The stars are our blanket.
I stretch my arms above me as if I could expand myself beyond the Milky Way, fingers reaching toward Mars, Neptune, Venus—and Priya’s home.
Okay, sex with Priya has made me corny and sentimental and a little bit stupid.
That didn’t happen with Em. We just laughed a lot after the first time because it sure didn’t take long. And then we fooled around and did it again and that second time was better, but it didn’t turn me into a poetry lover. Didn’t turn me into a lover at all. The next day I didn’t feel any different. I wasn’t changed.
But this was . . .
Magical. Exciting. Transformative.
Star stuff.
I roll onto my side, feel Priya tucked into me, her back against my chest, and I let my arm dangle over her waist. I can feel her heart beating through her spine and a thin layer of sweat on her skin. I’m sure my whole body is drenched in perspiration. That’s gross—
“You’re not gross,” she says, answering my thought.
“No? You don’t think so?”
“It’s a natural function.”
“For you too, I see.” I trail my finger down her shoulder, through slick, wet drops. I flick my tongue out to taste them. “Mmmm, salty.”
Priya laughs as if I’d tickled her. “Are you happy?”
“Am I . . . ? Well, uh, yeah, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes, I am. Also a little cold,” she adds.
Our clothes are scattered behind us, and I gather them up without actually standing. We dress side by side, lying on the ground, and stay there, looking up at the sky. I take Priya’s hand and point it at the cluster of bright lights around the moon high above us.
“Most people think those are stars,” I say.
“They’re planets. You call them Venus and Mars,” she says, dragging my hand from one shining beacon to the next.
“I do? What do you call them?”
“I told you, we have no language. We simply communicate to one another. Our thoughts are shared.”
As I twine my fingers around Priya’s, I think how beautiful it sounds when she talks about it. Shared thoughts. Communicating without speaking. How different would life be if we didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing? Doing the wrong thing? Thinking someone meant one thing when they meant something else entirely?
Like I promise.
“That’s how the Universe works,” Priya says. “We are all connected. We help one another through the power of our thoughts.”
The cynic in me snorts. I can’t help it. “Sounds like prayer.”
Priya thinks a moment. “I suppose you might call it that.”
Yeah, okay, I have to laugh. “What, you pray to each other? Like, to God?”
I feel Priya smile. “We are all God.”
I push myself to sitting and stare into Priya’s face to see if she’s messing with me. “We are all God. You? Me? How about Ginger?”
My dog lifts her head, thinking I’m calling her for treats.
“Matthew, this is well-known throughout the Universe,” she says, a bit perturbed by my ignorance. “Just because something can’t be seen doesn’t mean it can’t be believed.” She aims a critical eye at me. “You seem to have a hard time with concepts that must be taken upon faith.”
“You mean, like God, aliens—”
“Love.” She smiles. “You can’t see it but you believe it exists.”
I feel my cheeks color. “Love is a theory.”
“Like gravity?”
“I can’t prove that either of those things exist.”
“Yet you believe the periodic table of elements exists, yes? You believe hydrogen and nitrogen and plutonium exist?”
I feel my head nod. The basics of chemistry. That was one class I didn’t fail.
“Then you know that every element in the Universe, every atom, every particle has always existed. Which means we have always existed. We are God.”
I spread open my arms wide. “I am immortal! Bow down to me!”
Priya laughs. “Stars are born, burn out, go supernova—and are reborn. Everything in the Universe dies and is reborn over and over again.” She sits up, grabs hold of my arms, and pulls them around her and we tumble back onto the ground. When I open my eyes, I am looking up into hers. They are vulnerable yet wise, calm, confident.
I’ve seen that look before: on my dad. Before he got caught up in the voices of the crazies, he was excited about science, about the possibilities of the Universe.
“And our souls?” I ask her. “Do we have them? What happens to our souls when we die? Are they reborn too?”
She looks at me with a question on her face. “Soul.” She rolls the word around in her mouth. “Your spirit is energy and energy never dies. It’s—”
“It’s merely converted,” I say. Because I know that is true. That is physics. Energy can’t ever be created or destroyed.
“We are energy,” she says. “We are matter. We are not created or destroyed.” And then she pulls me closer and presses her lips against mine and I feel a surge of energy between us.
This won’t ever die, I think wildly. We, us, this moment will never go away. It might be converted into something else—love? memory?—but it exists forever.
I gently release her and her eyes flutter a few times, sleepily. “Are you tired?”
“I must stay awake,” she says, trying to sit back up. “My ship—”
“I’ll watch for it.”
“You?”
“What, you think I don’t know what a spaceship looks like?” I kiss her forehead and her eyes close again. “I’ve got my eyes on the skies.” In a minute, she’s asleep and I slide my arm out from under her neck.
A few yards away near the telescope is Priya’s bag. I crawl quietly across the field to retrieve it and place it within arm’s length of her, in case she wakes up and feels for it. Naturally I grab it from the wrong end and something tumbles out.
Priya’s notebook.
It feels dense in the palm of my hand, heavy with import. To look inside this, to peel back the layers of this, would be an invasion of privacy, wouldn’t it? It would be like opening up her mind and poking around inside.
Or would it?
