Of Jenny and the Aliens

by Ryan Gebhart

  The hell? Why is she acting like this alien who lives on a ranch — or whatever that was — is a sign of the apocalypse?

  I say, “I should eat some breakfast.”

  “We’re going.”

  “Why?”

  She looks at me, completely perplexed. “What do you mean why? That was a goddamned monster!”

  “Didn’t you hear what the news lady said? It’s probably just a hoax.” Even though I don’t believe that. It just seems like a thing that could calm her down.

  “We’re going,” she says again sternly.

  “Fine,” I say. “At least let me shower.” Not waiting for a response, I walk down the hall and into the bathroom and catch myself in the mirror.

  Oh.

  Heh.

  So that’s why Jenny’s dad called me Tiger. I’m still painted up like a kitty cat, and that girl from Perrysburg did a pretty decent job. I’ve been walking around with neon-red whiskers and a spot on the tip of my nose since the party.

  I turn on the shower, get my loofah sudsy, and scrub my face clean, then the rest of me, washing away the smell of the greatest night of my life. I take my time, because that video is a stupid thing to get worked up about. So I towel off my hair, put on my acne medication, my body spray, boxers and pants, and my Cleveland Browns shirt. This is their bye week, but I still gotta show my colors.

  The alien heard me say “Go Browns,” and he said it back. He was letting me know he heard me.

  What am I saying? That out of the nearly eight billion people on Earth, an alien chose to talk to me? That’s ridiculous. He probably said something else like . . . Well, I don’t know. Besides, there’s no way he could have traveled to Pud 5, recorded a video, then sent it to Earth in less time than it took me to get home. It would take almost four and a half years for a message to travel from the Alpha Centauri system to here. And nothing travels faster than the speed of light.

  I go to my bedroom and clean out my ears with a couple of Q-tips. I leave them on my dresser, then open my door, where Mom’s waiting impatiently.

  We go out to her car in the driveway. It’s still dark out and cool enough for a hoodie, but I’m fine in my T-shirt.

  We’re waiting to turn right onto Conant Street, but the white Chevy Sonic in front of us hasn’t realized he’s got the green arrow. He’s looking down at his phone, earbuds in. Probably watching the alien video.

  The arrow’s gone yellow.

  “Move it!” Mom lays on the horn and gets near his bumper, slamming on the brakes before the guy looks up and apologetically waves, then speeds away.

  The speed limit’s thirty-five, but the speedometer says Mom’s pushing fifty. She swerves through traffic like the people she bitches about, people who treat the roads like their “own personal racetrack,” as she always says.

  “Asshole,” Mom says. Because everyone else is the asshole. Everyone else is always the asshole, including the Buick in front of us going the speed limit. She suddenly banks to the right, and we both lean over to see this alleged asshole as Mom’s car revs up. He’s a sweet old man with squinty eyes behind thick glasses, his hands in the ten-and-two position. “Asshole!”

  There are about ten cars at the light to turn into Meijer and, beyond that, an absolutely full parking lot. And Meijer’s parking lot is huge.

  Her fists crash down on the steering wheel. She’s having a panic attack, or she’s on the verge of one. We did this same anxiety-induced trip to H-E-B in Austin to stock up for the End Times when I was in the second grade and Pud 5 was first discovered. Back then we had no evidence that life even existed there, but that didn’t stop her and so many other people from thinking these hypothetical creatures were about to invade. I want to tell her nothing happened then and nothing is going to happen now. But I’ve learned from experience that it’s best not to say anything when she gets this way.

  We wait. Four cars get through on the first green light. Mom’s eyes are furious, and she swerves the instant the light goes green again — thumping my head against the passenger window — and she nearly hits another car as she fights her way into the parking lot, which is so full that cars are parked on the grass. She jumps the curb, and my head hits the ceiling.

