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  He starts talking again. “I brake the truck. Because? Well, what else am I going to do. I can’t turn around. I wasn’t about to try to run through it. There were three or four figures outside the craft. They were moving around it. It reminded me of how you spot check the outside of an airplane, but I don’t know if that’s what they were really doing or if that’s just me trying to put human reason onto what I saw, you know?”

  “We all want things to make sense. It’s normal to do that,” China says.

  “Yeah … yeah…” Wharff picks up a french fry, dabs it in ketchup. “I was pretty much freaked at this point. I couldn’t make out any features on the figures, but they were human-shaped, just not quite right. Their heads were wrong. They were elongated and their shoulders were tiny, more like Mana here than a normal person.”

  I am not sure whether or not to be offended but I decide it doesn’t matter that I don’t have normal-person shoulders. There are worse things. Believe me, I know.

  He keeps talking. He didn’t know what to do, but he was scared. Really scared. He fully stopped the truck, reached into his glove compartment and pulled out the gun he kept there, a .357—whatever that is. He flashed his lights at the craft.

  “I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Maybe that I’d scare them off, the way you scare a deer. Yeah.” He laughs. “I’m an idiot.”

  “It was a good idea,” I say, because I feel bad for him, not because it was actually a good idea.

  “You’re a nice kid, Mana. A real good kid.” He sighs. “They took me.”

  I stop chewing my own french fry. They took me, too, once, but I don’t remember it. Maybe that’s why China is letting me hear this story. Maybe it’s so I can understand my own. Maybe it’s so I don’t feel so alone, because you feel so alone when something like this happens to you.

  “They took me,” he repeats. “One of the figures started walking toward the truck. I tried to shoot it. Nothing happened. I tried to run, to scramble out of the truck, but I was frozen. Next thing I know there’s this thing in front of me, wearing a glittery, skintight unitard-type thing. Not glittery in a princess toddler girl way, but just sort of sparkling.”

  “What color?” China asks.

  “Black.”

  “A unitard like dancers wear?” I stutter out and feel instantly bad because the expression on Wharff’s face is guarded and embarrassed. “I’m just trying to imagine it,” I babble in my attempt to make it less awkward. “Sorry. I don’t meant to sound offensive or anything. I totally believe you.”

  And I do. I do believe this stranger. I don’t trust anyone, but I believe him, and for a second I have to wonder if belief is the first step in trust or vice versa.

  He sucks his lips in toward his mouth before he talks again. His face twists into something stern and resolved and full of anguish all at once. “I know. I know it sounds … It sounds ridiculous.”

  We both start trying to make him feel better and assure him that we have seen things much more ridiculous than an alien in a glittery unitard-type thing (alien acid tongues, alien Shrek monsters killed by toilet seats), but it isn’t until I say that wrestlers wear skintight stuff like that, too, that he finally calms down enough to finish his story.

  “So, he walks toward me and I can’t move. I just literally can’t move. A second before, I had grabbed my gun, got ready to open the door and run, since the truck wasn’t working … and then … nothing. I focused everything I had on pulling the trigger to that gun and my freaking finger did not move one inch. Not one freaking millimeter, honestly. Excuse my French.” He laughs, shaking his head, but it isn’t a happy laugh. “The only good thing I can say about the whole thing is at least I didn’t piss myself. Excuse my French again.”

  I make a face so he knows that he doesn’t have to “excuse his French” around me, whatever the heck that expression is even supposed to mean. He gobbles down some pie and then tells us, the next thing he knows, he’s walking out of the truck, the alien right next to him guiding him along toward the spaceship. He didn’t feel like he was moving himself. It was more like sleepwalking or dream walking.

  “But I wasn’t dreaming,” he insists.

  He continues into the spacecraft, a V-shaped door opens up, and then next thing he knows he is in a pale metal room and the alien is telling him not to panic, that everything is fine.

