It’s kind of cool not having a phone. Mom can’t contact me. No one can text me. I don’t have to stare at an empty screen and see no calls from Dad. And the thought of Priya holding it, using it, swiping a long, delicate finger across the screen as she plays Angry Birds, which is the only game I have on my phone—it sort of pisses me off but it sort of doesn’t.
When Em and Brian drop me at home, after saying good-bye for a week, I see a car in my dad’s spot in the garage. For a moment, I freeze; then I realize it’s my uncle Jack’s. A brand-new Mustang as befits a Ford salesman. He and Mom are inside, sitting at the kitchen table with glasses of wine in front of them. I watch from outside for a few minutes, wondering what they’re saying, how much of that bottle they’ve already had.
Although Jack is ten years younger than my dad, he looks like he’s the older brother. Maybe because he has a real job in the real world with real responsibilities. And maybe because he wears a tie and a sad smile. My dad was always in jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers; he looked like an aging but happy-go-lucky skater boy. Tony Hawk, if he hadn’t been successful at anything.
Jack leans back in a chair at the table, his long legs stretched in front of him. His tie’s gone and his shirt is open at the neck so you can see his undershirt. Yeah, he’s a guy who wears undershirts. He also shaves on the weekends and wears his hair in a crew cut in the summer. Like my dad, he isn’t a bad-looking dude, but his wrinkles make him look tired.
And now that his wife is gone with his brother—
Ginger barks, startling me and my mom and uncle. They wave me in but I’m not sure I’m ready. The air is gonna be heavy in there. I point at Ginger and raise my voice through the glass. “Gotta take her for a walk.”
They don’t care. Of course not. They’ve got wine to drink.
When I get to the side yard, I feel a pull in my gut. I have to look up at the field. I know she’s gone but—
She’s there.
No. Way.
My stomach flips like a pancake and my heart pounds. I speed-walk to the creek—and jump over it in a single bound like goddamn Superman. And as I’m panting up the short hill, I keep telling myself this is for my phone. It’s the phone I want, not Priya.
She’s sitting on the ground, just like the last time I saw her, with her face tilted up to the moon, as if she were bathing in its glow, getting a moontan. Her eyes find me, but she remains motionless and still. “I know you, don’t I?”
“Uh, yeah. We met last night.” I point at the ground. “Right here.”
She smiles serenely. “I sensed that.”
“You, uh, you borrowed my phone?” I feel awkward and way too tall standing over her like this, so I crouch down beside her. She looks exactly the same as last night: same top, same tutu skirt, same nose piercing. A silver chain falls over her throat, sparkling in the moonlight. The charm is a droplet of white-black pearl that matches the color of her hair. Would it be too weird to touch it? To lift it from her neck and roll it between my fingers? To feel the smooth surface of the jewel against my skin?
Yes. That would be weird. Hands. To. Self.
“My phone,” I say again, strong and insistent. “You took it and I’d like it back.”
“Your . . .”
“Phone, my phone.”
Her brow furrows; tiny little ridges appear on her forehead. “No.” She elongates the single syllable into three. No-o-o.
I glance over at her black bag, which she clutches like it’s a part of her. I start to reach for it and she pulls it closer. I drop my knees to the ground and lean over her, inches from her chest and stomach. “Priya, I need my phone back. I only loaned it to you.”
She sits up, her face so close to mine that I can smell the flowery perfume of her shampoo. Her lips look like pale pink pillows and I notice for the first time that her face is all wide eyes and plump mouth, curves that are at odds with her skinny frame.
“I did not require the use of your phone,” she says in a low voice, very formally. “Although I appreciated your offer.” She reaches into her bag and takes my phone out with all the flourish of a magician’s assistant. When I take it from her, our fingers touch, sparking a wild sliver of electricity that I can feel all the way down to my toes.
No, no, that’s the cell phone. Or the dry grass of the field creating a static burst. It’s not anything romantic or magic or . . . crazy.
I shake it off. “Well, if you didn’t call anyone, then how did you get home?”
She frowns as if I’m stupid. “I’m not home.”
“Not now. But you were.” I settle back, putting distance between us. “You were gone this morning. Because you went home, right?”
Again, she shakes her head.
“Did your boyfriend come pick you up?”
“Boyfriend?” She twists the word around in her mouth.
I feel my cheeks warm. Did I really just ask her that? “Or girlfriend. Or just friend. Or . . . whatever.” I clear my throat and begin again. “You went somewhere today. Where did you go?”
She points to my house.
