Dark Energy

by Robison Wells

  It mirrored a conversation we’d had earlier that morning when Coya pointed to the picture on our door and asked what a succubus is.

  “Do you know the word seduce?” Brynne asked.

  No.

  “Do you know the word flirt?”

  No.

  “Do you know romance?”

  No.

  “Do you know sex?”

  Oh yeah. That one. She knew that. Everyone knows that.

  “We’re not really evil monsters that have sex with boys and then kill them,” Brynne had explained matter-of-factly. “But that’s what we call ourselves. As a joke.”

  The Bruner Scholar for Uncomfortable and Awkward Silences just accepted her award.

  Anyway, AP U.S. History eventually ended, and I knew that the professor was going to recommend some kind of crash course in world events for his two Guide students. He couldn’t assign them extra reading, given that they couldn’t read, so he told them he’d have some videos ready for them next class, and they could watch them in the library to help them catch up.

  “So, tell me about Suski,” Brynne said, sitting backward on her chair, her chin resting on her folded arms.

  “What do you want to know?” Coya asked.

  “Well,” Brynne said, putting her hands up innocently, “I know he’s your brother, but you’ve got to know he’s cute.”

  Coya took a deep breath and furrowed her brow.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Rachel?”

  “Not my type,” she said. “But I can see the draw.”

  “I don’t understand,” Coya said, getting flustered. “Why does it matter?”

  “We don’t have to talk about it right now,” I said, and picked up a magazine. “We could take a Cosmo quiz.”

  Rachel threw a pillow at me and then turned to Coya. “Why don’t you wear shoes?”

  Coya looked puzzled, as though the translation didn’t go through.

  “Shoes,” I said, and patted my black leather boots with a two-inch heel, because I’m a naughty rebel. “Why don’t you wear anything on your feet?”

  “Oh,” Coya said, and looked uncomfortable again. It was a face she had mastered.

  We all waited.

  “Shoes?” I asked again.

  “We don’t wear those,” she said. “We don’t feel it is appropriate.”

  Appropriate? Really?

  “Now wait a minute,” Rachel said. “Is this a Guide thing? Like, is this one of the things that you’re supposed to teach us?”

  There was that awkwardness again.

  “I’m not your Guide,” Coya said. “That is Mai. He is our leader.”

  “He is your father, right?” I asked.

  She slowly nodded her head. “He is my father. Suski is my brother. I have many other brothers and sisters.”

  “What about your mother?” Brynne asked.

  “I do not know ‘mother.’ That is not a thing that we have,” Coya said.

  “What?” Rachel said. “Everyone has a mother. We all have mothers.”

  I spoke up. “My mother is dead. Is that what you mean? Your mother is dead?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have one of those.”

  Rachel jumped in. “Is this some kind of commune thing? The kids are raised by all the women, and mothers don’t take care of their own babies?”

  “I don’t know ‘commune,’” Coya said, looking confused.

  “We did see children coming out of the ship,” Rachel said, her voice almost desperate. “I don’t remember if they were with mothers.”

  “Who raised you?” I asked. “Who took care of you when you were little?”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Coya said, and her discomfort turned to defensiveness. “What do you mean ‘take care of’?”

  “Who taught you?” Brynne asked. She stood up and began changing out of her uniform. “Who made sure the kids had food to eat?”

  “We all did,” Coya said. “We all taught children.”

  Brynne pulled on a Kansas State sweatshirt. “But when a woman had a baby, wasn’t she in charge of that baby? Didn’t she teach the baby?”

  Coya shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “You have a brother—Suski. Does he have the same mother as you?”

  “I want to talk to Suski,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “We’ll take you to him,” Brynne said, standing up slowly. “But answer the question. When a woman had a baby, what happened to the baby?”

  “Everyone taught the baby,” Coya said, standing up and folding her arms. “Everyone loved the baby. This is good.”

  “Fine,” Rachel said. “We’ll take you to see Suski.” She stood up and rummaged in her closet before pulling out a pair of very simple leather sandals. “But you have to wear these.”

  “And,” Brynne said, holding out a long Q-Tip, “this is a tradition. Open your mouth.”

  “What is this?” Coya said.

  “Aaaaah,” Brynne said, and soon Coya was mimicking the expression. Quickly Brynne swabbed the inside of the alien’s cheek and dropped the Q-tip into a test tube.

  We sat in the common room, me with a bowl of ice cream, Brynne with a bowl of blueberries, and Rachel with an enormous wedge of chocolate cream pie. Of the three of us, she seemed the most outraged by the mother issue, although none of us were happy about it.

  Suski and Coya were in the cafeteria at a table by the window, a plate of food in front of each of them that they weren’t touching. Coya had the sandals on her feet. I hadn’t seen if Suski had reacted to them, but in all the time I sat staring at the two Guides, he never looked.

  His roommates hadn’t taken the time to dress him like we’d done with Coya, so he sat there looking sullen in his blazer and khakis and bare feet. He was talking quietly to his sister, both of their translator earpieces removed and lying on the table.

