by Cat Jordan
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.
2:27 A.M.
I pull a chair up to the window in the guest room. This and my mom’s room are the only ones that face the space field. From here, if I use my old G.I. Joe binoculars, I can see Priya.
I thought I was done—I mean, I know I am done—but I couldn’t sleep knowing she was out there. I tossed and turned and well, here I am.
Keeping an eye on her. That’s all I’m doing. I’m not stalking her. I’m not spying on her. I’m making sure nothing happens to her. She’s a girl all alone in a field. Someone unscrupulous, someone who doesn’t have her best interests at heart, might try to take advantage of her. Or, what’s more likely is she gets bitten by a million mosquitoes or twists her ankle in the dark. I’m here for that, too.
I feel a little silly using the binocs. They’re kiddie-size, from a party Brian had when he was six and big into action figures. We used to play Search and Rescue in the creek and sometimes G.I. Joe would rescue Emily’s Barbie while riding his surfboard.
You didn’t know Joe could surf? Oh, Joe can do many things. Rescuing pretty blond dolls with big boobs and high heels is his specialty, though, and many afternoons were spent pulling Barbie from deep water or the crooks of tree branches.
The binoculars barely cover my eyes, but if I hold them and squint, I can just make out Priya in the field. She sits there, legs stretched in front of her, hands in her lap, chin to the sky. There’s an awkward, colt-like quality to the way she sits. I’m used to girls like Emily, who twine their legs at their knees and ankles, who hug their legs to their chest. Even my mom can’t sit still. She’s often crossing and uncrossing her knees, sitting with her feet pressed together, curling her legs under her butt.
But Priya just sits there, motionless. I realize I have never seen her walk. I have seen her stand and sit and lie back on the ground, but I wonder what she looks like when she walks. Does she strut like a supermodel? Tiptoe like a dancer? Does she run, jog, sprint? Does she pump her arms by her sides or hold them close to her waist?
I stare at Priya and imagine her moving. Imagine her reaching her arms to me, wrapping them around my neck and back, and pulling me close to her. Her legs pressed to mine, her lips on my cheek, her breath in my ear.
She’ll call me Matthew and I’ll laugh and tickle her until she calls me Matty. And . . .
She’s not your personal porn channel. I take a breath and look away, give my fired-up hormones a chance to think of something else and calm down, for god’s sake.
I wonder if Brian’s tried to reach me. I grab my phone and bring it back to the window. The Wi-Fi’s lousy all over the house but there’s some kind of signal here. I tap the screen and see about a dozen messages. I don’t even bother reading them.
Yo, I type.
Sup dude?
Um . . . I type the truth: girl’s back
Yaaaaassss
She’s
I start to type “crazy” and stop. I try “alien” and stop.
Whut???
She’s going home tonight
And as soon as I type that, I feel my ribs ache like someone punched me hard. Yes, she’s going home, wherever that is, and I won’t ever see her again.
And I want to. I really, really want to.
What’s her name again? Brian texts back.
“Priya,” I say aloud. “Priya. Priya.” It feels weird on my tongue. I can imagine Brian goofing on her: “What is she, a car? Gets good gas mileage, har, har.”
Before I can respond, another message: don’t forget cat
Oh crap, that’s right. I told the Aokis I’d take in the mail and shit while they were gone. They have a cat too. Emily’s cat. Super finicky. The only cat I know of that won’t eat canned food. It has to be prepared fresh every day, which is why they need a sitter whenever they go away.
What cat?
Dude!! Em would kill u
Little does Brian know Em has already killed me. We were stealthy in our hookup on grad night. No one knew but us. Neither of us was sure what Brian would do if he found out.
Yeah yeah cat got it
Dude cool
We spend another minute goofing around until Brian’s mom calls him away and I’m back on my own.
I reach for my laptop and open Google, type Priya’s name into the search bar, just to see what comes up.
Not much, as it turns out. It’s the name of a bunch of films, a popular sitcom character, and an Indian restaurant fifty miles away. But locally? Nothing. Even when I search Google news, I don’t come up with her name anywhere.
That’s a good sign, right? That means nothing’s wrong. She’s not an escaped mental patient. She’s not a killer on the run.
Except I don’t know her full name. Or if Priya is really her name at all. I really don’t know anything about her.
I groan and pick up the binocs again. She’s leaning against the tent now, her face tilted up at the sky, and that makes me smile. At least it’s good for something.
Is she really waiting for a lift from the other side of the universe? She sure thinks so.
I take to Google again and this time search the skies. Maybe a comet’s on its way, scheduled to pass through our atmosphere soon, or a meteor shower. People like my dad’s blog followers, who believe in aliens and interstellar space conspiracies, are usually big into astronomy, too, and events like passing comets or the Perseid meteor shower give them the crazy idea that something or someone is coming for them.
