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SAM GOODE; your typical teenager, providing that your typical teenager spends half his life combing through alien journals looking for evidence his dad is still alive.

"Three hours later, at eight o’clock, Sam’s mother still isn’t home. I ask Sam where she is and he shrugs as though he doesn’t know and her absence is nothing new. Mostly we just play video games and watch TV and for dinner we eat microwavable meals. The whole time I’m there he doesn’t once wear his glasses, which is odd since I’ve never seen him without them before. Even when we ran the mile in gym class, he kept them on.

I grab them from the top of his dresser and put them on. The world becomes an instant blur and they give me a headache almost immediately.

I look at Sam. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back against his bed, with a book of aliens in his lap.

“Jesus, is your vision really this bad?” I ask.

He looks up at me. “They were my dad’s.”

I take them off.

“Do you even need glasses, Sam?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

“So why do you wear them?”

“They were my dad’s.”