Read The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion for Free Online Page B

and— pppffft —clipped a tag through her ear, which snapped her out of her strange feline state.
    â€œOUCH. What the—”
    She was about to protest further when she looked up into the faces of the aliens and let out the most piercing, extended yell of pure terror I had ever heard. I won’t try to replicate it here.
    The aliens covered the holes in the sides of their heads and looked at each other like can you believe this? They were visibly annoyed with the volume of Sophie’s screaming. When she paused to take a breath so that she could yell again, the larger Viking took out a syringe and injected her with a liquid that knocked her unconscious, after which the smaller one picked her up by the back of her neck, tossed her into the cage, and threw the cage into the van.
    The duo climbed in behind her and shut the door, and with that, the van lifted into the air, hovered for a moment, and then— WHOOSH —disappeared into the sky in a streak of gold light, upward and out of sight.
    The desert was silent. From the moment we saw the UFO toSophie’s disappearance, the abduction had taken five minutes, tops. If that.
    I heard a ringing. Sophie’s cell phone was stuck in a crevice between two rocks. I answered.
    â€œHello?” I said weakly. All the air had left my body, and I felt like I was about to pass out.
    â€œHey, this is Dusty at the garage. Your motorcycle is ready.”
    â€œBe…right there.”
    â€œHoly crap, man, that beer must have hit you hard. You sound messed up, hombre.”
    â€”
    Bizarrely enough, back at the garage, Dusty didn’t seem concerned that he had seen two high school students walk out into the desert together but only one return.
    â€œAs long as somebody pays me a hundred for my work, I don’t care who goes missing,” he said. “For another hundred, I’ll help you bury her.”
    I had $146 dollars in my bank account—money left over from my eighteenth birthday—so I paid Dusty’s fee with my emergency-only debit card and hit the road with the motorcycle in the bed of my truck.
    My first instinct was to call somebody for help, but I quickly realized that was unrealistic. It wasn’t as if NASA had a 911 hotline you could dial to report abductions: “Hey, this is Bennett Bardo. Listen, the girl I’ve loved since I was five years old was just snatched up by a couple of deformed Viking dogcatchers—no,I don’t know if they were actually Nordic, I’m just making a comparison—and I was wondering if you could send up a shuttle to get her back. They sprinkled some confetti on her and she lost her mind. So you’ll handle it? Thanks, appreciate it.”
    If Sophie didn’t turn up, her parents would file a missing-person report, police would come around asking if I had seen her, and eventually somehow it would be revealed that she and I had walked out to the desert as a twosome and I had returned as a onesome. I was fairly certain my excuse that she was taken by aliens wouldn’t hold up in court.
    I considered my options. I could try to make a run for the Mexican border, but given I didn’t know anybody in that country, didn’t speak Spanish, was still technically not yet a high school graduate, and sunburned easily, I didn’t see a future for myself as a bandito in Juárez. In the opposite direction, Canada was two days away, but my truck would never make the trip, and I didn’t have enough money for gas. Going back to Gordo meant inevitable arrest and jail time, but I also couldn’t stay here in Roswell, unless I wanted to Dumpster dive for sustenance and sleep in my truck. Just trying to avoid the situation would make me look even guiltier when I was eventually apprehended.
    Driving my truck nowhere, I took lefts and rights aimlessly, obeying the speed limit so I didn’t draw attention to myself, watching the broken center traffic stripes disappear