  He laughs at himself. “I said that everything was not fine because I was being abducted on an alien spaceship. That got the alien’s attention and he said that they weren’t taking me anywhere and so they weren’t technically abducting me. I said that any sort of entrapment for any period of time against a person’s will is technically abducting. The alien said I was smarter than the average human.” He lifts his shoulders. “I guess he meant that as a compliment, but I was sort of pissed off on behalf of the entire species, you know?”

  I know.

  “This whole time, are you guys talking English?” I ask.

  “No. It’s more like he’s in my head with me. That’s how I even knew he was sort of male. I didn’t see his di—his genitalia or anything. It was more like the sense of him.” He examines his fork. “So, I ask him what he is doing this for, why he has me. And he says that they thought they had a tiny glitch with the ship and had to make sure that it was okay. They took me because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw them. He said that they were scientists and that they don’t interfere with life on other planets, but…”

  China finally perks up. “But?”

  “But that they were worried about ours because of other aliens interfering. I was like, ‘What other aliens?’ And he said, ‘There are only five violent federations in this galaxy. Yours is one of them, but yours is by far the most primitive. Others are interested in seeing you gone.’ That was all he’d say about it, really. He took some of my hair and some blood with this weird thing that kind of looked like a thin silver gun. And I was like, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ And he said that it was insurance in case the race was exterminated, that maybe they could start us again and make us over in a nonviolent way. He said that they’d been studying us for centuries and that we had promise, but such great weakness, that we fought and glorified that violence while other parts of our consciousness deplored it. Still, he said, no species deserves to be extinguished and we’d already been so interfered with that he didn’t think our little exchange would affect things that much. So, he was going to let me remember it, what happened. He made it sound like remembering it was rare and this great honor, thanks to my elevated intelligence or some such shit.”

  “That’s nice of him, I guess,” I say, thankful that I don’t remember my own abduction, which happened when I was a baby. “It’s nice to be told you’re smart.”

  “He told me to try not to act out of fear, like when I went to shoot him. He said that all humans are afraid of death and we are violent because of that fear, but death was not something for humans to be afraid of.” He shrugs. “That part was kind of nice, really.”

  “It sounds nice,” I say because it does sound nice. Death hangs over all of us, looming there like the ultimate failure, but it would be cool to think of death in another way. Like if you think about it like this: Death isn’t the absence of life, but the triumph over life. It’s the end prize for having gone through life’s turmoil and ups and downs. I’d like to think of it that way instead of the Big Badness that threatens us all. Obviously, my mother probably should have brought me to church.

  “Deep thoughts, Mana?” China asks, shocking me out of my little thinking time.

  “Naw. Never.” I give them a blustery answer that’s all rah-rah flippant. Wharff manages to grin back at me, which is really saying something about his level of awesome. Not everyone would get abducted by aliens and then manage to be nice to random people at a diner.

  China asks him a couple of detailed questions about communication: if he could see the alien’s eyes, if he saw other people on board the craft�
��human people—and whether or not those people looked like they were in trancelike states. Wharff repeats that the communication seemed to be telepathic, and says that he saw no other humans. He was in one small room with dull metal walls and no noticeable windows or doors, but it did sort of feel like other people were in there, too. There were crystals. I perk up at this, but a little muscle by China’s eye twitches and I know that this is the information he’s been waiting for.

  I ask, “What kind of crystals?”

  “Dark ones, like prisms.” Wharff meets my eyes. “Why?”

  “Just trying to imagine it. I’m into concrete details,” I say without missing a beat, I don’t think, even though the crystal moves a bit in my pocket.

  “I’m like that as well. So, let’s get this story over with. Don’t you—”

  “Did they say anything about how mankind was going to be obliterated?” China interrupts. “Any talk about machines? DNA?”

