Coya stopped, shivering. “Does this snow come often?”
“Half the year,” Rachel said. “So, yeah. A lot.”
“I think . . . ,” Coya said. “I think I will wear shoes.”
NINE
The FBI must have placed alarms on all the doors, because one of the agents appeared almost immediately in the common room, talking into his radio. Soon we were sitting in the headmistress’s office getting a lecture on safety and responsibility.
“I entrusted you girls with the care of this young woman,” she said, in that voice that adults use when they want to show how disappointed they are with your behavior. “This isn’t a game. Life and death are on the line. You’ve seen the protestors.”
“She looks human. And we were outside for maybe five minutes, not to mention we were nowhere near the front gates,” I said.
“It was still irresponsible,” she said, which I think was her way of saying I’d won but she didn’t care. “Your parents will be notified. Coya will be assigned to a different room—to girls who are more trustworthy.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but Coya spoke.
“I want to stay with Alice and Rachel and Brynne.”
The headmistress smiled at her—she didn’t want to make the guest unhappy, but she wanted to punish us all just the same. “I’m sure we can find another situation that is a better fit.”
“This is a good fit,” Coya said with newfound fierceness. “I like these three girls. They protect me.”
The headmistress sighed and leaned back in her chair. Her eyes met mine, and then she glanced at Rachel and Brynne. “You realize that this kind of misbehavior could hurt your chances of becoming Bruner Scholars. Part of the scholarship is based on leadership and citizenship.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they chorused, more cowed than me. I didn’t have as much to lose.
“I’ll be watching you more closely,” the headmistress finally said. “And, Coya, you have my apologies. This should never have happened.”
“This was a good thing,” Coya said. “I liked it.”
She gave us all one last disapproving look. “You’re dismissed.”
We stood up from the plush leather chairs opposite her desk. Coya’s face broke into a big smile. “Headmistress, do you like my hair? It’s blue, like Alice’s.”
She nearly choked on her sigh. “Yes. Very nice.”
We managed to get outside and wait for her office door to shut before we started laughing.
Coya wanted to find Suski to show him her hair, so we headed back to the cafeteria. Suski was still sitting at the same table. It didn’t look like he’d moved an inch. The tray of lunch he hadn’t eaten had been replaced with a tray of dinner he wasn’t eating. When he saw Coya, he stood up, obviously upset.
They spoke together in their own language, not waiting for their translators, and it was hard to follow the conversation as the machines struggled to keep up.
“Where have you been?”
“—getting blue in my—”
“—just do this without—”
“—safe and with my—”
“—not safe. You don’t know what this place is like. You don’t know who these people are. You don’t—”
“—not Father. I was—”
“—dangerous. I demand that you obey.”
She stared back at him, and then made a gesture with both fists knocking together. She spun and looked back at me. “Let’s go to the room.”
I nodded and gave Suski a hard look, which he returned. Rachel took Coya by the hand, which seemed to surprise her at first, but then she smiled weakly.
I turned to Kurt. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
“Sure. I’m not going anywhere.”
I headed after Rachel, Brynne, and Coya, who were already out of the cafeteria and down the hallway. We entered the dorm and passed the RA’s room, but she didn’t glance up.
“Is he always like that?” I asked Coya. “So serious?”
“Yes,” she said. “Suski is always serious.”
“Why?” Rachel asked.
“He’s had a hard life,” Coya said. “He doesn’t trust you aliens—humans.”
I laughed. “I’ve never thought about that. We’re aliens to you.”
We opened the door to our room, and Brynne flopped down on a couch, picking up a magazine. Of course, it wasn’t Cosmo or something fun like that. It was The Journal of Human Genetics.
“You are such a nerd,” I said.
“Such a frustrated nerd,” she said, looking again at Coya’s hair. “I love it. It should be a succubus thing. We should all do it. What do you think, Rach?”
“Alas,” Rachel said, “I think we’d better toe the line after the You’re not going to win the Bruner if you act like this talk from the headmistress.”
“Ugh.”
I turned to Brynne. “You could probably dye your whole head a rainbow and still get the Bruner. There’s no one in biology that comes close to you.”
“You only say that because you haven’t been here very long,” Rachel said. “What the headmistress said was true—a lot of the scholarship is about being a good citizen, which means following the rules. They want geniuses, but they want geniuses who will give the school a good name.”
Coya spoke. “I don’t understand. The blue is a bad thing?”
“Not for you,” I said. “And not for me. Do you know the term double standard?”
“No.”
Brynne answered. “It means that Rachel and I are trying to win an award, and we won’t win it if we have blue in our hair.”
“I don’t understand ‘award,’” Coya said.
We spent the rest of the evening explaining words to Coya, trying to teach her our culture. It was amazing the things that she didn’t have any concept of: awards, winning, competition, prizes. For her, life was about work, and everyone worked and everyone got the same reward for their work, and the only surprises were unpleasant—accidents, death. Crashing into Iowa.
