In retrospect, Lana should have known better. She should have seen it coming from miles away. All these years, it had been so clear that her parents really loved each other—more than anything else in the world. It was evident in the way Dad always stood up for Mom, sided with her no matter what havoc she wreaked, and still stole kisses when he thought nobody was looking. Lana had been so wrong. She thought Dad was her only friend, the one who took responsibility and saved his child from what would have been a horrible life without him in it. But the reality was that the one who had saved her was none other than the woman she had spent her entire life criticizing. The reality was that her father never even wanted her to begin with.

Kyungsoo awkwardly apologized over and over again, refusing to let up no matter how many times Lana insisted she didn’t want to talk about it. She soon tuned him out as the two packed up their belongings and vacated the hotel room, deciding it best to check out early. Lana didn’t want to see her parents again for a long, long time. She wanted to be taken as far away as possible, and Kyungsoo insisted he knew the perfect time and place to cheer her up. So she tried to brush what she had seen in Vegas to the back of her mind as the two boarded the bus. She customarily slipped into the diner booth as her friend took to the wheel, immediately punching in the coordinates for their next stop.

There was a crack of thunder and a swirl of light, and the next thing Lana knew, she was falling—falling straight out of the sky and plummeting hundreds of feet toward the ground below.

“CODE RED MARK ALPHA TWO PUT ON YOUR SEATBELT,” Kyungsoo spat out in a frantic, seamless string of words.

But it was too late. Before Lana even had time to register what was happening, the bus crashed into the ground, and Lana collided with the roof. She fell back to the floor, somehow landing softly on the mattress that had come loose from the bed.

There was a long moment of silence as everything went still. When the dust finally settled and Lana realized she was somehow still alive, she carefully peeked up from the mattress. Kyungsoo had already unbuckled his seatbelt and was hurrying down the aisle toward her. She picked up her aching body, cradling her pounding head in one hand as she sat up in bed.

“Are you alright?” he breathed, latching onto her elbow.

“I’m fine,” she groaned. “What on Earth happened?”

Kyungsoo bit his bottom lip sheepishly. “I guess I misentered the coordinates slightly,” he explained. “Sorry. Thank goodness you weren’t hurt.”

“Yeah, I have no idea how either of us is still alive after the fall,” she mumbled, quickly glancing around the bus. Aside from the mattress, a few cereal boxes, and Lana’s school bag, nothing else seemed to have been the slightest bit affected by the drop. In fact, the massive pile of thises and thats on Kyungsoo’s table remained perfectly still, as if everything that sat atop it was superglued to the surface.

“That’s because the inside of the bus is kept in a suspended state,” he elucidated as he helped her to her feet. “Nothing outside really affects what’s inside. Dad never explained exactly how it works.” He shrugged.

“So the bus is okay then?” Lana wondered. “It wasn’t totally wrecked in the fall?”

Kyungsoo’s eyes widened. “Oh, well, it probably was,” he mumbled before grinning. “But don’t worry about that! It’s been in much worse crashes than this before. Its auto-repair system will have it shiny and new in a jiffy.”

He flashed two thumbs up and turned to scurry back to the dashboard. Head still reeling, Lana joined him, peering through the windshield. Outside was nothing but desert, but she could just make out the blurry lights of what looked like a neighboring town out in the distance.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the far-off lights.

“Roswell, New Mexico,” he answered matter-of-factly. “At least, that’s what I was aiming for. To be honest, I expected the area to be a little more developed than this. I must have gotten the time coordinates wrong, too. I’ll have to be more careful next time.”

He turned to the junk table and, after scrambling through it for a moment, casually pulled out a full-size bicycle that looked just as antique as the bus did. Lana blinked and rubbed her eyes vigorously, wondering just how hard she hit her head. But Kyungsoo merely beamed back at her as he steadied it on the bus floor.

“Let me do a look over the systems,” he said, pulling a handful of coins out of his coat pocket and handing it to her. “Why don’t you go into town and get yourself something cool to drink? By the time you get back, the bus will be in tip-top shape.”

“Alright.” She pocketed the money and wheeled the bike down the doorsteps, calling back behind her, “I’ll be back in a little while. Don’t you dare leave without me!”

Kyungsoo chuckled as she disappeared from the bus. She turned to watch as the doors creaked shut, only to gasp and drop the bike when she first caught sight of the vehicle from the outside.

It had been reduced to a pile of mangled scrap metal, no longer remotely recognizable as the old blue bus it used to be. If it weren’t for the weird voodoo magic Kyungsoo’s dad had apparently cast on it, the two teens would have been toast. She shuddered at the thought as she picked up the handlebars and hopped aboard the bike.

After only a ten-minute ride, Lana was drenched with sweat from the desert heat. She rolled into town, wheeling down the street past little houses and convenient stores until she found an old-timey diner. She parked the bike against the wall and sauntered inside.

The diner interior was just as Lana would have imagined, stereotypical like a Hollywood movie and filled with the sounds of chatter and sizzling pans. Against the wall lay a line of booths packed with hungry patrons munching on pancakes and eggs. On the other side was a rounded bar surrounded by tens of cushioned stools. Lana squeezed into an empty spot as a waitress hurried up to attend to her.

“What’ll it be?” she asked, smacking on a piece of chewing gum. She flipped open a notepad, hand clasping a pen as it hovered inches from the paper, ready to jot down the order.

“I’ll have a chocolate milkshake, please.”

The waitress nodded and quickly disappeared without another word. As she waited, Lana dove a hand into her pocket, pulling out the myriad of coins Kyungsoo had handed to her. She sifted through them, squinting as she searched for a coin from an appropriate year. It was only then that she realized she didn’t even know what time period she was sitting in. Sighing, she picked out the most beat-up quarter she could find, hoping the waitress wouldn’t look at the “2009” etched into it until long after she and Kyungsoo had disappeared.

The waitress soon returned, setting a tall glass topped with whipped cream and a cherry down on the countertop before scurrying away. Lana sipped on the creamy milkshake, unconsciously sighing in relief as the cold liquid slid down . As she continued drinking, she couldn’t help but let her eyes wander to two spouses chatting nearby. The man was thumbing through a newspaper, occasionally grunting as his wife talked his ear off.

“Have you heard about all the UFOs people have been seeing around here lately?” she prodded.

He flipped to the next page, grumbling, “Yep. It’s right here in the paper.”

Lana smirked. How ironic that Roswell was renowned for its 1947 UFO crash, and here this couple was talking about UFO sightings.

“Don’t you think it’s weird though?” the wife insisted, shuddering. “I mean, what if there really are aliens flying around in the sky right now as we speak? Little, grey aliens with big, black eyes and slimy skin—”

The husband grunted, cutting her off. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such thing as aliens, and even if there were, what business would they have spending all their time floating around in the clouds anyway? Why wouldn’t they just come down and greet us already?”

The woman opened to speak, but she would never get the chance to reply. Right at that moment, a little boy no more than ten years old came bursting into the diner, panting as if he had been running for miles. Without a moment’s rest to catch his breath, he shrieked at the top of his lungs, “EVERYBODY, YOU HAVE TO COME OUTSIDE! COME LOOK! I JUST SAW A UFO FALL FROM THE SKY AND CRASH OUT IN THE DESERT!”

Author's Note
lol that last line