The notebook is nothing special: smooth black leather cover with lined pages. It’s worn and soft, like a well-loved jacket, and it has an elastic band attached to the spine to hold it closed. You’d think something as important as this is to Priya would be kept under lock and key instead of a thin strip of coated rubber.
On the first page is her name. Or rather, a sentence that declares her name: “My name is Priya.”
Directly below that is a series of symbols I’ve never seen before.
That’s it. That’s the first page. Okay.
Page two. Whoa. Line after line is filled with words spaced very tightly together, hardly any blank areas between or around the letters.
Red means stop.
A dime is worth more than a penny.
Hot dogs are NOT dogs.
The third page is the same, although the pen color is different.
Do not pick flowers from a strange garden.
Do not eat flowers from a strange garden.
Okay. . . .
And on and on. Some of the most inane things are written in varying degrees of penmanship. Some lines are printed very clearly while others are sloppily scripted. Black and blue pen, a few lines in pencil, but very little white space.
Drawings, too. Sketches of faces and eyes and hands, cars and cats and houses. A lamp, a teapot, a railroad crossing sign. Symbols below and their English translations, from what I can tell.
I flip to the very last page where she has written, “Ginger is a dog.” But “dog” is crossed out and “Labrador retriever” is written above it. In the margin, there is a hastily drawn image of a dog, my dog, with her wide face and her runty body.
But why?
Obviously this was new information to her and she needed to write it down in order to remember it. And the only reason these sorts of basic things would be new to her is if she wasn’t from a place that had them.
A place without dogs. A place without railroad crossing signs. A place without teapots or houses or cars. A place where the color red did not mean stop.
Where on earth would a place like that exist?
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you can’t believe in it.
The realization of what this could mean stuns me like a punch to the jaw. Are these crib notes? Cheat sheets? Important information a visitor to our planet would need to know?
No. Like, no fucking way. That is seriously not possible.
I hold up the notebook, inspecting it from all angles as if I might read into it some other explanation.
A normal girl doesn’t carry a notebook like this.
A normal human girl doesn’t carry a notebook like this.
I want to slap myself silly. In fact, a stupid little giggle bubbles up in my throat and I have to swallow it like spit. No. Just no. And no.
She is not an alien. She is not from another planet.
But the notes . . . who keeps notes like that?
I glance over at Priya, who is on her back, hands by her sides, softly snoring. “Are you crazy?” I whisper. “Or are you what you say you are?”
I want to believe.
About a year ago, long before we had any inkling Dad was going to cheat on Mom, let alone hit the road with Carol, my uncle and his wife were over for dinner. It was a weird, middle-of-the-week get-together, something they didn’t usually do. While Brian and I were sitting in my room, all four of the adults downstairs were drinking with every course. Whiskey with their Doritos and dip, white wine with their salads, beer with their baked chicken. By the time they got to dessert, they were thoroughly wasted, which we discovered when we came downstairs scrounging for a snack.
We found Mom sitting on Dad’s lap while Carol and Jack were leaning into each other and making goofy faces.
Brian and I couldn’t stop laughing at the four of them as we inhaled all their apple pie à la mode and leftover chips.
Jack saw us and immediately straightened up, pretending he was actually sober. “Hey there, kiddo, what’s going on? How’s school?”
Normally I would have rolled my eyes at the kiddo bullshit, but I just shrugged and shoved more chips in my mouth. “’SallrightIguess.”
“You don’t do much of that stargazing with your dad anymore, do you?” he asked with a nod at my father.
“Uh, no, not really.” More chips. More pie.
“Then you won’t miss it when he sells the telescopes.”
“Sell . . . you’re selling the telescopes?”
My dad, his cheeks red from the booze, grinned, but it was halfhearted. “Yep. I’m selling it all.” He threw his hand in the air like he was tossing confetti.
“Why?”
Mom interrupted. “He doesn’t need it anymore. He’s getting a job!”
My heart pumped. “You are? Well, that’s . . . that’s awesome.” I was confused. My dad loved his telescope and his stargazing. Why would he get rid of it all? “What kind of job are you getting?”
“He’s gonna sell cars with me,” Jack said proudly.
“Cars?” Brian blurted out, his mouth filled with ice cream. “DJ, you can’t sell cars.”
My father looked sheepish, like he knew Brian was right. He couldn’t sell cars. I couldn’t even imagine him in a tie, or a shirt that had buttons.
“He can do anything he sets his mind to,” Mom declared. “First the telescopes are going and then the rest of the junk out there.” She met my dad’s gaze and smiled. “That workshop’s going back to what it used to be.”
“A wine cellar,” Jack said. He high-fived Mom.
A wine cellar. A job for Dad. No more stars. What was going on here? Had I fallen through to another dimension?
As my teeth ground through another handful of Doritos and orange cheese dust coated my fingers, I watched my parents plant sloppy kisses on each other. I was glad my father was finally getting a job but disappointed the telescopes were going away—and with them, the heart of my dad’s existence. I knew he’d brought it on himself. He’d done nothing memorable, nothing substantial, in the past ten or fifteen or maybe even twenty years. He needed to move on, move forward, leave this crap behind.
But part of that crap involved me.