  “No … not that I remember.” Wharff clears his throat. “Yeah, so anyway … He cut a piece of my hair off. He told me that there was a war coming. A war that involved humans and aliens and that it was not likely the humans would win.” He gulps. “I believed him. I don’t know how humans could fight against things like him, with technology like they had. He sort of laughed and he said that it wasn’t his type of alien that would be fighting with us. They were scientists, not warriors. Explorers, not fighters. So, I was like, then you’re going to help us, right? And he said they didn’t interfere with other cultures. Like Star Trek, you know? The prime directive that Captain Kirk was always breaking?” He lowers his voice, but his tone is still urgent. “It’s messed up, honestly, because there is obviously already another alien race messing with us, so therefore they should interfere. I was getting angry then because I didn’t think it was cool that they would just let us all die. And the alien guy held up the piece of hair he’d taken from me and said, ‘We are preserving you. Your genetic material will ensure that your species will live on.’ But not here? Not on Earth? I asked. He just sadly shook his head and then said, ‘You never know the outcome of things, but it is not looking favorable.’ I kind of lost it then, just started this crazy-ass angry weeping, and then he touched my face and I was back by my truck. Two hours had passed. My gun was on the passenger seat but the muzzle was melted so no bullets will ever come out of it again. What a waste of money. Guns are expensive.”

  A huge, wracking breath moves his chest in and out. He pushes both his palms flat on the table and scrutinizes us one at a time. “I know the story is whacked.”

  “It’s not whacked,” I say, thinking the only whacked part of it would be that there are only five kingdoms that are violent. “It’s not whacked at all.”

  China grunts.

  Wharff’s chest does that strange heaving thing again and he excuses himself to go to the bathroom.

  Once he’s out of earshot China says, “Poor guy. Sucks when your concept of the world goes to pieces like that.”

  “Is he right?” I add some more salt to my french fries. “Is there going to be a war? A real war? Like in movies and stuff?”

  China sighs. “Maybe. Possibly. If the machine gets assembled, they hardly need the bang-bang explosion kind of war.”

  “We need to stop that.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “And get started on stopping it.”

  “Yep.”

  “China, you’re not being Mr. Information here.”

  He brushes me off. “Sorry. Sorry. Soon.”

  I swallow hard. The french fries have all globbed into a big stone-shaped glob in my gut. At least that’s what it feels like. “It’s hard to be courageous with all of this stuff going on, you know?”

  He accepts my topic change without even blinking. “Look, courage is something that has to be cultivated. The more often you are courageous, the easier it becomes. It isn’t something that everyone is blessed with in abundance. You have it. Use it. The more you use it, the more courage sinks itself into your DNA and becomes synonymous with who you are,” he says, and then I must have some sort of face because he goes, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  I try to sound tough and aloof. “Sometimes you’re kind of deep, China.” I pause and then a random thought comes into my brain. “Wait. Why is your nickname China? You aren’t Chinese. Is that some sort of cultural appropriation?”

  He makes a noise that sounds a lot like a guffaw. “No.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He peers around the diner like he’s more worried about someone overhearing this than Wharff’s story. “When I was a little kid, really young, I had this tendency to fall off things and break. I fell off a couch, broke my arm, fell off a roof, broke my collarbone, fell—”

  “You fell off a roof?”

  “Yeah. Fell off a moving car, broke my leg. Fell off the diving board into the pool at the YMCA, broke my nose. So, my father, being the brilliant and loving jokester that he was, decided to call me China, not after the country but after the doll. You know? China dolls. They break easy.”

  “Wow. Douche move.” I think about it for a second. “But isn’t that still sort of wrong? Culturally? I mean, those dolls are made of porcelain.”

  “Exactly.” He looks around toward the bathroom. “Wharff hasn’t come out of there yet, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “He’s been in there a long time.”

  “Some guys take forever to poop.”

  “Mana!” he scolds.

  “What? You know they do.”

  He loses his jocular expression and gets a weird parental air about him, the kind my mom would get if I burped or something. I can’t handle that. I don’t need any surrogate parents, so I stand up. “I’m going to go check on him.”

