Free From a Distant Star by Karen McQuestion

from the pee tube. Eric and I were asked to leave the room, which was fine by me. Much as I loved Lucas, this was not an image I wanted to commit to memory. I wandered into the kitchen and looked out the window of the back door. Eric had the same idea, and soon we were shoulder to shoulder.
    He said, “You know, I searched the news while you were talking to those people in the other room, and I came up with nothing. What did she say—there was an aircraft collision? You’d think it would be a big deal if they have all these people searching.”
    “That’s what they’d like us to believe.”
    “You don’t believe it?” He took a step back to take in my expression. “How come?”
    “Something about their story doesn’t add up,” I said, and leaned in to whisper. “I think there’s more to it than they’re saying.” It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him more, to confide in him about the object I’d found in the field, but I held back. Not just yet.
    “Yeah, something’s off about this,” he agreed. “It’s probably one of those top-secret military things. And if they don’t want the public to know, there’s no way we’re ever going to find out.”

CHAPTER TEN
    That night, when no one was looking, Lucas pulled off his pain patch and left it on the side table next to his water cup. When his mother asked about it the next morning, he said he didn’t need it anymore.
    And that was just the beginning. Every day, he seemed better. His wispy hair seemed noticeably thicker from one day to the next. It was happening so fast it was like a dream. And every step of the way I proudly thought,
I did this. Me. If it had been left up to the Walkers and modern medicine, he’d be dead by now
.
    By then, I’d already transferred the object I’d found in the field, moving it from Eric’s barn to my bedroom closet at home. I was afraid one of the Walkers might find it, or worse yet, that the agents might return to do a more thorough search and confiscate it. I still didn’t know what it was, this disc-shaped thing that fell from the sky. Something illegal that had been smuggled into the country? Or a secret military weapon in the testing stages? I was willing to believe anything at this point. The one thing I was becoming sure of was that the object and Lucas’s recovery were somehow connected. It had to be the disturbance Mrs. Kokesh had mentioned. I wasn’t sure how or why the two things were connected. It could be anything. Maybe the military was using this object for chemical warfare and the chemicals had a healing effect on Lucas’s cancer,and the potion was a separate thing entirely. I decided that when all the commotion settled down, I would try to figure it out.
    And there was commotion.
    Word travels fast in a small community, and soon Lucas’s friends, the ones who’d stopped coming around when they thought he was dying, came to visit the farm in droves. I think every member of the senior class came at some point that first week, so many converging on the farm at once that Mrs. Walker made them come inside in shifts. By that time, she’d allowed Lucas to get dressed in regular clothes, though he’d lost so much weight he had to borrow Eric’s jeans. He still wasn’t very talkative, but his speech seemed less halting and he could hold a conversation. The guys on the football team asked if he’d be playing next year since he’d be a senior again and he smiled his new, thin-lipped smile and said, “I’ll have to see how it goes.” They clapped him on the back and told jokes and he grinned at all the right times and I breathed a sigh of relief. He was almost back to normal.
    For days, I yearned to talk to him alone, but there was always someone around. I wanted to ask what he remembered about the night I put the potion on his lips and kissed him. Did he hear me when he was in the coma? Did he know how close he’d been to death?
    The visiting nurses still came, but less frequently, and on day