Annette Malloy <amalloy@stmaryshs.com>

to Casey Peters <cpeters@stmaryshs.com>

Tuesday, October 25, 2022 – 09:36:03 AM EST

Hi Casey - 

I’ve taken a moment to read through what you have so far. While these pieces are thoughtful and show a masterful grasp of the English language, I fear that the subject matter may be inappropriate for the medium. Though I recognize the impact these events have had upon you, I recommend exploring a different topic in future drafts. Remember, your admissions essays don’t have to be tragic to be meaningful! That being said, the level of self-reflection you exhibit here is exemplary. I am confident that once you find the right subject, you will produce phenomenal essays. 

Best, 

Ms. Malloy

----------------------------------------  begin forwarded message --------------------------------------------

Casey Peters <cpeters@stmaryshs.com

to Annette Malloy <amalloy@stmaryshs.com>

Friday, October 21, 2022 – 22:09:37 PM EST

Hi Ms. Malloy, 

Here are my college admissions essays if you’re still willing to take a look. I know you suggested we vary our topics from essay to essay, but mine mostly ended up being about the same thing. I didn’t really know what else to write about. I guess just let me know which one is best, and I’ll re-write the others. 

Thanks for taking a look. 

-Casey

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? 

When I was sixteen, I was abducted by aliens. I didn’t prevent an extraterrestrial invasion or learn a heartwarming lesson about what it means to be human. I didn’t even see anything all that interesting. No, my abduction was simple: I fell asleep one night, saw a flash of green, and woke up five days later naked in a crop circle. 

The abduction changed my perspective on everything, quite literally. A little-known fact about zero gravity is that it can affect the shape of a person’s eyeballs. Without gravity to control the distribution of fluid in the body, these juices linger in the head, placing pressure on the eyeballs. I learned from several very frightening YouTube videos and an article in Nature that all of this pressure leads to a gradual flattening of the eyeballs. Vision problems among astronauts were often reported after six months in zero gravity. My vision degraded in just under six days. 

For most of my life, aliens were a tough sell. I associated UFOs with B-horror movies and the meme of Giorgio A. Tsoukalos from Ancient Aliens. If aliens were real, I figured they were single-celled organisms floating in space. Sentient beings capable of building spacecraft and operating tractor beams seemed too “Star Trek” to believe. It wasn’t until I found myself in a perfect circle of flattened corn stalks that I considered maybe Hollywood had gotten this one right. 

In a way, I’m grateful I didn’t believe in aliens until after I was abducted. Knowing wouldn’t have saved me. In fact, I think the most difficult part of this has been realizing that nothing has actually changed. Aliens have always been real. I have always been wrong, and they have always been able to come for me. They will always be able to come for me. Understanding these facts doesn’t make me any safer. I was abducted through my bedroom window, the whole event so silent that my family didn’t realize I was gone until the next morning. The aliens can get me if they want me. The knowledge doesn’t protect me. It just scares me. 

Tell us about a time where you had to either take a risk or stay safe. What did you do? What happened? Would you do it again?

When you’re abducted by aliens, you have two choices. The first is to deny, deny, deny. You can claim you were taken by a Ted Bundy type or Satanic cultists in search of virgin blood. Really any answer is better than aliens. In a terrestrial abduction, when you come back, your tragedy becomes a triumph. You make the paper, and you always have something interesting to say at parties. After a whole lot of therapy, you may even begin to feel normal again. 

Based on personal experience, I cannot recommend the second option: tell the truth. This option is perhaps better titled “submit yourself to a life of freakdom.” Telling your peers you believe you were abducted by aliens is a potent social poison. Don’t misunderstand me, people will talk to you, but only when they have questions. My top two frequently-asked Q’s are the following: Was there a tractor beam? Were you probed? (The answers to these questions, if you’re curious, are yes and my medical evaluation suggested probably not.)

The invasive questions will make you feel very popular for a while. That is until you realize that all the askers want is a little piece of your experience. They want to carry your strangeness with them. You will become their party anecdote. “A girl in my high school said she got abducted by aliens. No, seriouslyˆ!” My credentials notwithstanding, I can promise you this: If you admit me to your prestigious institution, your parties’ conversations will never be boring. 

I understand the point of this question. I know you want me to tell you I am grateful to have taken a risk, that I’m better off for having done so. But, I’m just trying to tell you the truth. It’s better to stay safe, just lie. 