  He stands up, too. “You’re going to go into the men’s bathroom and check on him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t believe that’s legal.”

  “Whatever. You sound like Lyle.” I pace away, darting between the tables, and throw over my shoulder, “I’ll just knock.”

  If China responds to me, I don’t hear it. Instead, I move past tables full of burgers and fries and the occasional salad, and make it to the restroom door. There’s a symbol on it that’s meant to represent a man. For a second, I hesitate. I don’t know if this is a single-person bathroom or a stall situation. If it’s stalls, Wharff might not even hear or notice if I knock.

  “You think too much,” I mutter.

  And then I knock, loud and hard without apology, because that’s the kind of person I am. I rap the door a good three times. There’s no response.

  Maybe it is a stall bathroom.

  I reach for the doorknob and try to turn it. It’s locked. Crap. Something like dread fills my chest. Who am I kidding? It is totally dread.

  Knocking again, even louder, I call out, “Wharff? Mr. Wharff? You okay?”

  There’s no answer.

  “Wharff? Hey! You okay in there?” My voice is now officially on the verge of panic.

  The waitress comes over to me, looking concerned and slightly amused. Amused? “Everything okay?”

  “Um … Ah…” I flounder. I’m not sure what to say and how to interact with her. This is because she has mostly been ignoring me. I am not sexy and giggle-inspiring.

  China’s suddenly right behind me. “Our friend is in there. He has blood sugar issues and sometimes passes out. The door locked, Mana?”

  “Yeah.” I am amazed at how smoothly he lies. No wonder I have trust issues.

  “Oh! We have a key. You hold on just a minute.” The waitress scurries off with a poor dear expression on her face. It is the face of pity. I hate that face. I’ve seen it a million trillion times since my mom went to the hospital. I reach out and knock again.

  China tries the doorknob as if he has some sort of opening-doorknob magic mojo or something. It doesn’t do anything different from when I tried.

  “I could just br
eak it open,” he grumbles.

  “I told you he was taking a long time.”

  “Are you seriously saying ‘I told you so?’”

  “Yeah.”

  “You are just like your mother. You’re even unrepentant.”

  “Yeah.” I let a smile move across my face despite my worry about Wharff. I used to never want to be compared to my mom, and yes, I am upset that she lied to me for years about who I am and what she does, but I still love her. It seems you can love someone even when you don’t really trust them. “She does things because she believes in them. And she likes to be right. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  China rattles the doorknob and the waitress comes back, triumphantly dangling the keys in front of her. She has almost a sexy saunter as she appraises China. She slips in front of him and casts him a glance through her eyelashes. I almost vomit. There’s a guy stuck in the bathroom and she’s still trying to put the moves on China. Sighing isn’t a good enough expression of my displeasure. I glance away and I swear I spot Wharff standing outside the window, beckoning me to join him. But it’s a good distance away and the windows are so dirty that I’m not 100 percent sure it’s him. I turn to grab China’s arm and show him, but then I’m distracted by the waitress.

  There’s a little bit of a flirty flourish as she inserts the key into the lock and then turns the doorknob with a flick of her dainty wrist. She pushes the door in toward the restroom. The keys dangle there.

  “Hel-lo?” Her voice is singsong, breaking one word into two melodious syllables. “Mist-er, you o-kay?”

  The bathroom is completely empty and normal-looking—gray, boring, toilet paper clumped on the floor, paper towels hanging from a dispenser—but my breath hitches. It isn’t right. Something isn’t right. It smells, and not like a bathroom usually stinks. More like a gas station odor.

  “China?” I step forward. “You smell that?”

  He lifts his head, inhales, and swears in a quiet voice that I’m not used to him using. Fear fills my chest. Pivoting, he propels me out with his hand square on my back. His other hand yanks the waitress away from the bathroom door. She giggles. I swear to God. I gaze at where I thought I saw Wharff standing outside. Nobody is there.