all make mistakes, and I suspect Aidan made a big one. Even though we were all so scared, nobody was hurt. Life goes on. And I’m hoping that Aidan’s life will go on too, and eventually it won’t matter to anyone where he was. We’ll forget it ever happened.”

  “I don’t care either,” I said.

  “Good.” Dad looked at me. “But, Lucas? If he does tell you something about where he was, you need to tell us, okay? We’ll never let him know you told us. We just need to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

  I didn’t want to spy on Aidan for my parents. But at the same time, I knew if I told my father I wasn’t going to do it, he’d think I already knew something and wasn’t telling.

  Dad went on. “I keep wondering if Aveinieu is from a book or a movie or a game. It’s not like Aidan to make up fantasy worlds in his head. It’s not like he reads that many fantasy novels, right?”

  “Right,” I said. Aidan pretty much only read books set during World War II.

  “He had to have gotten the story from somewhere. It’s not the kind he’d invent all by himself.”

  Doesn’t that make it more believable? I wanted to ask. But I knew better than to say that.

  When we got home, I went to Aidan’s bookshelf, to make sure I was right about what he read. There wasn’t any C. S. Lewis or Garth Nix or Holly Black. There was a lot of Alan Gratz and Deborah Hopkinson instead. I took out each of the books I didn’t know and read the back covers, to see if any resembled the stories Aidan had told me about Aveinieu. I searched for green skies and unicorns, boarses and maddoxes. I couldn’t find a single one.

  Eventually I put all the books back on the shelf and started my homework. I was on the floor surrounded by textbooks when Aidan returned from his appointment with the psychiatrist.

  “How’d it go?” I asked, looking up from my math book.

  Aidan dropped his book bag on the floor and headed for his bed. “It was okay, I guess.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I didn’t want to talk about what happened. And he said that was fine, if I didn’t mind him asking questions about before. I said I was okay with that, so he asked me all about Mom and Dad, and about sharing a room with you, and about whether I ever felt the need to run away.”

  “What did you answer?”

  “I told him the truth: I’ve never had any desire to run away. I tried once or twice when I was little, I think, but that was just for attention, and I didn’t really mean it. I told him I was happy here.”

  “But you would’ve stayed there?”

  “What?”

  “What you said the other night, that you wished you hadn’t had to leave Aveinieu. If you’re happy here, why would you want to stay there?”

  Aidan leaned forward, clutching a pillow in his lap. “Because it was incredible! Because I was doing something nobody else had ever gotten a chance to do, not like that. I felt…”

  “Different?” I offered.

  “No. Important. I felt important. I was making a hund
red new discoveries every day.”

  “But you can discover things here too.”

  “Yeah, but they’re things a lot of people have already discovered. If I discover something in a book, someone else had to know it already in order to write it down. If Mom or Dad tells me something, then they have to know it first. In Aveinieu, I was the first person from my part of the world to see everything. I was seeing things no book has ever been written about and no one else in my life has ever been through.”

  “Did you tell Dr. Jennings that?”

  Aidan leaned back against the wall, crossing his legs on his bed. “No. He didn’t ask. I told him, ‘Look, I know everyone thinks something’s wrong with me. But nothing’s wrong with me. I’m back. I’ll play along.’ ”

  “Play along?”

  “You know what I mean. If people don’t want me to talk about Aveinieu, I’m fine with saying I was out of my mind, totally blabbering. I’d never planned to tell anyone. I was happier keeping it to myself.”

  I didn’t know whether he was fishing for an apology from me for telling about Aveinieu in the first place…but I didn’t think he was. It wasn’t about that.

  Aidan reached over to his bedstand to get his headphones. “Look, I just want to zone out for a while. The police are coming in an hour. I’m just going to lie down until then.”

  He moved to put his headphones on.

  “Just one thing,” I said, stopping him.

  “What?”

  “Remind me what maddoxes are again?”

  “They’re like…bears and oxen. Why? Do you think you saw one?”

  That last question was like having the old Aidan back. So maybe that’s why I didn’t follow up with the natural question: Why did you say maddoxes were something different last night?

  Instead, I made him think I was satisfied with his answer, and asked, “Do you want me to turn off the lights?”

  “Nah,” he said. “This is fine.”

  He left me then, as surely as if he’d walked out of the room. I was alone with my homework until Mom came up to tell us the detectives had arrived.