didn’t want to be crazy.
But it was morning now, and there she was again. Figment or real?
I wanted to stay away from her, safe in my room; but more than that, I wanted to prove that I wasn’t losing my mind.
I threw on a morning coat, and went outside to meet her.
She lit up when she saw me. “Are you ready for the first day of summer?” she asked, when I was in earshot.
“I want you to come in and meet my parents,” I said.
She seemed taken aback. “Pee-trrr, how sudden. Why?”
I didn’t want to say why, so I simply started towards the house and trusted her to follow me. She did.
“Is meeting one’s parents not considered sacred in Earth culture?” she asked.
“What? Where did you learn that?”
“In those delightful on-screen dramas you called ‘rom-coms’.”
I made a face. “It’d only be special if we were dating or something.”
“Your dictionary defines a date as a pre-arranged engagement between two of the opposite sex. So do our plans for today not constitute a ‘date’?” she asked, looking genuinely confused.
“First of all: what plans? You’re ambushing me right now. Secondly: no. No, it does not. No, in a million years, it does not. Now stop asking questions and come in,” I grumbled, opening the door to my home.
It was a Sunday, so Dad and Mom were in the kitchen, pouring cups of coffee. Or rather, Mom was pouring what was likely her fifth cup of coffee, whilst Dad was watching with envy, a cup of chai tea in his hand. He was on a healthier diet; better to combat the lung cancer.
“Good morning,” I said, rapping my fingers on the surface of the kitchen island.
My family looked up from their respective preoccupations.
“Morning sweetie,” Mom said, setting her coffee down. She looked surprised. “Who’s your friend?”
Relief flooded my mind. Mom could see Her too. So, I wasn’t going crazy. Drinks and cheers all around.
“Mom, Dad, this is Mi-Yao. She uh…she goes to my school,” I muttered.
“Hello Mi-Yao,” Dad said. “Is that Chinese? You don’t look Chinese.”
Mi-Yao smiled. “It is not Chinese in origin. It is Castodonian.”
“Oh, Castodonian.” Mom looked at Dad. “Is that in Asia too?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s one of those tiny East European countries isn’t it?”
Mi-Yao glanced at me. She looked very amused.
“Can we just settle on she’s not from around here?” I said.
“Father and mother of Pee-trrr, it is an honour to be accepted into your home,” Mi-Yao said, going over to them and, to my embarrassment and their utter confusion, giving each of them a hug. “I have been to several of your earth’s largest cities. How quaint they are. How sweet that you call them ‘cities’.”
“However, this is my first suburban building and I very much look forward to my tour,” she finished.
“Tour?” Dad repeated, giving me a look.
My parents didn’t like people ‘touring’ our house. We weren’t the most organized family, you see.
“Um, I’m sure it’s alright,” Mom said, rubbing Dad’s arm. “Just don’t close any doors behind you. I’m not quite ready to be a grandmother.”
I groaned, and Mi-Yao beamed, oblivious to the meaning behind Mom’s joke.
“Bye,” I said, quickly leading Mi-Yao away from them.
“Your father has a pleasing head shape,” she said, as I showed her the living room. “Recently in my city, the bald cut is quite popular.”
“Well, he doesn’t really have a choice,” I explained. “He’s got cancer. The chemo’s been hard on him.”
“Cancer?” Mi-Yao said it funny, and frowned. “My translator repeated that word phonetically. I do not believe there is a translation for ‘cancer’ in my language.”
“Lucky you.”
“Is it a genetic condition?”
“I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s okay.”
“Alright,” Mi-Yao said, following me up the stairs to the bedrooms. “I do like your family. Particularly your mother. Would you be so kind as to provide me a tissue sample from her so I may grow myself a clone for amusement?”
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
Mi-Yao’s expression was blank. “I think she would make a delightful pet. At least, until she grew older and then I could trade her in for a new paint job for my ship. Interplanetary slavers adore exotic creatures.”
I felt a sudden sickness in my stomach. Oh God, I had brought a crazy person into my home.
She stuck out her tongue, striped black and white all over. “I jest, Pee-trrr.”
“About the cloning bit, or the selling my mother into slavery bit?” I damn near screamed.