She didn’t have much of a story to explain how they crashed. She had never even been to the control room of the ship—the bridge, or the cockpit, or whatever they called it. All our attempts at explaining that word didn’t register with her. She had spent her life in the outer rings of the ship, working. We asked her what kind of working, and other than a vague description of cleaning, she didn’t really have an answer.
Coya was not a good storyteller.
“Everyone just lived together?” Rachel asked. “No separate rooms, like our room here?”
“No,” she said. “My people live together. All together. No, I am wrong. There are many rooms like this room—many rooms for people to sleep in. But never a room with just two people. Never.”
“What about Mai?” Brynne asked, a little suspicion in her voice. We were all getting the impression that Mai lived in some kind of luxury with a harem of women. But Coya denied it.
“Mai lived in my room,” she said. “With all my brothers and sisters.”
“What does this mean?” I asked, typing a few keystrokes into Google and turning my laptop screen for her to see. It was the door they’d all come out through—I pointed to the alien language written above the opening.
“I don’t understand.”
“Is this writing?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and pointed to the image. “Not that. Not those pictures.”
“What are the pictures, then?”
Coya got that uncomfortable look again. She could be the Bruner Scholar for Discomfort. “I don’t know. They are just pictures. They are pretty.”
I looked back at the laptop. The symbols were blocky, with sharp angles and small twists. They didn’t look pretty to me at all. And they didn’t look like art.
“They have to be letters,” I said, and tapped on the screen. “Look, this one is the same as this other one. They are some kind of writing.”
“Or a repeating design,” Brynne sai
d, with a sigh that made it sound like she didn’t believe that herself. She turned back to Coya. “Do you know anyone who can read?”
“I don’t understand ‘reading,’” Coya said.
“Reading,” Brynne said, and held up her magazine and made a box with her fingers around the letter T. “This is a T. It sounds like this: t-t-t-t. Then this is an H. It sounds like h-h-h-h. So together—wait, why did I choose the?”
Coya shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“What about math?” Rachel said, grabbing four pens from her desk. She laid them on the bed. “One, two, three, four.”
Coya took the four remaining pens and continued, and I listened to her language: “Taam’a, sh’isa, maityana, kukyum’ishi.” The translator followed with “five, six, seven, eight.”
There was something familiar about the words. I only knew English and a little bit of Navajo, and this definitely wasn’t either, but it sounded like something I’d heard before.
Rachel laid out two pens and then two more. “Two pens and two pens is . . .”
Coya paused for a moment. “Dyaana.” And her translator said, “Four.”
Rachel took a deep, calming breath, as though everything was going to be okay now because Coya could do arithmetic. But I was hatching a plan. I was going to find Suski and show him the letters from the picture. See if he could read them. I wanted to see just what kind of patriarchy we were dealing with where barefoot girls didn’t have mothers and weren’t even able to read. And then, depending on how it went, maybe I’d show him some of the self-defense moves Dad insisted I master before I could date. Mostly jujitsu.
Then again, it wasn’t just barefoot girls. It was barefoot everybody. But still.
Sometimes I think I hatch too many plans.
So, instead of going on a mission, I pulled out my copy of Cosmo and we took the first quiz: “What Kind of Female Are You?” Despite the stilted name—and having to explain to Coya what the point of a Cosmo quiz is—we began. How do you feel about your job? None of us had jobs, so we used school as a stand-in. Rachel chose Love it, seriously. Brynne did, too, and I couldn’t believe I was rooming with such losers. I picked It’s fine, but I don’t work more than I have to. And Coya finally picked It’s a job, it’s necessary.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the details, but Brynne got Experience First and Rachel got Love First and I got Figuring It Out. That stung a little bit, but I guess it’s true. Coya got Career First, which we all laughed at since she didn’t even know what career meant.
Then, lest it turn into too much of a slumber party, I told them I needed to sleep. The day had been a whirlwind, and I was ready for peace and quiet. I think I was asleep before I even pulled the covers over me.
The next evening I found Suski at his usual table, picking a little at his steamed broccoli. The way he always sat there made me wonder if he was used to sitting in one place, like a king holding court or something like that.
“A lot of people don’t like broccoli,” I said, inviting myself to sit.
“It looks the most like the food we ate at our home. What did you call it? Broccaa?”
“Broccoli,” I said, and I pointed to an empty spot on his plate, where the remnants of some dark sauce remained. “What was that?”
“Very good, just like a food we have. Fungus.”
I was repulsed for a moment and then laughed. “Mushrooms! You like mushrooms. I bet they would grow well in a giant dark ship.”
“We never put this liquid on them.”
“You can go back and get more.”
“I don’t want to take more than my share.”
“We never run out of mushrooms,” I said. “Hang on.”
I set all my stuff on the table—my laptop and my backpack—and I grabbed a plate and jogged to the long buffet. There were people getting food, but not enough that it looked like I was cutting in line. The dish I was looking for was marked with a card: “Wild Mushrooms in Red Wine Sauce.” It was supposed to be a sauce for the steak nearby, but if Suski just wanted to eat gravy, at least he was eating something. I filled up the dish with it and carried it back to him.
