by David Gordon
Sami was following Brian downstairs for their snack. When they stepped into the entryway at the bottom of the stairs she noticed that the double doors leading into the Brian’s father’s office were open a few inches. She paused to peer across the entryway, trying to see what that room looked like inside. She had just made out a part of a flickering computer screen on a desk and wires and electrical equipment on the floor when someone inside the room slid the door shut. At the clump! of the door being closed, Brian stopped and glanced back at Sami, smiled, and waited for her to join him. They continued on through the living room (stepping over musical instruments), then around a big table piled up with moving boxes in the darkened dining room, and into the kitchen.
The kitchen was bright and sunny, with lots of windows, bright colors, and shiny surfaces. Shareen was smiling at them from beside a breakfast table that was tucked into the sunniest corner of the kitchen. Neatly arranged on the table were four place settings, each with its own plate, knife, fork and spoon, a napkin, and a glass of orange juice. Next to each of the glasses of orange juice was a box of animal crackers. In the middle of the table there was a bowl of grapes, a bowl of mixed nuts, a plate of carrot sticks, and a bowl of gummy worms. Now Sami was smiling.
“Come sit down, children,” Shareen invited them. “Brian’s father will join us in just a minute.”
“Cool! Thanks!” said Sami, and she and Brian slipped into the chairs on one side of the table. Shareen sat across from Sami.
“Will this be alright for a snack?” Shareen asked.
“Yes, thanks,” said Sami. “But it’s…” Sami bit her lip to stop herself from saying any more.
Shareen smiled and said, “Yes, Sami? It is what?”
Sami could not look at her as she answered. “Well, it’s kind of weird. My mom never gives me animal crackers and gummy worms and stuff for a snack.” Sami dared to look up at Shareen, who was not at all offended. Shareen thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Well, Sami,” she said, “for each animal cracker you eat you must also eat a grape and a nut. And with each gummy worm you must eat a carrot and a nut.” Sami grinned. She was really starting to like Shareen. “Go ahead,” she said.
Where to begin was a big decision for Sami, so she thought for a moment while Brian took a grape and selected a nut. Still smiling, Sami reached for a gummy worm, laid it on her plate, then added a carrot stick and a nut. She dangled her gummy worm in front of her mouth, then slurped it in, which seemed to delight Brian and his mother. Then she popped in her nut and started chomping on her carrot stick. Brian picked up his box of animal crackers and started to open it. Sami stopped chewing as she stared at Brian’s alien hands work at the box. The box had been designed by human beings who, of course, had one thumb and four fingers on each hand. Now it was giving Brian some trouble as he tried to position it so that his fingers could get under the cardboard flaps.
Sami said, “Here, I’ll do it,” and she impatiently snatched the box from him. “You gotta press your finger under—” Suddenly Shareen’s hand, with its two thumbs and two fingers, was resting on Sami’s own hand. Sami was so startled to see that strange hand touching her that she dropped the box and jerked her own hand away.
“What is going on here?” Brian’s father had just walked into the kitchen.
Sami and Shareen were staring at each other. Shareen looked embarrassed and tucked both of her hands in her lap, under the table and out of sight. Sami felt embarrassed, too, but she was not quite sure why. Shareen said to Brian’s father, “We are having a snack.” Then she turned back to Sami, made herself smile, and explained, “Sami, Brian needs to learn how to do things for himself.”
Sami just nodded. She put the box back on Brian’s plate. Brian’s father popped his iPod ear buds out of his ears and sat in the chair opposite Brian. He looked just like Brian and Shareen, except that he was even taller, he had longer fingers, his nose and mouth were a little bigger, and he had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and underneath them, as well. He smiled at Sami and said, “Hello, Sami. My name is Alexi.” His voice was deeper than Shareen’s. In fact, Sami thought it was a beautiful, rich voice that reminded her of an opera singer Mr. Sanchez had once played for her. Then she realized that Shareen had a beautiful voice, too. It almost sounded like she was singing when she talked. Even Brian’s voice was very nice and smooth. Sami started to wonder what her own voice sounded like. She was sure it did not sound as nice as theirs.
