First Day On Earth Read online

  But I’d hurt me before I’d hurt them.

  I lean my head against the cool of the metal locker. The coolness seeps right down into my brain and I feel calm for a minute. Even though the bell is about to ring. Even though I am going to fail the history exam that I didn’t study for. Even though my knuckles are bloody from punching the cactus last night after Hooper said what he said.

  “Hey,” Posey says. She’s standing right next to me. Unafraid. She stands there with me the same way I see her mom stay with the feral animals. She is slow and careful with her voice and with her movements. The amount of time that it takes for her hand to move from her hip to her face to brush away a stray piece of hair is an eternity.

  “We’re fostering that dog,” she tells me.

  “What?” I croak.

  “That dog you brought in. My mom brought her home.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “My mom thinks she’s going to make a great dog; she just needs to be acclimated to people.”

  I am glad for the dog.

  39.

  I am actually upset that I don’t believe Hooper.

  Which is a hard thing for me to process. I mean, how come I believe that I was abducted by aliens, but I don’t believe that he could be one?

  It seems like I should believe him. Otherwise, what is the truth?

  I ride my bike over to the shelter. I have to ask Hooper about what he said.

  About being an alien.

  It’s the first time that I’ve been to his room. It feels ridiculous to confront a man in a tiny studio with an orange bedspread, a cream-colored landline telephone, and brown curtains drawn closed to block out the bright California sun. I am talking about the universe and there is a mysterious stain on the carpet.

  “What do you want to know?” he asks.

  He looks much too calm to be an alien.

  “Everything,” I say.

  “I do not know how to answer that question,” Hooper says. “Can you be more specific?”

  “Did your people abduct me?”

  “My people don’t bring people up, Mal. We only send people down.”

  “That’s the answer of a person who is not really an alien,” I say.

  “Are you having trouble trusting me?” Hooper says.

  He is sitting on his bed and I am sitting on the only chair in the room. His paisley-patterned secondhand-store button-down shirt clashes with everything, including how I think he should look if he weren’t a liar.

  “You look like a human and you don’t abduct people,” I say. Then I ask, “Do you know why the other aliens took me?”

  “I don’t know,” Hooper said. “I don’t know them.”

  I feel stunned. As though he should know. As though there’s some kind of alien crossroads where they all get together and talk about the funny earthlings. Where they compare notes. Or do battle.

  “Mal, let me tell you about my people,” he says.

  I am suspicious, but I am also all ears.

  He goes on to say that his planet’s technology is okay but not that great. They can go longer distances but not with large ships. They are interested in exploration and science.

  I must look disappointed.

  “The universe is very big,” Hooper says.

  He sweeps his hand to span the sky. I look up. And I swear that on his ceiling there are stars. Have I been stunned? Is he in my brain? I recognize the Big Dipper and Orion, distorted by the stucco.

  “There are some stars,” Hooper says. “And Earth is here.”

  He points to the wall next to the sink, where there are no stars. I notice on the bedside table there’s a lamp, the kind you can get at Target that projects the night sky on your ceiling.

  “We are standing on a tiny planet, orbiting a small, uninteresting sun, on an outer arm of the galaxy we live in,” Hooper says.

  He opens his silver bag and unfolds a star chart. The chart is alive with lights that blink and twinkle. There are things that rotate, and points that move slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the form of rocket ships.

  He points to the stars on the ceiling and then to their corresponding spots on the star chart.

  “Every star a sun. Many planets. Many are dead. Lifeless rocks with nothing, not even an amoeba. Some gaseous giants where no life, not even a creative or spirited life-form, could figure out how to survive there.”

  Next to some of the stars, there is a symbol. Along the bottom of the chart there is a string of them.

  The symbols roll along blinking and changing, like a news ticker.

  I run my finger along them. The symbols and the stars are slightly raised, like Braille.

  I don’t know if they are really moving. I don’t know if I can trust my eyes. Or my fingers. Or my heart.

  “All these stars, the ones with small symbols on them, life is there. Some planets have a kind of life that is unfamiliar. We might not call it life. Bugs. Single-cell life-forms. Plant life. Even animals. I have stepped on some of those worlds. Observed. Never harmed.”

  Then he moves my attention to another symbol.

  “All these symbols are the ones with life that thinks. The ones with civilizations. The planets that house a sort of life as we know it, planets with life-forms that speak and build and think and dream.”

  There are thousands of stars on the chart, but only twenty-seven stars with those symbols.

  “One of those stars is the star that shines on the place where I live,” I say.

  “Sol,” Hooper says, pointing to this one lonely star, far away from the others.

  It’s sitting there. Far-flung, away from anything else. Alone. Abandoned. In exile from all the other stars that have even simple life on the planets around them.

