The night I wasn't abducted by aliens changed me. I'm not sure if for the better or the worse. But this much I know for certain: nobody likes rejection.

       I'd stood outside the tent that Buck and I had set up in the far corner of our family's garden at the precise spot where we calculated the aliens would most likely return.
       Suitcase in hand, a welcoming smile pasted on my face, and a well-rehearsed greeting ready to roll off my lips, I was set to go. But just like they'd done the week before, the aliens didn't show. They didn't send regrets. They didn't try to reschedule. I felt like a fool.
       Buck told me not to take it too hard. He said it was their loss. He said specimens like me are a rare find, that sooner or later, they would regret having wasted their opportunity to do to me what they'd done to him.
       "Twins as identical as us are hard to come by," Buck said. "It's one thing to be monochorionic, quite another to be monoamniotic. You know that better than I do, Tucker. And the aliens know it too. They need to examine you even more than they needed to examine me. If they're serious about the science, and I believe they are, learning about just one of us isn't enough. They'll be back for you, just wait and see."
       But I didn't want to wait and see. I wanted to figure out what I'd done wrong. Why over the last three months, they'd abducted and experimented on my twin two dozen times, but they hadn't bothered to come for me. Not even once.
       I wondered aloud if I'd made it too easy for them. I mean, a potential abductee shouldn't actually prepare for an abduction. Yeah, he could hope for one and keep himself in tip-top shape should it coincidentally come his way. But he should not make it easy for an abductor to abduct any more than deer should grow bullseye patterns in their coats at the start of hunting season.
       Buck listened patiently to my rant before telling me not to overthink it.
       Easy for him to say. His curiosity had been satisfied. He'd been poked and prodded, his every crevice examined. The aliens had watched him copulate with exotic creatures and plied him with delicious food and drink, the likes of which no human had ever before savored.
       What's more, their investigations went beyond his mere physicality.
       They'd taken copious notes as he opined about art and science--the humanities even!--as if my twin could have anything cogent to say about the sum of human knowledge.
       He's barely making it through ninth grade.
       Not to brag, but I plan to go to MIT in three years. Yes, on early admission. And after that, Cambridge, like Newton and Hawking. I aim sky high.
       You see then, don't you, how hard it was for me to understand why the aliens would want to study the dumber, or should I say, less ambitious twin, instead of me. Sure, he could read minds, but had he ever done anything admirable with this superpower? Not in the least.
       My jealousy was most roused when Buck told me they planned to ferry him at warp speed through wormholes and show him the far reaches of the galaxy. To amuse him! Didn't want him to go nutty or get claustrophobic inside a galactic-class starship. Said he needed enrichment as all expensive laboratory animals do. Enrichment! That's what they called the adventures they would send him on. Lucky dog, Buck. What am I saying? Lucky rat.
       "Tucker," Buck said to me after every abduction, "it was incredible. I wish you could have experienced what I experienced. The word dazzling doesn't begin to cover it."
       "Yeah. I bet." I scowled.
       It was easy for him to say I shouldn't overthink it, and I shouted as much. "You've had your fun. Me? None. Naught. Zilch." I swung at him in frustration.
       He was understanding. He tried to calm me down.
       "Listen to me, Tucker." He put his arm around me like he had when we were little kids. "I put many a good word in for you. I reminded them that we had shared a placenta and an amniotic sac and how that makes us practically the same person, or at least better than most identical twins. I did my best to impress upon them that you'd be an excellent experimental subject. Like I've been. In fact, since you're a virgin, you'd be even better."
       "Yeah?" I said, hopeful and thankful that, for once, my brother saw my virginity as a positive and was looking out for me much like he does whenever the tenth-grade bullies try to take my lunch or the eleventh-graders try to steal my bike.
       "You bet, bro." Buck flexed his muscle as if he'd used his arm and not his brain to advocate on my behalf. Of course, his biceps were no bigger than mine, but somehow, they looked more convincing on him.
       "Confidence," he regularly told me, "is all you need to get out of any scrape."
       He just grinned when in response, I nicknamed him Confidence Man.
