He reads the word WE in the stratocumulus clouds that form after a tornado one summer. He discovers ARE and LEAVING in the pattern of blinking lights on the Christmas tree the following year. Six months later, he emerges from his room, finds Teresa cutting coupons at the kitchen table, and tells her in an excited, almost breathless voice that the Visitors are on their way.

She looks at him over the tops of her reading glasses. “And how do we know this?”

“I found the fourth word!” Frankie says, and then explains how he’s been monitoring the static between stations on his police scanner. “They did it with clicks. N is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, and there were fourteen clicks. Then fifteen for O. Those came yesterday, and I just got the last letter—twenty-three clicks for W. WE ARE LEAVING NOW. They’ll be here any day. We have to get ready!”

He sits down across from her with his graph paper and a pencil and sketches out plans. He wants to relocate the palm tree in the middle of the front yard to make room for a landing area. He wants to paint WELCOME on the roof.

“Couldn’t we just clean the house, instead?” Teresa asks.

“They can’t land anywhere. It has to be someplace where they feel invited.”

“Well, does it have to be our front lawn?” She doesn’t want him digging up the yard and can just picture him breaking his neck if he tries to climb up onto the roof with a can of paint. “Maybe they could use the airport. There’s a perfectly good runway less than a mile from here.”

“They don’t need a runway. They land like this.” Frankie holds one of his hands horizontally and brings it down in front of his face.

She suggests the mall parking lot, even closer than the airport.

He groans. “They’re going to be looking for me,” he says, patting his chest. “I have vital information.”

“About what?”

“Us.”

Then he hears the police scanner crackling again and hurries back to his room.

The next day, he pulls his poster boards and tackle box of markers out from under his bed and begins drawing a series of family portraits to show the Visitors when they arrive. A week later, four of the portraits are finished. But they look nothing like their subjects. They don’t even look like people. The one labeled “Joe” is a picture of a melting typewriter with eyeballs for keys. “Karen” is a white bird flying upside down with feathered crosses for wings. “Matt,” from what Teresa can tell, is a Greyhound bus sliced into pieces and fanned out like playing cards. And “Roy” is a trail of footprints zigzagging across a beach to a pair of boots filled with water.

“What in the world?” she asks, looking at this last one taped up alongside the others on his bedroom wall.