fascination by far was with bathrooms and bathing.
“I adore this,” were Mi-Yao’s first words, when I showed her our bathroom. “And you say you fill this up with water?” As she said this, she stepped into our bathtub and sat down.
“Come on, don’t sit there. You look ridiculous,” I sighed.
She ran her fingers along the smooth inner walls of the tub. Her finger sheaths clicked against the acrylic surface. “This much water…for a bath. Unbelievable. Where I am from, we would never waste such a valuable resource on cleansing.”
“We washed your pet the last time you were here,” I argued.
“Yes, but we used a lot less water than this bath requires,” she countered.
“How do you get clean on your home world then?”
“Pressure washers. It is faster, more effective, and more efficient. We have cut down our water consumption by a hundredth in the last century. Not even a member of the royal family uses up this much water in a single sitting. Your people are so spoiled.” She sounded a little angry. But then she looked up at me. “May I try it?”
I blinked. “You want to take a bath? Right now?”
“May I?”
I was too surprised by the request. “I guess.”
“Oh, what luck!” She narrowed her eyes, clapped and bounced on her behind. “Show me how it works, show me how it works, show me how it works.”
“Then get out of the bath. I need to fill it up first.”
She complied, and I filled the bath with water: three quarters hot, and a quarter cold. Then, I threw in some bubble bath and half a bottle of the cheap bath oil Mom kept buying but never used.
I wanted to be out of the bathroom for the whole thing, but she convinced me to come back in when she was in the water. I tried to keep my eyes on the ceiling. I was so glad my parents were at work.
“This is the most amazing experience I have ever had,” she sighed, playing with the lather.
“With a different girl, I could’ve said the same thing,” I sighed back.
“Pee-trrr, I have been meaning to ask you this,” she said, pointing. “What is that thing you are sitting on for?”
I was sitting on the toilet. Of course, I wasn’t using it; it was closed.
“The toilet?”
She looked exasperated. “Well, I know what it is called.”
“You really don’t know what this is for?” I asked, incredulous.
“When I visited the New City of York—“
“Do you mean New York City?”
She paused. “That is what I said. The New City of York.”
“No, it’s—never mind.” I shook my head. “I’ll chalk that up to your translator.”
“When I visited the New City of York, I patronized a modest guest house they call the Ritz. I asked my attendant what the toilet was for, and after a lot of confusion, he explained something quite disgusting. I was not certain if he was jibing me with some of that ‘sarcasm’ nonsense your kind is so fond of.”
I was amused now. “What did he say?”
Mi-Yao made a face. “He said it was a receptacle for depositing excreta.”
“If by excreta you mean poop—and you do—then no, he wasn’t ‘jibing’ you.”
She looked stunned. “Your species still egests feces?”
I raised a brow. “What species doesn’t?”
“Uh, any species at the peak of digestive evolution? Try seventy per cent of the fauna on my home world. My specie has eliminated egestion altogether, digesting all food matter that enters our body up to ninety-nine point nine-nine per cent.”
“What happens if you swallow something that isn’t food?”
“Then our digestive tracts crush it the best they can and we regurgitate the foreign matter in a matter of hours,” she lectured. “Our only excretions are the sweat through our skin, and some uric acid which is metabolized into the very fibers of our hair.”
I looked at her yellow locks and made a face. “Oh so, you throw up stuff and poop through your hair and, we’re the disgusting ones?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “Absolutely.”
I shook my head.
We spent a lot of our days bumming around town, watching TV and reading comic books in my bedroom. I wasn’t even sure if Mi-Yao understood the comic books; I was no expert on her translator but I assumed that it worked on an auditory basis. I expected that an intergalactic traveler would want to spend her days better but she never complained.
Soon, all of my fear of Mi-Yao was replaced with a comfortable sort of apathy. Mi-Yao became less ‘alien’ and more ‘somewhat annoying sister who liked to tag along’. Essentially, she was just another kid on holiday. Which begged the question:
“How many of you are here?” I asked her one afternoon over PBJ sandwiches.
“How many of us are where?” she asked, as she munched. “On Earth?”