“For you,” I said.
For the first time he looked at me with a smile that felt real, but it quickly faded.
“Coya says you have been rude to her.”
“About what?”
“About the way we live on the ship. About not knowing who gave us birth.”
“You know who your fathers are.”
He stabbed a mushroom with his fork and ate it, chewing with his mouth slightly open. “Our people are different than your people.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, stopping that line of questioning—for now, at least. “Can I show you a picture?”
“Fine,” he said.
I opened my laptop and quickly found the photos with the lettering. I turned the computer toward him.
“Do you know what this means?”
He looked for a long time. “I don’t understand your question.”
“Do you know how to read?”
He turned and reached into his bag. I started to get excited, wondering what amazing thing could possibly be in there. Maybe a reading translator, like his speech translator?
He pulled out a thin graphic novel, with a spaceship on the cover. Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler. “The English teacher is trying to teach me how to read English. She thinks this spaceship funny book will be easier for me, but it is not.”
I tapped the screen at the writing above the door the guides had cut their way through. “So you don’t think these designs here mean anything.”
“Are they for reading?”
I put my forehead in my hands. “Yes.” Why did he—the son of Mai, the leader—not recognize the language on the ship?
“Coya said you guys never left the ship, right?”
He nodded, chewing on another mushroom.
“Then maybe that writing is not for you, but for someone else?”
“Possibly.”
“Why don’t you have mothers?”
“What?”
“You have a father. What about a mother?”
His lips straightened into a tight line, and he pushed the mushrooms away. “Is this what you attacked Coya about?”
“We didn’t attack Coya. We just talked to her about it.”
“She felt betrayed.”
I felt my stomach drop. “That wasn’t our intention. Not at all.”
“Coya is a good girl,” he said. “We did not come to this school to be treated poorly. We are the children of Mai.”
“Well—” But he interrupted me.
“I do not know what is on the outside of the ship. I have never looked at the outside of the ship until we came to this planet. I didn’t know we were even on a ship. I didn’t know what a ship was. I thought I was in my home.”
“What?” Just then my phone buzzed, and I snatched it up. “Hi, Dad.”
“The FBI has me surrounded.”
“I’ll be right out.” I slid my laptop back into my backpack, said good-bye to Suski, and headed to the school’s front entrance. Dad was standing there, looking at a display case of inventions created by former Minnetonka students. He was flanked by two frowning FBI agents.
“Aly,” Dad said, and gave me a hug. He had shaved and was even wearing a clean shirt. I was impressed.
“You didn’t have to go all out,” I said. “I kind of expected you to be grizzled and covered with coffee stains.”
“I’m taking my daughter to dinner,” he said. “I can at least shave and put on deodorant. I even showered. I know you’re doubting me.”
One of the FBI agents spoke up. “She’s not allowed to leave the property.”
“Excuse me?” I said, just as Dad said, “What? Why not?”
“Orders from above,” the FBI agent said. “Just yesterday she snuck out of the building with one of the aliens.”
“Aly,” Dad said. I couldn’t tell
if it was his real disappointed voice or his fake one.
“We were outside for maybe three minutes,” I said.
“All I know,” the agent said, “is that we have new orders. If students leave they cannot come back in.”
“Want to join me in the cafeteria?” I asked.
Dad looked down at me. “It would be an honor.”
“They’re serving deep-fried walleye. It’s a fish,” I said. “I looked it up. It’s called ‘walleye’ because its eyes point out to the sides, like it’s looking at the walls. The opposite of cross-eyed. And they’re serving steak with a mushroom sauce that one of the Guides really likes.”
“Really? Which one?”
“The boy.”
“I bet he does. They live off the stuff. We’ve found huge mushroom cultivation chambers. They grow well inside the ship.”
“He also eats anything that looks like pureed vegetables. I think they must have eaten algae?”
“And here I thought you weren’t learning anything.”
“Oh, I’ve learned tons of stuff here. Tons. Did you know that in Call of Duty: Black Ops, if you shoot all the mannequin heads really fast, you can get to a secret level? I’m telling you, this is a quality education.”
“Wow.”
“You have to be in multiplayer.”
“I’ll remember that,” he said. “This is a nice cafeteria. But, well, seafood in Minnesota?” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m craving it,” I said.
“Lead on.”
The cook behind the counter fried us some fresh fish and some chips to go with it. Dad wouldn’t take one of the desserts, so I took two cherry pies—his favorite—and set one on his side of the table. He did, however, get a few pieces of pickled herring. Probably just to gross me out.
As he dipped his hot walleye into tartar sauce, he spoke. “So where are your Guides? I can’t pick them out in this sea of pasty-white Minnesotans.”
“Suski is sitting alone at his table over your left shoulder. And Coya is probably not eating dinner. She’s a lot more liberal than her brother. Not liberal in the way that a scientist hippie who grew up in San Francisco is liberal. But she’s liberal in the sense that we got her to wear shoes, and she hangs out and takes Cosmo quizzes and goes to parties.”
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