Alexi clapped his hands together and rubbed them with pleasure. “Oh, this looks like a good snack,” he said. Sami thought that he seemed like a very happy person. He put a few carrot sticks and some nuts on his plate, then started to open the box of animal crackers.
“Aren’t you supposed to have gummy worms with carrots and nuts?” It was out of Sami’s mouth before she could stop herself.
Alexi looked at Brian and at Shareen with wide eyes, then at Sami. “I am very glad you caught me, Sami,” he said as he put down the box. He grabbed a gummy worm and put it half in his mouth, started to chew and said at the same time, “You saved me from a truly horrible mistake.”
Sami laughed, Shareen and Brian relaxed, and Sami already liked Alexi. In fact, she really liked all three of them.
There was a lot of munching, crunching, and slurping as the four of them dove into their snacks. Of course, Brian quickly managed to open his box of animal crackers. But a minute later Sami opened her box with so much excitement that it ripped apart and animal crackers went flying across the table. Naturally, this delighted everyone. As she bent across the table to gather her scattered crackers she asked, “Do you like it here?”
Shareen looked out the window, at the dead lawn, the brown trees, and the cloudless sky. “It is so very dry here,” she said sadly. She kept looking out the window as she continued, “Where we are from there was water. Everywhere there was water.”
Sami heard something in her voice that she had heard before, but she did not know what to call it. It was the same thing she had heard in her mother’s voice when it was the end of the month and she wished she had more money in her bank account. It was what she had heard in Mr. Sanchez’s voice when he missed being in the classroom, teaching “my” kids. It was the way her own voice sounded inside her head when she thought about her father. “Do you want to go back home?” she asked Shareen.
Shareen looked down, and so did Brian. Alexi leaned forward and said, “Even if we had a spaceship that could make the trip, we have no home to go back to, Sami.”
Sami remembered that the news programs had said that the home world of the aliens had been destroyed. It was something about the inside of their planet—the core, she remembered—getting super hot, causing volcanoes that melted away the land. Now Sami felt dumb and rude for having asked the question. Alexi must have noticed this, because he smiled at her and said, “It is okay, Sami.” He shrugged and continued. “We were among the lucky ones. Thousands of spaceships were built and launched in many directions into the galaxy. In your language you would call them ‘seed ships,’ because we were using them to plant our people in other worlds. We hoped we would find planets on which we could live.” He raised his hands to the ceiling. “And here we are!”
“What about the people back on your planet?” asked Sami. “The ones who stayed? What happened to them?”
Alexi’s smile faded, his arms came down slowly. “They are gone, Sami.”
“Well, what about the people in the other space ships? Where are they?” she wanted to know.
Alexi shook his head. “We do not know where they are.”
All of this was very unsatisfying for Sami. She wanted answers to her questions, but Alexi did not seem to know much. Then she remembered that there had been something like fifty families of aliens on the space ship that had crashed here on Earth. So without thinking she blurted out, “Well then, where are all the other aliens here on Earth?” Sami noticed that both Brian and Shareen flinched and looked away when she said ‘aliens.’ He
r stomach knotted up; she had blown it…again. She glanced up at Alexi, but he seemed okay and was watching her. “Sorry, Alexi.” She frowned and added, “But I don’t know what to call you guys.”
“Your scientists call us ‘Adonites,’ because we called our home planet Adonae,” he explained. Sami was startled when she heard Alexi say ‘Adonae.’ What startled her was how it sounded when he said it. It sounded like singing. She must have been staring at Alexi for a long time, because eventually he asked her, “Are you alright, Sami?”
“Um, yes,” she said.
Alexi went on, “But that does not have a beautiful sound. Adonites.” He made a sour face. “That word ends with jagged edges, like a broken piece of wood.” He tilted his head to her and asked, “Do you agree?”
Sami shrugged. She had never thought about the sound of words before.
He leaned closer and spoke like he was telling her a secret. “I prefer Adonaeans.”
He was right, thought Sami. It sounded much nicer to her, too. She said, “So, okay, so where are the other Adonaeans?”
“In many different cities.”
“Is your family the only one living in Paradise?”
