Disclaimer: My head's not big! And I don't own Invader Zim! Jhonen Vasquez does.

Chapter Two: Live can bear almost

... but in fact it was Coach Walrus, the gym teacher, who had a hold on both boys' collars and was marching them into the skool. "Your pummelling was amusing for a while, kids, but now it's just scary!"

Never in his life had Dib been so relieved to be on his way to the principal's office.

This time both Torque and Dib got in trouble for fighting. Torque nearly exploded when the sentence was handed down. "Whaddyamean THIRTY minutes for fighting? HOCKEY PLAYERS only get five!" Torque's outburst netted him an additional ten minutes, giving Dib a decent head start for leaving skool grounds. Whew, so many good things were happening today, he couldn't keep count any more! When his detention time was up, Dib wasted no time bolting. He ran all the way home where he slammed the door behind him. Safe! Well, until tomorrow, that was.

No, not even until then. His relief was short lived. Gaz, who'd arrived home earlier, flew out of the living room and tore into Dib, even though at the time she had given no sign of noticing the drama being enacted for her benefit. She backed him into a corner of the kitchen and proceeded to hurl everything within reach at him.

"HOW DARE YOU!! I wanted to DESTROY that JERK!" she shrieked, throwing cups and plates as Dib frantically tried to keep clear of the non-stop fusillade of missiles. Actually, she could have easily taken Torque with one arm tied behind her back and enjoyed doing so, but was furious at having lost her chance.

"Gaz, please!" A mug exploded against the wall over Dib's head as he ducked. When Gaz yanked open a clattering drawer full of sharp utensils Dib decided not to push his luck any further. He dodged around her and dove for his room, ducking and weaving as Gaz flung a hastily grabbed handful. That they all missed did nothing to improve Gaz's mood. She worked off the additional spite by throwing more items until one final large object that sounded like the blender shook Dib's closed door. Gaz's loud footsteps stomped back to the living room, where the game sounds began once more.

Dib breathed a long sigh of relief. He was once again safe in his room, a dimly lit cavern of coolness... a room filled with everything he loved most... his refuge from all the bullies and from Gaz.

Or was Gaz a bully too? Naw, she couldn't be. A bully was someone who picked on those smaller and younger than they themselves were. Or was a bully anyone who controlled you through fear... regardless of age and size? Dib used to think he knew what the word bully meant, but when he considered Gaz he wasn't so sure any more.

Dib sat at his desk and decided his homework could wait, as it rarely took him more than half an hour. In any event, his current project was of far greater significance.

He looked through some back issues of his UFO magazines before booting up his computer to continue researching his latest fixation, aliens. While some theories suggested that the aliens would be friendly, not all of them were so optimistic. Dib had long ago decided to err on the side of caution and to conduct himself as if these beings were out to terrorize, enslave, and destroy his planet given half a chance.

And from the exhaustive list of alien encounters he had compiled, it seemed like every tenth person on the planet, people from even the humblest walks of life, barely a single one with even the slightest interest in the paranormal, had had a close encounter of some kind with an alien.

"Where's the sense in this?" Dib stormed, shaking his clenched fists at the ceiling in his frustration. "I've studied aliens more than anybody... and I've never seen even a UFO!"

An actual sighting would be the culmination, the apogee, so to speak, of his life long obsessive study with the subject. It was something he owed to himself as well as to the world.

Finally, figuring it to be dinnertime, Dib cautiously opened his door and peered out. The hall was strewn with broken cutlery and assorted household items. Whoever would be cleaning up this mess, it would certainly not be Gaz.

Hoping she had cooled down at least somewhat, Dib prepared their microwave dinners and placed one on the coffee table for his sister. Only then did he see the empty cookie package, chip bags and candy wrappers piled high around her.

"Here's your supper, Gaz."

Gaz scowled at him. "I'm not hungry... any more. You sure took your sweet time preparing dinner."

Dib decided not to risk reminding her of why dinner was late. "Well, it's ready now."

"I won't eat it 'til I'm good and ready, Dib." By the looks of it, that wouldn't be any time soon. "You also took your sweet time coming home today."

"I got detention."

"Why." Gaz never bothered to raise her voice at the end of her questions. She didn't ask for answers. She demanded them.

"For fighting. Torque." Even though Gaz had witnessed the entire thing, Dib didn't dare reply any other way.

Gaz's lip curled with scorn and triumph. "See. I don't know why you even bother. You couldn't fight your way out of a paper bag set on fire and put out with acid."

Dib retreated to the kitchen where he ate his own microwaved supper. After cleaning up after himself and then picking up the hall and kitchen, he retrieved his laptop and headphones, got a soda from the fridge and headed for the garage. After climbing to the roof, he carefully pulled the ladder up after himself just in case.

A few weeks earlier, the Professor, absentminded as ever, had put the ladder away while Dib was on the roof, not remembering he hadn't taken it out in the first place. When a storm began brewing, Dib had called down the chimney for help. Holding an umbrella, Gaz had come out almost immediately. Pointing to the gathering clouds while trying not to lose his footing, the shivering Dib had begged her to tell their father he was still up there, to get the ladder, to do something!! But Gaz had come out to enjoy the show, not to help him. Near panic, Dib looked around for the ladder one last time and noticed the eaves trough. Nimbly he skittered across the roof, grabbing the rain spout just as the rain began to lash down in earnest. Dib slid down the spout as if it was a fire pole, barely ahead of the oncoming rain, and dove through an open window... right into a sink full of water.

The roof was another of Dib's refuges; very few children could throw anything heavy up this far.