“No, no. I mean, where did you hang out today if you weren’t here or at home?”
Her finger hovers in the air, still aimed at my house.
“Wait, my house? But how . . .” I left the door open for her so she could use the bathroom and my phone, but . . . “Wait,” I say again, because I can’t quite wrap my mind around what she’s implying. “You were in my house? All day? But . . . I was there!”
“I saw all the rooms. There were many, many rooms, many places to gather data and then . . .” She wiggles her finger in the air, drawing a path from one place to another. “. . . there.”
“The workshop? You were in my dad’s workshop?”
She nods. “Yes. Much cooler.”
I stare at her and then—I can’t help it—I laugh my ass off. The idea that she was in my house while I was there and didn’t even know it floors me.
“You’re so sneaky!”
“Sneaky?”
“Yeah, stealthy. Like a ninja or something.” I shake my head. “You’re lucky my mom didn’t see you. She might have called the cops.”
“I would like to meet your mother.”
My mind snaps a picture of mom and Jack at the dinner table, drinking and whining about their loser spouses. “Under normal circumstances, yeah, but now? Maybe another time.”
Priya’s smile is fleeting and wistful. “There will not be another time. I’m going home. Tonight.”
“You said you were going home last night.”
“Yes. My calculations were imprecise.”
“Um . . . okay. So . . . where exactly is your home?”
She raises a long arm toward the sky. I feel a laugh bubble up in my chest. She can’t be serious.
“You’re from . . . space?”
“A planet near Gliese 581c. It’s twenty light-years from Earth.”
Ding-ding-ding-ding! Crazy alert. This is not a drill.
“Only twenty, eh? Well, hello, neighbor.” If she catches my sarcasm, she doesn’t react, which makes me feel kind of bad. I don’t want to make fun of her, but these people, the fanatical ones my dad talked to all the time, make it too easy for me to mock them. Aliens? Spaceships? Special magnetic energy? Please. It’s all too ridiculous.
“Gliese 581c, you said?”
“Near Gliese 581c.”
“Oh, I see. Near. That’s totally different. Does it have a name that I can pronounce or is it just a bunch of numbers and letters?”
She turns her face toward me and I see in her eyes that she did catch the snark I was throwing. My face flushes with embarrassment.
“It’s okay that you don’t believe me.”
“Kind of an unusual thing to say.”
“I think your father would believe me.”
I almost choke on my spit. “Excuse me?”
“Your father . . . he’s a crazy person too.”
Oh no. She must be part of one of my dad’s online conspiracy groups. “How do you know my father?”
“I don’t.”
“Then how—”
“You were thinking he was a crazy person. Like me,” she adds.
“That’s not true. Not exactly.” Actually I don’t think my dad is crazy, just that he supports the crazies. Encourages them to believe in conspiracy theories like the government secretly housing aliens in Area 51. But I don’t tell Priya this because . . . I have a twisty gut feeling she’s one of the crazies.
On the other hand, if she is one, maybe she knows where he is. “Priya, do you—”
“If you don’t know, then I don’t know.”
“Huh?” I didn’t actually finish my sentence. Did I?
Priya falls onto her back and then rolls over to one side, curling herself around Ginger, who fits her big head into the space between Priya’s ribs and hips. I have two sets of inquisitive brown eyes looking at me.
“Back on my home planet, we can sense what others are thinking. Not specific thoughts,” she says carefully, almost delicately selecting her words. “But on your planet, it’s different. It’s not sensing but hearing.”
“You can hear my thoughts.” I roll my eyes. “You’re an alien from another solar system and one who can read minds.”
She smiles slyly in the moonlight. “How do you know Gliese 581c is in another solar system?”
I sigh. I have to tread lightly with these people. “My father was into astronomy. He might have taught me a few things.” More than a few.
“How much more?”
I glance at her and she smiles again. “A lot. But it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you’re an alien.”
“Why? Don’t you believe there’s life on other planets?”
I lift my chin and glance up at the sky, spot the North Star. “You know, I should be smoking a joint if we’re going to have this discussion.”
“A joint?”
Maybe she is from another planet. “Never mind.”
I lie flat on my back and we both look up into the stars.
My dad and I used to do this when I was young. He’d sneak me out while Mom was sleeping and we’d count the stars till the sun began to rise. I don’t think my father enjoyed being awake during the daylight hours. There was too much pressure, too many responsibilities. At night, we had the vast Universe to contemplate, to discuss, to imagine. We were Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock speeding through the galaxy on missions to explore new worlds and new species. We were Galileo and Copernicus marveling over the planets, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking projecting life onto those planets.
