Dark Energy

  “What did we do?” someone asked.

  “Who said we did anything?” someone replied.

  “They did,” Hannah said. “They’re protesting something.”

  I pulled out my phone—which we weren’t allowed to bring to class, but I was pretending I was too new to the school to remember that rule—to check the news just as a voice came over the PA. “All students and faculty please come to the auditorium.”

  “They’re bringing them here,” I said to Rachel after a quick Google search of the news.

  “Who?”

  “The aliens.”

  “You mean there are going to be aliens living here? Because they need a place for them to live? I heard they were taking over a bunch of hotels in addition to the tent city down by the ship.”

  “Well, they have to live somewhere. They’re people.”

  “They’re aliens,” Hannah said.

  “You know what I meant.”

  “No, I don’t. They’re not people. They’re aliens.”

  I ignored her and followed the rest of the students to the auditorium.

  The auditorium wasn’t just the auditorium: it was the Jeffrey S. Savage Auditorium, and the stage wasn’t just a stage, but the Annette Lyon Commemorative Stage. The lectern even had a name on it—somebody Eden—but it was too small for me to make out most of the words.

  This was the first time I was able to get a real sense of what was left of the student body. The school was small. Like, tiny. There were maybe three hundred seats, but the seats were less than half full. Everyone was dressed neatly in their uniforms, and they must have been drilled on auditorium etiquette, because the boys sat on one side and the girls sat on the other. I kept my eye out for other girls of color. There were two black girls and four Asians. And that seemed to be it. Minnetonka School was obviously not well known for its diversity policies.

  Brynne found us and sat down beside me. “Maybe the school is handing out condoms and Planned Parenthood brochures, or maybe they’re going the other direction and announcing that we’ll all be taking mandatory gun safety classes.”

  I handed my phone to Brynne. Her jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

  We sat in the auditorium for more than thirty minutes. We ran out of things to talk about, except for speculating on why they would possibly be sending aliens to our school. I started to make notes of the questions I wanted to ask my dad when we had dinner on Wednesday night, assuming he hadn’t forgotten that we’d made plans.

  At long last, the lights dimmed, and two men in dark suits approached the stage, staying close to the wall. I glanced behind me and saw four more men dressed in similar suits with similar short haircuts—two standing by each door.

  “Tell me if I’m crazy,” I whispered, “but don’t they look like the Secret Service?”

  “It can’t be the real Secret Service,” Rachel said, craning her neck back to look. “They didn’t check to make sure none of us are carrying weapons. If this was the real Secret Service, they’d do that, wouldn’t they?”

  A moment later the headmistress of the school walked out onto the stage, and all the students clapped for her. This seemed weird to me, but I wasn’t fully trained in Minnetonka culture yet.

  “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you so much for your patience today. I know you’ve been left waiting for quite some time. Before we get to our main business of the day, a few announcements. First, we’ve had a few new students arrive in the last few days, due to the circumstances at Lakeville.”

  The circumstances at Lakeville? You mean the crash of an enormous UFO?

  “These new students are the children of our country’s best and brightest who have moved to the area to conduct research. Alice Goodwin, Heather Moore, Michele Holmes. Please stand.”

  I reluctantly got to my feet, looking around for the other two new girls. They looked as uncomfortable as I was. Everyone clapped, and we sat back down.

  “I’m sure that you have already given a great Minnetonka School welcome to these stellar students. Top-notch kids.”

  If anyone looked really uncomfortable, it was the headmistress.

  “I’d now like to present to you Lu Ann Staheli, our fine senator from the state of Minnesota.” She held out her hand, gesturing off stage. There was a pause, like no one knew what they were supposed to be doing, and then the senator appeared, her shoes clacking across the hardwood stage.

  She stood at the podium, perfectly calm and collected, as if she did this every day. She probably did, I guess. The applause for her was more of what you’d call a “smattering.”

  “The Minnetonka School for the Gifted and Talented is known for two things—academics and citizenship. Your school produces some of the brightest scholars in our country, as well as many great leaders, in both the private and public spheres. It is this second topic I want to address with you.

  “We have seen a great change in the past several days. You all heard the president address the country and the world about the growing relationship we will have with this alien race. Over the past few days we’ve had many diplomatic talks about how to integrate these men and women—and yes, I’m calling them men and women. They are people. They may come from another world, but we believe that they are deserving of the same inalienable rights that are granted to everyone.”

  Brynne shot a look at me.

  I looked back, worry on my face.

  “We believe that it would be a sign of goodwill—a sign of the best of mankind’s intentions—to try to integrate a few of the Guides into our society.”

  The murmuring in the crowd was getting loud now, but Senator Staheli’s smile never wavered. “It is my privilege to bring you two additional students to join the Minnetonka student body. Let me present to you, Suski and Coya.”