“Yes, I think so.” For the first time, Alexi’s smile faded. He stared down at the table and said, “We are watched.”
“By that Sombra guy,” added Sami.
Alexi nodded. “For now we are not allowed to communicate with our people.”
Only moments before the atmosphere around the table had been lit with pure fun. Now it was as though a dark and chilling cloud had formed over them. The tabletop suddenly felt icy to Sami. She slipped her hands from it and folded them into the warmth of her lap. Without lifting her head, she swiveled her eyes to peek at Brian, Shareen, and Alexi. They were lost in their own, sad thoughts. She was already spooked about being rude to them, but she was not going to let that stop her from doing something to cheer them up. “So!” she suddenly chirped. She straightened her back and looked at each of them in turn. “What were the seed ships called in your language?”
Alexi smiled and said the word. It also sounded like singing.
Sami and Brian were standing in the entryway, waiting for Mr. Sombra to take her home. Shareen was playing a clarinet in the living room (badly). Once again the door to Alexi’s office was slightly open. Sami really wanted to look in there, so she said to Brian, “Can you go up and get my backpack?”
“Yes,” he answered, and disappeared up the stairs.
As soon as he was gone, Sami tiptoed to the office doors and peeked inside. No one seemed to be in there. She gently slid one of the doors open enough for her to slip into the room. The blinds were closed, so it was darker in the office than in the rest of the house. There was not just the one computer Sami had seen before, but three computers on three different desks, and two of them were on. There was also a printer, two scanners, bookshelves with books, binders, paper, and stacks of CD and DVD discs. And, as she had noticed before, there were wires running this way and that across the floor, connecting the two computers that were on, and connecting them to the printer and to one of the scanners. Table lamps cast cones of yellow light beside each of these two computers. The third computer (the one that was off) was connected only to the other scanner.
“Sami?”
In one wild movement she jumped and spun around. Alexi was standing in the doorway. He held his hands up with his palms turned to her and said, “It is okay, it is okay. I did not mean to frighten you.”
Sami was annoyed with herself for being caught snooping around and, so, naturally thought it was a good time to lie. “I was just looking for the bathroom!” she said way too fast and way too loud. Inside her head, she was saying to herself, “Dumb, dumb, dumb! He knows that’s not true!” But if Alexi did know it, he did not show it. Instead he smiled and waved his hands at the computers.
“This is where I spend my day,” he said. “Just like you, I am studying. I am in school.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Like college?”
“Yes. College. At some point your government will not want to pay for taking care of us and we will have to take care of ourselves. I am studying so that, when that day comes, I can obtain a job that will support our family.”
Sami looked at the computer screens. They were filled with words and diagrams. Then she asked, “Why don’t you go to a regular college, like my mom went to?”
Alexi glanced down at his hands and smiled. “It is easier if I stay here.”
Sami knew exactly what he was talking about, and again felt bad about how she had jerked away when Shareen had touched her. “I’m really sorry about what happened,” she said.
And Alexi knew exactly what she was talking about. “Do not trouble yourself,” he said. He shrugged. “No one touches us.”
Brian leaned into the room behind his father and said, “Sami, Mr. Sombra is here.” He held her backpack out to her.
Sami glanced at him, then back up at Alexi. “I have to go,” she said.
He nodded. “Come back and visit us, Sami.”
“Okay,” she said. But she just stood there, looking up at Alexi and remembering Shareen at the breakfast table, and remembering the principal, Mrs. Aguirre, waving Brian into the classroom without touching his shoulder, and remembering Miss Fox hiding her hands behind her back as she leaned over to welcome Brian.
Then Sami said, “Bye,” and she held out her hand to Alexi. Surprised, he hesitated, then slowly reached out with his own hand to shake hers. His hand felt strange to Sami at first.
But then it just felt like someone shaking her hand.
“Goodbye, Sami. It is good to meet you.”
They let go and she dashed to the door. She took her backpack from Brian, then faced Alexi again and said, “It’s good to meet you!”
Alexi nodded and smiled. “It’s good to meet you.”
Sami zipped off.
Chapter 9
“Ugh!”