  “That kind of life. That kind of heart. That kind of dreamer, it’s rarer than anything.” Hooper pushes the chart toward me. “You can keep that if you want.”

  It’s too beautiful a thing to give to me. I would lose it in a pile of mess in my room. Or shove it in my locker at school with a tuna sandwich. Or leave it open to fade in the sun on the front seat of my car.

  “This is the copy,” Hooper says.

  He hands me the star chart now, closing my fingers around it. “No, I couldn’t. I mean, what would I do with it?” “I find it a pleasant thing to look at.” I fold up the map carefully and put it in my bag. In my gut, I believe him.

  40.

  When she is a certain kind of drunk, my mother loses all of her words. But just because she has no way to express how she feels, it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to say something. She pulls a book off the shelf and she reads. Dramatically. Slurred. Tearfully. Hysterical. Sometimes it’s poems.

  I know that it is all

  a matter of hands.

  Out of the mournful sweetness of touching

  comes love

  —ANNE SEXTON (“THE FURY OF ABANDONMENT”)

  Sometimes it’s passages from books.

  Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

  —CHARLOTTE BRONTË (JANE EYRE)

  Sometimes it’s Shakespeare.

  So many journeys may the sun and moon

  Make us again count o’er ere love be done!

  But, woe is me, you are so sick of late,

  So far from cheer and from your former state,

  That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust,

  Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must.

  For women fear too much, even as they love,

  And women’s fear and love holds quantity,

  In neither aught, or in extremity.

  Now, what my love is, proof hath made you know;

  And as my love is sized, my fear is so:

  Where love is great, the li
ttlest doubts are fear;

  Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.

  —THE PLAYER QUEEN IN HAMLET

  When I come home and find her reading aloud, I know that she’s drunk. The kind of drunk that means there was an anniversary that I didn’t know about. Or that she’s gotten wind of some kind of news. Or perhaps she just had a bad day where everything, all the lies, all the broken promises, all the heartbreak, were too much for her to bear.

  I should feel sorry for her. But when she’s in the living room reading out loud and gesticulating and spitting out her words and chasing them down with the heavier stuff, like bourbon, I don’t even say hello. Or ask her if she’s eaten anything.

  I go straight down the hallway, turn on my computer, put on my earphones, and kick some troll ass with Sameer and Mark online.

  The whole time I’m thinking of the symbol on the map Hooper gave me.

  How we think. How we build. How we live.

  How this defines us.

  How we are stars that can explode.

  41.

  I probably shouldn’t have brought the star chart to school, and definitely shouldn’t have opened it during free period, but I like to look at it every chance I get.

  “What is that?” Posey is leaning way over. Her chair is tipping off its legs and I fear for her safety, so instead of covering up Hooper’s papers, I open them up toward her.

  Her eyes pop open. “Star charts!”

  She scoots her chair closer to me.

  I can smell her now. I always thought she would smell good up close, just from the way that she looks. She smells lemony. Her hair falls all over the place as she leans over the chart, oohing and ahhing.

  I sneeze.

  “These are beautiful,” she says. “The real deal. Where on earth did you get these?”

  I don’t have to say anything, and she doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t. She keeps looking at the charts until the bell rings.

  “Thanks for showing me those, Mal,” she says. “I really like space.”

  “Me, too,” I tell her.

  I don’t know. I’m blushing — not because of her, but because of how embarrassed I’d be if I told her I’d gotten the chart from an alien.

  “I’m going to go one day for sure,” she says. “It’ll be cheap by the time we’re adults.”

  “I’ve been,” I say. “Nothing to write home about.”

  Posey looks at me and laughs. Not in a mean way. She thinks I’m being clever. Or maybe that I mean I’ve tripped on acid or something and imagined it, even though I don’t do drugs and never would.

  She touches my arm when she laughs. That makes me feel good. I touch her back. Lightly, on the arm.

  She laughs again. I am embarrassed by the tenderness of the moment. So I get out of there as fast as I can. As I leave, I hear Suki and Natalie. They are asking all kinds of questions, and laughing, too. But not in the nice way. They laugh daggers.

  They say things like, “Watch out, you’d better not get too close or else you’ll be the first one he’ll look for to kill when he shoots up the school.”

  Here’s the thing that they don’t know:

  You never harm.

  You just observe.

  42.

  Hooper and I are taking a hike up to the Mount Wilson Observatory. He has five bottles of water in his bag. He says that the gravity of the planet makes him extremely thirsty all the time. He says that water here tastes funny. He says that it smells weird, too. I think the water is fine.

  We get to the top of the hill and in front of us are picnic tables. Behind them are some telescope arrays that are collecting data from space. Hooper looks pleased.

