Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone by Tae Keller

It all began with an empty space at the edge of a cul-de-sac, a patch of Florida pavement still warm from the sun, and a girl who had vanished. Not metaphorically. Literally. Gone.

Her name was Jennifer Chan, and she believed in aliens. Real ones, not just the science fiction kind — she believed they were out there watching, listening, maybe even waiting. She believed so hard it made her brave. Or maybe it made her foolish. Or maybe — just maybe — it made her something else altogether.

And me? I’m Mallory Moss. A twelve-year-old girl with a spine made of rubber bands, heart of cautious curiosity, and a mouth that had learned too well how to twist itself into a perfect, performative smile. I was the girl who saw, the girl who stood by. Maybe the girl who broke Jennifer Chan. Or maybe just the girl who was too afraid not to.

Let me tell you what happened.

Jennifer moved to Drifter, Florida, after her mother died. She came from the desert, from New Mexico, and with her she brought not just notebooks full of alien theories and drawings of crop circles, but a strange kind of intensity — the kind that makes you lean in and then lean away. She was different. Wildly, uncomfortably different. The kind of different that middle school eats alive.

She wasn’t scared of being weird. She wore moon boots and T-shirts with galaxies on them. She asked questions in class that made our teachers blink — about existence, souls, cosmic patterns. She talked about them, the ones from the stars, like she knew they were watching. She called them "The Beings." She believed they had a plan for her. And she walked through our school hallways like she was already halfway to the sky.

And of course, we didn’t know what to do with someone like that. My friends — Reagan, Tess, and the rest — we were perfectly trained to maintain the hierarchy. Popularity is a fragile thing, you see, like a glass crown balanced on a stack of secrets. You don’t climb up by standing next to someone who believes in aliens. You climb up by laughing. Smirking. Whispering.

At first, we just watched her. Then we laughed behind our hands. And then it got worse.

Jennifer didn’t fight back. That made it easier.

But then, one day, she disappeared. Walked out of her house and never came back. No one knew where. Not her dad. Not the police. Not me.

And that’s when everything changed.

I found her notebook. The notebook. Filled with drawings, journal entries, questions scribbled in the margins. And plans — Jennifer's plan to contact the aliens, to prove to the world that she wasn’t crazy. She believed the Beings had been sending her signs. That they were waiting for her. That they were going to take her home.

I read those words like they were sacred. And also like they were evidence. Because deep down, I didn’t know if I believed her. But I knew — I knew — that I had done something terrible.

You see, the bullying wasn’t just whispers and giggles. It was a video. A trap. We’d filmed her. Posted it. Turned her into a joke on the internet. It went viral — or viral enough in our small town. And she saw it. Of course she saw it. Her eyes were wide and dark and hurt like a black hole. But still, she never yelled. She just walked away.

And then she was gone.

After the disappearance, the school turned upside down. Teachers tried not to mention it. The police came and asked questions. And me? I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Not because I missed her. But because I felt guilty. Terrified. What if something had happened to her — because of us?

I started following the clues in her notebook. She’d written about "The Contact Plan" — her steps to make herself known to the aliens. She had dates, times, places. And she believed, with every bone in her skinny body, that she would be taken — saved — if she just believed enough.

Was she still alive? Had she really left with them? Or had she run away — or worse?

That’s when I met Ross.

Ross was Jennifer’s only friend. A boy with eyes like the storm and a quietness that cut through the noise. He’d been watching too. He didn’t laugh. Didn’t participate. But he didn’t stop it either.

We started investigating together. Going over her notebook. Looking for clues in the places she’d marked — the old water tower, the dried-out lakebed, the school roof. I didn’t know if I was trying to find Jennifer — or to redeem myself.

Maybe both.

And the more I dug, the more I remembered. Who I used to be before I tried to fit in. Before I twisted myself into someone acceptable. I remembered how Jennifer looked at the stars like they had answers. I remembered how she told me, once, softly, “You don’t have to pretend.”