  The murmurs dropped to utter silence as two people stepped slowly out of the wings and onto the stage. They were the aliens I’d seen on TV—the first two out of the ship after Mai and the woman.

  They seemed puzzled by the bright lights in their eyes, and only walked to the senator after much coaxing from the headmistress.

  They both wore the school uniform, although neither wore shoes, which seemed totally out of place. Each had on a small headset, and they wore big round buttons on their sweaters, which I assumed were the speakers for their translators.

  “The dude’s hot,” Brynne whispered, breaking the silence, and a few of the girls around us giggled. “Seriously, I think he could bench-press me.”

  I groaned. “Please don’t say—”

  “If you know what I mean,” Brynne said.

  “That.”

  “Succubus,” she reminded me.

  The senator stepped back to the microphone. “We will have security on-site. FBI agents inside the building and the National Guard outside. We trust that you will treat these students as you would any other student—any other foreign dignitary,” she corrected.

  “Freaks!”

  The voice came from the male side of the room—one of those insults half-disguised as a sneeze. The senator looked into the crowd, shielding her eyes from the stage lights.

  Murmurs ran through the auditorium, but if anyone knew who had said it, no one was letting on. The senator took her place at the microphone again, her voice stern and challenging. “Minnetonka was chosen because its student body can be trusted to be respectful. I know many of you are well connected and may think you’re beyond reproach. But I’ll have you know that none of you is as well connected as these Guides are now. They’re here under the diplomatic wishes of the president. Please keep that in mind.”

  I tried to read the faces of the two Guide students, but they seemed like they weren’t entirely sure what was going on—like they hadn’t caught the insult or known what to make of it. “These are not simply two of the Guide children,” the senator went on. “These are the son and daughter of Mai. We don’t have a full grasp on Guide societal structure, but for now you should consider them royalty.”


  A girl behind me whispered a few words under her breath. “The hell we will.”

  “What about all the people who died?” Rachel asked me, her voice not angry, but uncertain. “What about them? Are we just supposed to forget?”

  The room was getting loud, and the senator spoke again. “You will have a hundred questions, but I urge you to save them for your school leadership and not to let speculation run rampant. For now, we thank you in advance for your help in this matter. And know that we will be watching. Thank you.”

  The senator shook the hands of the two Guides and then left the stage, only to be replaced by the headmistress of the school.

  We will be watching. Was that a threat? An admonition? It didn’t sound warm and cuddly.

  The headmistress started addressing the room again, but none of us were paying attention to anything she said. We had too many questions, and I don’t think any of us expected the questions to be answered—at least not to our satisfaction. We still didn’t even know what the Guides were. We didn’t know what had happened on that ship. We didn’t know what plans the president had for “integrating” the Guides into our society, or what plans the Guides had for us. Maybe that was the biggest question—we knew they wanted to teach us: were we supposed to learn from these two? From Suski and Coya?

  And why weren’t they wearing shoes? They were wearing everything else. Why not shoes? Of everything going on, that pissed me off the most. I don’t know why.

  I was shaken from my thinking when both Rachel and Brynne looked at me, one from each side. I knew I’d missed something.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Weren’t you listening?” Rachel asked. “They’re putting the girl in our suite—in Nikki’s bed.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “There are other empty rooms,” Brynne said. “Maybe they think that because your dad’s in NASA, you’ll be a good fit?”

  “It’s probably because you’re both supersmart,” I said. “They want to make a good impression.”

  “We have a new succubus,” Rachel murmured, turning back to look at the girl.

  She wasn’t as pale as the boy, and her hair wasn’t that odd shade of bleached yellow. If she’d been wearing shoes and didn’t have the translator, I might have mistaken her for a human. Very probably.

  I wouldn’t have mistaken Suski.

  Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. Yes, he looked albino, but he was a good-looking boy. Man. He was a man. I don’t know how old he was, but once you get muscles like that, you’re a man. His neck looked like it could do its own weight lifting.

  Coya looked tough herself—broad-shouldered and built like a gymnast—but Suski was built like a god. Maybe not a Zeus or an Apollo, but certainly a demigod: a Hercules or Achilles.

  Eventually, the headmistress stopped yammering on and everyone was dismissed—everyone except the people who were going to be rooming with the aliens. Brynne, Rachel, and I worked our way up to the front, and three boys I only sort of knew—Malcolm, Joshua, and Eric—came from the other side of the room. Rachel pushed me to the front, and I pushed Brynne ahead of me. She crossed the stage to where the headmistress stood with the two Guides and reached out to take Suski’s hand.

  “My name is Brynne,” she said. “You are?”

  There was a pause—I assumed the translator was working.

