I Don't Want To Believe

The Boy On The Bleachers

"You alright mate?" Greg asked.
"Ya, I'm fine." John sighed, putting his sandwich down for good.
"Obviously you're not fine, you're distant, what's going on?" Greg asked, biting ravenously into a chocolate chip cookie.
"Nothing's going on, literally, nothing." John assured, forcing a smile on his face. But honestly, his mind had traveled to other places, to his backyard where the crop circle waited.
"Alright then, you don't want to talk, that's cool. I'll just sit here and talk to myself then." Greg decided, wiping cookie crumbs from the corners of his mouth and moving onto peeling his orange.
"You don't think there are actual aliens in my yard, do you?" John asked.
"What do you mean?" Greg asked with a laugh.
"Well, you know, didn't that circle kind of give you a bad feeling?" John asked, sounding stupid even to himself.
"No, it didn't. It made me fear for society, but that's every day." Greg shrugged.
"I never told you, but that night, before I found the circle, I saw a face in my window." John pointed out. Greg smiled excitedly, dropping his orange peels onto the table and starting munching on the fruit.
"Like, an alien face?" he asked hopefully.
"I couldn't see it very well, I thought it was a glare from the TV, or maybe my reflection that I saw out of the corner of my eye, but doesn't it seem odd, that right after a face appears in my window a crop circle appears?" John asked. Greg thought for a moment, spraying juice everywhere as he bit off the end of his orange.
"Well, I mean, maybe the thing that looked in your window had arrived just then, and that's how the crop circle appeared, through their little laser beam things." Greg guessed.
"So you're saying it arrived on earth just to look in my window?" John laughed.
"Well...yes?" Greg muttered. "It could've been trying to figure out where it was, or what planet or year it was in."
"And by peaking in my window for like, five seconds, it was able to figure that all out?" John asked with disbelief.
"I don't know, don't judge me, come on John." Greg insisted.
"Ya well, k don't know, it just seems kind of...ironic." John shrugged.
"Well, if there really was an alien in your window, wouldn't it come back? Like, you would've seen a white light and all that as it beamed itself up onto the ship." Greg guessed.
"I don't know, I mean, there's only one thing wrong with our theory." John sighed.
"What's that?" Greg wondered.
"Aliens aren't real." John pointed out. Greg just frowned, as if he were looking for a better reason than that. When lunch was over John followed Greg to his locker, having the next class together they walked up to the room, and John didn't have to stop at his own since his lunch bag was paper, and therefore he could throw it out. The hallway was packed, everyone going in different directions, talking, laughing; kissing each other not so discreetly in the doorways, it was all sort of disgusting. But there was one boy, someone John would swear he had never seen before, standing in the middle of the hallway. John would say he was a freshman, since he knew the face of everyone in the school and therefore some newbie must have slipped his mind, but this boy was a good head taller than everyone else, with black curly hair and dangerously pale skin. Of course, seeing some stranger in the middle of the hallway wasn't the issue, it was the fact that, despite standing in the middle of the hallway without moving for a good minute or so, he was staring right at John, over the heads of everyone as if he knew exactly who he was looking for. John stared back for a moment, and he could swear that he could almost see the corners of the boy's lips curve upward, as if John's amused him for whatever reason.
"You ready?" Greg asked, shutting his locker so loudly that it made John jump in surprise.
"What, oh, ya, sure." John agreed, looking back to where the boy had been standing to see that he had disappeared, blended in with the crowd or simply ducked behind the corner somehow. The rest of the day was boring, as school was supposed to be. Classes droned on, teachers wouldn't shut up, and they learned all sorts of useless stuff that you'll never need in life. But there was one point of this school day that didn't bore John, the boy; he couldn't get that boy out of his head. But why? Had he seen him before, did he know him from somewhere, what type of feeling did that boy radiate that made John so, so confused? He had been staring right at John, from the most inconvenient spot in the whole hallway, blocking the stream of people, yet no one yelled at him, looked at him, it was like he hadn't even existed. Was he a ghost, was he a hallucination produced by some sort of wacky cafeteria food, what was going on? Finally the bell rang, so that meant John, Greg, Mike, and all of his other teammates were off to soccer practice, dragging their backpacks filled with books and papers towards the locker room.
"John, you look sick." Greg decided as he pulled his uniform over his head. Mike was sitting on the bench excitedly, already dressed and scrolling through some weird alien website.
"I'm fine; just need a little exercise I suppose." John shrugged.
"Soccer helps everything." Greg agreed with a smile, lacing up his cleats and going to fill up his water bottle.
"You made the news John." Mike said happily, holding up his phone to show a large, overhead view of John's cornfield with the large circle in the middle.
