Only Alien on the Planet

by Kristen D. Randle

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. “He must—” he said, leaning forward over the table and looking very sober—"have great lips.”

  This was, of course, considered just incredibly humorous.

  I considered turning the table over on all of them. I settled for pointed silence.

  “I can see up your nostrils,” James said.

  Charming. And so appropriate at dinner.

  “As it happens,” I said primly, shaking out my napkin and placing it carefully onto my lap, “I haven't even told him yet that I would go.” I looked up, daring anybody to say anything. Evidently, I was looking a little dangerous. I smiled, smoothing the napkin. “It's so nice to have the family all together,” I said. When I looked up again, it seemed to me my mother had taken that comment just a little more to heart than I'd expected.

  “Yes,” Charlie agreed with great relish—"it is wonderful.”

  chapter 15

  As it happened, the date with Pete Zabriski turned out to be a complicated matter. We couldn't seem to settle on a day that was good for both of us. Mostly, I couldn't seem to settle. Couldn't seem to want to commit myself. Of course I had a lot on my mind, and maybe that was the trouble; I'd finally decided to take a little independent affirmative action, so that Saturday, all on my own, I took Charlie to meet the person I now knew as Michael Tibbs.

  The visit started out quietly enough. Charlie was very civilized and decorous while I was introducing them. Michael had never in this world expected me to be bringing casual visitors by, and he kept looking at me like he wondered what, under heaven, I thought I was doing.

  Then Charlie suddenly whipped something out of his pocket. “Cards,” he announced. He fanned them against his palm a couple of times, grinning at Michael. “I bet you have a terrific poker face.”

  Michael raised his eyebrows. I'd never seen him do that before. I suspected he must have been practicing it.

  “You're on your own,” I told them, neatly sidestepping any pitiful, pleading shots that might have come from the Tibbs eyes. And it worked out. They took to each other pretty much immediately. I spent the afternoon in a chair by the window, reading a book and feeling guilty about sneaking in here without Caulder, while Charlie taught Michael how to play canasta. And then rummy. And then five-card stud.

  I think that afternoon did more for Michael than all of the sessions and visits and general torture he'd been through, put together. By the end of the day, Michael finally seemed to have lost all awareness of himself. He wanted to beat Charlie. And he thought Charlie was funny. They sat there insulting each other— after Charlie'd shown Michael how to do it. It was just two kids playing together. It was magic, and it was really beautiful.

  I tried to explain the whole thing to Caulder that evening. I told him we need to bring the light into that room, not fix on the darkness. And I don't know, I guess Friday's incident had finally humbled him up a little, because he listened to me without taking any offense.

  Over the next couple of days, Caulder really worked on forgetting where we were, who we were with and what that person had been through. And as the pressure from him came off, so did the medication. We all started breathing a little easier, and Michael got more and more clear-eyed every day.

  Like I said, he would always be a quiet kind of person. But as the days went on, he retreated less and less into isolation. The shadows around his eyes disappeared. His sense of humor started popping up.

  He still wouldn't let me tell anybody but Charlie his name. I guess he had to keep something where he felt like it was safe.

  And then came the day, weeks and weeks after that fateful party, when we finally found him sitting up in the bed. He was wearing sweats, his hair clean and rumpled up. He was reading out of a Reader's Digest which he closed as we came in, and dropped on the night table.

  “Whatcha reading?” I asked him. I put my books down and pulled off my coat.

  “'Drama in Real Life,'” he said. I looked up. I had heard irony.

  “You look good,” Caulder said. This was a nonthreatening version of the old question.

  “I'm vertical,” Michael said. “No drip,” he added, holding up his left hand so that we could see there was no needle stuck in it.

  “Sweet,” Caulder said, swinging his chair into place. He pulled out his World History text. “Chapter Twelve,” he announced, and started reading. I slipped down in my chair and let my eyes wander. There wasn't a lot to see in that room. For all the homespun wallpaper and prints on the walls, there was nothing in the room that could have told you it was Michael's—not a picture, not a keepsake of any kind, nothing on the dresser but that Reader's Digest and a new box of light blue Kleenex. A soulless place.

  While I was looking around the room, Michael was looking at Caulder, studying him, one finger absently pressed against his lips. Caulder finally felt it. He forged ahead with the reading for a time, but in the end, he couldn't stand it anymore. He closed the book and put it down on his lap. “What?” he said.

  Michael blinked once. Caulder waited. Michael repositioned himself, folding his hands into his lap.

  “What is it?” Caulder asked again.

  “Ginny said you love me,” Michael ventured at last.

  “That's right,” Caulder agreed.

  Michael looked down at his hands thoughtfully, and then up at Caulder again. “I don't understand,” he said.

  And then Caulder was mulling it over, trying to figure it out himself.

  “You want control over me?” Michael asked.

  “No,” Caulder said, looking shocked.

  Michael nodded thoughtfully.

  “It means…” I started. But Michael held up one finger, cutting me off.