       "And let me tell ya," he said as he clasped my shoulders and squeezed my abductors, "the aliens were very, very intrigued by my arguments. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they do even more to you when they come fetch you than they did to me. I'll be jealous, of course, but I won't be surprised."
       "You're never surprised," I laughed. "How could you be with your mind-reading abilities?"
       "About that," Buck said, "let's keep it to ourselves. Okay?"
       "You mean they don't know?"
       "Of course not. It's in our blood-pact, isn't it? Nobody but you knows that I can read minds. Not even the aliens. And nobody but you will ever know. It's our secret, Tucker. And our secret it must remain."

       Buck's superpower first manifested itself nine years ago, on our first day of kindergarten.
       As usual, we were dressed in identical outfits--blue shorts, white knee socks, and pink bow ties. Our dad had parted Buck's hair on the left and mine on the right so our teacher could tell us apart in an emergency. As soon as Dad was sure she knew just who was who, he left the classroom.
       I was wondering how long it would take before the teacher mixed us up when Buck elbowed me in the stomach.
       "Let's have a little fun," he said, comb in hand.
       And that's how it went, comb in hand for the remainder of elementary school and beyond. We traded places for fun and profit--not financial, of course, but certainly rewarding in second helpings of the treats we each preferred, kisses from the honeys that rang our individual bells, and, predictably, in A+'s on our report cards.
       By thinking alone, I took school exams for us both. No sooner did I come up with an answer in math or English (my best subjects) that Buck jotted it down on his paper too. In turn, hair parted on the correct side, Buck took my place in gym class and in the more violent games on the field. He's always been fearless.
       So through the years, our deceptions succeeded thanks to a comb and Buck's mind-reading abilities. The hair thing was a breeze, of course, but the mind-reading thing wasn't much trouble either. Although he could glimpse the thoughts of our friends and even our elders, only my thoughts were wide open to him. He could read me better than he could a book; that is when he even deigned to read one for himself.
       No matter how far apart we were, Buck knew my thoughts as if our brains were still connected in utero. Not that I ever wanted to exploit his abilities for any criminal conspiracy. I always considered our hijinks to be the kind of horsing around identical twins have engaged in since time immemorial; only, in our case, Buck's abilities made us better at it than an average duo could be.
       It's easy to understand, then, isn't it? When it came to the aliens and me as an experimental subject, I have no doubt that Buck knew just how desperately I yearned to be abducted too.
       Indeed, he kept prodding me to obsess more and more about what the aliens had to understand. To concentrate on how they absolutely needed the twin of their most recent abductee.
       "Keep thinking it, Tucker. I have a feeling they can read minds too. Especially minds as advanced as yours."
       With him cheering me on, I focused harder.
       "Don't stop for a minute, brother," Buck redoubled his encouragement, "your opportunity is right around the corner. Just focus on how important it is that you are my twin--and remember that I'll be there, right by your side, when they come."
       Of course, at Buck's suggestion, I did everything I could to keep his mind-reading abilities out of my thoughts. And not just because he wanted me to, but because I considered myself genuinely cleverer than him. The last thing I wanted was for the aliens to see Buck as the superior subject just because of the mind-reading thing. So, I concentrated only on our twinness, never on Buck's superpower.
       It may seem odd that I expected my thoughts to reach the aliens, but a lifetime of broadcasting to Buck had left me believing it a viable approach. And I felt Buck was right. Although I can't do what he can, I have an advanced mind. It's not a stretch to suppose that alien beings, being advanced themselves, could, with little effort, tune into a superior specimen like me.
       I fixated so intently on just how much they needed to study a twin's twin that, twice this week, I woke feeling like I had really given a long speech in my sleep on the detailed merits of such studies.
       When I told Buck, he said deep-seated desire often crops up in slumber. When people sleep, he explained, they think what they are doing in their dreams is real.
       "Wet dreams, for example," he deadpanned.
       I had to agree he had a point.
       But real as the dreams were, it was hard to hear from Buck over breakfast how, once again, he had been abducted, and I hadn't.
