Excerpt: Sheila’s Alien Friend and Ramona’s Not So Normal Life

I lay on my bed and sighed. I was waiting for my dinner to finish digesting, and I didn’t really have anything I wanted to do, with nothing good on TV at the moment, and not really feeling like reading, either. So I was just hanging out in my room while Em worked in silence. He had been working in my room for days, and he still hadn’t finished fixing the leak or whatever was wrong with the hub thing, despite working tirelessly (in my opinion, anyway) almost nonstop. And frankly, I was getting a little tired of him. When he worked, he didn’t talk, because he needed the tablet to translate, but he also took up my room so I couldn’t use my desk comfortably. And alien or not, I didn’t want to dress or undress in front of him, so I was stuck using the bathroom for my changing purposes, and I was getting sick of that. I didn’t mind so much at bedtime, but in the morning, I usually liked to sit on my bed and read a little bit before getting dressed. It made me feel more dry, and I didn’t have that luxury changing in the bathroom.
On top of that, I still had yet to let my roommate in on the fact that we had an extra alien tenant. Somehow we kept missing each other. Either she’d go in early and go out after work (I assumed most of the time, although sometimes she left a post-it on her door to that effect), or she’d still be asleep when I was getting ready for work, which usually meant that she was staying at work late into the night, and the one time I was still up when she got back in, she’d gone straight to her room with such a murderous look on her face that I decided to wait for a better time. But I knew that the longer I kept Em’s presence from her, the worse it would be when I finally revealed it. Unfortunately, I also knew that it would be better to tell her when there was plenty of time for her to get used to the idea. I couldn’t just throw out, “Oh hey, I’m secretly harboring an alien in my room,” over breakfast, and I definitely couldn’t send her an e-mail about the situation, either. Although at the rate I was going, that was starting to sound like a viable option. I decided to give it two more days, and if I didn’t find a good chance by then, I would have to force it.
I wondered briefly whether I should just go to Grocery Mart while she was working and tell her about it there. I could pretend I was a bagger and talk to her there. But I quickly pushed that idea out of my head. Telling her about Em while she was at work would be even worse than tossing it out over breakfast, that was almost certain. My best bet, as far as she was concerned, was to casually find out what her schedule was this week, and then ambush her on a day off.
Then, wonder of wonders, I heard the front door open. I got of the bed, weaved past Em and the hub and opened my door just a crack, on the off-chance that it was a burglar, although I really doubted that. I heard Ramona’s voice talking to someone, but I couldn’t quite make out the actual words. It was not lost on me that here she was, home at a decent hour for once, and I probably wouldn’t get a better chance. But I figured I would give her some time to decompress from work (or whatever she had been doing. Who was she talking to?) before I approached her. While this made perfect sense, I was also feeling a bit apprehensive about the whole thing. I mean, sure, it was probably the best time I would get to talk to her all week, but still, how exactly do you bring this kind of thing up. I closed the door and went to lay on my bed again. I’d give her a half hour, I thought, and then I’d try to get a conversation going. In the meantime, I could figure out how to tell my roommate about the alien.
“So you’re going to tell her about me?” Em commented, not looking up from the hub he was working on.
“This is probably the best chance I’ll get,” I replied, picking at a piece of fuzz on my sweater.
“Probably,“ Em agreed. He turned the hub around without disturbing the drop cloth somehow.
It took a moment before it hit me what had just happened. “Wait a minute, you didn’t use the tablet!” I rolled over to make sure I was right, and sure enough the tablet was sitting on my desk, untouched.
Em looked right at me. “I’ve been practicing,” was all he said.
I was speechless. It hadn’t really occurred to me that Em could pick up our language without looking at the tablet in just a couple of days. But then, I was at work most of the day, so there was plenty he could have done when I wasn’t around, I supposed. But my immediate thoughts were on whether or not this would make it easier to present him to my roommate or not. I didn’t think it really made that much of a difference, since he and I had communicated just fine when he was stuck using the tablet, but it might be more useful (maybe) for Ramona to see him without it (again, just maybe). And then another thought struck me.
“So, all this time when I was being quiet because I thought we couldn’t talk while you were working, you could have been, I don’t know, telling me alien secrets of the galaxy?” I wasn’t sure why my mind went in that direction, but the words were out before I had fully formed them.
“Not really, no,” Em replied, unphased by the question, apparently. “I was still hard at work, after all.” He puffed out his chest a little. “I’ve made remarkable progress here. I should be done in about two days.”
“Well, that’s good,” I replied, still reeling a little from the combined forces of Em’s revelation and Ramona actually being home for once. I lay back on the bed and thought about what to say now, in light of this new piece of info. As I’d thought, it really didn’t make a difference with how I began. The facts were still the same: I had an alien living in my room, and he had been here under her nose for days without me mentioning it. But how to really bring that up? Should I go with a slow open, or cut right to the point? No matter which way I thought about it, I couldn’t see any “best” way to go about it, so I decided to just jump right into it.