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

Chapter Three: Any HOW - Nietzsche

The next day was exactly the same... as all the bad ones.

This time Dib made it to the kitchen first, but before he had finished preparing his breakfast, Gaz came in, snatched the cereal box out of his hand, and poured the last of it into her own bowl.

Such brazen rudeness would have struck anyone else speechless, but sadly, by now Dib saw nothing unusual about being treated as if he had no feelings whatsoever. "Gaz! I had that first!"

"You think you own all the cereal, don't you Dib! Well you don't! You just don't!" Gaz spat. She opened the fridge and took out the milk.

"Well you don't own it all either! This morning I had it first!" Dib repeated. "Doesn't that mean anything to you... at all?"

Gaz had calmly sat down while Dib was saying this, and was now pouring milk over her cereal before smugly chewing and swallowing a spoonful right in front of him. "Nope."

"Well now what am I going to eat for breakfast?"

"This..." Gaz slapped him sharply in the mouth. "... and plenty more of it, if you don't shut up."

As Dib sat at the table with a couple of toasted pastries, Professor Membrane appeared at the breakfast table on his hover screen. He'd had to leave for work early.

"Did you give your sister her supper, son?"

"Yes, Dad, I did."

"At supper time?"

"Uh, not exactly, but it's a long story - "

His father sighed. "When I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it."

"Dad, I even brought it to her and everything, but she just wouldn't eat it!" The microwaved dinner would still be on the coffee table had Dib not removed it himself the previous night after Gaz had decided to go to bed.

"I'm disappointed in you, boy."

"In ME? ME? I can't eat it FOR her! And stuff... just... happened... "

His father waved away Dib's protests. "Son... take care of your little sister until - "

Dib stood and took a firm hold on the edge of the table with both hands. He spoke slowly and evenly. "Dad... Mom... is not... coming home."

This time Dib was glad his father was on the hover screen; the Professor's hand, slowly lowering, leaped back up showing Dib the back of his hand before he remembered he was actually at the lab, not physically in the same room as Dib.

"Ohhh, no... !" Dib groaned, blood draining from his face, as his father's hand hovered awkwardly in the air.

The Professor settled for jabbing his finger at Dib through the screen and booming, "Don't say that about your mother!"

Before Dib even left the table to finish preparing for skool, Gaz tackled him to the floor where she punched his head and stomach and kicked his shins mercilessly. When it was finally over, Dib slowly picked himself up, venturing, "Am I allowed to know what I did... or didn't do... this time?"

Normally Gaz wouldn't have deigned to reply, but saw fit to do so on this occasion. She fastened a steely grip on Dib's shirt collar and yanked his head down until they were eye to eye. "Next time you say something like that, just be close enough for him to hit you if he wants to. He couldn't reach you this time, so I did it for him."

Dib didn't watch the sky this morning for UFOs quite as intensely as he usually did. When they got to skool, Gaz watched with obvious relish as Torque chased Dib all around the skoolyard until the bell rang. Dib ducked inside the building, Torque not far behind. Dib was safe for a while... safe physically, at least. The bully now pounded his fist as he declared his intention to catch Dib and make up for yesterday... only this time when no nosy teachers were around.

"I was late for the game and had to run laps after... because of YOU! Enjoy today, because you won't enjoy tomorrow! You're gonna hurt, Freak! HURT!"

Somebody had seen Dib aiming his camera at the sky the day before, guessed the reason, and run around making sure everyone else heard about it. Hooting loudly, Dib's classmates mocked him all the way across the classroom to his desk. One of the kids covered his face with the heels of his hands pressed together, yelling, "Face hugger! AAAH!" Another held up two fingers like antennae and squeaked, "Take me to your leader!" Still another held out his middle finger and croaked, "E... T... phone... home!" Stolidly ignoring their taunts, but burning inwardly, Dib took his seat.

When Ms. Bitters told the class to pass in their homework, Dib gasped. Between everything that happened the previous night he'd done something he never had before... he'd completely forgotten it! He wasn't looking forward to the time when Ms. Bitters passed back the corrected work. It made her day like nothing else when a student forgot something, Dib reflected with a shudder. She would build such an incident into a cruel parody of a stand up comedian routine.

Dib was planning his third alternative escape route to get out of the skool, the yard, and through several blocks to keep ahead of Torque when suddenly -

"DIB!"

Dib's pencil snapped as he jumped. "Yes, ma'am?"

"I SAID, 'What is the answer?'"

The board offered no clues today. "I... I don't know, ma'am."

"Well, well, well," gloated Ms. Bitters with gleeful sarcasm. She floated over to loom above Dib's desk. "Membrane, the class brain, 'doooesn't knoooow'. You are dooomed!"

The classroom filled with laughter. Ms. Bitters asked one of the slower students, who was delighted at the chance to show he knew something. "One and one is TWO!" Keef announced. Dib then realized that Ms. Bitters had been asking simpler and simpler questions while she tried to get his attention as he'd been preoccupied with the problem of Torque.

Dib sank in his desk and waited for the laughter to die down. An evil teacher, bullying classmates, no friends... Any adult working under such conditions would have long since quit and found another job. And then after each day here, he went home to a distant, demanding father who didn't even always bother to be there, no mother at all, and... and Gaz. Grownups who had to deal with less than that filed for divorce or moved. But Dib was a kid, and so he had no choice.

No choice except -

For the rest of the day, Dib consoled himself with thoughts of throwing himself off the roof... which, ironically, cheered him up considerably. Oddly, now that he had something to look forward to... well, so to speak... this skool day brightened immediately.

Then something happened that would completely banish even the merest glimmer of suicide from Dib's mind forever. In the same breathless second, Dib identified his immediate goal, accepted his mission, saw his misunderstood passion vindicated, and joyously received all the proof he would ever need that he was not crazy, when the door opened and... one of THEM walked in...

Dib's chin hit the floor and he gaped until his glasses nearly dropped off. Other than that, the only thing he could manage to do was point. He believed in some pretty far out things, even he was willing to admit that much on occasion, but never did he dare dream that he would ever behold such a thing so close... and right in his own classroom!

He had been right all along. He had known they were out there. For six months he'd had advance knowledge of something, something of world-shaking significance, that these frivolous, oblivious children had not, for all their teasing and taunting. A lifetime of studying the subject, capped by six months of dedicated vigilance, had finally, at long last, paid off.

This specimen was as tall as Dib himself, with vivid green skin, unearthly facial features, and the most transparent, amateurish disguise Dib had ever seen. "Close encounters" indeed... encounters could not possibly get much closer than this!

Not ten feet away from Dib stood an undeniable, indisputable space alien.

The Beginning

A/N: I really couldn't tell you how long I had the idea for this one; it may be older than "Dib Believes in Ghosts." Originally I planned and wrote it with Dib seriously considering suicide as an option, but when that failed the "Would he really?" test, I knew I was facing some rewriting.