by Ryan Gebhart
“Really?”
“I’ve never met this Jenny girl, but I remember what it’s like to be eighteen and in love. I know what you’re going through.”
I look at him. I don’t want to be blunt, but I say, “I went to another planet, Dad.”
He shakes his head, not wanting to lose his train of thought. “This is the first time you’re experiencing these amazing things, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘How could I ever have these feelings again?’ Well, let me tell you something. Your mom was the new girl at Anderson High. She moved to Austin from Cleveland, and Mr. Fielder sat her next to me, and she was so beautiful I couldn’t stand it. You’ll think that no one will ever make you feel full of life the way Jenny does. Believe me, someone will. I experienced those same feelings when my boss assigned Abby MacGregor’s plane seat next to mine. I was married and legitimately in love and I had a son, but my heart was racing as if I were eighteen all over again.”
The cluster of traffic breaks up, and we’ve reached the intersection of Key and the Trail. A pop pop pop of gunshots goes off somewhere close, and maybe someone just died. But it’s like Dad doesn’t even notice or care that the world is falling apart around us. His voice has been getting louder, and I know what that means. He’s not the kind of guy who cries, but when he gets emotional, it’s like he tries to shout back the tears.
He says, “I’ve been thinking of your mother ever since y’all left Texas, and I can only hope she gives me a second chance. But you know what? Ever since I’ve been up here, now I can’t get Avery’s mom out of my head.”
“Would you tell my mom that you’re still thinking of Abby?”
“I’m not just thinking of Abby, Double D. Heck, I still love her. We have so much history together. Fifteen years!” He lets out this disbelieving laugh and shakes his head. “Why can’t I just be in love with one person? It would be so much easier.”
“Jury’s still out on that one.”
Maybe it’s just the drab glare from a bright, bone-colored sky — I can’t even tell where the sun is — but he doesn’t really look like my dad right now. All I see is some guy who thinks he should have his shit figured out at his age, and he’s frustrated that he’s nowhere close.
I say, “I don’t know. It means you have a big heart, and that’s a good thing. And . . . really normal.”
I think I’m starting to see where Dad and Jenny and the aliens and pretty much everyone who’s not me are coming from. Heck, maybe one day I’ll fall stupidly in love with someone as much as I did with Jenny. I highly doubt it, but crazier things have happened.
“Love sucks,” he says. “One day you feel above the clouds, then the next you’re suicidal. But whether we like it or not, it’s what keeps the human race going.”
The car’s at a complete stop. I open the door and step into a pile of crusty brown snow on the side of the road that goes up to my shins. From here, the stars are still spiraling above uptown Maumee a half a mile away. I look up to the gray, wintry Ohio sky. “Stop moving the stars for me.” As if Karo’s grandma could hear me.
They continue to spin. She’s probably passed out after all she ate, moving the Milky Way even in her sleep. Or maybe she can hear me, but she’s teaching me a lesson. Those stars will remain here for twenty-four hours because that’s what I asked of her and that’s what she promised me. There’s nothing I can do to stop people from looting stores, from shooting each other in panic, or from ending their own lives.
In less than twenty-four hours, it will all be over and I’ll have the rest of my life to think about what I did the day before Thanksgiving.
I look at Dad through the open door. “I’ll get to my truck faster if I walk.”
He nods, not objecting. “Be safe.” I close the door and he takes a right onto Key, empty of traffic because everyone’s taking the Trail to get onto the highway and go someplace they think is safer than here.
Everyone across the world is searching for that someplace.
I’m walking in brown slush piled between two lanes of stalled cars. Steam is coming out of exhaust pipes, and engines idly rumble like a thousand dogs that are dreaming in their sleep. No one is honking.
There’s a red Honda Civic loaded to the brim with clothing and other belongings, and the couple in the front seats are arguing. It’s muffled, but I know they’re saying they should’ve taken a different route. There’s a man in a Ford Fusion clenching the steering wheel tightly, his jaw set, and he doesn’t look at me even though I’m looking at him. He’s trapped in a panic attack right now.