  I rub my head, my eyebrows furrowed, but I’m not pissed at her. I guess, in a way, I get it. I can see this same scenario playing out, not just on Earth, but all across the Milky Way and beyond. Odds are that last night, on one of the billions of potentially habitable planets, a teenage alien boy hooked up with a teenage alien girl that he liked and he really hoped they’d hang out again. Maybe this morning, his mom saw a video of people from another world and they weren’t what she was expecting. They had terrifying faces, and so she completely lost her mind. Given the scope of the universe, my story can’t be that unique.

  Mom’s eyes are like those of a predatory cat, stalking for any place to park. The car rumbles through the grass until she finds a spot right next to the street. We’re like a quarter mile from the entrance.

  We hike, passing a lady loading the back of her SUV with cases of bottled water and plastic grocery bags. A guy wearing a black hoodie creeps up, then dashes off with her shopping cart while her back is turned.

  This is ridiculous. All this because an alien wouldn’t be winning any beauty pageants?

  I mutter, “Just because life exists on another planet doesn’t mean life on Earth is about to end.”

  “Did you hear me?” Mom says.

  Apparently she was asking me something. “What?”

  “I said, get as much water and bottled drinks as you can find. I’ll meet you by the canned foods in fifteen minutes. Okay?”

  We pass through the sliding-glass doors, and two police officers are standing with dead-serious faces and their hands uncomfortably close to their holsters. But the greeter next to them — an old man in a red vest with his hands behind his slouched back — is still doling out genuine smiles and saying hello to the people barging in.

  “Derek!” Mom says.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  She bullies her way through the traffic jam of shopping carts and concerned faces. God, it’s hard to breathe in here. It’s humid and musty from all these humans. Every checkout line is backed up into the apparel sections.

  There’s no way these people admired the stars like I did last night. They’ve probably never made up constellations either. And now they’re all surprised and worried that there are aliens with shark teeth and livestock that look like the offspring from some scandalous, drunken dinosaur-turkey hookup. I mean, there’s a lot of strange shit going on in those black skies. In the Milky Way alone, there are black holes and planets made entirely out of diamonds and a massive space cloud of raspberry-scented alcohol. It really shouldn’t be surprising that any of this exists.

  What did Mom want me to get? Potatoes? Lunchables?

  The shelves are shockingly bare — in one aisle the canned foods have been picked clean. A box of spilled Cheerios is on the floor in another aisle. A bunch of crumbled-up pieces and the wheel of someone’s shopping cart sits on the smashed box. Everyone’s devolved into animal survival mode, fighting for the last twelve-pack of ramen noodles, the last container of beef sticks, the last box of Gushers.

  At the very back of the store in the dairy department, the Go-Gurt has been completely untouched. I grab a box. But those lines at the front of the store were so long. Do I really want to wait? God, where’s Mom at? How long are we going to be here? Probably for hours, and then we’ll have to fight traffic out of the parking lot, and then Mom will want to fill up the car, and I bet there are really long lines at the gas stations too, and by the time Mom gets to a pump, they’ll all be tapped. Then Mom’ll get pissed again.

  Screw this.

  I get on my phone and message her.

  ME: I gotta get out of here or I’m gonna lose my shit. See you back at the house.

  ME: Sorry.

  ME: Love you.

  I walk through the sliding-glas
s doors, squeezing my way through the shopping carts and people yelling at each other to move, and then to the cars honking at each other. People are grabbing hair, clenching teeth, smoking cigarettes. But nobody’s moving.

  I walk home.

  If this really is the end of the world, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

  It’s eleven a.m. and Mom isn’t home and she hasn’t responded to my texts. I’m sure nothing happened. She’s probably just at an emergency appointment with Dr. McDermott to get a prescription for more of her anxiety meds.

  I’m playing Mario Kart: Double Dash!! in my garage with Andy and Shugar. Shugar’s such a stupid poop. He picked Bowser Jr. and the green Koopa. Everyone knows Bowser Jr. is my character.

  I end up with Baby Mario and the red Koopa.