  “Who would think,” Brynne began, “that a vastly advanced race of supposedly superior beings would be so conservative? They don’t think it’s appropriate to wear shoes? Is that why they all wore the same clothes, too? Is it some kind of Amish antifashion thing?”

  “Maybe it’s the opposite,” Rachel said. “Maybe it’s not conservative, but liberal. Maybe the lack of differentiation is because they’re all equal and no one should dress any better than anyone else.”

  “That doesn’t explain the shoe thing.”

  “No.”

  Suski’s eyes met mine, and I immediately looked away, embarrassed that I was staring at him. He turned back to Coya and said something. She nodded. He didn’t look happy. Maybe he was pissed that we’d given his sister new clothes. Brynne stood and stretched. “Let me know if something interesting happens. I’m going back to study. I want to get that cheek swab going soon.”

  “I should really be studying,” Rachel said. “The Princeton Math Competition is coming up, and I’m trying to get on the team.” She took another bite of pie.

  “You all work too hard.”

  “It helps me relax, though.”

  “Then all of this work has driven you crazy.”

  “It’s something we have in common with them,” she said, gesturing to Suski and Coya with her fork. “Math. It’s the one language that everyone has in common, because math is math. Pi is always pi. One plus one always equals two.”

  “Maybe if they ever get past telling us not to wear shoes, they’ll pass along some of that knowledge.”

  “I hope so,” she said, and took another bite.

  “Not that you need help,” I said. “You’re freaking brilliant.”

  “That’s all relative,” Rachel said absently. “You can be brilliant in the first grade because you know all your multiplication tables. But that doesn’t compare to being brilliant in junior high or being brilliant in college. These guys probably just raised the bar. They’ll have new math. New, amazing stuff that will make our Nobel Prize winners look like those first graders. They must. You can’t have a ship that
advanced and not have figured out some amazing things.”

  “That doesn’t make you any less brilliant,” I said. “You’ll just have more material to learn from. I bet Coya doesn’t know all the math that made the ship fly, or how to put it together. It’s not something that every alien would just know. It’s still a specialized skill. It’s probably the engineers who are working with my dad—they’re the really smart ones.”

  “Either way, my point is that we have at least one thing in common—math.” She stood up. “I’m going back to the room. Text me if anything interesting happens. If Suski caresses your hair again or something.”

  She grinned and headed toward the dorm. My eyes met Suski’s again, but I held the stare this time, and he was the one to look away.

  “You’re shedding friends,” a voice said behind me, and I looked up to see Kurt. He hopped over the couch and plopped down next to me. “People are beginning to talk.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve been in this school for less than a week. People should still be coming up to introduce themselves to me, not leaving me to wander the room getting to know people.”

  “That’s not what they teach in the networking seminar,” he said.

  “There’s seriously a networking seminar? Of course there is. I’d forgotten where I was.”

  “You have to work the room, like a cocktail party.”

  “I don’t go to a lot of cocktail parties.”

  “Then work it like a high school dance,” he said. “Move around the room. Talk to people. Exchange business cards. Swap golf stories.”

  “So, what do you think,” I said, gesturing to the Guides with my now-empty ice cream bowl. “Coya in Brynne’s clothes. You think she could pass for a human?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Nicely done, by the way. Dressing her, I mean.”

  “You think we could do the same thing with Suski? Or is he just too, well, alien?”

  “He looks albino. I bet any humans who are real albinos right now are getting a lot of crap.” He cocked his head to one side and looked at her. “But Coya—platinum blond hair. Fair skin. Brynne’s got more of a tan, but not much. I personally think Brynne’s hotter—”

  “Shut up.”

  “You asked.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I stood up.

  “Where are you going? What if I say that you’re prettier than Brynne?”

  “I’d say you’re lying through your teeth.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to dye a blue streak in Coya’s hair.”

  I sat down at the table with Suski and Coya. They put their earpieces back in and stared at me.

  “Hello, Alice,” Coya said. I liked her language: “Guw’aadzi, Alice.”

  “Gooadsee,” I said back to her, and they both smiled warily.

  I looked at Suski and took Coya’s hand. “I need to borrow your sister.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I need Coya to come with me. We’re going to go hang out with the girls. Is that okay, Coya?”

  She pulled her hand away suspiciously. “What do you mean by ‘hang out’?”

  I touched my blue hair. “You said you wanted blue in your hair?”

  Her face slowly changed from suspicion to worry to tentative pleasure. She looked at Suski, like she needed his approval. He said something in their language, clearly displeased, and the translator automatically interpreted it for me.

  “You said they were angry with you.”

  “They were angry with life on the ship. They don’t understand.”

  Suski realized I was listening and turned off both his and Coya’s translators. He talked sternly for a good two minutes.

  “Does your translator know the word patriarchal yet?” I asked, knowing they couldn’t understand me.

  They looked at each other and then back at me, and then Suski returned to his speech.

  “Well, good. You seem to have a very patriarchal society.” I smiled as I said it so that maybe they’d think it was a compliment, and after a moment, Suski forced a smile back.

  I took Coya’s hand and stood up. She followed me and turned her translator back on.