The intersection of Conant and the Trail is in complete gridlock from the police barricade. I continue past the water tower to Ford Street. I take a right on West Broadway and it turns into West River Road, where the traffic disappears. My truck is in the parking lot for Side Cut park, and it’s got company: a black Toyota Corolla caked in salt.
I unlock my truck and take my phone out of the glove box.
There are the seven missed messages from Adriana from the night of my birthday that I still haven’t checked. There’s one from Jenny.
I can’t click on the conversation. It’s like all the different glands in my body just dumped their chemicals into my bloodstream, because I’ve never felt such a rush and contradiction of emotions, and so many questions are bombarding my head. Will the United States stop the invasion of Raya? Will countries set aside their differences and train their weapons at the stars? Will Jenny’s standards for world peace be reached? Is she going to fulfill her promise and be a faithful girlfriend to me? After all that’s happened, do I even want her to? Because maybe what me and Jenny have isn’t true love; maybe it just seems like it because it’s the only thing I’ve ever known.
I pull up CNN instead, and the first thing that appears is the headline: PRESIDENT TO ADDRESS GLOBAL CRISIS AT 9:00 PM EST.
Fuck it. I take a deep, resigned breath, and open our conversation.
JENNY: Where are you? I’m at the park by your truck.
There’s a set of footprints in the snow that lead up to my passenger door and I follow them over a walking bridge, where a waft of smoke rises from the right side. I lean over the railing. Jenny’s sitting cross-legged in the dirt, her back against the abutment. She’s not with Mark. I’m not thinking this with relief or joy, because I’m not feeling either of those things even though I should be. She came looking for me because she’d rather spend her last day on Earth with me and not him, and that’s exactly what I wanted and I’m trying to be excited by this.
“Jenny,” I call out, and she looks up. Her eyes brighten when they connect with mine. Her cheeks and nose are red from the cold.
“How’d you find me?” Her voice echoes beneath the bridge.
In an angry Russian-woman accent, I say, “It wasn’t that hard. I just followed the trail of deflated blow-up dolls.”
She gives an amused smile. “Your Boris accent sucks,” she says weakly.
“I try. What are you doing down there?”
She gets up, balancing herself with her staff, and walks up the hill. The way she’s all bundled up with scarves and accessories, she’s just like the hottest wizard. She lets the staff fall and embraces me in the hardest, most sincere hug she’s ever given. She buries her head between my shoulder and chest.
“You’re okay,” she says.
“ThunderShirt,” I manage to get out. I put my cheek atop her skull.
“Your parents messaged me to see if I was with you, and I told them I wasn’t. Mark and I came to find you and I saw your truck and we looked everywhere — Blue Grass Island, then we walked the towpath to Conant and then this flying saucer just appeared out of nowhere. Everything turned to panic, and the next thing I knew I couldn’t find Mark. I ran back to my car. I’ve never run faster in my life. I saw the bridge and thought maybe the Centaurians wouldn’t find me there.”
I was wrong — she was with Mark. He must’ve spent the night with her and this doesn’t surprise me, and I’m stil
l not having any emotions even though just yesterday she was capable of making me have them all.
I say, “Did my parents tell you anything else?”
She’s not letting me go. “Where were you?”
“I was having dinner with a friend.”
She pulls back just enough so I can see her confused look. “In the morning?”
“It wasn’t morning where I was at.”
She’s staring blankly at my chest, trying to figure out what I mean. She’s thinking I’m referring to Pud 5, but that doesn’t make sense because how could any human travel to another planet? But she knows that there’s only one reason why I would go to Side Cut on a morning when the city had to declare a Level 3 snow emergency: I met with the Centaurian, and it’s me who’s behind all this.
I say, “It’s not an invasion and they’re not flying saucers. It’s all just a show. I saw some guy in Seattle on the news and he was firing his gun at the ring of lights and they went right through because there’s nothing there. Well, I mean, there is, but not in any way that matters, I guess.”