And I remembered how I laughed in her face.

But guilt is a strange thing. It’s heavy and hot, but it also fuels you. I started writing my own notebook — a journal of everything we’d done. Not just the video, but the little moments. The choices. The silences. I thought maybe, if I could confess it all, I could make it right. Somehow.

Because that’s the thing about people like Jennifer. They don’t vanish completely. They stay with you. In the stars. In the silence. In the places you’re afraid to look.

And then, one night, we found something. At the edge of town. Her bike, half-hidden in the weeds. A flashlight. A trail.

And a question: what if she was still out there?

What if she was still out there?

It echoed in me like a bell tolling at midnight, each ring colder, sharper, truer. The kind of question that doesn’t leave you alone once it finds a home in your ribcage. What if Jennifer hadn’t just vanished into the woods or into danger — what if she had left? Chosen to go. Ascended.

I know, I know. That sounds ridiculous. But that was the thing about Jennifer — she made you believe the impossible might just be possible. That the edges of the world were not so sealed, that the sky wasn’t so far away. That maybe loneliness was just the price you paid to touch something larger than yourself.

Ross and I followed the trail — not just the physical one, but the emotional breadcrumbs she’d left behind. She wanted to be found. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she wanted to be understood. And that’s a much harder thing.

We found ourselves at the old water tower in the middle of nowhere, half-rusted and leaning like it was listening to the wind. Jennifer had written about it. "The place of clarity," she called it. Where she’d first heard them — not with her ears, she said, but with her soul. I remember standing there, the humid air sticking to my skin, the trees whispering around us, and wondering — not whether she was crazy, but whether I’d ever been brave enough to listen for something like that.

I should’ve listened sooner.

The search became a pilgrimage. Each stop we made felt like a piece of her voice rising from the dirt: the tree behind the middle school where she used to eat lunch alone, the drainage ditch she swore was a communication tunnel, the radio tower where she recorded her “frequencies to the Beings.” To me, they had once been oddities. Now they were sacred. Sacred and damning.

Because with each new clue, I also had to face something else. Myself.

And here’s the truth I didn’t want to write in my own notebook: I had liked Jennifer once. Before the other girls trained me out of it. Before the price of acceptance became too high to afford friendship. I had liked her fierce certainty, her boundless curiosity. I had even liked the way she challenged the world — asked it to be bigger than it wanted to be.

But I chose safety. I chose the girls who wore matching scrunchies and ruled with quiet threats. I chose not to be the target.

That’s the thing about middle school. It’s not just cruelty — it’s survival. And when Jennifer arrived, too loud, too strange, too bright — we decided to survive her out of existence.

Then came the email.

An anonymous message. Just two lines:

She’s not gone. She’s waiting.
But not for you.

I read it a hundred times. Couldn’t tell if it was a prank, a threat, or a truth.

Ross didn’t get one. Neither did anyone else I asked. Just me.

Why me?

I thought about the last time I’d seen Jennifer. Really seen her — not through the blur of reputation and groupthink, but as a person. She’d looked tired. Hollowed out. But still — still — there had been this flame in her eyes. Like she was sure she was on the brink of something important. Like she’d already forgiven us.

I didn’t deserve forgiveness. But I wasn’t going to let her be erased. Not like this.

So Ross and I decided to go back — one more time — to the place where it all began. Jennifer’s house. Deserted now, with her father gone, windows boarded. But in the back yard, under a cracked birdbath and a sky full of heat lightning, we found a final clue: a buried jar.

Inside — a letter.

Not to the aliens. To us. Or maybe just to anyone who would listen.

If you’re reading this, then I’ve made contact. Or I’ve run away. Or maybe I’ve just decided to disappear. But either way — I’m not afraid anymore. You don’t have to be, either. Maybe the Beings are real. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe we’re the aliens, and Earth is just a stopover. What matters is that someone believes in something. That someone dares to be different. That someone dares to forgive — even if it’s themselves.

