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Overview
A timely and thought-provoking environmental SF/fantasy for young adults
Seventeen-year-old Emily and her best friend Reese can't wait for summer vacation on Cape Cod. Every year, it's the same thing: high hopes that they will finally hook up with some cool guys…and it never happens. So it's totally amazing when, out of nowhere, they meet two unbelievably adorable boys who are just too cute to be true! Which, they soon discover, may be the case. A lot of odd things happen when Steve and Dave are around. Reese figures it's because they're not from around here. So where are they from, France? Well, not quite….
Summoned from the depths of the sea by the dire threat of global pollution, friendly aliens "Steve" and "Dave" have manifested themselves in human form and come ashore in a last desperate effort to save the oceans.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429996419 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/26/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 339 KB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
BLAKE NELSON is the author of several critically-acclaimed books for children and teens. They include Gender Blender, Prom Anonymous, Rock Star Superstar, and Girl. He divides his time between Portland, Oregon and New York City.
Blake Nelson is the author of several critically-acclaimed books for children and teens. They include Gender Blender, Prom Anonymous, Rock Star Superstar, and Girl. He divides his time between Portland, Oregon and New York City.
Read an Excerpt
They Came from Below
By Blake Nelson
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2007 Blake NelsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-9641-9
CHAPTER 1
"Cape Cod! Oh my god!" I said quietly to myself, staring out the airplane window. Of course it wasn't Cape Cod at all, it was just Boston harbor, but I was so excited to get there I couldn't help myself. I couldn't wait. I had been trying to concentrate on my summer-reading book, trying to do a crossword, but now I gave up on everything and just mashed my face against the little plastic window.
Soon Boston's downtown appeared beneath the airplane. It was much bigger than Indianapolis. It was much more complicated and tangled and just ... older, I guess. I could see a stadium. Was it Fenway Park? Probably. There was a river that was brown and polluted looking. The whole city was brown and grimy and smoggy in the June heat. They were having a heat wave; I had been following it on the Weather Channel. As we got closer you could see the highways leading in and out of it, like arteries going to a heart.
We landed with a thump. I got off the plane and went downstairs and there was my dad at the baggage claim, looking tan and summery. I love my dad. It was so great to see him. He gave me a big hug and we carried my stuff to the car. Then, going out of town, we stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and got delicious iced lattes and crunchy plain donuts.
I was so psyched to be going back to the Cape. My dad asked me about school and Indy and my mom, and we talked about everything. It was so fun to be riding along, letting my head lean back and watching the sun and the highway move past.
Then, after a couple hours, we got to the ocean. It was late afternoon and you could see the water through the trees and the sky was blue and the beach was so white and clean. We stopped at an overlook so I could do my ritual, which is: I get out of the car, take off my regular shoes, throw them in the backseat, and put on my flip-flops ... and the summer begins!
The first thing I did in South Point — after I unpacked and had a cheese sandwich with my dad — was run down the street to see Reese Ridgley. Her parents were sitting on their front porch in their beach clothes, having their five o'clock cocktails. I said hi to them and asked them about their summer, but before they could answer I ran inside and up the stairs to Reese's room. She was there, folding her laundry. The minute she saw me she dropped her clothes and ran to me and we both jumped up and down and hugged and then stood back and looked at each other.
"Reese, oh my god!" I squealed.
"Emily Dalton! You're finally here!" she squealed back.
I, of course, lived in Indiana and she lived in Boston, so during the year we never saw each other. But now we were back in South Point for two whole months of fun in the sun — or whatever it was we did. Reese was not a typical beach-babe type. She was kind of Goth and dressed in black a lot. But I liked that about her. She was seventeen, a year older than me, and an East Coast girl, a city girl. When I told my friends in Indiana about her they thought she sounded like a freak. But I thought she was great!
After we calmed down, our first order of business was to walk into town and see who was around in terms of people our age and boys and the general tone of stuff. Our first stop was the Rad Shack. It was supposed to be a "serious" surf shop, but it made most of its money selling joke T-shirts and trendy flip-flops. We went in and looked around and I bought some sunscreen and a hat with orange flowers on it and Reese bought some sunglasses, which looked very punk, since she was already wearing black cutoffs and a DangerFactory T-shirt.
After that, we went across the street to Antonio's Meatball and Pizza Palace and ordered two "specials" — a slice and a Coke for $2.99. We flopped at a booth and breathed in the ocean air and the summer heat and watched a tourist family order different combinations of slices and Cokes (they could have just ordered three specials, but they didn't know how and spent twice as much money on the same thing).
Then Harold and Carl came in. They were local boys who worked at a garage at the edge of town. They had harassed us last summer, making fun of Reese mostly, calling her Miss Scary or Hairy Scary because she wore black and had really black hair on her arms. But they didn't say anything today. Maybe they had grown up and matured a little. Or maybe they just forgot who we were. They flopped at the booth closest to the door and watched the people on the sidewalk.