  “Love,” he said slowly. “So. I owe you—whatever you want?” Caulder shook his head. “I have to forgive you? Always and at any time?” Michael, asking these things in that delicately shaded way he had, was almost eloquent now that the drugs were out of his system. And these were obviously questions he had worked out before this moment. “Does it mean—you deserve unlimited access to my mind and my body?”

  “No,” Caulder said again and again, looking appalled. “None of those things. How did you come up with that? That's not what I want from you. Geez. What brought all this on?”

  Michael leaned over and picked up the Reader's Digest again. “My mother visited me this morning,” he said, riffling through the pages. “She also said that she loved me. You evidently mean a different thing.” He sighed, closed the magazine and dropped it on the bed.

  Caulder's face tightened. “Yeah. I mean a different thing.”

  Michael gave him one slow, silent nod. “You said, 'That's not what I want.'” Then, “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” Caulder said.

  Michael waited.

  “Caulder,” I said. “You think about it for a minute. You want him to answer your questions. You want him to care about you. You want to share things. You want to be able to joke around with him, talk about stuff—real stuff. Stuff that means something. You want Mich—Smitty—” I glanced up apologetically. “You want to be friends. I think that's a lot to want from anybody.”

  “That's true,” Caulder said quietly after a moment. “I do want all that.”

  “But you have friends. Normal friends. Why—” Michael parted his hands.

  Caulder had no answer for him.

  “Friendship,” Michael said, tasting the word. “Desire? Keeping? Holding? Ownership? Control?”

  “No,” Caulder said. He turned to me. “I don't own you, do I?” he demanded. “Just because we're friends?” But then he got confused. “We do kind of own each other. And we owe each other. I mean— we're responsible for each other. We are committed.”

  “How contractual,” I said.

  “Shut up,” Caulder said. “This isn't easy.” He frowned down at his hands. “What do I want? I want Ginny to respect me. I want her to care about me even when I don't deserve it.”

 
“Which happens all too often these days,” I pointed out.

  “Please?” Caulder said to me. “It's not like I think I have a right to know every little thing Ginny has in her mind. Just because I love her, doesn't mean she has to give me herself—I don't own her.”

  Michael blinked and looked away. “I just wondered,” he said. And then, “I don't understand your interest in me.”

  “I don't either,” Caulder said finally. “And I'm getting the feeling it bothers you.” Caulder looked at him closely. “Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

  Michael's eyes met Caulder's. “I have been loved before,” he said. Caulder's eyes darkened. Michael moved his hand, maybe warding off further discussion.

  “You don't have to be afraid of me or Ginny,” Caulder said firmly, almost with anger.

  Michael smiled. “Ginny doesn't scare me,” he said. “Ginny doesn't love me.”

  “You don't?” Caulder asked, turning to me.

  I dropped my pencil.

  “I don't know,” I said. I bent over to pick up the pencil.

  “Well, do you love me? “ Caulder asked.

  “Of course I do.” That was easy enough.

  “You are often angry with him,” Michael observed.

  “That doesn't mean I don't love him,” I said.

  “That's what I mean by commitment,” Caulder said. “If you love somebody, you're loyal. You hang on to them through the bad parts, the hard parts. You stick by them.”

  “Do you love Pete Zabriski?” Michael asked me, those blue eyes suddenly plain, flat disks.

  “No,” I said. “I don't even know him.”

  “Then why do you want him?”

  “I don't want him,” I said. “I just think he's kind of cute.”

  “You want to be with him,” Michael said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depends on what you mean by 'with.'”

  “Never try to get a girl to tell you the truth about love,” Caulder advised.

  “Ah,” Michael said. “And when you go out with him, this person who is kind of cute. If he wants your kiss. Would you give it to him?”

  My cheeks flushed. Caulder was sitting back in his chair, watching—half-grinning at me. “It depends,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Depends,” Michael repeated.

  “On the circumstances.” I opened my math book. End of discussion.

  Caulder was still grinning.

  “But you don't know him,” Michael remembered.

  “Could we change the subject, please?” I asked.

  Michael moved restlessly. “My mother,” he said, now obviously very uncomfortable, “always wants to touch. My arm. My face.” His mouth tightened. “I don't like it.” He looked at Caulder.

  Caulder said slowly. “Touching isn't always the right thing. It's perfectly all right to object, if that's the way you feel.”

  “In my family,” I said, “we touch a lot. Hugging and stuff. I guess because we don't need a lot of space. Or something.” The way Michael was looking at me, I got flustered. “Some people like it, some don't. I like it, myself. When it's appropriate, I like it.” I faltered to a stop.

  Michael kept his eyes on me. “Touching—itself—was not the problem,” he said. Then added, “This morning.” He picked up the magazine and started leafing through it again.

  Caulder looked at me and shrugged. Then he opened his book and went about finding his place in it. “Oh,” he said suddenly— using his finger as a bookmark. “I'm supposed to ask you—Hally wants to know if it's okay with you if she comes here with us one of these afternoons. Would that be okay with you?”

  There was not much reaction to that.

  “She said Marti Avery wants to come with her.”

  And then something very weird happened. One of Michael's eyebrows did a microscopic lift, and suddenly he and Caulder were looking at each other—exchanging some kind of energy. I'd never seen anything like it between them before. Instant bond.

