Excerpt: Summer of the Aliens

Then he pointed into the distance. We knew what he was pointing at without turning to look. It was the blue haze of the wall shimmering in the heat. From afar it looked almost like mountains on the horizon, only we knew it wasn’t. There weren’t any mountains in the desert. “Heard a lot about that while I was there. When they heard where I was from they’d always ask about the wall, ask if it were true the Government is keeping it secret that aliens are hidden inside that thing.”
“Aliens,” I scoffed, trying to lighten the mood, but no one laughed with me. Lucy looked uncomfortable, like she’d sat on something prickly. Pete was just thoughtful. The truth was no one knew where the hell the wall had come from. It just appeared one day our senior year in school, 50 miles long and 500 feet wide, a single wall in the middle of nowhere that didn’t appear to be guarding anything. You could walk all the way around it, no problem, if the National Guard didn’t have a fence around it and men posted there 24-7. Newspapers called it the not-so-great wall of Arizona.