“Did you hear the news?” Her voice lifts a little.
“That the president is speaking tonight?”
“No, no. The United States deployed the troops into Raya. We were just about to launch a bunch of missiles and that’s when the flying saucers appeared. Suddenly no one knew what to do. There were all these pictures of American soldiers and Rayan soldiers together, but they weren’t fighting. They were looking up.” She playfully bumps her fists against my chest like a drumroll. “Derek.”
“Yeah?”
She grabs the back of my neck and brings our lips together, practically slamming my nose into her cheekbone. But my eyes close and my mouth opens and I let her do what she wants. Her tongue touches my tongue. Her teeth bump against mine. She tastes a little like chocolate milk and cigarettes, and I fight down a reflexive gag.
My closed eyes squeeze tighter shut because the sky must be getting brighter, like the sun is breaking through the clouds. I gently push her back. Another ring of stars — about a hundred feet in diameter — surrounds us, halos us.
The stars are glinting off Jenny’s eyes, and she breathes in a joyous gasp.
This one wasn’t made by Karo’s grandma. It’s a gift from her grandson to me, and he really went all out. He might even be here right now, creeping on us from behind a tree, but if he is, I can’t see him. He last told me he was only able to move twenty stars. This one must be made of at least a thousand: blue giants, yellow and red dwarfs, and even a relentlessly blinking pulsar. They’re spinning around slowly and casually, almost like the horses on a merry-go-round.
Jenny walks to the edge of the ring, her eyes wide with disbelief and maybe fascination. She opens up a hand, and a yellow star as big as a baseball passes right through her.
I say, “Pretty cool, isn’t it?”
She smiles so big, I can see both rows of teeth. “All the UFOs appearing around the world. They’re not flying saucers.” She’s acting like I didn’t just tell her this.
“Nope.”
“You did this.” She turns to me with her hand still extended, and the stars keep passing through her, and it reminds me of light bouncing off a spinning disco ball. “What did you do?”
My stomach groans as gases build up inside of me. I take another swig of Pepto.
I don’t know if I want her to be my girlfriend.
I say, “All day Thanksgiving, you won’t see a single news report about one country fighting another. Nations will unite against the Centaurians, but there won’t be a fight because they’re a world away and” — I point at the lights —“those are stars.”
“Will you marry me?”
I laugh it off, because she wasn’t supposed to say that. She’s obviously joking. “You only love me for my wenis.”
“Your what?”
I take off my jacket, then push my sleeve up to my bicep. I hold out my arm with my palm facing up, then with my other hand I grab the skin on my elbow and pull. It stretches over three inches.
“Whoa,” she says.
“I have a really big wenis.” She furrows her eyebrows, so I add, “That’s what the skin on your elbow is called. Shugar said it reminded him of a scrotum elbow. He called it my scrobo.”
Jenny’s looking at it in disbelief.
“Yo, Jenny. My eyes are up here.”
She does a genuine belly laugh and, my God, if I don’t love another sound more than that. I have to look away because it’s the thing that I want the most. It’s the thing that I traveled light-years to have.
It doesn’t belong to me.
I say, “I’m not a piece of meat.”
“I’m totally putting the scrobo in my script.”
“You working on Monkey Business?”
“First time since Alex . . . you know. Since he left for Raya.”
“That’s awesome.”
“Monkey Business plays ‘Hakuna Matata’ on the sax for all these homeless people at a shelter.”
“Hakuna matata,” I say, imitating Pumbaa’s voice from The Lion King, and I’ve never had to rip ass harder in my life. I make it retreat to my bowels. “These two words will solve all your problems. I can’t wait to read it. Or see it on TV.”
She shakes her head, and her smile recedes back into her face. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I know I was drunk at Red Lobster, but I’m pretty sure the deal was —” I stop myself because in the end it doesn’t matter that she said she’d be my exclusive girlfriend, not my wife. Marrying her was what I wanted all along. That was the point of all this. “Can we talk in private?”
