Dad drops his fork down on his plate and looks across the table at me.

“Do you know who the ‘they’ is you keep mentioning, Mark?”

“Uh, sort of. The FBI, for one.”

“And you’ve probably seen enough movies to know how the FBI works. And what happens to people who ask questions about top-secret investigations, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “Black bags over your head and stuff.”

“I don’t know about that, but the last thing I want is for my son to end up in trouble because he was poking around in things he should’ve let be. It’s bad enough that Sarah was involved with this boy. The last thing I want is for you to get wrapped up in it too.”

“Of course,” I say.

He picks up his fork and keeps eating, but my head spins. Sarah was involved with this boy. It’s not the fact that this is true that makes my stomach drop, it’s that my dad knows. I rack my brain, trying to think of a moment I might have mentioned that Sarah and John were dating before, or even after everything happened, but I can’t think of one. Talking about a guy who kicked my ass and stole my girl is not exactly the type of thing I would bring up with my family. If Dad knows Sarah was “involved” with John, it’s from the investigation. Meaning the FBI and whoever else is in Paradise right now must know too.

“You got another letter from Ohio State today,” Nana says as she tries to force a second round of mashed potatoes on me.

The nice thing about living in a small town is that if your house burns down, the mailman can probably still find you.

“I’ll look at it later.”

“Just like the letters from other colleges you said you’d take care of, right?” Dad asks. “The ones that have piled up on your desk? I went and looked at them earlier, and half of them haven’t even been opened yet.”

“It’s just—,” I start, but he won’t have it.

“Jesus, Mark. Do you have any idea how lucky you are? Do you have any idea how many other kids would kill to have schools clawing at each other to have you attend. To have even half of the scholarship money some of these places are offering you just to do what you love? To play football? How ungrateful . . .”

He keeps going, but I zone out a little bit. When I think back on how hard and boring I thought the application process was for colleges, I feel like an idiot. But it was the most important thing in my life at the time, trying to remember whether or not I’d sent off all the right transcripts and letters of recommendation. Now I realize there are much, much bigger things to worry about.

Dad keeps lecturing me. He’s normally a really nice guy. Good to us. Always there when I need him. The one thing he doesn’t like, though, is when he feels useless. When things get taken out of his hands or jurisdiction and he gets cut out of the loop. Then he gets cranky and starts to become a real dick at home.

I guess that’s something I must have inherited from him.

CHAPTER FIVE

ALEX DAVIS TEXTS ME AFTER DINNER. HE’S A wide receiver a year younger than me who was part of my close circle at Paradise High. Apparently his parents are out of town for the weekend, and he’s managed to score a whole keg. Everyone we know is going over there. “No open flames lol,” he says. I text Sarah to ask if she wants to go, but she says no, as I expected. Inviting her is just a gesture. Neither of us is really in the mood to party lately. Pick any Friday night in the years before Mogs invaded Paradise, and I would have been out with friends—maybe out with Sarah—partying at someone’s house or in a clearing in the woods that we’d circled our cars around. But now, I just don’t see the point. There’s an alien war that could break out here at any moment. When that happens, I don’t want to be trying to recover from my third keg stand.

My friends—my teammates—bothered me about my newfound lack of social life a lot at first. Then I told Sarah’s friend Emily that I was weirded out about parties ever since my house burned down. That’s not actually true, but Emily’s kind of a gossip, and pretty soon no one was giving me shit about staying home so much. Or at least, most people weren’t.

I text Alex and say I’ll pass and he calls me a little bitch and for half a minute I think that maybe I’ll go over there to kick his ass and remind him which one of us was MVP, but then I just click my phone to silent and head upstairs.

My room at the house used to be my granddad’s office before he died. At least, everyone called it his “office.” Really it was just the spare room where my grandmother stored all his old history books and navy trunk and stuff like that. But there’s a desk and a foldout couch in there, which is all I really need.

The first thing I do when I sit at the desk is log on to this blog I’ve started following called “Aliens Anonymous.” I stumbled on it by chance, back in the first few days after the battle at the high school, and despite its dumb name, it’s turned out to be pretty interesting. One of the guys running it—a dude who goes by the name GUARD—posted a story from the local paper and wrote a bunch of stuff about how the whole destruction at the high school might be a cover-up for alien activity. At first I thought GUARD might have been from around here, but the Paradise incident was actually just one of many accidents or events he’d pegged as being somehow linked to aliens. In this case, at least, he’d guessed correctly. He’d even made the connection that the “John Smith” that everyone kept pinning stuff on was probably not exactly of this world.