  We hurried back to the girls’ dorm, and I burst into our room, already kicking off my shoes and unbuttoning my shirt.

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked, sitting at her desk. She really was studying math, two pencils holding her hair up. I couldn’t understand her.

  “Help me,” I said. “We’re giving Coya a blue streak.”

  I heard Brynne’s voice from the other bedroom. “What?” A moment later she appeared. “I am so getting involved. You have dye?”

  I pulled on a T-shirt that I didn’t mind ruining, and then fumbled through my luggage until I found the slightly beat-up box of Blistering Blue. “I brought it along to clean up my roots, but it sounds like that won’t be happening.”

  “Sweet,” Brynne said, opening the box to see how much was there. “Coya’s hair’s long, but this should work fine. Rachel, can you run down to the kitchen and ask for some tinfoil?”

  We didn’t take long—Brynne was a seasoned professional, and Coya was a good canvas to work on. After Brynne dyed the streak into Coya’s long hair and wrapped it in tinfoil, I set to work on Coya’s makeup. She freaked out at the eyeliner pencil, but everyone does that at first and I couldn’t blame her. After twenty minutes we moved her in front of the mirror, and she smiled uncertainly. To finish off the look, we gave her a warm winter sweater and a pair of Brynne’s designer jeans. We couldn’t talk her into better shoes, not even when we told her how cold it was outside, but overall the look still worked. I felt a little bit like a mother watching her little girl getting her first haircut. Everything was new and scary to Coya—especially when Brynne opened the foil and rinsed and rinsed, and rinsed some more, and then began to towel it dry with a thick old red tattered thing.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to dye blond hair?” Rachel said. “I think I read that in one of your magazines.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” Brynne answered, “it’s just that you can’t dye it out. You can’t bleach it. You get weird blue and green.”

  “I love my hair,” Coya said, beaming. “I love blue.”

  “So what do we do now?” Rachel asked.

  “I think we go back to the cafeteria and get something to eat. Show her off.” I looked at Coya. “Suski is going to be there.”

  Coya’s hand gripped the edge of her desk, staring through the small window at the end of the room. “What is that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just the back of the school. You can see the track—for running.”

  “What is falling?”

  “Oh,” Rachel answered excitedly. “That’s snow. It’s frozen water.”

  “I love it,” Coya said, with wonder in her voice.

  To be honest, I was almost in as much awe as she was. The only place I ever saw snow was at my Shimasani’s home in New Mexico, but that snow always melted quickly. My grandma and grandpa Goodwin got a lot of snow, but we usually visited them in the summer.

  “We can go the back way to the cafeteria,” Rachel said.

  “What back way?” Brynne asked.

  “C’mon,” Rachel said with a smile as she led the way into the hall. “There’s a door out here that I use to avoid, well, people.”

  She led us twenty feet out of our room to a steel door marked “Electrical Room.” I would have assumed it was locked, but Rachel turned the knob and we entered a small, dark room. I lost her in the darkness for an instant and then saw her outline and felt a rush of cold air.

  “This goes outside?”

  “Yep,” she said, pushing the door open against the slushy snow on the patio. “This goes all the way around past the gym and the cafeteria and to the parking lot.”

  “I do not like this place’s feeling on my skin,
” Coya said.

  It took us a minute to get it, but Brynne was the first to figure it out. “The cold, you mean? I guess you guys never had changing weather.”

  A shock of ice hit my neck and zapped down my spine. I spun to see Brynne and Rachel both laughing.

  “Which one of you did it?” I said, trying to get the clump of snow out of my shirt. “Rachel, I know it was you. You’re dead.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said, holding up her hands in an I’m as innocent as Mother Teresa look. Brynne gave me the same look.

  “You’re both dead, then,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Coya asked. “They are not dead.”

  I laughed, still unable to get the snow out from under my coat. It was soaking into my waistband. “It’s just a saying,” I told her. “It means they’re in trouble.”

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly serious. “I understand dead. They are not dead.”

  “No,” I said. “And they’re not even in trouble. It’s a joke.”

  “It seems a strange thing to joke about,” she said, and then drew her fingers through her hair again. “I love this blue.”

  We walked around the back of the school in mostly silence. Coya asked a few questions about the snow—how much would fall, how soon it would melt—which Rachel answered. I kept thinking about what Coya had said about death. She understood death.

  When we got to the common room door, it was locked. Rachel looked heartbroken, like the one thing she was good at had gone wrong. I pulled out my phone and called Kurt.

  “Hey, want to rescue four freezing girls?”

  He laughed. “Where are you?”

  “At the common room’s outside door.”

  “I swear, Goodwin, you’ll owe me for this one.”

  “Because it’s really hard to open a door.”

  “Is there a good reason for you to be out there?”

  “Just open the door.”

  “I can see you from here,” he said, and hung up.

  As he walked toward us, a few glances came in our direction, and when he opened the door, at least a dozen people were looking at us.

  “I don’t think we’ve achieved much avoiding the crowd, Rachel,” I said.

  “Are you kidding?” Brynne said. “I just learned how to get out of the building without even sneaking past the RA. That’s gold.”