Return to Paradise

Searching through the blog’s archives, I’d come across a few stories that sounded like they might have had to do with the Loric or Mogs. The site is mostly a lot of posts that look like they belong in one of those “Elvis Still Lives!” magazines at the grocery store, but some of them sound true—or at least like they could be true, given what I’ve seen. I knew I could help the blog by telling them some of what I know, and by doing that I could get them to help me search for clues as to where John and Sam and Invisible Girl might be now.

So after browsing the blog for a while, I’d contacted GUARD and told him I was from Paradise and that I thought he might be right. There were a couple of weird emails from him full of instructions that had made me wonder if I was dealing with some kind of messed-up lunatic wearing a tinfoil hat—a guide on how to hide my IP address, passwords to access restricted sections of the blog, rules on when and how I could contact him—but after a while we started to get to know one another. I guess I started to trust him, because before long I’d told him about what happened at the school that night.

GUARD doesn’t know everything, though. I’ve seen enough specials on the news to realize that I should question the identity of anyone I meet on the internet, especially now that I know the Mogs would do anything to find John and the others. I didn’t tell him my name or anything. Just that I saw things that made me a true believer. On the blog I go by the name JOLLYROGER182, which I stole from the skull-and-crossbones flags flown at the Paradise Pirates football games and some of my granddad’s old navy stuff that’s framed in the upstairs room. He was part of the Fighting 182nd in the navy. I wonder what he’d say if I told him I was gearing up to maybe have to one day fight for Earth.

There are a couple of other people who are regulars on the blog, or “editors” as we call ourselves. Usually it takes a long time to earn that title, but I must have really convinced GUARD that I was legit, because he gave me full access to the blog pretty fast. The others are fine and all, but GUARD is the de facto ringleader, and the dude who’s the most serious about everything that’s going on.

I’m happy to see he’s online. We start chatting immediately.

JOLLYROGER182: wassup man

JOLLYROGER182: anything new 2night?

GUARD: Hey, JR. Still trying to make sense of that thing in TN.

GUARD is convinced that a freak storm in Tennessee was caused by one of the Loric’s powers, but we haven’t been able to track down any evidence. The story came from a police officer who had too much whiskey one night and started yelling to everyone at a bar about how some magic kids with the power to control thunderstorms were tearing across the state, and somehow that made it into the local paper. I called to see if I could talk to the officer, pretending I was someone from the Paradise police department, but they told me the guy had been transferred to a different county and they couldn’t put me in touch with him. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s the FBI’s version of sending a dog to a nice farm upstate, which probably provides more evidence that it was John and the others than anything else.

JOLLYROGER182: want me 2 look into it some more? i can try to call around again

GUARD: No. Take a look at this. Sound familiar?

He sends me a link to a post on an online journal. It belongs to some girl named Meredith down in Miami. It starts out really sad—her parents think she’s on drugs and have had her in and out of institutions—and I can’t figure out why GUARD is interested in it. Then, after a few paragraphs, I get to what he’s talking about: the reason her parents think she’s on drugs is because she says she watched some random dude on the streets of Miami use what she describes as “mind powers” to shove her boyfriend up against the wall of a coffee shop, keeping him pinned there a few feet off the ground.

My chat window dings while I’m reading.

GUARD: What do you think? Telekinesis?

GUARD: Could this be your friend? The time stamp on the journal entry is yesterday, but she doesn’t say when the coffee shop event happened.

GUARD: Emailed to find out more info but she hasn’t gotten back to me.

JOLLYROGER182: hold on

Luckily, this girl’s listed the facility her parents had checked her into and her full name. Not exactly smart stuff to put on the internet, but great for me. I look up the hospital and call the front desk.

“Hi,” I say when a woman picks up. “I’m trying to get in contact with Meredith Harris.”

“Just one minute,” the woman says. I can hear the clacking of keys in the background for a few moments before her voice comes back again. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir, but Ms. Harris was checked out a few days ago.”

“Oh, um . . . ,” I say, trying to come up with my next question. I realize that I probably should have thought this through more before I called, but thinking before I act isn’t really my style. I go off instinct.

“Um, that can’t be right,” I continue. On my computer screen, I see the date of the journal post, and something clicks in my head: It’ll be easier to figure out if it was John in Miami if I know when this chick first got sent to the hospital. “Maybe I have the wrong number. When was your Meredith Harris checked in?”

“Well . . . ,” the woman says. I can tell she’s hesitant to give me any more info.

“Please, ma’am, this is my sister. I’m just trying to make sure I know where she’s at.”

I must have come up with the right amount of sob story, because she gives me a date—one that puts Meredith Harris going into the hospital at the same time I was trying to kick John’s ass on the hayride.