And that’s when it hit me. This wasn’t about aliens. Not really. It was about belonging. The thing Jennifer had been looking for in the stars — the thing we’d all been looking for, in each other. It’s easy to hurt people when you think they’re strange. Harder when you realize they’re just like you — longing, scared, aching to be understood.

We never found Jennifer.

Or maybe we did — in the pieces of herself she left behind. In the questions she planted like seeds in our hearts. In the way I started to live differently after. Less like someone afraid, more like someone trying. Someone growing.

I told the truth about what we’d done. Not just to the teachers, but to the world. Wrote it all down. Let people read it. Let them see me as I was — messy, cowardly, trying to be brave.

Because maybe that’s how you begin to heal. Maybe it starts not with being believed, but with believing — in someone. In yourself.

Jennifer Chan may be gone. Or maybe she’s on a ship, somewhere out past Saturn, smiling at the stars.

But one thing’s for sure.

She is not alone.

And even now, even after all that time, I still feel her watching me from somewhere — not in a creepy way, not like a ghost story. More like… a promise. A quiet, persistent gravity pulling me toward becoming a better version of myself. Jennifer was like that — a disruption, sure, but the kind that rearranges you. The kind that stays.

I think that’s why I kept writing. Because once you admit the truth, once you crack that shell of silence and shame, the words won’t stop coming. I wrote about the way we laughed at her behind her back, how we rolled our eyes when she talked about “the Beings” like they were neighbors. I wrote about how I let Reagan and the others decide what was cool, what was cruel, and how I fell in line like it was a survival drill. And I wrote about Jennifer’s kindness — how she still smiled at me that one time I almost said sorry. Almost.

Do you know what it’s like to carry an almost in your chest?

It throbs. It grows teeth. It makes you wonder how many lives might’ve gone differently if you’d just said one thing, done one thing, looked someone in the eye and seen them.

But I’m learning. That’s what she gave me. Not just guilt. Not just a mystery to unravel. But the gift of starting over.

It’s weird, though, what happens after a story like that starts to spread. Some people called me brave. Some said I was just chasing attention. A few even called me a liar — said Jennifer must’ve been unstable, that I was romanticizing her pain.

But they weren’t there. They didn’t see her under the water tower, arms lifted to the sky like she knew something we didn’t. They didn’t hear the way her voice trembled when she talked about the stars like they were old friends. They didn’t watch her walk through a school full of whispers with her chin still up.

She wasn’t perfect. She was weird, infuriatingly stubborn, and a little too obsessed with conspiracy forums. But she was real. More real than most of us dared to be.

And when you lose someone like that — when you let yourself lose them — the guilt isn’t the end. It’s the beginning. Of reckoning. Of change.

I started talking to others at school. The quiet ones. The ones who wore the same jacket every day or stared at their shoes too long. I didn’t swoop in like some savior — I just sat with them. Asked about their drawings, their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, their weird theories about ancient civilizations.

And I listened.

God, I listened.

Because I kept thinking — if someone had really listened to Jennifer, not just nodded politely, but truly heard her, would she have stayed?

Maybe not. Maybe the pull of the sky would’ve called her no matter what. But maybe it would’ve made a difference. And maybe that’s what any of us really wants: not to be fixed or pitied or explained away — just to be heard.

Ross drifted away a bit after that. We didn’t fight or anything — we just didn’t need each other in the same way anymore. That’s the bittersweet part of these kinds of stories. They bring you together, and then they let you go. Like fireflies.

But I kept going. Kept writing. Kept speaking out when someone started picking on the new kid in the hallway. Not because I’m some hero now. But because I remember.

I remember what it’s like to be afraid of being next. I remember what it’s like to think blending in is safer than being kind.

And I remember Jennifer’s voice, clear as radio static on a mountain top:

What if being different is exactly the point?