  “Wonderful,” he says. “I love how you humans are always watching and listening. Even though you don’t actually watch or listen in the right way.”

  I take a long sip of water. He always says things that almost make sense, but if you think about them, make no sense at all. Like he’s a fake Yoda. But the more I hang out with Hooper and the more I look at the map, the less I worry about whether he’s crazy or not and the more I believe him.

  “Hooper, did it happen to me? Did they take me?”

  “I don’t know, Mal.”

  “But there are aliens. Out there.”

  “Yes. There are other life-forms in the universe. Some are intelligent. We are not alone. You are not alone.”

  “I feel alone,” I say.

  “There are over six billion people on this planet,” he says.

  That’s not what I mean, but for all that Hooper does understand, there are some things he doesn’t get. He wanders the universe, or so he says, alone, just him and the blackness of space, and the quiet of the suns, and the thoughts he has, as his companions.

  But I need to know what happened to me.

  “Look at me, Mal. I am your friend. I am not from this world. Therefore if you feel that you were taken, then I believe that it is very likely that you were.”

  “I need proof.”

  “You will never have proof. If your abductors are anything like my people, they want to be hidden. Secret.”

  “But I need to understand.”

  “You will likely never understand.”

  “Why?” I ask. Then, when Hooper doesn’t answer, I ask him something else.

  “Do you think we humans are so bad, that you’re going to tell your people to enslave us or attack us or something?”

  Hooper laughs.

  “I’m not kidding,” I tell him.

  “Mal, I have shown you how Earth is very far removed from the center of this galaxy. It is a tiny planet far flung out away from anything. You are all likely to die out before your species learns how to even escape your own solar system. My people are not in the habit of exterminating or colonizing. We’re explorers. We’re scientists. We’re interested in the beauty of life. There is not much beauty here, as advanced as you are. Your species is terrible. A terrible species. Selfish. Evil. Cruel.”

  “All of us?”

  “No, not all of you. But there is so little hope here, I’m convinced every day that you will blow yourselves up.”

  “Why do you hate Earth so much?”

  “Hate is a very strong word. I don’t hate. I dislike.”

  “Okay, what is there to dislike?”

  Although, when I think about it, I have a million things that I dislike.

  “Do you really want to know?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “There are things in this universe that are evil. I’m surprised you don’t know that. There is so much evil on this planet.”

  It is something I know, but it’s the kind of thing I hoped wasn’t obvious to aliens.

  “Couldn’t you preach peace or something? Couldn’t you help us?”

  If he could help us, then maybe he would help me.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you help ants?”

  “What?”

  “When you see an anthill, do you try to tell them what to do? Tell them where a better source of food is?”

  “No,” I say. “But we’re not ants. Humans have a higher consciousness. Humans have souls. Humans have opposable thumbs. Art. Literature. Infrastructure. Quiche.”

  “Burritos,” Hooper says. “I am not saying that your people are barbarians. I’m only convinced that there is very little I can learn or do here that I want to learn or do.”

  “Detroit,” I say.

  “Pardon?” Hooper says.

  “It’s like Detroit. I went there once with my middle school. I used to be in chorus and we were competing there in the nationals. I walked around in Detroit. It was a perfectly fine city, but there was nothing about it that I liked or that made me want to know more about it. It didn’t fit with me.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Hooper says. “I have been to more primitive planets and have had more of a connection. I’ve been to more sophisticated planets and have been dazzled by th
e heights of their civilizations. I think we can safely say that Earth is just not for me.”

  I think, It’s not for me, either.

  “I very much want to go home,” Hooper says.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “My ship was damaged upon entry,” he says. “I may be here much longer than I ever intended to be.”

  “Isn’t there anything you like about Earth?”

  “You, Mal. I like you.”

  43.

  Posey is waiting for me when I get out of the boys’ room. I think it’s kind of weird that she’s waiting for me, but Posey is the type of person who doesn’t really care if something seems weird. She does look like she’s pretty excited and has to talk to me right away. I wonder if it’s about the dog.

  She shoves her phone in my face.

  “What?” I say. I don’t know what I’m looking at.

  “Read,” she says.

  It’s a news article about a civilian spacecraft that’s going to blast off in a secret night launch from the desert in the next few days.

  “So?” I say.

  “I thought maybe we could go,” Posey tells me. “Why?”

  “Because there’s a spaceport right here in our own backyard, and I think it would be cool to go see something blast off into the sky.”

  I get a kind of vertigo feeling. I put my hand on the wall and lean on it, trying to look as cool as I can while also steadying myself.

  Posey is standing there and looking at me. Other people are looking at Posey talking to me. Darwyn is fiddling with his bag near us.