After Antonio's, Reese and I walked home along the beach. It was so beautiful and relaxing, with the sun on the water and a soft breeze blowing and our toes curling in the sand. Also, there seemed to be some cute guys around. Reese was especially psyched about that. She was determined to get some "boy action," as she called it. The summer before, we had blown it in various ways, mostly by being too shy or chickening out. But this year we were older and more mature and more determined. Boys, adventures, falling in love — whatever was going to happen, we were ready!
CHAPTER 2That night I made a special dinner for my dad, which was pork chops and rice and pineapple, which is his favorite — especially if you burn the rice a little.
My dad is so cool. He is a professor of marine biology at MIT in Cambridge, though he is now semi-retired and doesn't actually teach classes. He is older than most dads (he had me when he was forty-six), so he has white hair and he kind of limps around. He spends most days smoking his pipe and sitting on the porch thinking about science and the ocean. He has tons of books about philosophy and poetry and he listens to old jazz records that he keeps in a special cabinet where the sea air won't warp them. He lives about half the year in South Point. Everyone knows him and likes him. Once when his car got stuck in the sand, Sheriff Moshofsky and his deputy personally helped him get his car out, and they didn't charge him and after that they always called him "the Professor."
I should also tell about my mom. She's not as nice as my dad, but that's natural because she's my full-time parent, so she has to discipline me more and have a more practical approach to my future. I live with her, my two stepbrothers, and our dog in Indianapolis, which is nice if you like flat places that have no beaches. My mom and dad get along okay. She is much younger and had a second husband for a while (result: my younger stepbrothers), but then she got divorced from him, too, so there's a thing with my mom that she is pretty independent and also way smarter than your typical mom. That's how my dad met her; she was a brilliant student at MIT, though now she sells real estate around Indianapolis — not that that doesn't take brains, too; it's just different.
Anyway, so I made pork chops, rice, and pineapple for my dad and kind of messed up the pork chops because I hadn't cooked in a while. But I put a lot of extra pineapple on the pork chops and extra pineapple juice on our plates because that's the best part anyway. The wind had come up and there was a summer storm coming, so we turned down the lights and ate in candlelight while Dad listened to the BBC radio news. He likes the British news, I guess because British people are smarter and it's not just "murders and the weather" like American news.
When we finished dinner I cleaned up and Reese called and said we should walk on the beach because it was windy and spooky and there might be lightning later.
"You girls be careful," said my dad when Reese arrived. He went to the kitchen to make tea, but I insisted he sit down and I made it for him. I was still so happy to see my dad, it was the least I could do. Reese helped and then we all had tea, which is very civilized and British and good for you. Then Reese and I put on rain ponchos and walked to the beach to check out the storm.
CHAPTER 3During the next week Reese and I established our pattern for the summer: Wake up. Go to each other's house. Eat breakfast. Get our beach stuff. Go to the beach. Sit around and read magazines or whatever. Walk up and down the beach and check out boys. Go back home and take showers and put on moisturizer. Walk to Antonio's Meatball and Pizza Palace in the afternoon. Check in at the Rad Shack and say hi to the cute guy who works there (who was unfortunately twenty-five — too old — though Reese flirted with him anyway).
The only bad thing was if Harold and Carl spotted us. They were back to their old ways of harassing us. They would always say something crude or stupid, mostly to Reese, about her arm hair or her breasts (she had pretty big ones), which just proved how immature they were and how they secretly had a crush on her.
That was our day schedule. At night we would usually go to Reese's, because her parents had satellite TV and a DVD player. Some nights we hung out with my dad, because Reese thought he was the cutest dad ever and liked how distinguished he was and how he smoked a pipe. At my house we had to entertain ourselves without satellite TV, so we would lie on the floor and play cards or do tarot while my dad listened to old Charlie Parker records.
So one night, after about a week, Reese and I were at my house, playing gin rummy on the floor. At about ten-thirty, the phone rang. My dad answered it. We didn't usually get phone calls that late, so I noticed it and Reese and I both stopped playing our game.
"Oh, hello, Sheriff," said my dad.
Reese and I looked at each other.
My dad listened. He nodded his head. "I see," he said. "Well, sure, I could take a look. ... All right. ... About twenty minutes ...?"
He hung up the phone.
Reese and I both stared at him. "What did the sheriff want?" I said.
"Nothing. Just a dead seal or something washed up on Hadley Beach. They don't know what it is. They want me to come down."
Reese and I looked at each other. "Can we come?" I said.
"I don't know why you'd want to," said my father, getting his coat. "It's just going to be a dead animal carcass."
"We like dead animal carcasses," said Reese.
"It might smell bad," said my dad.
"We don't care," Reese and I said together.
"Well, if you feel like going for a ride."
Reese and I always felt like going for a ride. That was one thing about South Point in the summer. It was great and fun and everything, but very little actually happened. You had to grab any chance for excitement that came along.
