Visitors by R. L. Stine

“You were being so weird, I thought you were the aliens,” I said.
    I sat back in my chair, letting this new information sink in. It was still so hard to believe. I was an alien!
    “What about Will?” I asked. “Is he an alien, too?”
    “No,” Mom replied. “He’s our own, human child. He was born soon after we found you.”
    It figured Will would get to be the human child.
    “But we love you just as much as we love Will,” Mom insisted.
    I was still in shock. So much was happening at once.
    “We hoped you’d never have to know the truth,” Dad told me. “But as you grew older, you became more and more obsessed with aliens. Without realizing it, you were searching for your roots. For your true identity.”
    “Does Will know about me?” I asked them.
    Dad shook his head. “We’ve never told him anything. If you want him to know, it’s up to you to tell him. We’ll never say a word to him unless you ask us to.”
    It wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of teasing I’d get from Will if he knew I was an alien. “Don’t tell him,” I said. “I don’t want him to know.”
    Mom returned the hologram screen to the closet. “I suppose it’s best to keep this hidden away,” she said. “But if you ever want to come up and look at it, just let us know.”
    They each kissed me. Then we made our way downstairs.
    I’m an alien, I thought. An alien!
    It explained so much. Like why I felt such a jolt when I stepped inside that figure eight in the woods, and Summer and Jeff felt nothing.
    I trudged to my room, feeling weary and dazed. My mind raced with a million weird thoughts.
    I’m The One, I realized. I heard my true father say it.
    I’m The One chosen from all the rest of my peopleto battle the aliens who have come to Earth.
    But how? What can I do against so many of them?
    I lay on my bed and closed my eyes, thinking hard. Those egg-shaped aliens didn’t seem to recognize me. The one inside me was sending his brain waves to me. He never once suspected that I wasn’t human.
    Yes, that’s it. I’m not human, I realized.
    The egg alien inside me must have died—because I’m not human!
    Suddenly, I pictured the leader. The biggest, ugliest, most powerful alien.
    What had I overheard about that big alien? They need the leader to survive—or they’d all die.
    Maybe there’s a way to defeat him, I thought. If I can do that, I can defeat them all.
    But how?
    My head swirled with crazy thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, but tossed and turned in a strange half-dream state, my mind racing.
    Rikki, Ms. Crenshaw, and the others were going to force all the kids at school to swallow those aliens. The aliens would live in their bodies forever.
    Tomorrow…tomorrow…
    They planned to carry out their plan tomorrow.
    But how? How were they going to do it?
    How would they force each kid, one by one, to swallow an alien?
    Think, I instructed myself. Think, Ben. What is special about tomorrow?
    “Oh!” I sat up in bed with a cry. I knew! Suddenly, I knew exactly what they planned to do!

28
    “Ben, change your shirt,” Mom said the next morning. “You’re having your school picture taken today. Don’t you want to look nice?”
    Actually, looking nice was about the last thing on my mind. But I dutifully went upstairs and changed into a white button-down shirt.
    “That’s better,” Mom said. She smoothed my hair over my ears. I suddenly realized that she’d done that all my life—smoothed my hair over my ears, I mean. And now I understood why.
    “Ben doesn’t have time to get his picture taken,” Will teased. “He’s too busy hunting aliens. He has to hunt for them at all times!”
    I considered offering Will up as a sacrifice to theegg-shaped aliens. They’d take over his personality. I thought it would be an improvement.
    Then I shuddered. That could really happen, I realized. That could happen today.
    At school, the kids looked extra nice. I could tell that their parents had made them dress a little