The Fellowship for Alien Detection Read Free Page B

velvet prose and the dispatches from East Africa that did that thing where they spun you dizzy with beauty and heartbreak at the same time.
    Because what if, just what and in addition if , Haley could get Mr. Conrad-Wayne to notice her, maybe by mentioning that she followed him on Facebook and just so happened to have read all of his articles? And what if he was like, cool , and then, what if someday, years later . . .
    A story would come through that he was too busy to take. . . .
    And he would remember that plucky Junior Correspondent. . . .
    And then it would be Haley, descending through turbulent tropical skies to a remote island village on the edge of the world, with sweat stains on linen shirt, weight of digital SLR on neck, stained-edge notebook on lap, sticking to knees.
    Haley could picture it all, a big future in a big world, that started this summer . . .
    Happening to Bradley Hong! This was so wrong! Writing wasn’t even Bradley’s favorite subject! Though he was annoyingly good at it. But his real passion was physics! Physics!
    Meanwhile, Ms. DeNetto had chosen the next card. “Two of clubs.”
    Carl Powell sauntered up. At least he and Haley had no summer aspirations in common. While Carl read about basketball camp, working at the movie theater, and how there would be free popcorn for his boys, and a few lucky girls, if you knew what he meant (Haley never really knew what Carl meant), Haley just gazed out the window into the lazy June afternoon.
    The air was faded tan, the fat green leaves of the maple trees swaying lazily in a hot, pollen-coated breeze. It was so June, so the-last-day-of-school, the world ripe with possibility, but . . . Haley wasn’t going to New York this summer, or Thorny Mountain.
    In fact, she’d be spending six of the eight weeks of vacation right here in Greenhaven with the Parks and Recreation Department, where she’d worked for the last three summers, and where life-changing opportunities included fishing trash and worse out of the filters at the town pool, planting flowers around town hall, and then pulling weeds and shoveling pet leavings and trying to keep those once-promising blossoms from wilting in the long, hot sun, day after day, running in place, time slipping by.
    And yet . . .
    All that said, the summer wasn’t necessarily a total loss, because for those remaining two weeks of summer, there was something that Haley was doing. And when Haley could put aside her disappointment about the Times and Thorny Mountain, she was able to remember that this other thing was a big thing. Well, maybe. It might also be nothing. Haley didn’t know yet, and that was the main reason for her blank page.
    It was also the reason why she didn’t want to get called on right now. It was one thing to go up in front of the class and talk about things like the JCF, or Thorny Mountain, or State Select Soccer or whatever because everybody knew what those things were, and they all sounded serious and legitimate. Haley’s other thing might well be amazing. It was potentially bigger than anything anyone else was doing, but the problem was, it didn’t sound like it from the description. In fact, it sounded kinda crazy. Haley knew this, and so she’d tried to keep it secret, but thanks to chatty parents and nosy teachers, there were no secrets in middle school.
    She’d already heard the jokes, from kids like Kaz and Dawn and Carl. And she’d heard the rumblings from parents and from her relatives: What kind of summer opportunity focused on extraterrestrials? How could that at all be serious?
    Yep, these were the joys of winning the Fellowship for Alien Detection. And yet, Haley knew that what she’d discovered, the theory that had led to her winning that fellowship, was actually very serious, mind-blowingly serious, at least, again . . . maybe. She wouldn’t know until next week, when she got out on the