  We’re sitting in shopping carts that me and Shugar converted into chairs. Back in July, we went to Meijer in the middle of the night and ran off with four carts. We used his dad’s reciprocating saw and chopped off the front panels, lined the insides with blankets and pillows, then locked all the wheels so they wouldn’t move around so much. Mom asked me where we got them, and I told her Meijer let us have them because they were already broken.

  Since she never parks her car in the garage, she let me convert it into a place where me and my friends can hang out. It’s detached from the house, so she doesn’t care if we get too loud and she rarely comes in to check on us. It’s still a work in progress because it’s a big two-car garage, so we have a lot of room to fill. So far we’ve got the shopping carts, the TV with the messed-up color filter, my old Nintendo GameCube and a DVD player, and a coffee table we found on someone’s curb that we’ve been painting a bunch of stuff on. Mom let me have the old couch, but no one sits there unless all the chairs have been taken. They’re not that comfortable, though. You have to scrunch in your shoulders, and even though we padded them really well, they’re still stiff and lumpy.

  We’re racing Baby Park in Versus Mode, and we changed the settings to nine laps. I’m way ahead in first place, and Shugar gets a blue shell because he can’t get out of third. He’s snickering.

  I look over my chair and see the top of his head. “You little bitch.”

  I get blown up and Shugar speeds ahead of me, though he’s still two laps behind. I’m not worried. Baby Park’s my jam.

  He says, “Scrobes, were you at Meijer this morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought I saw you. My parents made me and my brothers go. I was going to say ‘What’s up,’ but it was slammed in there, wasn’t it?” He gives a long-enough pause for me to respond, but I don’t. “Like something out of World War Z. I had to fight off this old lady for the last box of Hamburger Helper.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Andy says. He’s pulling ahead of me for the first time all race, and then covers the road with a bunch of bananas. I maneuver through them no problem.

  “Did you guys see the video?” I say.

  Shugar turns to me, his eyes big and his face serious. “Dude. He looked like he was coming after his preciousss.” He says this in a slithery Gollum voice. “After my parents dropped me off from the store, they went to this place on Airport Highway to buy us some guns. My dad was like, ‘When they invade, we’ll be ready to take on those shark-faced bastards.’”

  “But the Centaurian never said they’re gonna invade,” I say.

  “Yeah, he did. He said, ‘You’re going down.’”

  “Oh.”

  I thought he said Go Browns.

  “I don’t see why everyone is getting so worked up about it,” Andy says.

  Finally, someone talking some sense. “I totally agree.”

  “So fake. You could totally tell those dinosaur-looking animals were CGI.”

  “They looked pretty real to me,” I say, slightly embarrassed. Because maybe I have been duped. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Yeah, well, you’re an idiot. And besides, aliens wouldn’t be wearing human clothes.”

  “How would you know? Maybe pants and T-shirts are things that we’ll still be wearing a thousand years from now. How do you make pants better?”

  “Things can always be improved upon.”

  “What do you think they should be wearing? What is the future of pants?”

  “I don’t know. But not pants.”

  “No pants!” Shugar says in a Mario voice. “No pants” is one of his self-proclaimed catchphrases.

  Andy continues, “The door had a knob and a knocker. It should have been like the doors in Star Wars. It’s like the director wasn’t even trying.”

  I say, “But why have it air-powered when a doorknob works just fine?”

  “So the world’s coming to an end, and Derek’s not going to die a virgin,” Shugar says in this grating and condescending tone. “There is a God.”

  Andy says, “What do you mean?” He looks at me, unbelieving and excited at the prospect that I finally got laid. “Wait, did you finally hook up with Adriana? I thought something seemed different about you.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Why not? Dude, she wants your nuts.”

  Shugar says, “He went home with Jennifer Novak last night.”

  I look at him. As far as I know, no one saw me and Jenny leaving Dorton’s together. Everyone was in the backyard. “How would you know? You were grounded last night.”

  “Still grounded. Today’s my last day, thank God. So tell us, did you bang her?”

  I gotta change the subject. “Did I tell you guys I saw a flying saucer and an alien last night?”