CHAPTER 4We found some sweatshirts and got in my dad's Volvo. I sat in the front and Reese sat in back. We drove through South Point, where stupid Harold was sitting in his pickup truck, drinking beer and talking to some younger boys on bikes. Probably teaching them the finer points of harassing tourist girls.
We got to the highway and drove the eight miles to Hadley Beach. It was dark and the moon was big and glowing and gave everything that special moonlight shine. As we got closer you could see glimpses of the Atlantic through the trees. We came around a bend and suddenly you could see the whole ocean, silver and shimmering, the moonlight on the waves, far out to sea. Cape Cod was the most romantic place ever.
We pulled into the parking lot at Hadley Beach. I was surprised there were so many cars. There was a big white truck with the words HAZARDOUS MATERIALS on the side. There were two local cop cars and a Massachusetts State Police car. There was also a white van that had some official government logo on the door. It seemed like a lot of people for one dead seal. Reese, who was leaning forward between the two front seats, gripped my arm with excitement.
My dad parked and we walked to the wood staircase that went down to the beach. People were bunched at the top of the stairs, police and people on cell phones and walkie-talkies. They acted kind of paranoid. They wouldn't let us down, but my dad told them he was Professor Dalton and had been called by the sheriff. Even this didn't get him permission. Someone had to call someone on a walkie-talkie first. Down below, a crowd gathered around a thing that looked like a shiny white garbage bag. Farther along the beach there were other official people with flashlights looking at the beach and into the surf and not letting people walk through. Someone had a dog, and a policeman made him turn around and walk the other way. The dog was barking and freaking out.
Reese and I watched all this from the parking lot while my dad waited for permission to go down. Someone finally said okay and we started down the stairs, but the police stopped Reese and me. We were not allowed. We protested and complained to my dad, but he told us to wait in the car. We didn't want to, but more police had arrived and they began pushing everyone away from the edge of the parking lot. It was very strange. The cops were as curious as everyone else, so even as they told us there was nothing to see, they snuck looks at the white glob down on the beach.
Reese and I pretended to return to our car; then we ran to the other side of the parking lot and crept to the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach. From there we could see my dad. The policemen led him forward. People talked to him and talked into their walkie-talkies and someone with a very strong flashlight shone it on the white thing and it kind of sparkled and glowed in a strange way. Everyone stepped back with surprise. But not my dad. He bent down and touched it.
Then a helicopter came. I couldn't believe it. A real Coast Guard helicopter came down the beach and hovered above the parking lot. Reese and I were like whoooa! By now more police cars had arrived and some other official cars, Parks Department, et cetera. They made everyone drive their cars to one side, and landed the helicopter in the parking lot. It was superloud and dust and sand flew everywhere. Reese and I stayed hidden in the bushes by the edge of the cliff. We watched two paramedic guys jump out of the helicopter with a stretcher and hurry down the wood stairs. When they reached the bottom there was a big conference.
There were about thirty people now, gathered around the white thing. You could tell they weren't sure what to do. Finally the paramedics wrapped the white thing in an orange plastic tarp and rolled it onto their stretcher. They carried it up the stairs. Everyone wanted to help. The cops all followed the paramedics while they ran with it across the parking lot. They loaded the stretcher into the helicopter, and everyone stepped back. In another blast of sand and gravel, the helicopter lifted off the ground again. People had to turn away. When the helicopter was gone, everyone kind of stood around. One guy shone his flashlight on his hand and something must have happened, because everyone started looking at their hands. One guy started rubbing his hand on his pants.
We crept back from the cliff and returned to the car. My dad was waiting for us. He had a dazed look on his face. We were like, "What was that?"
He shook his head. "I have no idea."
"Was it a seal?" I asked.
"No," said my dad. "It wasn't anything like a seal."
"Was it alive?" asked Reese.
My dad shook his head again. "I ... I'm not sure."
"Where are they taking it?" I said, looking into the sky.
"To the Coast Guard base. In Crutchfield."
"Are they trying to save it?"
"I assume so," he said. He looked at his hand. At the front of it and the back. We all looked. But there was nothing to see. "I need to talk to some of my colleagues," murmured my dad. "Let's go."
CHAPTER 5For the next couple days I listened to the news and watched the TV to see if they said anything about the white blob. Usually if they save something with a Coast Guard helicopter they put it on the news as one of those heartwarming stories about how nice humans are to animals. But there was nothing about it. Also, my dad went totally into science mode from that moment on. Like we got home that night and my dad went straight onto his computer and was talking on his phone and when I woke up the next morning he was still there, in the exact same place, reading printouts and answering the phone really fast when it rang. I went over to Reese's for breakfast, and when we stopped back on the way to the beach my dad had fallen asleep on the couch with his reading glasses still on. I took them off and put them on his desk. Reese lifted his feet onto the couch and we put a blanket over him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from They Came from Below by Blake Nelson. Copyright © 2007 Blake Nelson. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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