I used to feel so connected to my father back then, proud to be his son, thrilled to share his passions. But . . . something changed, something was lost. The magic of the stars dissolved like dust.
I push myself up to a sitting position and lean my face into Priya’s. “Who are you?”
“I’m Priya.”
“Where are you from?”
“A planet near Gliese 581c, twenty light-years—”
“Where are you really from?”
“I just told you—”
“That’s crap and you know it.”
She rolls her head from side to side. “No, Matthew, it’s—”
“How did you get here?”
“My people were left here for data collection.”
“No, how did you travel here?”
“We came on a spaceship, through a wormhole.”
“If you’re an alien life-form, why do you look exactly like a human?”
“Our planet is a lot like this one.”
“You speak English there?”
“I speak whatever you speak.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but she sits up and stops me, getting right in my face so that we are nearly nose to nose. “Matthew, my planet is a lot like Earth but much smaller. It has less gravitational force, so we are smaller than humans, lighter than you. We communicate in different ways, through a shared energy field. Our planet is rapidly changing. It’s been cooling very quickly, and we’ve had to adapt and work together to figure out ways to save it. Because of that, we pushed our technology further than yours, which is why we can travel across the universe and you can’t. Yet.”
She winds her arms around her knees and rests her head on them, weary and exhausted from standing up to me. “Does that answer all the questions in your head?”
Prove it to me, I think. Take me with you.
“You can’t come with me.”
I scowl and look away. I don’t believe she can read my mind—that was obviously a lucky guess—but whatever is happening, I’d appreciate it if she stopped doing it. “Why are you here?”
“I told you. Data collection.”
I bob my head at her black bag. “That your data in there?”
“Oh no. This couldn’t possibly hold everything.” She taps her temple with her forefinger. “The data is stored up here.”
Oh lord. I laugh and shake my head. She frowns. “Not laughing at you. Just . . . go on.”
“It functions like your cloud computing. Everything I have observed here will be incorporated into our world back home. If it’s useful to us, it will become part of our culture, our shared education.”
“So, you’re stealing from us?”
She stares at me for a while, as if she were studying my lips and mouth. My brain? “Not stealing. Borrowing.”
A smile escapes me. “Priya, you may not be from Pennsylvania. Hell, you may not be from America at all. You could be . . . I don’t know . . .” I shrug.
“I could be what?”
“Indian? Pakistani? It’s not like I see a lot of different kinds of people in this Podunk town. My best friend, Brian? His last name is Aoki. My mom said his family caused a huge stir years ago when they moved here. We aren’t exactly a cosmopolitan neighborhood.”
Priya regards me for a moment. “You speak. Too much.”
I can’t help but laugh. I let my eyes wander from Priya’s white hair and sharp cheekbones past the ridge of her lips and her chin. Her mouth opens and she smiles mischievously, a hint of something sly in her gaze. Her eyes meet mine and slowly-slowly-slowly blink, lashes moving through liquid quicksand, swallowing me up. I feel my pulse quicken when she looks at me like that. “What I’m saying is, I believe you’re . . . you’re not from around here.”
“Thank you.”
Suddenly her hand flies to her temple. It’s as if she’d been struck. She blinks quickly a few times and her brow wrinkles.
“Are you okay?”
“I . . . have . . . pain. . . .” She presses her palm against her forehead, splaying her fingertips. “It’s . . . it’s . . .” Her eyes dart from side to side as if she’s searching for the word.
“Headache? You have a headache?”
She nods. “Yes, yes, that’s it.”
“Maybe you have some medicine in your bag.”
“No. We are forbidden to carry our own remedies.” She presses a second palm to her head, gripping it like a vise. She looks like she’s in excruciating pain.
I glance over my shoulder at the house. “Come inside. We have aspirin. And Tylenol.” I hold my hand out to Priya, but she stares at it quizzically, her eyes registering confusion. When I grab her hand and tug her to standing, she nearly collapses onto me. I catch her and steady her on her feet. Her lips briefly touch my neck and her white hair tickles my mouth before I can set her right.
She holds my shoulders, keeping herself balanced, but I can see she’s faint; her lips tremble and her eyes spin. Should I carry her to the house? Will Mom and Jack freak out?
“My mother’s a nurse,” I tell her. “She can help you.”
Despite her pain, Priya manages to shake her head back and forth. “No,” she says brusquely. “That would not be wise.”
“But she knows stuff about—”
“No!”
