Journal of a UFO Investigator by David Halperin Read Free Book Online Page B

needed quiet. Needed me to stay with her, read to her. My friends, when I had any, had to be hushed. Asked to leave the house if they couldn’t be still . . .
    Sadness transfixed me. I could not move so much as my eyeballs. I don’t know how long it was before I felt a hand on my shoulder.
    â€œYou all right?”
    Rosa Pagliano. Some kind of hallucination? Her touch was real, though, or had been before she took away her hand. Relief flooded me; happiness too. But also confusion. “What are you doing here?” I said.
    â€œI wouldn’t leave with Jeff. He wanted me to. You wouldn’t believe the fight we had. They almost threw us out of the library, we were screaming so loud.”
    â€œSo the bus did stop in Braxton—”
    Of course it had. And today she’d come with us, not just me and Jeff. She’d climbed onto the bus at Braxton, told Jeff to move over, wiggled into the seat beside him. . . . Each detail so vivid; how had I forgotten, even for a moment? “Rosa,” I said, and felt my tongue curl around her name.
    â€œWhere were you? Why didn’t you come back to the Newspaper Room? We waited and waited.”
    Rosa slipped into the vacant chair beside me. She carried a book, which she slid into her lap, where I couldn’t see it. I caught a whiff of her perfume, strong stuff, the kind the sexier girls in our school wear, but I’d never before noticed it on Rosa. Why hadn’t I?
    â€œJeff got sick of waiting,” she said. “He started carrying on, the way he always does when he doesn’t get his way. Got himself so worked up, that finally—”
    â€œI did come down. You were gone. The room was empty.”
    â€œWha—a?” Her lips parted. “I understand,” she said after a second, which was enough time for my eyes and mind to have glued themselves to those lips. Not quite rose red, as the poets say. Yet red enough, and luscious, without benefit of lipstick. I was too hypnotized, those few silent moments, to ask what it was she’d understood. “Finally he says to me, ‘Come on! The hell with Danny! We’re going home.’ I told him to screw himself.”
    â€œYou told him what?”
    â€œTo screw himself .” She broke out of her whisper. “Go home and listen to records of his stupid musicals, for all I cared. I wasn’t going to leave you alone.”
    A librarian frowned at us, finger to her lips. Another minute and we would be thrown out. Rosa put her hand on my knee. “So he left by himself,” she said. “Now listen to me, Danny—”
    â€œ Could I have your attention, please? The library is closing in twenty minutes. Please bring all materials to the checkout desk . . . ”
    And on and on, while I thought about Jeff, and what he’d do without Rosa as his girlfriend, and whether she liked him all that much to begin with. Whether after this we could still be friends. Our Delta Device, once the link between us, now a piece of junk, a silly, lumpish toy from eighth-grade metal shop—
    â€œWhat’s that book you’ve got?” I said when the loudspeaker voice finished.
    â€œOne of theirs.”
    It was still in her lap. I tried to make out what it was, then looked up, embarrassed. She’d think I was peeking under her skirt. As she snatched it away, I glimpsed the jacket picture: a battered, twisted rag doll, stringlike hair tumbled around its averted face. Also the title, The Scandal of something. “It’s about—” I said, and felt myself turn red, because I knew what that “scandal” had to be but didn’t yet know a name for it.
    â€œThat’s right. So I’ll know why Helen does to me like she does. I’ll take it when we go.”
    Helen was her mother. I’d never heard Rosa call her by her first name. “Take the book? You have a library card? Will they let you—”
    â€œNo, I don’t