I was watching the movie without paying much attention. I was sitting on the couch with my feet propped up on the coffee table, finishing a stromboli and some Pepsi. My parents had been gone a couple of hours, and already I was bored.
My parents were taking a trip down to the Virginia beach. My brothers and sister had been farmed out to stay with my grandparents for three days, but at seventeen, I'd been deemed old enough to stay home unsupervised. My father had given me three rules: Be inside by dark, no friends sleeping over, and something else; I hadn't paid attention.
I was considering what else to do when there was a knock at the front door. I got up and opened it.
It was my friend Mark, from down the street. He had a sleeping bag in one hand, and a BB gun in the other.
"Lou," he said,"I need to stay here. There's a biker gang after me."
"Okay, you know my mom's a nurse, right?" Mark sat in my kitchen. "She called a half hour ago. She was on her way to the hospital for her shift, and she found this guy on the road. A biker gang had beaten him up, and left him for dead."
"She told you this?" I was pacing around the kitchen.
"In a big hurry. They gang found out, and they called and threatened her. She's staying tonight at the hospital---She's fine. But she wanted me to get out of the house and find someplace safe to spend the night. And you been blabbing all over the neighborhood how you'e by yourself for three days, so...."
"Well, hey, you can stay, man. Just don't tell anyone. My dad will kill me."
"Sure."
"We should be safe here. We're way outside of town; you can't find this place without trying real hard. The goddamn school buses can't figure out where I live."
"What if they do find us, though? We can't fight a biker gang. We'd need an army."
I stopped, turned around, and looked at him.
"Then let's get an army."
We made a few calls.
Ordinarily, "Come over and maybe fight a biker gang" is not an easy conversation to have with your friends. It's why I made Kline the first call. With no questions asked, he said,"Be right over."
In half an hour, we had a bunch of friends gathered in my bedroom. Mark and Kline, PJ, the Voiceman, Robby, Buddy Nickel, and Missy.
The bedroom was sort of disconnected from the rest of the house. It had once been a separate servants' building, until I'd moved in just before starting high school. I'd painted the walls purple, put up my superhero posters, and taught my dog Lucky to climb in through the window.
"So what's all this about a biker gang?" asked PJ, a short, cute, brown-haired girl from my neighborhood.
"Mark's mom fixed up a guy they wanted dead," I said. "They made a threatening call to her at work. She was worried that they might come and find him at home, so he came over here."
Robby turned to Mark. "Seriously?"
"Mom was worried," said Mark. "It gets me out of the house."
"Awesome," said Kline. "I got some guns, and my trauma kit in the car."
"Can we not be waving around guns in the house?" I said. "We're just gonna kind of wait it out here and hope they don't find us. And nobody tell my dad. The seven of you know, but keep this quiet."
"I'll check outside, and stand guard," said Kline. "We can take turns."
"Can we go swim in the pond while we're here?" asked Robby.
"My dad won't let me do that anymore since I tried to find a Kraken in there," I said. "Also I made coffee."
Within half an hour, everyone had settled into a weird sort of sleepover. My friends were drinking coffee that was too strong, playing cards, watching a VCR tape, and and generally keeping out of trouble. I wound up carrying my whip, on the front porch with Kline, who was standing guard and looking out at the road.
"Gonna be seniors soon, man," said Kline.
"Who cares?" I said. "School sucks. I'm smarter than all the teachers, except for Paula."
"Maybe we'll get to sit at the cool kids' table in the cafeteria," he said.
"Come on, man. You know better. The jocks are gonna sit there. We'll be at those tables on the outskirts like we always are."
"We make better smoke bombs than they do, though."
"This is true."
"You wanna walk around some?"
"Yeah."
We walked down the stone steps, off the porch, and up through the yard into the Douglas Fir fields.
"No outlaw bikers yet," said Kline. "Been quiet."
"Too quiet."
He grinned. "You have any good adventures lately?"
"Well, I found a guy the other night all dressed in black trying to get into a house through a window. I tackled him, told him I was protecting Slatington."
"Awesome! You send him to jail?"
"No, actually, it seems I just scared hell out of a priest who accidentally locked himself out."
"Oh," Kline said. "Was it the Church on Washington Street?"
