Welcome to Alien Inn

Chapter 4

"Don't go upstairs yet, okay?"

Matt blinked in surprise. To his astonishment, Bart was standing at the bottom of the staircase in front of him—if it really was Bart. He looked different, but Matt couldn't put his finger on why. Lisa and Maggie were on either side of Bart, and they looked different, too. At least Maggie did. She looked bigger. Almost as tall as Lisa.

How had Bart and the girls gotten past him and made it to the stairs without his seeing them? he wondered, shaking his head.

"It's not that late," Bart insisted. "We could sit in here by the fireplace and talk."

"Yeah, I'm dying to hear about your school," said Lisa, turning to Julee and Ashlee.

"Do you guys have boyfriends?" Maggie asked excitedly.

"We don't have to go up yet, do we, Matt?" begged Julee.

"Mom and Dad won't care if we stay down here a little while longer. Please, Matt, can't we stay?" Ashlee asked, looking at him with pleading eyes.

Matt glanced at the big smile on Bart's face. Maybe he'd been imagining things again. The funny feeling he'd had when Bart said they might be here longer than they thought was probably silly. Bart had just been making conversation. And the impression he had that Bart and Maggie looked different was probably his imagination, too. After all, a lot had happened that day. He'd gone from skiing to getting lost in a snowstorm to being snowed in at a ski lodge called, crazily enough, Snowed Inn.

"Okay," Matt said. "Grab the other end of this sofa, Bart, and let's turn it around the way it's supposed to be. I don't know who arranged the furniture in here, but they sure have a weird sense of humor."

Bart hurried to help turn the sofa around while Ashlee and Julee each turned a chair toward the fireplace and sat down. Lisa and Maggie did the same.

"Hey, Matt. What do you do for fun?" asked Bart when everyone was settled.

Matt shrugged. "The usual, I guess. Mostly hang out at the mall with my friends. Go swimming at Fairfield beach in the summer. Play ball and video games."

"What's a mall?" asked Lisa.

Both Julee and Ashlee's mouths dropped open in amazement.

"You don't know what a mall is?" gasped Ashlee. "I couldn't live without going to the mall."

"Um...we live in a small town," said Maggie, looking embarrassed.

"Wow. It must be awfully small and way out in the boonies if you don't know what a mall is," said Julee. "I mean, really!"

"A mall," Ashlee began patiently, "is...well, it's a bunch of stores that are all in one building. And there's usually a food court where you can buy stuff like pizza, burgers and fries, tacos, things like that."

"All the kids we know hang out at the mall," Julee added.

"Unless they're at the beach," said Matt.

"Is the beach another kind of mall?" asked Bart.

"Not funny," said Matt. "You're putting me on." Matt glared at Bart. The guy was too much.

"I'm not trying to be funny, or putting you on," Bart argued, saying the last three words as if they didn't quite fit in his mouth. "And I remember now. A beach is a place with all that sand. We don't have a beach where we live. Like my sister said, we're from a really, really small town. We don't go many places, and your parents won't let us watch much TV."

"So what are you doing here if you don't ever go anywhere?" Matt asked.

Bart's face was blank for an instant. Then a smile broke across it. "Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go," he said proudly. "That's where we're going. To Grandmother's house."