Star Buddies

Author's note: Don't own nothin'.


Angela started losing sleep around the beginning of May, right when reviews for finals started. She ignored the restless nights, chalking her slow mornings and dragging thoughts up to stress. She credited the unexplained pinpricks on her skin to mosquitos, as did the rest of the kids in her class. It was odd, sure, but it wasn't like it had never happened before.

The nightmares that started happening a week later had never happened before. She dreamed she was strapped down, her vision blurred and her throat weak as she was touched and rubbed with garden hoses, her hair blown around with electric fans and her skin singed with light bulbs. She struggled against whatever held her, trying to plead "Come on, cut it out" to her non-violent, non-invasive, but still unknown captors.

Each night, the nightmare would end the same way. A caring hand would stroke her hair, cooing a calming word into her ear.

"Row... row... row..."

She would giggle to herself, finishing in her mind "Gently down the stream..." before she slipped into a deeper sleep. She would wake up the next morning, still tired but excited, and tell her friends about her "awesome dream where she was abducted by aliens and nothing bad happened, it was great!".

The next week, she stopped having those dreams, but her friend Carrie started. Then Mike. Then Albert, and Sherry, and by the time summer had started, Cedric begun having the dreams too. Cedric didn't take to the nightmares as well, calling his friends in a panic saying they had actually happened, he had woken up, he had seen the aliens and they'd knocked him out and-

He was terrified, and Angela only thought it fair to give Cedric a break. She called in a long-overdue favor and got Mike to stay over at Cedric's house for a night; if nothing else, would would make the younger kid feel more welcome. A year ahead of his other friends, he'd moved to a new city, a new school, a new system... Mike and Angela were the only good friends he had made that year, and it was the least they could do.

When Cedric woke them up, it was midnight, and they weren't on his floor.

They were in a lab.