Priya is outside the tent when I run up the hill. She tilts her head to one side and a sliver of sun catches the diamond stud in her nose. The sun is shining and the air is clear and I’m out of breath again, but this time it’s not from running.
It’s her. It’s relief. It’s . . .
Fine. It’s all fine. “Hey. You still up for hanging out? Collecting some data?”
Priya’s smile grows. “Yes! My . . . what is the word? Mentor?”
“You have a mentor?”
“Not mentor. Someone you . . . are responsible to? You . . .” She shakes her head, suddenly impatient and frustrated.
“Work for?”
“Work? No. No,” she repeats, biting off the word. “That is not what I mean.”
“Well, maybe it will come to you.”
She wrings her hands, clearly unsatisfied by my answer. Clearly upset she hasn’t found the right word to describe her—
“Teacher?”
“Yes! Teacher. We are all teachers on my planet. We teach each other new things we have learned. I am a teacher.” Happy again. Whew.
“Good. Maybe you can teach me some things.” Did that just come out pervy? Honestly, I didn’t mean it that way. Not entirely. “All right, let’s get going. You have a lot of data to collect.” We start down the small hill with Ginger, side by side by side. I’m not five feet away from her when Priya’s knees buckle and she collapses to the ground. She doesn’t even try to stop herself, though—her arms just hang by her sides as she drops to the grass. I hurry to help her up. Her eyes blink, bewildered by her body. “You okay?”
Her surprise turns to annoyance. “Yes.”
“Maybe you just need some breakfast.” I cup my palms under her elbows to steady her.
“Gravity,” she says, nearly spitting the word. “Your planet’s gravity is much stronger than ours. I told you,” she adds, irritated. “My planet is much smaller and far less dense. The gravitational force is less. Moving—walking—everything is harder for me here.”
“Okay, I just don’t want you to fall again. That’s not a bad thing, you know. To not want you to get hurt.”
She brings a hand to the back of her head. “My pain . . . is back.”
“You need more Tylenol?”
She shakes her head, wincing. “I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe we should stay—”
“No, no, I want to go,” she says, grabbing my arm with both of her hands. The warmth of her touch radiates all the way to my scalp, upping my core temperature, and I immediately forget she just snapped at me. And then she takes my hand, squeezing it. I glance at it, at its smallness in mine, and then at her. She smiles shyly. “To help me? So I don’t fall.”
I find my voice. “Yeah, okay, sure.” Very carefully, I lead her down the gentle slope, parting the weeping willow branches as if we were walking through a waterfall, and lifting her over the creek. She weighs about as much as my mom.
I lead her to the garage and realize I’ll have to take my dirt bike if we want to go anywhere. Emphasis on the dirt part.
Then again, this is a girl who’s been hanging out and sleeping and most likely peeing in a field. I hand her my helmet. “You have to wear this.” My mom would kill me if I let her ride without one.
“Your mother would not be happy if I did not,” she says.
How the hell does she do that?
I show her how to fasten it and then motion for her to hop on behind me. “You’ll have to, um, hold my, um . . . here.” I put my own hands on my waist like a moron. Jeez, you’d think I’d never been around a girl before. I mean, like, seriously, I want to tell myself to stop acting like she’s a . . . an . . .
Alien?
She’s just a girl. Just a pretty, clumsy girl who happens to think her lack of coordination is due to Earth’s gravity.
Okay.
I feel her arms slide around my waist, feel her chest press against my back. Just two thin layers of cotton separate our naked bodies.
I feel a shiver up my spine. Oh my god, I’m five. Seriously, I’m five years old around Priya. When I glance over my shoulder at her, our noses touch. She giggles in my ear and nestles her chin at the back of my neck.
“Hold on.” I rev the engine and tear out of the driveway.
You can probably visit every single thing in our town in half a day. Less than that. Three hours, tops. She’s already seen the number-one thing on the Unofficial Visitors List: the space field. What’s left after that?
Leaving our street, I have to drive past two miles of farms before I get to what we call our town center. The road curves like a fat S and I feel Priya slide on the seat behind me. Her hands grip me tighter as she struggles to hold on. A shudder snakes through my body.
I swear I’m not swerving on purpose.
I have to slow down when we get to the main drag, such as it is. We have a few vigilant cops who have nothing better to do than nail people going a mile over the speed limit or who run the single stop light in front of the library. Plus this bike’s not street legal. It’s for off-roading only.
Whatever.
Oh, the library. That’s a thing. As I idle at the light, I thrust a hand toward a brick building with a slate roof. “That’s the library,” I tell Priya, raising my voice so she can hear me.
“And that’s the fire station.” I point across the street where several volunteer firefighters are soaping up a truck. Soap bubbles escape, scattering on the wind, popping like pin-pricked balloons. We have a paramedic truck too, but that looks like it’s out on business. Someone must have had a heart attack or something. Ate too much scrapple with their fried eggs.
The light turns and we get to the commercial block: the Dairy Queen and Dunkin’ Donuts and pizza parlor.
And . . . we’re done.
