Page 67 of Technically Abducted
"His parents were worried about me adjusting, so they sent him a recipe for comfort food—"
"STOP!" Alex shouts, shooting to his feet so fast his chair topples backward. "Just... fucking stop talking!"
The silence that follows is deafening. Alex is breathing hard, staring at me like I've just told him the world is ending.
"Alex," I say quietly. "What's wrong?"
"This isn't funny," he says, his voice barely audible. "If this is some kind of joke, if you somehow found out about..."
"Found out about what?"
Alex runs his hands through his hair, pacing to my window and back. "You can't know about this. Nobody knows about this. I never told anyone—"
"Alex." I stand up, noting how he flinches when I move. "What happened to you?"
"Nothing happened to me!" The words come out too loud, too desperate. "It was a hallucination, okay? A really vivid, really fucked up drug-induced hallucination that felt real but wasn't!"
"When?" I ask simply.
"When what?"
"When did you have this hallucination?"
Alex stops pacing. For a long moment, he just stands there, shoulders hunched, looking like he wants to run.
"I was sixteen," he says finally, so quietly I almost miss it.
My heart starts pounding. "Alex..."
"I was getting high a lot back then. Bad crowd, bad choices." The words come out in a rush. "One night I was walking home from a party, completely wasted. There was this light. Blue light, everywhere, so bright I couldn't see anything else."
He's not looking at me anymore, staring out the window like he can see the past playing out on the glass.
"I woke up in this white room. Sterile, like a hospital but... different. And there was this person standing over me." Alex finally turns to look at me, and his eyes are bright with unshed tears. "Blue skin. Tall. Golden eyes that looked... scared. Like he was more afraid of me than I was of him."
The coffee cup slips from my fingers, hitting the floor and sending brown liquid across my carpet. Neither of us moves to clean it up.
"He seemed young," Alex continues. "Inexperienced. Kept apologizing, saying there'd been a mistake, that he wasn'tsupposed to take me. I was so fucked up I barely understood what was happening."
"How long were you there?"
"I don't know. Time was weird. The whole time, I kept telling myself it wasn't real. Because the alternative—that I'd actually been abducted by aliens—was too crazy to consider."
Alex sits down heavily on my couch, like the weight of the memory is too much to carry standing up.
"But it felt more real than anything else in my life," he says quietly. "And that's what scared me the most."
I sit down across from him, my mind racing. "What happened when you got back?"
"I woke up in the same alley where I'd been walking. But I felt... different. Clean. The craving for drugs was just... gone. Like someone had reached into my brain and turned off the switch."
"You got clean after that?"
"Immediately. Completely. Everyone thought it was a miracle. Even I thought it was a miracle." Alex looks at me with an expression I can't read. "Because I thought the alien thing was just my brain snapping from all the drugs."
"But it wasn't."
"No." Alex stares at me for a long moment. "If you're telling me you were actually abducted... Jesus Christ, Finn. I've been carrying around this memory for ten years, telling myself it was fantasy. Ten years of thinking I might be crazy."