It was right here, in fact, that he had heard that alien transmission six months ago, but nothing like it since.

Dib sat down against the chimney, opened his soda and drank deeply, then began to review his day. He'd had a good breakfast, he wasn't blamed for breaking the water fountain, Ms. Bitters hadn't caught him empty-handed, he'd escaped getting beaten up by Torque... twice, and Gaz had attacked him only once. Lately he was down to living one day at a time, and today had been a good day... an exceptionally good one, actually.

"Then why do I feel so... so hollow?"

Dib knew why, even if he couldn't have put it into words. His life had no direction. He was always running, and always running away, never toward anything. At skool, being picked on and laughed at, he wished he was at home.... and at home... once more being picked on and laughed at... he wished he was at skool.

The worst thing about today had been that scene with Gaz. Even with that sort of incident happening more and more often lately, Dib had long ago stopped trying to confide in anyone about his problems with his sister. When he tried turning to his father he got, "Your mother deals with that sort of thing; she'll be home any minute." When he had risked confiding in an aunt, uncle or neighbour, a couple of times he actually got, "Are you sure it's not you who's beating her?"

When people were confronted with a choice between what they saw and what they believed, Dib knew only too well that they went with what they believed. Even when Gaz had wreaked her havoc on him in front of a funeral home full of relatives, not one single one of them had realized the source of it was her, not him. They all still thought Gaz was sweet, harmless and innocent like little girls were all said to be.

The very few who actually did believe him were the ones who told him to suck it up, you're a boy, aren't you? "It's BECAUSE I'm a boy that I can't do anything back!" Dib reminded them, and then got, "She'll grow out of it." Well, if Gaz was growing out of anything, she was growing into something else even worse.

Dib now hated the sight of the JERK who'd actually chuckled before saying "Gaz rocks!" after Dib had finally come to trust him enough to open up on so embarrassing a matter. Would you say I "rocked" if I so much as threatened her... even ONCE? So why is it so great for her to do that and worse to me?

The thing he heard most often, and which made him not know whether to laugh or cry, was that Gaz loved him to pieces, she just had a funny way of showing it. Oh, REAL funny. Hilarious, actually. In fact, it's positively hysterical, thought Dib. Only I'm not laughing.

Finally Dib left off his reverie, and set down the half finished bottle of soda to open the radar software, then tried listening once more through his headphones. Still nothing remotely similar to that fleeting transmission six months ago... and still he was picking up that interference, that tinny electronic noise, that absurd and never-ending buzzing that, if he had to describe it, sounded like "Doom doom doo doom doom..." and which was, if anything, getting even louder.

It made no sense, either the interference itself or the fact that there was no way to remove it. The headphones were outside warranty so he'd had to pay for a whole new set... and STILL he was picking it up!

Dib sighed, then took out his handcuffs and dispiritedly snapped them open and closed, open and closed, staring into space as he did so.

"I KNOW I didn't imagine that transmission. I heard it clear as a bell, plain as day. You do NOT just look at the stars and hear them say, 'You'll serve us... serve us curly fries!'"

Dib lay back, looking straight up so that he could see nothing else but the sky. A meteor glowed into brief life before just as quickly fading. His mother had told him they were -

The one person who had ever understood his problem with Gaz would never come home, no matter what his father kept saying. The stars blurred, but the tears that filled his eyes this time wouldn't fall. So that was it, then. Finally he had no more tears left to shed.

He rolled over, tired and worn, his unfocused eyes staring straight down. If a day like this could count as a good one, the darkness running along the bottom of the outside wall could look mighty inviting. Afterwards, his father would most likely get a housekeeper as he should have done in the first place. A kid of Dib's age looking after himself was one thing; a kid of Dib's age being forced to take total responsibility for a second child who scoffed at his tenuous authority and who took a perverse pride in being as willfully stubborn and overbearing as she possibly could was quite another.

Still staring into the darkness, Dib reached for the rest of his soda. Instead, his hand tipped the bottle over and before he could catch it, the bottle rolled off with frightening speed to crash half a second later into the black silence surrounding the house. That's how easy it could be, how quickly it could all be over. If he did go ahead and do the same thing, he wouldn't have to face these awful days any more.

Dib took a long hard look at the listening apparatus. For the past few months it had been literally the only thing keeping him alive. Through this machine he'd heard the transmission, which made him responsible for whatever came of it. And now even that wasn't working. He was just paranoid enough to wonder if the aliens were watching him, ready to pounce on the earth the second he did leap. "Even dead, it would still be all my fault."

Sighing, Dib packed up his computer and headphones. No, he would never really do himself in... but thoughts like these served as a powerful solace for getting him through many a bad night.

Or suppose he pretended to abandon all his real interests, and worked at fitting in and being just like everyone else. He'd probably find a friend or two eventually, once the jibes and taunts about being a ghost chaser or alien hunter died down with nothing to back them up.

The next thought froze him, eyes open wide. Was there actually any difference between these two? The person he really was would be dead either way!

Dib climbed down from the roof and put the ladder away. With a weary sigh of resignation, he hung his head and retreated inside the house just before the Voot Cruiser flew by overhead.

"Doom doom doom doo doom..."

Slack jawed and drooling all over himself, staring straight ahead, Zim was by now reduced to a silent, desperate mantra. Are we there yet... Are we there yet... Are we there yet... Are we... ?

Dib headed for his room, got undressed, put on his UFO pajamas, and got in bed, hoping tomorrow would be at least as good as today.

End of Chapter Two