But at the NASA site, there’s no news of any upcoming happenings in the skies, nothing that screams, The aliens are coming! Of course, that phrase would never be on a government site. It would be on . . .
. . . do I dare? I know the address by heart, although I wish I didn’t.
www.reallifewithufos.com
Dad’s crazy-ass website. You’ve seen it. Or you’ve seen one like it. Or maybe you’ve seen a thousand like it. Black background, tiny yellow-and-white lettering, lots of exclamation points. Every headline is BIG NEWS!!! Every follower includes the words UFO or conspiracy in his or her Twitter handle. Every photo of a flying saucer or a gray-faced blobby ET includes the caption “Not to scale” or “Artist’s rendering” to make sure we know it’s not real—but it sure as hell could be and we all know it.
On one side is a list
of links to DJ’s favorite sites: legit ones like NASA and ESA and all the observatories in the country but also the crazies like We Believe, I Was Taken, We Are Not Alone, and so on. On the other side is his Twitter feed, a constant stream of posts and comments from his followers.
His blog, A Star Is Born, is smack in the middle of the page. He’s got 304 subscribers, most of whom love to comment using GIFs and strings of emoji.
Yeah.
I never minded my dad’s interest in aliens and astronomy. It was what we did together; it was our family legacy. Dad always told me the stars were our destiny—we were made of star stuff, like Carl Sagan famously said, only us more so than everyone else. We searched the skies with our telescopes and charted the planets in the galaxy. We high-fived whenever a new exoplanet was discovered, another possible Earth. DJ and Junior, father and son.
The blog was ours for a long time too. There were pictures of us. Pictures of me. Our house, our dog, our field. Our telescopes. And it was fine and it was fun and it was ours.
But then, when I was in ninth grade, it suddenly morphed into something else. I remember I’d been busy with Brian and Em a lot back then: Bri and I were new to high school and there was a lot more work to do. And Mom kept pushing me (“Face facts, Matty, you need a scholarship if you want to go to college”). So I hadn’t been paying attention to Dad and the blog.
I knew he always wanted to bring more people to our small town, to make the field a tourist attraction, but this was different. This was more out there. He was starting to appeal to the wack jobs, the Tin Foil Hat society. They had rediscovered the episode of a reality TV show about our town that was made in 1990 and they began pushing him for more.
And to my huge and utter astonishment, he complied. He gave it all back to them—and beyond. He gave up on “DJ and Junior” and spent more and more time with the online crazies.
I notice the blog hasn’t been updated since before Dad left. His last entry—about the potential for life existing on icy Pluto (#ibelieve)—sheds no light on where he went or with whom.
When I look at the comments his followers are leaving on Twitter, though, I see they care.
@braintrust: DJ!! Did they take u??
@fmulder: u’re not talkin. wr r u???
@therealdana: dude, in town? gotta c u!!!
On and on, names and dates and places, people worried he was taken, people celebrating he was taken. Everyone believes. Every. Single. One.
I don’t. I don’t believe at all. What I believe is that he encouraged people who were probably on the edge of sanity to take a giant flying leap off the cliff. He wrote stupid nonsense about aliens and life on other planets and what it must be like to travel through the stars at warp speed. Half of the tech shit was real; half was cribbed from Syfy channel. I’ll bet he doesn’t even know which is which anymore. What’s worse, though, is that he doesn’t care.
“What does it matter, Junior?” he’d say with a shrug. “It makes them happy. They have dull lives and they want to cheer themselves up.”
“With conspiracy theories?”
“It’s harmless. They’re harmless. It’s just for fun.”
I think of Priya out in the field. Is this just fun for her? Is this harmless?
I close the site, shut off my computer, and take one last look at her through the binoculars. She’s asleep. A quick glance at the digital clock on the bedside table relaxes me a bit. Only a few more hours of being vigilant, of watching over her until daylight comes.
Or until she gets a lift home.
DAY THREE
8:32 A.M.
Morning comes with a bang. Literally a huge crash that jolts me awake.
“Mom? You okay?”
The last syllable is cut off by another thunk of metal against stone and a “Shit!”
She must have dropped something on the kitchen floor. For a split second I forget why I’m sleeping in a chair in the guest bedroom and then the binoculars with G.I. Joe’s logo on them remind me. I peek through the window and see Priya awake and standing, her back to the house, her arms at her sides.
Seeing her jump-starts my blood. I stretch for a moment and shake out the kinks in my legs and neck and head downstairs.
Mom has started to make the coffee—except the grounds are all over the floor. Looks like she was reaching for the can on the top shelf, knocked over the toaster, and dropped the can.
“Shit,” she says when I walk in, barefoot.
“And a happy shit to you too.”