“No, in this kitchen.” I rolled my eyes. “Yes, on Earth.”
“It is hard to say,” she said. “You do not have particularly effective interplanetary immigration laws.”
“Oh, that might have something to do with our governments having no clue that you exist in the first place.”
She looked amused. “Who says that they are not aware?”
I froze mid-chew. “You’re kidding.”
“Though I would not worry too much if I were you. Your planet is not exactly tourist destination number one.”
Now, I was a little peeved. “Our planet is amazing. We’ve got beaches, and Stonehenge, and pyramids and the Grand Canyon.”
“The Grand Canyon is a giant hole, Pee-trrr,” she said, giving me her ‘extremely unimpressed’ expression. “You are bragging about a giant hole.”
“Are you serious? It is more than a—You take that back.”
“No,” she said.
“Right now!”
“Absolutely not. Gonron has the Great Singing Forest. Uquorius has the Rainbow Sea. Fastadah has the Thousand Floating Isles, and Xi has the Eternal Comet Stream. All those places are on one planet, mind you. And that planet is ranked number twenty-one on the Greatest Tourism Worlds list of the 7th galactic quadrant. The only reason I am here is because Earth is so remote and unpopular, it provides peace and quiet. Otherwise your planet might as well be terraformed and replaced with a shiny new warp station.”
As she said those words, she blinked in rapid succession—an action I had come to learn meant that she was laughing.
I slammed my glass of milk down and stormed out of the kitchen.
That was one of several fights we had that summer. The fights never lasted long. In a couple of hours, we were back to reading comics or watching TV like nothing had happened.
The days seemed to melt into each other, and summer flew by. Mi-Yao came at dawn, and left at dusk every day, but my parents did not meet her if I could help it. I grew used to having her around. I’d never really had friends, and having someone to laze the days away with was….not terrible.
It must have been why I was so surprised when one late afternoon in August, she put down her copy of Black Panther and said, “Well, it has been a restful eight weeks. I will take my leave now.”
I looked up from my Justice League issue. “What?”
“I am going back home, Pee-trrr. My time here has come to an end.”
I blinked. “That’s a little sudden, don’t you think?”
“Is it?” Mi-Yao said. “It has been eight weeks after all. You heard that the first time I said it, did you not?”
“You could have given me a week’s notice at least,” I said. “When do you leave?”
“My ship is scheduled to leave dock in an hour.”
“Dammit Mi-Yao.”
“Pee-trrr,” she said, her expression sly. “Is this your not quite subtle way of telling me I will be missed?”
I avoided her eyes and grunted something random.
She smiled—both with her eyes and her lips. “I shall miss you as w
ell.”
I saw her to the front door, still a little incredulous that this was happening so suddenly. “Do you need me to come with you to your…spaceship?” I asked, when we were standing outside on my driveway.
“That will not be necessary,” she said. “I do want to let you know before I leave that I have left you a present.”
“A present?”
“A gift.”
“Yes, I know what a present is. Where is it?”
She smiled. “In my culture, it is rude to look inside a gift when the giver is present. You will receive your gift in a few days.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I paused. “Will I see you again?”
She smiled. “Would you like to?”
I hesitated, and then nodded.
“Alright. Then, you shall,” she said. “Goodbye Pee-trr.” With that, she turned around and walking away.
A part of me expected her to suddenly disappear. Maybe even be swallowed up by a beam of light. But nothing of the sort happened. I just watched her walk down the street, and disappear around the block.
I went back inside, feeling a strange sort of emptiness.
The next few days, I looked out for Mi-Yao’s gift. I didn’t know what I was looking out for though, so I basically became suspicious of everything around me; I riffled through every package that came in the mail, whether it was mine or not (it was always not); I couldn’t open the refrigerator without checking behind every item in there at least five times; I freaked once when I woke up to find a robin pecking at my window. Mom eventually just asked me to stop being such a weirdo.
By the end of the week, I had given up. Perhaps, Mi-Yao really didn’t understand the meaning of ‘gift’.
Two weeks later, my parents sat me down to give me some big news. Dad had been to the doctor several times that week. The