"Yeah, it was the church on Washington Street."
There was a sound above, and we looked up. Something was flying low overhead.
"What the hell?" said Kline.
"UFO!" I said. "Look! What the hell is that?"
It was low enough we could hear some sort of engine, and looked like a triangle composed of red and white lights. It was flying north, and we watched it, running underneath until it passed over.
"I just see the lights!" I shouted.
Kline pulled out a small automatic and pointed it up, at the thing. I smacked his arm. "No! Will you put the guns away? Don't shoot it!"
It roared overhead, disappearing over the mountains in the general direction of Walnutport. Things got quiet again.
"What the hell was that?" I said.
"Definitely unidentified," said Kline.
"Some kind of military thing?"
He shook his head. "There's no bases close enough. And if it was, they'd never admit it."
"Well, it was weird."
"Is the Slatington airport that direction?" he asked.
"Let's find out."
We walked back to the house, and into my room, where a few of the kids were sitting and talking.
"What was all that outside?" asked Mark.
"Something flew over," I said. "It was big, with all these lights."
"Aliens!" said Mark.
"Your sister's an alien," I said.
I sat down at my desk and opened my desk drawer. I had a photocopied map of Slatington in a file, and I got it out and set it on the desk.
"Where are we, right now?" Kline asked.
I pointed at the lower portion of the map. "South of Slatington. Right here. Where's the airport?"
"Here." He pointed at the northernmost end of the town.
We looked it over.
"Yep," I said. "It was definitely heading in that direction. Not aliens---Some kind of plane, flying way too low."
"Looks like it," agreed Kline.
"Now, aren't you glad you didn't shoot it?"
"Not really."
And that was when Voiceman came running into the room through the back door.
"Guys! Come quick! PJ fell in the old well!"
Behind our farmhouse was an old well that we hadn't used in years. It was covered with a wooden platform that was rotting away. All of us knew not to stand on it---My dad had covered that rule pretty thoroughly---But PJ was new. She hadn't hung around long enough to know that.
And she was in there.
"What're you going to do?" Mark asked.
I looked at him.
"Whatever I can."
The platform at the top was broken, and I could hear her splashing around down below. I grabbed a rope from the back porch, tied an end around my waist, and jumped in, dropping about ten feet into the water. PJ was thrashing, and I grabbed her. I held onto the pipe running down into the water, and we clung to each other.
"You okay?" I asked.
She nodded and coughed.
"Get....us....out of here."
"Working on that," I said.
It didn't seem a good time to mention that I'd forgotten to tie the other end of the rope to something.
But then it drew up. I felt it pulling, tightening. Up above, Kline and Mark were pulling, hauling me up.
Clinging to PJ, I felt the rope tighten painfully around my waist as it pulled me up, out of the water. As we got closer to the top, Kline reached over and grabbed PJ's hand. Mark grabbed me by the arm, and they hauled us up and out.
We lay on the grass for a moment, soaked and coughing. I looked over at PJ.
"You okay?"
She nodded, blinking at me.
"Okay. Yeah. Okay."
The night we spent in my purple room was about the worst-kept secret of Northern Lehigh High School. By the time Kline and I began our senior year, everyone knew about it except the adults. Most of the other kids treated the two of us with a little trepidation for a while.
My parents came back two nights later. By that point, we'd cleaned up everything, and erased most of the traces of our adventure. My dad got an immediate sense something had happened; he prowled around the house for weeks looking for something. A broken dish, a missing vase. He was thinking too small; he never stood a chance.
Incidentally, seventeen years later at age thirty-three, I would confess the whole thing to him over my mother's deathbed.
"Got everything cleaned a fixed," said Kline. "We got the well patched up, the rope hung up, the window with the bullet hole fixed. Missy picked the dog hair out of the shower drain."
I nodded. "Good. Thanks. Hope we didn't miss anything."
"Everyone's on their way home now," he said.
PJ came into the bedroom. She'd changed clothes and dried off.
"Hey," she said. "Lou. Thank you for saving me."
"You know, all's well that---"
"No," she said. "Don't be flip about this. I was going to drown, and you saved me. Thank you."
I nodded.
"Anytime."
"And no matter what anyone says," she said,"You'll always be a hero to me."