  Andy’s making this gross horned-up laugh. “Dude, I saw her at the party. Homygod her tits were nice. How the heck were you able to hook up with someone as hot as her?”

  “Because she’s literally a slut,” Shugar chimes in.

  “So are you,” I say.

  “You’re goddamn right I am.”

  He crosses the finish line. I’m right behind him, and Andy rounds it out in last.

  I get out of my shopping cart and tip Mark’s over. He winces and his face gets red, but he’s laughing. He fixes his chair and there’s a black smear on his cheek from where he landed on the greasy concrete. “What was that for?”

  I move to the couch and take out the one-hitter and plastic baggie from the coffee table. I say, “I walked the towpath after the party, and I saw these lights in the sky right above that island at Side Cut.”

  “It wasn’t aliens,” Andy says. “Come on. Pick your characters.”

  I spark up, then settle into the couch, the piece sitting on my lap. I close my eyes and slowly exhale. “I know what I saw. There was a creature on the island, and he looked exactly like the thing on the news. I swear.”

  My eyes open and Andy’s leaning way out of his chair, his hand extended out to me. I pass him the one-hitter and the bag. He says, “Do you have any idea how long a light-year is?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah. It’s long. If aliens from Alpha Centauri were to come here, they would literally have to travel at the speed of light for four and a half years. First of all, traveling at the speed of light is impossible —”

  “It is possible,” I say. “We heard their music, remember?”

  “Those are radio waves, dumbass.”

  “So you don’t think the music was faked?”

  Andy shrugs. “That could’ve been legit. But trust me: there has never been and there never will be an alien spaceship on Earth. It’s just not physically possible.”

  “You don’t know their technology.”

  “Okay, look. Even if these aliens were able to break the laws of physics and make some spacecraft that runs on . . . I don’t know . . . magical high-octane unicorn farts, do you have any idea how dangerous outer space is? It’s not like you can pull over if something breaks down. You’re in the middle of the void, and the radiation out there is deadly.”

  I say, “We were able to travel to the moon, and that was, like, back in the nineteen sixt �
�”

  “Allegedly,” Andy says.

  I say, “Imagine where we’ll be a thousand years from now. And who knows how advanced these beings from Pud Five are.”

  “Don’t get me wrong: it’s cool that aliens really are out there. Maybe we can pen-pal with them, sending little messages every four and a half years. But you don’t have to worry about an invasion.”

  “Did I say I was?”

  “I am,” Shugar says casually.

  I say, “Look, all I said was that I saw an alien and a flying object that I couldn’t identify.”

  “It was probably a spotlight,” Andy says.

  “There was nothing going on last night.”

  “Or a helicopter.”

  “It didn’t make a sound.”

  “Maybe it was the Chinese,” Shugar says.

  “It’s not the Chinese,” Andy responds, annoyed. “Come on, dude. Let’s be real.”

  “They’re probably spying on us all the time. They have trillions of dollars, and they’re building some high-tech drones nowadays.”

  I say, “Why spy on Maumee, Ohio?”

  “Because it’s a suburb of Toledo and . . . I don’t know. They’re pissed that we’re over in Raya. You know, like, they think we’re trying to take their oil.”

  “Raya doesn’t have oil.”

  “Yeah-huh. All those countries over there have oil. China’s trying to secure the drilling rights to all these nations before we do.”

  “That sucks,” I say.

  “Pick your characters,” Andy says, then lights up one of his clove cigarettes.

  I put my one-hitter in the drawer. “Shugar, let me be Bowser Jr.”

  “No way. Bowser Jr.’s my favorite.”

  I grab on to the handle of his shopping cart chair, and his fingers wrap around the interlinking plastic. I say, “This is my house. Come on.”

  He starts giggling like a dork. “Only if you tell me: did you bang Jennifer?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Just tell us, Scrobo,” Andy says. “You know he’s not going to stop asking.”

  I sit back in my chair and take my controller, and as much as it hurts me, I select Baby Mario and the red Koopa again.