“There isn’t anyone here.”
Even though I can’t see him, I still sense Karo’s presence. He’s nearby and what I’m about to say to Jenny, I don’t even want him to hear. I take her hand and she takes her staff.
“Why do you always walk around with that?” I say.
“It’s stupid.”
I shrug. “So am I.”
She doesn’t deny that, so she says, “I’ve always got to be holding on to something, especially when I’m outside and the sky is wide open. Sometimes I get this thought that I might just suddenly float off into outer space. Holding on to something makes me feel connected to the ground.”
“That doesn’t sound stupid. Because for all we know gravity is, like, a sentient being, and maybe one day when it dies we all start floating away.”
“Exactly.” She says this like I’m the first one to understand and not judge or question her for her fear.
We duck beneath the bridge and I sit with my arm around her shoulder and my back slouched against the abutment. My right arm’s going numb, sandwiched between her back and the wall, my tail bone is jammed up on a rock, I’ve got raging swamp ass, and I’m holding back the most painful fart — but I could stay like this all day. I’m destroying a trillion galaxies for this uncomfortable and perfect embrace.
This one more moment with her.
She’s never going to be my faithful girl. A trillion stars could move, I could change the entire universe ten times over, but that still wouldn’t change her feelings for Shugar. I owe it to myself to get over her, to move on and find someone new.
But also.
But also I owe it to her. She’s not going to change and I shouldn’t expect her to, and she doesn’t deserve a lifetime of knowing that I was incapable of finding another person for whom I can have these feelings.
“Hey, Jenny?”
“Yeah?”
I clear my throat.
I’m not the same person I was a month ago.
I say, “I love you. And . . . I’ve seen the way the Centaurians view love and they’re all about open relationships and it’s way more evolved than how humans view it and it’s beautiful and great for them, you know? It doesn’t change what I want. I want you and you know I would do anything to marry you, but I can’t have you be my wife or even my exclusive girlfriend.”<
br />
“Derek, this is going to create world peace. I told you I wouldn’t break my promise.”
“Nah, it’s not like we signed some contract with our blood. If we got married just so I could have what I want, you’d end up resenting me because you couldn’t have what you want. I mean, who did you spend last night with?”
“Mark,” she says with a guilt that I don’t want her to have.
“And I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry I came to Dorton’s party and Mark didn’t because he was grounded. Hell, even that’s partly my fault; he was texting me when he got into that accident. I’m sorry I came into your life. It would have been so much easier for the both of us if I hadn’t. I thought I was the right one for you. Maybe I’m not. I’ve never understood you, and I never will.”
She looks at me, and I can’t tell whether she’s confused or angry or something else entirely. “You think I haven’t been trying to figure you out? Like, are you honestly only attracted to me and no one else? That doesn’t make sense. There are so many hot people out there. So many amazing and interesting and fun people to meet.” She points at the stars, still peacefully moving in a circle. “But look at that. I want to marry you.”
“How about when we’re forty?”
“Why forty?”
It’s such an arbitrary number and I have no idea why it makes sense, but I say, “We don’t know what we want. Maybe I should see other people and, you know, you can see how this whole thing with Mark plays out.”
“But forty? We’re gonna be old.”
“Jenny, come on. You know I’d love you even if you were eighty and your face was, like, one giant, wrinkly ass that was perpetually oozing diarrhea. I’d be there by your side with a roll of Angel Soft.”
“Can it be Charmin Ultra Strong instead?”
“You think I’m made of money?”
We’re laughing. This would be the perfect time to change my mind, but I say, “You know what? How about this? If you’re not with Mark Shugar or someone else when I turn forty, then I will find you, call you up, and I will propose to you. And if you say yes, then sweet. If you say no, fine. But if you’re my wife, damn, we’ll have mucho sexo. So much sexo that my penis will get chafed and then I’ll have to go to the doctor to get some ointment, and the doctor will be so impressed by how much we’re doing it.”