"Well that's great." John muttered sarcastically, putting on his shin guards as fast as possible as to avoid any more of Mike's taunting.
"Hey John, one more thing." Mike called. John sighed, halfway out of the locker room door when he turned to look at Mike.
"Yes?" he asked with an exasperate sigh.
"Did you see anything the night before, lights, sounds, aliens?" Mike asked hopefully. John sighed, definitely not going to tell Mike about the face he might have seen in his window, and not the boy he saw in the hallway.
"No, nothing." John insisted, and with that he followed the hallway to where Greg was waiting for him at the door.
"Mike asking questions again?" Greg asked.
"Yep." John agreed, trudging out to the soccer field.
"You think he'll come back and try to investigate?" Greg wondered.
"I hope not, I don't want him to be in my cornfield at two in the morning." John decided.
"Well, I never said at two o'clock, more like, four in the afternoon. Maybe you can invite him in for dinner." Greg suggested.
"I think I'd rather die than voluntarily let that kid into my house." John decided, shading his eyes from the harsh sun.
"I think we are going to die. I heard coach has a wicked workout for us today." Greg sighed.
"Oh yippee." John muttered sarcastically. They walked to the practice field, putting their bags and their water bottles on the small set of aluminum bleachers on the side of the field. John didn't know why they bothered to put bleachers up here, the soccer games were all played on the football field, just with goals on the ends so that all the parents and relatives of the players can sit on the large bleachers and buy stuff from the concession stand. Maybe back in the old days they played soccer on this little crappy field, who knows? Greg was right, there was a workout, but it was just the thing that John needed to clear his head of all extraterrestrial nonsense. All sorts of sprints, pushups, core exercises, ball kicking, dehydration torture every soccer team needed to shape up its players from high school nerds to soccer playing machines. What annoyed John the most was that he was positively suffering from the heat of the sun and the burning of his muscles, but Mike, nerdy as he was, managed to get breaths in to ask him all about eh crop circle in the middle of the workouts. Mike was hardly even fazed by the fifty pushup, fifty sit up combo, the sprints to the end lines, the bench dips and burpees, the only thing that he was troubled with was the fact that John hadn't witnessed anything that was going on in his cornfield. When finally they were able to get a break (a member of the team was feeling faint and had to sit down near the goal while all the coaches fussed), they all collapsed in center field, laying in the soft grass and staring at the cloudless sky.
"I've never appreciated the simplicity of nothing before." Greg admitted, laying on his side and poking the grass blades with his fingers.
"Don't be so dramatic." John laughed. He was sprawled out, snow angle stile, right in the center circle, watching as a couple of geese flew overhead.
"What a work out." Mike said happily, still on his feet and stretching out his quads.
"Please God, let it be over." mumbled another teammate, who was lying on their stomach with their face in the dirt. John groaned, sitting up and looking towards the bleachers for some water, when his heart nearly stopped. The boy in the hallway was sitting at the top, leaning forward slightly and staring directly at John once again, as if he had followed him from school all the way to practice.
"Greg." John hissed, poking at his friend.
"What?" Greg groaned.
"That kid on the bleachers, do you know him?" John asked, trying not to make a big scene so the kid didn't notice John's panic. Greg looked up at the bleachers, not really studying the boy for long before letting his head fall back into the grass.
"I don't see anyone." He decided. John looked at him in awe, looking back at the bleachers to see that Greg was right, there was no one there.
"No, there was...there was definitely a boy sitting there!" John insisted, getting to his feet to get a better view of the field. Unless he was hiding very well under the bleachers, which John doubted since he'd probably get stung by all the wasps that lived down there, there was no where he could've gone without John seeing.
"Do you need some water?" Greg asked, not sounding terribly concerned as John sat back down, now extremely confused about what he saw and what he didn't see.
"I swear to you, there was a boy sitting there, our age, curly dark hair, incredibly pale skin, I saw him in the hallway after lunch! He keeps staring at me, I don't know who he is and now he's...well, he's invisible." John insisted, feeling very stupid as he saw some of the other players lift their heads up to see John's confused reaction.
"Ooh, is it an alien?" Greg asked with a very bored tone.
"Don't make fun of aliens!" Mike growled from where he was sitting.
"My bad." Greg sighed, not caring at all. John sighed, staring once more at the bleachers as if the boy would suddenly reappear.
"Tell me I'm not going crazy." John muttered.
"You're going crazy." Greg decided, and John just frowned. That wasn't very reassuring at all. When practice was finally over, John had to get a ride from his parents because he doubted his legs could bring him any farther than that gigantic alien statue before they gave out. All of his muscles seemed to be collapsing underneath him, so he sat in the back of the family's minivan and pressed his cold water bottle to his quads.
"Are you alright John?" Mrs. Watson asked, looking at her son through the mirror.