You know, sometimes, when the clouds are low and the night hums in that strange way it does before a summer storm, I walk to the edge of town where the cornfields begin. I look up at the stars — the real ones, not the kind you make wishes on, but the burning, faraway kind that don't care if you pass your math test or wear the right brand of sneakers — and I imagine her there.

Jennifer. Somewhere in the dark, laughing into a headset, telling the Beings that Earth is messy but beautiful. That people are scared but trying. That maybe they should give us another chance.

And I whisper something back. Not out loud. Not quite.

Just a thought, like a signal bounced off a satellite dish.

I believe you now.
And I miss you.

That’s the thing no one tells you about growing up — that sometimes, your heart cracks open in ways that never fully seal. But maybe that’s how the light gets in.

Maybe that’s where the stars fit.

And maybe — just maybe — that’s how we become someone worth remembering. Not through perfection, not by getting all the answers right, but by holding space for the things we once tried to erase. The people we misunderstood. The truths we silenced. Maybe we grow when we finally stop running from what we did and start sitting with it instead. Letting it breathe beside us like a restless animal — not tame, not safe, but real.

Because the truth is, Jennifer never really left. Not entirely.

She stayed in the quiet pauses between conversations, when someone hesitates before making a joke at someone’s expense. She lived in the eyes of the girl who transferred in mid-year, and flinched every time someone laughed too loudly. And she was there, too, in the questions people began to ask each other: How are you, really? Do you want to sit with us? What do you believe in?

It was slow, of course. No instant redemption arcs here. Middle school doesn’t hand out clean narratives. Reagan went on being Reagan, though her power started to feel less magnetic, more hollow. People still gossiped, still played the game. But a few of us — maybe more than a few — stopped following the script. And every time someone paused to think before joining in, before echoing the laughter, before sending the meme — that was something. A small, silent defiance.

Jennifer would’ve liked that.

I kept her notebook.

Not out of morbid curiosity or guilt (though, let’s be honest, those were part of it too), but because it felt sacred somehow. The pages were chaotic — scribbled diagrams of alien spacecrafts next to lists of potential interdimensional hotspots (Florida appeared suspiciously often), and little doodles of stars and cats and spirals. But then, every few pages, there’d be something else. A question. A raw, aching sentence.

Why do they hate what they don’t understand?

If I vanished, would anyone notice?

What if Earth is just one stop in a longer story?

I’d read those words again and again, feeling both cracked open and stitched together at the same time. Because I’d thought those things too, just never brave enough to write them down.

And somewhere between the margins and her scrawls, I stopped seeing her as just a mystery to solve, or a story to finish. She became, instead, a kind of compass — not pointing north, but pointing inward. Toward the questions we all carry but rarely say aloud.

It’s strange. I started this whole thing thinking I could explain what happened. Lay it out clean — this happened, then this, and here’s why it matters. But life’s not an essay. And grief, especially, doesn’t obey structure. It spirals. It revisits. It changes shape depending on the day.

Some mornings I wake up remembering Jennifer’s smile and feel warm. Other times, I remember what I didn’t do — and it burns.

But I live with it now. Not like a punishment. More like a tattoo you gave yourself in a moment of truth. It hurts, yeah. But it also means you were real.

That she was real.

That we were here, and it mattered.

And maybe that’s all we can ask for. To matter. To leave something behind that’s more than just silence.

Jennifer Chan didn’t leave us answers. Not really. But she left something else.

A question.

A challenge.

An invitation.

To listen. To believe. To see.

Not just the aliens, though who knows — maybe them too. But each other. The weird and brave and awkward and brilliant people walking beside us in the hallways, sitting two desks away, dreaming under the same skies.

And so, if one day, the Beings do land — if a ship tears through the clouds and Jennifer walks out with a grin that says I told you so — I hope we’re ready. Not just with welcome signs and government protocols.

But with open eyes. And open hands.

Because maybe the truth isn’t out there.

Maybe it’s right here.

And maybe — just maybe — we’re not alone either.

The End.