“So, there I was, walking through the forest from Timmy's house. You know Timmy, right? He's in Mrs. Folsom's class. His dad owns the hardware store. Anyway, me and Timmy -”
“Timmy and I, Johnny.”
“Yeah, yeah. Timmy and I had spent the day together, watchin' movies, playin' Xbox, you know, stuff. Then right as we're gonna see who can chug a whole Mountain Dew faster, his mom comes in. She's all mad because she got this email from Mrs Folsom about Timmy not turning in his homework. Says he has to sit down and do it right then, or she'll ground him and he couldn't hang out until he was old enough to join the Marines.
“I try to sneak home because homework sucks, but she rounds on me, and tells me I better do my homework when Timmy does his. I say I don't got no homework-”
“Don't have any, Johnny.”
“I don't have any homework, and she tells me to knock it off. I'm not gonna make Timmy's mom mad, she can be a real grouch when she's mad. So I get out my math homework, and sit next to Timmy. We tried to be good, I swear, but after a while, we got bored. Homework is borin' you know. So we're playin' eraser football and makin' paper airplanes, and Timmy's mom catches us. She's really mad now, and she tells me she's gonna call my Mom, and I better go back.
“So I go pack up my sleeping bag and my pjs. She tells me that my mom's busy, so I'll have to walk home. I don't care.”
“I say bye to Timmy and thank you to his Mom, even though she's a grouch, and I go. There's not a lot of people out, I think because it looks like it's gonna rain. I hear thunder, and decide I'm gonna take the shortcut home, beat the rain. It's a deer trail through the forest between my place and Timmy's.
“Timmy's place and mine, Johnny.”
“Timmy's place and mine then. It's this little path, you almost can't see it. We found it a couple summers ago, it's so much shorter, but your legs get chewed up by the bushes. Anyway, I take the trail. It cuts through this clearing, just a round hole in the middle of the forest. Sucks sometimes, because when the grass is tall, it gets you all wet.
“I'm almost to the other side when it shows up.”
“It?”
“Yeah, it. It's all windy, and I hear this hum. I turn around, and there it is.”
“What is it, Johnny?”
“Hold your horses Mrs. Smith, I'm getting to it.”
“It was shiny and kind of a big oval, but round too. Like one of those nasty lima beans, but fatter. And way bigger, it was as big as a school bus. It was all smooth, with no lights or windows or nothin'. Just this... blob, you know?”
“No, I don't know.”
“So anyways, it's just hovering there, in this clearing. It's humming, and I think it's making wind, because it just keeps getting windier. I drop my stuff so I can put my hands over my face. It's tearin' up the grass, and that stings. It just sits there for a couple minutes, and I'm watchin' it. If anything happens, I'll run, but I'm on the edge of the clearing, so maybe it don't see me.
“Didn't see you, Johnny.”
“Maybe it didn't see me then. All of a sudden, it zooms up. Like, straight up. It makes all this wind, and it knocks me flat, back into the trees. By the time I sit up, it's gone, not even a dot in the sky. The wind's knocked my stuff all over the clearing, and it takes me forever to get it all together. I never got my pj top. It was up in a tree and I couldn't reach.
“I go home, but no one's there for me to tell about the space ship. By the time Mom comes home with KFC for dinner, I'd kind of forgotten about it. I didn't think about it until just now.”
“And why is that, Johnny?”
“Because it weren't just my pj top that I left in the clearing. I think my math homework's there too.”