***
On the way over, Sarah mused, “I always wondered how many of the guests at the Cons were really aliens. Now I’ll wonder even more.” Barbara just shook her head at that thought.
“Yuri, Kay, I know that Arlin thinks 15 is the age of consent and I understand listening to your ‘incident’ at that age, why you insisted we be legal or close. Sarah is 17, Amber 18, Gabriella 44 and I am 33 but what about you?”
Yuri answered casually as she was flying slow to see the sights, their Cloak preventing detection, “I’m 22, Kay is 23, we think. Drakonan days and years are a bit longer than ours. We joined Arlin five years ago when we were Freshmen. I was seventeen then, Kay eighteen.”
“So you’ve spent five years in space and stealing, smuggling, whatever. That doesn’t seem like the kind of job I’d want for my daughters.”
“It’s not like we can go home,” she commented, waving her tail in Barbara’s face. “I’m an orphan so have no family to miss. Kay wrote her family a letter the first day back and called them a number of times since. I suppose finding an explanation for the absence wasn’t easy for her. Of course, they weren’t happy when she wrote them a letter and came out of the closet from college. That was a week before we met Arlin and she was fighting with her family about coming home and settling down with her cousin they wanted her to marry. They also yelled a lot about sin and counseling and Hell and I think they were going to lock her up in some institution for deviants. I think that is why we went. Escape. Arlin said he estanned, that means ESP, our desire to escape. Like the Demons abduct people who ‘hear the stars sing’ as he puts it. It’s some alien thing where people like Arlin stare at the stars a lot and want to visit them and the Demons pick up that desire. I don’t know where they stand now other than she cries a lot. I don’t know if she’s crying because they disowned her for being gay or if they finally accepted her and want her to visit which she can’t.”
“This is all really strange to me. I’ve watched _The X-Files_ and wondered, but you two are the first aliens I ever met,” she laughed, “And the first lesbians though you aren’t really aliens. It must be difficult for you two, being gay is hard enough then to be… so different.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve always known I was gay. Kay fought her feelings but met me, experimented at a frat party, and gave in. Her family has the problems. They had to accept their daughter being gay, then vanishing for five years, now back and no longer human. Having no family makes it easier on me. I’ve always been different and never had any family to embarrass so I could be myself. Just an endless series of Christian foster-families who didn’t understand that I was Japanese, not the middle-class white girl they wanted me to be. The ones that treated me like some heathen they were saving were better than the ones who pretended to love me to buy their way into Heaven or the Church’s good graces.
“Do you want to hear something really funny? The closest thing we have to family is Arlin’s. His people are really into Clan and Family so we go to Sothis every year when we can and Arlin hands over half his share of our earnings to his family and half whatever is left over to his Clan. They’re aliens but they accept me and Kay as their daughters. Once one of the boys in the street called us ‘lop-tails’ and Arlin’s brother beat the crap out of him for that. They are like an alien version of the Walton’s and that is the only place I have ever felt home and loved.”
Crap Shoot Page 4