Ha. No, seriously. We’re done. We have a junior-senior high school and an elementary school right next to each other. The schools even share a parking lot, which is more than a little embarrassing when a bunch of kids catch you smoking in your car. They tend to point and yell, “I’m tellin’ your mom!”
I drive for another ten minutes, up and down the side streets, in some of the nicer neighborhoods as I search for something cool. I think of visiting my mom, but the hospital where she works is two towns over. I think of my uncle Jack, whose showroom has some high-tech cars, but he’s two towns over in the opposite direction.
We have no pool, no movie theater, no Starbucks. Even the lake is just past the town line.
I suddenly realize I have nothing to show Priya. My town is boring as shit. We have absolutely zilcho here.
No wonder Em is going to Penn State.
No wonder my dad left.
I tool around the DQ and Double D for a second time, hoping something awesome will spontaneously occur. Maybe a fight will break out or a drunk guy will spill hot coffee all over himself. But while we watch, nothing happens. I stop the bike under the shade of a wide-leaved oak tree and flip the kickstand down. Priya stays on the bike, her arms still hugging me.
“I guess there isn’t much to see.”
I glance over my shoulder and see Priya’s eyes light up. “I saw so much already!”
“You don’t have to say that. I mean, you’re being really nice, but—”
“Nice?” She cocks her head to one side as if defining the word for herself. “No. I’m not being nice.”
“Please. A brick high school isn’t exactly something to write about in your notebook,” I say, aiming my chin at her bag.
As if in answer, she closes her eyes, head bobbing, whispering words in a language I don’t understand.
Finally, she opens her eyes and holds my gaze. “I have felt the wind on my face in a new way. I have heard birds sing and smelled fresh soap. I have seen the beautiful homes of people I have never met. I have traveled miles on this . . .” She looks down at her lap.
“Dirt bike?” I suggest.
She nods. “Dirt bike. Which I have never done before.” She takes off the helmet and shakes out her white-black hair. She tilts her chin up to the sky. “I am now enjoying the cool shade and delicate breeze of this tree. It is all more than I knew before.” She slowly lowers her gaze to meet mine. “Your life is full of wonder, Matthew.”
“It is? It sure as hell doesn’t seem like it.”
Priya slides off the bike and walks up to the tree, runs her hand along the bark. “This tree has so much to tell us.”
“It’s. A. Tree,” I say slowly. “It can’t talk.”
Priya grins and rests her cheek against the trunk. “Because it can’t speak your language, you think it can’t tell you anything? Listen to it.”
I roll my eyes and cup my hand behind my ear. “Nope. I don’t hear a word.”
She reaches for me and pulls me by the hand to the tree. I fall into her and our faces are inches from each other. She places her ear against the bark and urges me to do the same.
I feel like an idiot. Thank god it’s too early for most people to be buying Blizzards here at the DQ.
Priya closes her eyes again as if she truly is listening to the tree. I don’t, because that’s stupid. And because I don’t need to have anyone watching me literally hug a tree.
“What do you—”
Priya clamps a hand over my mouth to quiet me. I taste dirt on my lips from where her fingers touch my mouth and I smell something sweet and salty. The pizza, I realize. It’s from the pies we wolfed down last night.
“You want to know what I hear,” she says. “I hear the ripple of leaves as the winds blow. I hear the creak of the branches. I hear the silence this tree lives in.”
The silence? How do you hear silence? I want to laugh but she’s so serious. “You don’t hear anything, is what you mean.”
She pats the side of my head, her eyes still closed. “Just listen to something besides your own voice.”
“Ouch. Okay.” I close my eyes and press my ear to the bark. The nubby ridges are softer than they appear and the edges tickle my skin. But I hear nothing. . . .
Wait. I hear . . . the wind blow across the bark like it’s a musical instrument. I hear . . . the rustle of a squirrel running up the trunk. I hear . . .
. . . Priya’s soft exhale.
As I open my eyes, she does too. A sudden gust of wind sweeps Priya’s white hair across her face, making it cling to her eyelashes and the bark of the tree and my lips. I taste coconut. I doubt aliens use coconut shampoo.
She pulls her head away from the trunk and gently plucks strands of her hair from her eyelashes and the bark—and my lips. She laughs and I feel suddenly aware of being under a tree at the Dairy Queen with a girl who’s giggling into her hair. I take her by the hand and lead her back to the bike.
Fastening the helmet over her head, she glances back wistfully at the tree, as if she were saying good-bye to an old friend she won’t ever see again. Then her eyes meet mine and I see sadness shift to a glimmer of delight. “Will you take me on another adventure like this?”
“For real? This was just a stupid tree,” I say, shaking my head. “And it’s not even in, like, a forest or something cool. It’s just, you know, a DQ.”
“But this was data I didn’t have and now I have it,” she says. She taps her finger against the helmet. “It will all go back with me to my planet and everyone will benefit.” Her smile is so genuine, so joyful, so contagious that I smile back. I don’t want to, but fuck it, I do.
“Come on, space girl. Get on the damn bike.” When she hugs my waist, I feel my stomach cinch; and when her chest presses against my back and her lips against my neck, I almost can’t breathe.