Free Mr. Fahrenheit by T. Michael Martin

pics, though,” CR said, breath quickening again, “what if—what if there’s a GPS on the drone, and the government tracks it to the quarry? If I get arrested, man, I’m ineligible for scholarships. We have to do something. Please, okay? ASAP. Now. Tonight.”
    â€œDo what?”
    â€œI don’t know! Pull it outta the lake, break the GPS, blow it up, light the damn thing on fire. Something , okay?”
    Benji thought about that. He would love to pull the saucer out of the lake. Even if they waited until after the homecoming game to decide what to do, they would have to retrieve it from the ice first anyway. Then they would have the chance to get a closer look at the saucer, inspect it, and once CR and Zeeko saw that it wasn’t a drone, they wouldn’t just want to turn it over without discovering whatever secrets might hide within that chromium-colored mystery.
    That can still happen , Benji tried to tell himself. Once we pull it out, we can all figure out what to do, together.
    But how in the hell , said Papaw’s voice, do you plan to pull it out?
    Benji suddenly felt light-headed. He closed his eyes, thinking. . . .
    And when his eyes opened, he saw something strange.
    Way at the far end of the midway, the front face of the carnival haunted house seemed to be flying into the sky, like Dorothy’s home riding the twister to Oz. A moment passed before Benji understood the illusion.
    A crane . It’s being lifted by a crane.
    â€œCR, can you get everyone to delete the pictures before your dad gets online?”
    â€œI—I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. But what if that thing has a GPS?”
    â€œYou know that big tow truck at the quarry?” Benji said. “The one with a magnetic winch, by the gate?” CR grunted impatiently in the affirmative. “Does it still work?” Benji asked.
    â€œI guess. Why?”
    Benji smiled. “Because I think I’ve got a plan.”

6
    B enji rode his bike to the Bedford Falls High School football stadium that afternoon after he and Papaw finished at the carnival. CR had practice, which Ellie and Zeeko (as the class videographer and team trainer) would be attending, too.
    Benji cut through “downtown” Bedford Falls to get there, pedaling past the liquor stores and pawnshop and soaped-over storefront windows and fast-food drive-throughs. A ghost moon was rising in the late-afternoon sky, and it brought back a random memory: He was in the backseat of Papaw’s cruiser at night, staring at nothing in particular with his forehead cool against the window, when all of a sudden he gasped, “PAPAW,” in the awestruck voice of every six-year-old kid who ever stumbled upon a discovery of historic dimensions. “THE MOON IS FOLLOWING OUR CAR.”
    Papaw, of course, laughed his ass off. And Benji had realized something: The most beautiful ideas are the most fragile, and the most dangerous. If they shatter, they cut you.
    As you get older, you retreat into the safety of shutting up. You stop sharing your hazardous hopes with anyone . . . evenyourself, eventually. To Benji, the really terrifying thing about growing up wasn’t that it seemed hard, but that it seemed so easy , so effortless to make the hundreds of compromises that slippery-slope you into a quietly desperate life.
    Maybe that’s what happened to Bedford Falls , he thought now, feeling he understood something important about his hometown for the first time. Bedford Falls had once been a boomtown for a handful of industries, most recently natural gas, but now it felt futureless. And when people don’t have a future, they get nostalgic instead. Now Bedford Falls was just what (generous) people might call “a sleepy town.”
    Sleepy’s okay. But the sleepiness here seems so dreamless.
    But Benji smiled as he zoomed through the stadium’s parking lot, which was jam-packed because of all the FIGs and reporters here