  “Marti Avery,” Michael repeated, “wants to come?”

  “Who's Marti Avery?” I asked them.

  The communication between them deepened. And then that one corner of Michael's mouth came up, and Caulder had this grin on his face. Something palpably male was passing between them, and I was shut out of it.

  So okay. I might not know who this Avery person was, but I had a fairly good idea what she was. I felt a hard, hot flush of hurt.

  “You tell her,” Caulder directed.

  Then both corners of Michael's mouth turned up. He broke the look with Caulder, stared down at his hands—actually grinning. His first grin. For Marti Avery. “She's—” he started, darting a look at Caulder. Then he closed his eyes. His voice had gone ever so slightly husky. “—the girl who sits under the windows in Mr. Hanson's class. The girl with the long chestnut hair.” It came out in something like a poetic burst. He said the word chestnut as though he were tasting it.

  Yes. Okay. I knew the one.

  “The one who took the Tingen Medal in math last year,” Caulder added.

  “I don't really know her,” I said. My own voice had gone somewhat cold.

  “Yes,” Michael said, the ghost of his grin lingering. “Neither do I. Not personally.” He looked over at Caulder again and they reestablished contact. “You lie,” Michael said, and that sounded male too.

  Caulder put his hands up. “Truth,” he said. He stood up. “Anybody want a Coke?”

  “No,” I said, and I went back to my math. My face was burning. I was angry.

  “No caffeine,” Michael said.

  “You got it,” Caulder said, dropped his book on the table and left.

  Michael closed his eyes. His face was not quite back in neutral; he seemed to be working on it. He slid down off the bed and walked around to the other side of it. He leaned against the wall and looked out the window. There were only two leaves left that I could see—more brown now than scarlet. The light from the gray November sky was soft on his face.

  I reached into my purse for my calculator. Actually, I had to empty most of my purse out before I could find it. While I was putting the stuff back, I dropped my library card, which should have been in my wallet, and had to get down on my knees and reach under the bed for it. It was a horribly undignified-feeling position, me on my knees with my behind in the air—especially with visions of the shining, beautiful, nasty, and totally undeserving Marti Avery still shimmering in the electrified air of that room.

  I got back up on my chair, picked up my wallet and tried to work the card back into its little plastic pocket. And then I remembered the poem.

  It was there, just under my hand. Smitty's poem. Michael's.

  I drew it out. I dropped the wallet back into my purse. And then I sat there, holding the poem in my two hands while he stood by the window in silence.

  “I have something of yours,” I said finally. I couldn't look at him. I didn't like him very much just then. I stood up and leaned over the bed, putting the poem down on the side closest to him. Then I sat down again and resolutely opened my math book. He picked up the poem and then leaned back against the wall to read it. When he'd finished, he dropped the little paper into the trash. Then he turned back to his window.

  “How can you do that?” I asked him, shocked. Somehow, this hurt me almost worse than all that talk about little Ms. Avery.

  He looked at me.

  “That's a beautiful poem. It doesn't belong in the trash.”

  “Caulder found it there,” he said simply.

  “But I don't see how you can just throw it away. Especially now.”

  Another Michael silence. “I don't need it,” he said.

  “I want it then,” I said.

  He leaned over, fished it up out of the trash and placed it on the bed for me. He gave me one of his deep, unreadable looks, and then turned back to the window.

  “Come see out my window,” he said, not bothering to look at me.

  “No, thank you,” I said stiffly.


  “You're angry,” he said.

  I shrugged, keeping my face cold. I kept trying to make sense of the problems I still held on my lap.

  He made his little sound, his neutral, considering sound. “Too bad you don't love me,” he said. He might have been teasing. I looked up and met his eyes. But not for long. I sat back into my chair and studied his box of Kleenex.

  “I might have been wrong about that,” I said finally. “It's just hard to tell.”

  I couldn't know what he was doing without looking at him, and I didn't want to look at him, and he didn't say anything for a long time.

  “I try to understand,” he said finally, speaking almost as if to himself, “what you did at the party. I thought about it. Long time. But I don't—” he paused. He looked at me. “What passed between us?”

  “I don't know,” I said, fixing my eyes on my book.

  There was another silence.

  “If there was not this—this place. And my—” He made a gesture of helplessness. “Another place. Another time. If I asked you for—”

  “I don't know,” I said. I was cold all over and my hands were getting shaky.

  Then, after a moment, and very, very carefully, he said, “What if I asked you now?”

  “Are you sure,” I said coldly, “you wouldn't rather wait for Marti Avery?”

  I heard him breathe out one long, quiet breath. I glanced up at him and found him still watching me, that one corner tucked up. “It is complex,” he said. He was offering me sympathy. That took me off guard.

  I didn't answer. It was beginning to occur to me that he had just taken a terrible, astonishing risk. And maybe this was what I'd been afraid of all along. He had just given me so very little room to decide for myself.

  “Ginny,” he suggested gently. “Come look out my window.”

  My heart was pounding in my ears. “I can't,” I pleaded. “I'm scared of you.”

  “Scared of me? Or of what I ask?”