What makes you angry? What are you doing or what will you do about it? 

If it had been up to me, I’m not sure I ever would have told anyone I was abducted. As it was, the story had spread wide before I was fully conscious. “Missing Girl Found in Crop Circle, Local Authorities Baffled” was splashed across our paper’s front page. There’s no greater entertainment than gossip, especially in a North Carolinian small town. By the time I woke up for real, every local news show and active group chat had shared my story a hundred times over. 

Sometimes, I think about what things could have been like if I’d had control of the narrative. Would I have told anyone about the crop circle or the cauterized puncture wounds behind my ear? On days I’m not feeling charitable towards myself, I think that I probably would have. I have never been cool, certainly not popular. What little attention I was paid usually came from adults who told me I was so mature for my age. Before I was abducted, I was so desperate to be looked at. I would have argued that any attention was good attention. I was wrong. In fact, if this essay needs a moral, here it is: attention is overrated. It can be deadly, actually. 

Two Men in Black showed up at my door a week after I was abducted. I knew to expect them. I had fallen deep into the void of alien subreddits and abductee chatrooms. I knew about their red lips and white skin, their obsidian shark eyes. The men who came to my door could have been in facepaint and contacts. Their guns and trench coats could have come from Party City. Were these true Men in Black or costumed look-i-loos seeking the world’s most pathetic thrill? There was no way to know. So I screamed and screamed until my voice broke. And somewhere in all that screaming, the men disappeared from my porch and drove off in their black sedan. 

Everyone was so eager to look, not just internet weirdos. Neighbors came to my house with casseroles and prodded my mother for any scrap of information. Friends I hadn’t spoken with since middle school texted to ask how I was. Even my teachers sent emails under the guise of concern. All of it swam with the unasked question: Is it true? Over time, their concern began to feel just as invasive as the men in black. It made me so angry that I shut away from everyone. I retreated into my bedroom, even as it grew stifling in the summer. There was no point trying to open the window. It had long since been nailed shut. 

Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family. 

It is brutal to go through something no one around you understands. There is no counselor trained in extra-terrestrial trauma, no support group for alien abductees. For a while, after I was abducted, I turned to internet abductee communities. These exist on web pages that have pixelated alien clip art and look like they haven’t been updated since 2005. Their chatrooms were full of Star Trek fans, fetishists, and lonely liars. Each time I thought I had stumbled upon someone whose abduction was genuine, I would poke some hole in their story. Their tractor beam description changed, or their experience began to bear a striking resemblance to a classic film. After a while, I began to wonder - was I the only one? 

Things would have been better if something normal happened to me. If I’d been able to look into the eyes of my friends and family and see that they believed I was telling the truth, then maybe it wouldn’t have mattered that they didn’t understand. I could have taken their sympathy at face value. As it is, I don’t know that anyone believes me. Instead, there are those willing to admit they think I’m lying about the aliens and those who pretend they believe me because they love me. I get it. I don’t know if I would believe me either. I don’t know if I do. 

A few weeks after the abduction, my parents came into my room as I was getting ready for bed. They sat down together at the end of my bed like they were on a very special episode. My mom explained that they knew what I went through must have been terrifying and that they understood if I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I was confused. All I’d done was talk about it. The police had three hours of me talking about it stored on some hard drive somewhere. But then my dad entered the conversation. 

“When you are ready,” he began, “you know you can always tell us the truth, no matter what really happened.” 

The truth is, I don’t know what really happened. If I wasn’t abducted by aliens, then what was that beam of green light? How did I shred my fingernails if not by clawing at the shingles of my roof as I floated into the sky? Who cut the crop circles in my neighbor’s field? Where did I go?

I have trouble now knowing what is real. It’s the consequence of being told your entire life that something is impossible and then having it happen to you. Maybe I really was taken by cultists who left the crop circles to cover their tracks. Or maybe I had my first schizophrenic episode. In the end, it doesn’t matter. I will never be the same after this. Before the abduction, I thought I understood my capacity for pain, just how bad I could feel. Now I know there is a horror deeper than I could ever have imagined and that there is probably one below that too. Is this what it is to grow up? Will I continue to take enormous, life-shattering blows? Maybe that’s just what life is after a certain point. Maybe adulthood is learning to duck.