“Okay, okay.” I gently lower her to the ground. “But you need something for your headache. Can you use one of . . .” I sigh. I can’t believe I’m about to say this. “One of our remedies?”
She bobs her head in a sort of agreement, which is good enough for me.
“Great. I’ll be back in five minutes.” Ginger starts to follow me, but I turn back and command her to stay before rushing down the hill.
The kitchen is empty: Jack’s gone and I can hear my mom walking around upstairs. My eye catches the wine bottle sitting in the recycling bin near the door. Wow, that was fast.
In the tiny first-floor bathroom, Nurse Mom’s got drugs galore, although nothing prescription. Just the usual OTC: Tylenol, Advil, aspirin, Aleve, a few sleeping pills, some Benadryl. All in giant white bottles without childproof caps. I grab five of everything and then grab a Coke on my way through the kitchen.
I pause with one hand on the door. Priya said she was going back tonight. Not to her “home planet,” of course, but her real home, wherever it is. But what if she’s wrong? Like she was before?
Or what if she’s totally bats and there’s no one coming for her at all, even though she thinks there is? She can’t stay out in the field again by herself.
I could leave Ginger with her, but that dog’s no Lassie. She’s more likely to run away from trouble than to save anyone from it. And what if it rains before her ride comes?
In the front hall closet I find an old tent from the weekend Brian and I were Cub Scouts. Frankly we weren’t much interested in troop activities, but we really wanted to go camping. Or we thought we did. After a miserably cold weekend in the woods, we decided we’d rather make forts indoors where we could watch TV and raid the fridge.
I knock aside boxes of crap until I find the nylon tent with a foldable aluminum frame. It’s small but better than nothing.
When I get to the field, Priya is sitting up, her legs stretched in front of her, notebook on her lap. I try to get a glimpse of the page she’s reading, but her hand covers most of the writing.
She glances up with a quizzical smile as if I surprised her by coming back.
“Voilà.” I open my palm and display a rainbow of pills: orange aspirin, pink Benadryl, brown Advil, red-white-and-blue Tylenol, blue Aleve.
“Pretty,” she says. “What are they?”
“Medicine. For your headache.”
And now her eyes open a little wider, her memory sparked. “Oh yes.”
“What do you want? Aspirin, Advil?”
She stares forlornly at the drugs and then holds her head again. “This pain will not go away. Not with those.”
“Are you sure? My mom gets migraines, you know, and she wants to throw up but she takes, like, a bunch of this shit and feels a lot better.”
She cradles her head in her palm. “Thank you, Matthew.”
“Don’t you even want to try? Personally I’m a Tylenol guy.”
She looks at the pills, at me, and then back again. “Which is Tylenol?”
I pick out two of the oblong-shaped pills and place them in the palm of her hand, and then open the Coke for her. It pops loudly in the silence of the empty field, startling both of us. “Tylenol, sugar, and caffeine. How can you go wrong?”
She hesitates before swallowing the drugs, sipping carefully from the can as if she doesn’t want to touch her lips to the metal.
I unfold the tent for her, snapping the lightweight rods together and sliding them through the ends of the nylon covering. Considering I did this only once in my life, I manage to figure it out pretty fast. Priya watches, fascinated.
“Voilà,” I say for the second time, not sure when I got so sophisticated as to regularly use French words.
“This is . . . ?”
“A tent. For you.”
Priya runs her hands along the smooth edges, peeks inside. “It is very charming. Thank you. It’s a . . . ?”
“Tent. A tent.”
She flips a page in her notebook and scratches her pen across the paper.
“You sleep inside it,” I tell her, demonstrating. I don’t quite fit: either my head or my feet stick out. “Well, you’re small. You can curl up.” I crawl back out and hold the flap up for her. She doesn’t budge.
“Okay, well. There you go. Now you have a place to sleep and I don’t have to worry anymore. Okay? Okay.” I stand up and wipe the grass off my pants. “Come on, Ginger.”
I wave to Priya as Ginger and I start down the hill. “Have a nice trip home, wherever you live.”
“My planet is near Gliese 581c,” she replies.
“Yep. Near Gliese 581c. Good luck with that.” I shake my head. The girl is a wack job. Beautiful, yes. Sweet, it would seem so, and smart, but . . .
Not an alien. And therefore as crazy as a loon.
Inside I wander through the house, shutting off the lights as I go. I should feel relief that we’re done, Priya and I. If her ride comes, if it doesn’t. Doesn’t matter. I have my phone back and I’m done.
Then I run to the side door and double check that it’s open. Just in case.