“Ugh! I am not in the mood for this crap.” She pinches the skin between her eyes and winces. “I need coffee. Lots. Make it, please.” She holds out the half-empty can and ignores the grounds on the floor. “And don’t let Ginger eat that. She’ll get sick.”
I salute her. “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”
“Not today, Matty. Not today.”
I resist the urge to say something snarky about her hangover because she’d probably smack me. I do the coffee thing, the dog thing, and scoot my mom out the door with her giant Thermos and a promise that yes, I will clean up the kitchen; yes, I will check on the Aokis’ house; and no, I don’t mind if Jack comes over for dinner after work.
All I can think about is Priya. I am determined to get the truth and get her home.
I grab some Cokes and toast, because breakfast, and when I get to the field, Priya is in the same place as when I woke up. Dangling from one hand is her notebook.
“Hey,” I greet her when she turns. She looks at me oddly, as if she can’t quite place me. “You okay?”
Her nod is slow and steady and her eyes dart from my head to my feet. When she sees Ginger trot up the slope, her face beams. She bends down and accepts a warm snuggle from my dog.
In the daylight, she takes my breath away. The sun’s rays sink into her skin, as if it were absorbing every molecule and making it contrast richly with her pale blue shirt. Her hair shimmers like a mirror, a brighter white than it was at night, the black under it a liquid sheet of ink. Everything about her is more than it was at night. More brilliant. More defined.
“Sleep all right? How’d you like the tent?”
“Tent, yes. I don’t need to sleep.”
“Uh, well, you did. I saw you.”
“You were watching me?”
“Um . . . not really watching, just . . .” I mentally stumble through all the inappropriate things I’m probably implying: stalker, predator . . . what says I just want you to be safe?
“Although that wasn’t necessary, thank you.”
“You’re still here,” I say. “I mean, I thought you were leaving for real last night.”
Priya’s lips twist and she shakes her head. “This is a puzzle for me. I have recalculated the projections several times.”
I take a deep breath. “Has it occurred to you that maybe you aren’t an alien?”
“I am not an alien, as you say. I am from another planet.”
I feel a grin and I don’t want to smile, but okay, I do. “Well, here we’d call you an alien.”
“If you feel the need to define me, then that is what I am.”
I pop open two cans of Coke and hand her one. “Toast?”
Instead of getting angry and upset, like my dad would if I called him on something, a “fact” about aliens or Area 51, she merely gazes at me. “Why can’t you accept what I’m saying as truth, Matthew?”
“Matty.”
“Matthew.”
“Matty—look, why don’t you just prove it to me?”
“Prove what?”
Oh my god, she’s exasperating. “Prove that you’re an alien. Prove you’re from Gliese 581c.”
“Near Gliese 581c.”
“Near. Far. Whatever.” I chomp a bite of buttery toast, and crumbs spray over my shirt. “Prove it to me.”
When she smiles, my stomach cinches up. Stop that! I want to shout. Stop giving me a mini heart attack whenever you look me in the eye.
“How can I prove it?”
“Do you have green blood? Or two hearts?”
She looks up at the sun. “No. No.”
“Then I guess you’re not an alien.”
“Matthew—”
“Matty.”
“Do you only believe in things that can be proved? Aren’t there things that can’t be proved that you believe in?”
“If you’re trying to talk to me about faith, that’s religion, which is way different than science and fact.”
“Is it? Can you prove gravity?”
I take my shoe off, hold it above my head, then let it drop. It falls to the ground with a gentle thump. “Gravity. Next.”
“But how do you prove that is what caused your shoe to fall?”
“Oh, wow. Are you one of those ‘gravity is only a theory’ people? I’ve heard of you all, but I’ve never met one of you before.”
A theory, as we all know from grade school, is what scientists call just about everything because science never proves anything. It can’t. Nothing is absolute. But the average person thinks “theory” means it’s a whim, a fantasy, a passing fancy.
“Gravity can’t be proved, like nothing in science can be absolutely proved,” Priya says with an impish grin.
“Reading my mind again?”
She shrugs. “You’re easily readable. The thoughts just jump from your head”—she taps my temple with her fingertip and then her own—“into mine.”
Does she also know how hot I think she is? Can she tell?
“I’m a pragmatist, okay?” I tell her, making my voice sound gruff. “I gotta see it to believe it.”
A smile and light laugh dismiss my concern. Her eyes shine in the sun, full of pity for me, a disappointment that I don’t believe what she does. I’ve seen that look before.
I don’t let her deter me, as charming as her laugh is, as infectious as her smile may be. “You’re still here,” I say for the thousandth time. “No ride last night.”
“That is unfortunate but correct.”
I pointedly glance around the empty field. “No ride this morning.”
“It is daytime,” she says with a sly smile.