       When he showed me the depressions in the lawn and the scorched siding on the house, I was frustrated to note that the marks were more evident by my window than by his. Yet the aliens had taken Buck on another galactic joyride, not me.
       It hurt.
       In my mind's eye, I kept replaying each of the times they had stood me up. I saw myself standing there, suitcase in hand, expectant. I saw Buck's crestfallen face when the aliens didn't show. I thought it the greatest of brotherly solidarity that Buck took it so hard--he'd always gotten whatever he wanted, and I wasn't accustomed to him being disappointed on my behalf. But I was touched.
       Finally, I had enough. That last night, I vowed not to take no for an answer. I didn't yet know how, but I would bring things to a head. Force my hand. Exercise my agency. Demand change.
       To Buck's delight, I told him I would take the bull by the horns and return to standing by the tent that very night.
       Buck insisted on coming along.
       "It's in your best interest," he explained. "If the aliens suddenly become bullies, I'll fight for you."
       I didn't stop to ask how, even with his bravura, he could fight aliens who want to do things their way. Still, I was grateful for his company and, especially, for the emotional support.

       As I trudged along, suitcase in hand once again, I saw that Buck's plan had worked. The aliens must have finally read my mind, for there it was: a ship, larger and more beautiful than I could have imagined, but the silvery sphere emitting the otherworldly hum was strangely familiar all the same. The gleaming vessel was improbably perched with just one silver tube protruding more regally than any red carpet on a runway.
       This memory is as sharp as they come. And it still cuts me to the quick.
       A door at the end of the tube opened. Just as I imagined it would.
       A beam of light. So bright. Just as I expected.
       Smiling the widest of smiles, Buck slapped me on the back. "You did it, bro!"
       The flash!
       It was just like a green flash at sunset over the ocean's horizon!
       "Buck, it's exactly like you described it...."
       Only there was no Buck. The door closed. The silver tube retracted into the ship.

       Recovered memories, or so I have read, are often just a gauzy impression. Mine are barely that. Despite my weeks of guided meditation, journaling, hypnosis, and not a few nocturnal reenactments on site, there are only a few things I now know for sure.
       Before that night, Buck had never been abducted. It had always been me who'd been taken.
       Buck's mind-reading had allowed him to experience everything vicariously and pass it off as his own. And worse: because he was taking in my every experience in real-time and, crucially, before the aliens suppressed my memories at the end of each abduction, his tales were far more vivid than anything I'll ever manage to recall.
       My own memories are now only strong enough to confirm that it happened to me. But, to my eternal frustration, I am a hundred percent dependent on the memory of Buck's leering recitations if I want to fully relive my adventures.
       My twin literally stole the most extraordinary experiences of my life.
       And to think that the aliens had been preparing me for a whole lot more. Let's just say that I was going much further than MIT for college--if only my jock brother hadn't gotten them to call an audible at the last minute and take him instead.
       My twin played me--much the way we had deceived our parents, teachers, and friends. Only, this time, I was the patsy. While I was ruminating on the value of abducting the twin of a prior abductee, he was using me to make his case directly.
       Yep. The aliens bought it, and I haven't seen him since. For his sake, I hope they haven't soured on the bargain.
       Oh well. I suppose I'll settle for MIT and eventually for Cambridge. Newton. Hawking. And soon, it will be Tucker Rogers that will bring the school prestige.
       And the truth is it's not a bad deal for me. There's more than one way to see the universe. When it came to school, Buck was always the one for shortcuts. For me, it will be an excellent if conventional education. For my scheming brother, Buck U, all the way.
       I doubt that I'll see him again. What with special relativity (which I still don't think Buck ever appreciated despite my repeated explanations), it will likely be many years before he returns.
       Meanwhile, no one else knows he's gone.
       I think I'll keep this development covered up.
       Buck and I have fooled so many, so many times before. We can continue changing places, can't we? But henceforth, I will get to play both parts--and pass the Buck when I mess up.
       Sure, why not? I can always disavow any social disaster as his doing.
       All I'll need is a touch of confidence. And a comb.