very interested in. But that information wasn’t mine to give.
“Can I make a phone call?”
“Gideon!” Mother gasped, as if she couldn’t believe my gall.
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
Kaufman nodded and gestured for me to step out of the room. “Make it fast.”
I locked myself in the men’s bathroom and called Arden, quickly explaining the situation.
“You want to know if you can tell them about me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Will you have to use my name?”
“I think I will,” I said apologetically.
Arden was silent for a long time. My gaze wandered around the bathroom, which probably hadn’t been properly cleaned since the station had been built. I moved to the center of the room so nothing could touch me.
Finally, Arden said, “He’s not a good man, is he?”
“No.”
“He tricked all of us.”
“He did.”
Including me. I’d told myself I was immune to Oswald’s charm, but he’d appealed to my ego when he asked for my help with the lava lamp. And I’d fallen for it. He didn’t need me. Anyone could have figured out the mechanics of the lamp with just a little effort.
Oswald knew I was skeptical of him. It was so easy for him to make people love him, he couldn’t handle it when someone refused to bend to his will. And after I caught him with Arden, he had extra incentive to bring me to his side.
He made me complicit in a scam I’d passionately rallied against, simply by making me feel special.
I’d gotten played.
The whole time I was thinking of Oswald as my nemesis, I was nothing but a pawn to him. It was depressing to realize the person you considered a rival never felt the same way about you.
“Okay,” Arden said. “Do it. Tell them whatever they want to know.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she replied. I heard strength and resolve in her voice that I couldn’t help but admire.
Back in Kaufman’s office, Ishmael sat casually in his chair, sipping a Coke. How could he be so relaxed?
“All right,” I said, sitting down. “We’ll tell you everything.”
Kaufman asked if she could record the conversation. Ruiz took out a notepad.
“You might want to bring some chairs for my parents,” I suggested. “This will take a while.”
Five minutes later, we were all settled in.
“Where should we start?” I asked.
“At the beginning,” Kaufman replied.
“Well,” said Ishmael, and I could tell part of him enjoyed the moment, looked forward to the performance he was about to give. “It started with an explosion…”
Aftermath
Word traveled quickly in a town the size of Lansburg. It wasn’t long before everyone found out what Ishmael and I had done.
Adam Frykowski wrote a blog post praising Ishmael and me for being “hoaxer masterminds.” Robert Nash, of Basin and Range Radio, sadly informed his listeners of the hoax, calling my brother and me “punk kids.” Our classmates joked with us, and some asked questions about how we’d pulled off certain things, but we didn’t get much flack. After all, a lot of them had claimed to be abducted too.
Really, that went for the whole town. Nearly everyone had played a part in the alien mania. To call my brother and me out would be admitting their own UFO sightings or abduction stories were fake or imagined. Instead, most people picked up and went on with their lives, leaving a mild air of embarrassment lingering over Lansburg.
The embarrassment was probably exacerbated due to the coverage our town got on the national news. The reveal of the hoax proved to be even more attention grabbing than the hoax itself. Lansburg was famous. My brother and I had done it—we’d left our mark.
Only, sometimes leaving a mark should be called leaving a scar. At the center of Lansburg, proudly on display, the town’s broken and empty lava lamp was blocked off with sawhorses and caution tape. It would be dismantled and hauled away as soon as town officials figured out how exactly to dispose of a sixty-three-foot-tall lava lamp.
Ishmael and I had plenty of time to look at the lamp and reflect on our actions. Though we hadn’t officially been given community service orders yet, Kaufman suggested it would look good if we started ahead of time—by cleaning up the town square.
The myTality™ distributors had fled the day after the explosion and Oswald’s arrest. The Seekers had taken a little longer to disperse. I ran into Arnie Hodges as he packed up, loading his step stool into the back of his van.
“We hoped this time was real,” Hodges told me, and even his