“Well, initially only about the slavery, but I gather you are not very keen on the cloning idea either?”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Kids,” my Mom yelled from downstairs. “Language!”
“You do not joke about cloning or selling people to space slave traders, you crazy person,” I hissed, jabbing her in the chest with my finger. Even as I did so, I trembled because—hey, what if she was packing heat? I didn’t want to be disintegrated with a laser blaster or something.
To my surprise, she clutched her chest where I had jabbed her, and her eyes filled with tears. “I thought it was funny,” she whimpered. “I apologize. However, you did not need to physically assault me.”
“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. “I’m sorry.”
“I am a lady, a princess, and most importantly, your guest” she said, her words shuddering. “Surely, this is not how your people treat guests.”
“Well, no. I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I was mad, and I wasn’t thinking, and—“
“Goodbye Pee-trrr,” Mi-Yao whispered, and with the most dramatic air I’d ever seen, she swiveled around on her heel and fled back downstairs. I heard our front door slam.
I didn’t follow her. I was too stunned.
When I finally had enough presence of mind to run after her, there was no trace of her outside. She was already gone.
“Your girlfriend sure was in a hurry,” Mom asked me when I came back inside.
Dad wiggled his eyebrows at me. “You didn’t try any funny business, did ya?”
“Ew Dad, come on,” I grumbled.
I decided not to give them an explanation. Instead, I grabbed one of the bacon strips Mom had just fried and stomped upstairs to my room.
I was antsy for the rest of the day. I don’t know what I was afraid was going to happen. A pillar of light from the sky, shredding my home to pieces and frying the very flesh off my body and the bodies of the other two people I loved above everything else in the whole world?
Maybe. I tried not to dwell on possibilities.
Later that night, we were watching TV when Mom brought up Mi-Yao again.
“She’s…different, isn’t she?” Mom said.
“She’s weird,” Dad translated for her, and she punched him on the shoulder.
“I’m just saying—she’s a little, um, eccentric,” Mom continued.
I played innocent. “How?”
“The dyed hair, the contact lenses, the strange nail job, and that pearl thing she’s got in the middle of her forehead,” Mom counted off.
“How does she keep it there anyway?” Dad wanted to know. “Is it pierced into her forehead?”
“And her tongue—“ Mom continued.
“—Is tattooed like a zebra,” Dad finished with a guffaw. “I’ll bet she has her some of those artsy liberal types for parents, right?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, with a shrug. “We’re really not that close.”
“The way she talks,” Mom said. “She’s probably a real egghead, that one.”
“Those types usually are,” Dad said, shaking his head.
“Or maybe she’s just an alien,” I muttered,
thinking no one would hear me.
But for the television, the room went silent. I looked at Mom and Dad; they were giving me a look. A look I hadn’t received from them since the farmhouse incident of three years ago.
I pursed my lips. “I’m kidding, guys.”
Neither of them laughed. We kept watching TV.
“Either way,” Mom said to me, before I retired for the night, “we’re really glad you have someone to talk to. We get worried about you, Peter.”
“Don’t,” I told her. “I prefer being alone.”
I didn’t get much sleep that night. A few cars drove past around midnight, and each time I sat up shaking because I kept mistaking their approaching headlights for spaceship beams. Sometime past 3 am, I finally slipped into a light snooze. I remember my last thoughts being thoughts of gratitude and hope: gratitude that Mi-Yao had not decided to retaliate somehow, and hope that by some miracle of miracles, I had offended her so much that I would see no more of her.
I knew that my hoping was futile when I woke up at six thirty, and looked out my window.
Mi-Yao was seated across the street, waiting for me.
IV.
I spent almost every day of that summer with Mi-Yao. She asked a thousand questions, and only reacted to anything I told or showed her in two ways: extremely impressed, or extremely unimpressed.
For instance, she was extremely unimpressed by my collection of Batman-through-the-ages action figures. Then again, there’re not a lot of girls who’ve been impressed by that—alien or human. She was also not impressed by rock music, lightning storms, pudding, the Internet, or American Idol.
She was, however, over the moon about rap music, giraffes, peanut brittle, cat videos on Youtube, vanilla (as an aroma and a flavoring), dancing reality shows, Jell-O, and being able to see the stars at night.
I do think though that her most bizarre