I look up from my phone. “So Magonians are crop thieves?”
Jason is smug. “I don’t care about crop circles, but you know how the UFO people are. Are you at Gervase of Tilbury yet?”
No. I’m scrolling through reams of Irish history. Things about anchors being thrown from cloud ships.
“I’m in Annals of Ulster now,” I say and sigh, because of course he doesn’t have just one reference. Even his text messages come with footnotes.
“Gervase tells a story about how a whole bunch of people come out of church one day. They see an anchor drop out of the clouds and get stuck in a rock in front of the church. A moment later, a sailor comes swimming through the air, and down the anchor rope, trying to untangle it. How awesome, please, is that?”
I’m Googling. “This happened when?”
“Twelve hundreds. The townspeople cut the rope and kept the anchor. Made it part of the church door.”
“That’s a fairy tale.” Something occurs to me. “What does he say happened to the sailor?”
Jason looks at me.
“The sailor drowned,” he says.
I meet his eyes.
“In the air. He drowned in the air. So, keep telling me about the ‘not-relevant’ situation. You haven’t been drowning for sixteen years in air or anything.”
I feel shivery. There’s something stressfully specific about that anchor story.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure what I saw outside Mr. Grimm’s window was a helicopter.”
“Right. That’s why you freaked out. It’s not like you don’t have personal experience of helicopters. You definitely never got life-flighted out of a field trip in fifth grade, because you stopped breathing at the fake safari theme park.”
I roll my eyes.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Jason Kerwin says, at which point he’s busted for Trite.
“Hamlet. Really?” I say. “I’m not Horatio. This is med side effects, feather in lungs, early death.”
“Hamlet’s all about hallucinations and meltdowns and early death. Not that you’re dying. Because you’re not.”
He spins around and stirs some more.
I’m now even grouchier than I was. I feel shaky, like a dog wanting to whirl and get loose of water. My skin feels like Spanx. I don’t really know how Spanx feel, but my mom has a pair, and she tells me they’re torture devices specifically designed to cause women to lose circulation all over their bodies. My skin? Feels exactly that way.
“I don’t get it,” I say finally, after I bite the insides of my cheeks for a while. I don’t quite know what I’m upset about, but I feel inclined toward slapping and also toward collapsing. “Are you saying you think I’m hallucinating?”
Jason just considers me.
“Or are you saying there’s actually a ship in the sky looking for me? From this, this—Magonia place?”
I test that out by mumbling it.
“I’m saying you must have read some of this stuff somewhere, and it’s been rattling around in your brain, and now it’s showing up. You saw a cloud formation, and your brain filled in the gaps.” He pauses. “A ship in the sky isn’t the worst hallucination you could have,” he says. “You could be hallucinating everything on earth being on fire. That happens to some people. After the drugs kick in.”
“Please tell me more about drug side effects,” I say. “I know nothing about drug side effects.” I can’t shame him. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me either. Why don’t I want to be hallucinating? Hallucinating isn’t horrible. It’s absolutely a more palatable idea than ships in the sky yelling your name.
“Sometimes people hallucinate even worse than that,” he goes on. “You—the stuff you’re hallucinating? It’s like, a Disney movie. It’s some kind of Peter Pan plus E.T. hybrid.”
I’m disgusted by the implication that I’m having a children’s hospital hallucination.
“So you think this is brain melt,” I say to Jason. “Fine. Whatever.” I say something mean. “You’re one to talk about brain melt.”
“I am,” he says, so calmly I feel instantly bad. “I know about what brains do when they get screwed up.”
“How do you even know about Magonia?” I wish I didn’t sound whimpery. “You didn’t read the Annals of Ulster for fun.”
“Remember when I was building the UFO? Magonia’s an early version of UFO stuff.”
“Your moms would have hated that UFO.”
Jason’s mom Eve is a biologist who used to be an ecoterrorist. She would say anti-ecoterrorist, because she thinks people who ignore the damage they do to the environment are the terrorists. But regardless, she was once a person who chained herself to trees and in at least one case, for which she was arrested, seriously damaged a bulldozer, using a wrench. You wouldn’t think this looking at her. She looks like a mom. I guess that’s how it works.
She now writes academic articles about farming practices, and the way we’re messing the world up in order to make an economy out of food-buying. An essay she wrote about the irresponsible farming of bananas actually made it so I don’t eat bananas anymore.
“The UFO would have been made of recycled materials,” Jason says. “They wouldn’t have minded that. Taste this.”