"Ya, I'm fine." John lied. Not only was his body hurting, but his mind was as well. He had definitely seen a boy, and that boy had definitely seen him, he had almost smiled in the hallway, and now again on the bleachers, was he being stalked? And he had just disappeared, just as soon as Greg looked, as if he only wanted John to see him. Was he the person that looked through John's window, that made the crop circle in the backyard? Was he just a regular, very slippery boy, or was he from another planet? John groaned, questions buzzing around his head like annoying flies, and he had no answers and no means of getting them. Maybe he could ask Mike later, at practice tomorrow. When his mother finally pulled into the garage, John ran upstairs (well, more like hobbled at a quick pace) to shower and get dressed before dinner. Since there had been a disturbance during practice it had run a bit late, so by the time John got down stairs, dinner was already on the table. It was chicken, potatoes and broccoli, the traditional happy family weekday meal really, but John wasn't complaining. He'd eat the table if there wasn't a better option.
"So, how was practice?" Mr. Watson asked. John groaned, going into the hellish conditions they had to work out under. Mr. Watson, however, seemed satisfied that the players were suffering, as if that would make them into better athletes, which, of course, it would.
"And Harry, how was school?" Mrs. Watson asked. Harry shrugged; too busy pushing her broccoli around the perimeter of her plate to elaborate. So they sat in silence, John finishing up his third helping of everything before finally putting his fork down in defeat, his stomach so full he was sure it would burst.
"That was delicious." John decided with a satisfied sigh.
"Well, I'm glad you liked it, although I'm not quite sure if it's healthy to eat so much." Mrs. Watson muttered. John just shrugged, staring out the now dark deck door where he could just make out the tops of the corn stalks through the moonlight.
"Well, I'll tell you if I die." he decided.
"The boy earned it, nice day a practice, hard workouts deserve big meals." Mr. Watson decided.
"There we go, I'll be fine." John agreed.
"You're going to get fat." Harry decided. John just laughed, picking up his plate to bring over to the sink.
"No I'm not, I exercise enough to pay it off." John shrugged. He was just about to put his plate in the sink before he saw a strange shape in the door, the outline of a person. The plate slipped from John's stunned hands as he made out the figure of the boy, tall, lanky, with curly hair being framed by the light from the patio.
"John, what's wrong?" Mrs. Watson asked desperately as John stood, motionless, in the middle of the kitchen. He couldn't make out the boy's facial expression, he was probably smiling, laughing even, but now was the time for answers. Before his mother could rush over and pamper him, John took off across the kitchen, flinging the deck door open and dashing off into the night. He was fast enough to catch the boy retreating into the corn, and John was on hot pursuit, even though his legs were burning he knew that he had to catch this kid, demand answers about why he was stalking him. John tore into the cornfield, pushing away stalks and tripping over piles of dirt, the footprints of the reporters still mashed into the hardening earth.
"Come back here!" John demanded, smacking the corn away and tunneling even deeper into the field. He heard the boy rustling through as well, obviously John had to be gaining on him, there was no way such a thin, unhealthy looking boy could outrun him. Just as John was sure he had gotten him, he pushed through the last stalk of corn and found himself in the middle of the crop circle, the bent over stalks under his feet. John wandered to the middle of the circle, hearing his parent's feeble cries from back at the house. Obviously he was have time to explain later, but now he needed his own explanations. John took deep breaths, walking over the corn stalks and noticing that not one of the stalks were broken, as if they hadn't been crushed by a machine or any physical force, but by some sort of energy, or maybe a very careful rope. That ominous feeling was creeping up him once more, the feeling that maybe there was a reason he'd never been in this corn field before, maybe there was a reason that the boy had lead him straight to the circle and disappeared, that maybe John should start running back home before anything bad happened... But obviously he didn't make up his mind fast enough, because just as the idea came into his head that he should leave, a bright white light lit up from above him, blocking out the stars and the night sky and engulfing the boy in energy. John started to run, or he tried to, but found that he was paralyzed, his legs couldn't move, his arms couldn't flail, his voice wouldn't work out he tried to call out for help. If it hadn't been for this light, he would've fallen flat onto his face in the mud. But John wasn't thankful, in fact, there was no way this could be human, no way this could be possible, because he started rising, the toes of his sneakers leaving the earth and floating up in the sky, as if the light was sucking him into a spaceship. John felt panic rise up in his chest, this was no helicopter, no prank, he couldn't hear any rotating blades, couldn't see any people above him, nothing except this bright light as he watched the world he knew get smaller and smaller underneath him, nothing suspending him at all. John watched as his house started to get unrecognizable, now he could see his entire town, the football field, the cornfield, his legs falling into nothingness beneath him.