  “Hu Suski lessina,” he said. His voice was really deep. A computer voice said, with some mild inflection: “I am Suski.”

  Suski looked at me, then reached toward my blue hair.

  “K’uirska.”

  “Blue,” the translator said.

  “Kurska,” I repeated poorly, and held out my hair for him to feel.

  He smiled a little at my attempt at his language as he felt my hair between his snow-white fingers. I could see that his hands were rough and I wondered what kind of job he had on the spaceship to toughen him up so much.

  I reached out my hand and he took it in his, letting my hair drop back into place. Then I pointed him to Rachel, who shook his hand eagerly.

  “Rachel,” she said, patting herself on the chest. She was a pale redhead and Brynne was a pale blonde; I could see that both of them fit in more with the people we’d seen emerging from the ship. But I was the dark-skinned girl with blue hair, and Coya reached out to touch it the way her brother had.

  “Alice,” I said to her as we moved down the line and shook her hand. Her grip was just as strong as Suski’s.

  “Coya,” she said to me, patting her own chest, just as I had done. The translator said, “Beautiful.”

  “Perfect name,” Brynne said.

  After a moment of processing, Coya spoke, and her translator—using a female voice—said the words, “It is too much flattery. My brother’s name means he is a great warrior.”

  “Not too much flattery. Good to know,” said Brynne.

  “We’re going to be roommates,” Rachel said to Coya. “That means we’ll share a room, just the four of us.”

  She nodded and reached out to touch my hair again. “I would like blue in my hair.”

  I turned to the headmistress, who was listening to all of this. “That would be nice, don’t you think?”

  When we got back to our room we saw that some very helpful school administrator had taken down most of the Halloween decorations that could be construed as offensive. And admittedly, it made me look at everything in a new light. Was there a reason that we put up pictures of severed heads and rotting zombies and bloody skeletons? What was it about Halloween, and human nature, that made us revel in all things horrifying?

  Our succubi banner remained in place, as did the sexy devil, because gory corpses are one thing, but scantily clad girls with tails are something else entirely. If the Guides were going to get used to modern America, they were going to need to get used to scantily clad women. Or maybe that was what they were on their interstellar trek to teach us—that we all needed to be more modest. Either way, if Coya was bothered by the succubus on the door she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t ask anyone to translate the word—maybe she didn’t even recognize the letters as letters.

  The resident assistant was with us as we showed Coya her bed, her desk—which had a brand-new laptop with her name on it—and her closet, which was filled with a week’s worth of uniforms.

  “We’re going to have to take you shopping,” Rachel told Coya as the resident assistant finally left us in peace. “We’ll get you some new clothes.”

  “I have clothes,” Coya said through the translator.

  “New clothes,” I said. “More clothes. Did you guys always wear the same clothes, all the time? On the spaceship?”

  “Yes,” Coya said, trying to respond to my question quickly to cover up the lag in translation. “Always the same clothes. I am not accustomed to these. May I ask a question?”

  We all responded at once with a yes, and she smiled uncomfortably.

  “How do you sit down?” she asked. “With this?” She held out the hem of her skirt.

  “Oh!” Brynne said, and sat down. We all did, and Coya smiled.

  “I’m not accustomed to my legs not being covered.” She gingerly sat down, keeping her legs close together and holding the skirt tight against her.

  “Girl,” Brynne said, “you came to the right place.”

  We quickly assessed her sizes and dug through our drawers. Coya wasn’t self-conscious about changing in front of us and quickly got out of her skirt and into a pair of designer jeans. We also switched out her top for a button-up shirt and a warm white cardigan.

  “So we might as well talk about the elephant in the room,” I said. “Why did you and the ali— your people—land here?”

  Coya thought for a long time, and I exchanged glances with Rachel and Brynne.

  “Why did you crash?” Rachel said, her words slowed down significantly.

  Coya looked up. “I can tell you why we crashed. I just don’t understand ‘elephant?
?? and how to talk about it.”

  We laughed, a little uncomfortably, and I said, “It’s an animal. An ‘elephant in the room’ means that there’s a big question on everyone’s mind. Something everyone is thinking about.”

  “Animals are new to me,” Coya said, still fiddling with the last buttons on her cardigan.

  Brynne leaned forward. “You don’t have animals on your planet?”

  “I don’t have a planet,” Coya said. “I lived my whole life on that ship. My home.”

  “Seriously?”

  “None of us ever lived anywhere else. Even my father, Mai.”

  Rachel spoke. “So, back to the elephant. Why did you come here? Why did you crash?”

  “We came as Guides,” Coya said, repeating the party line. “We crashed because of a malfunction with the ship. I don’t know what it was. I didn’t work in that part.” Her lip began to quiver, but it seemed to be more out of fear than of sadness. “We didn’t mean to hurt anyone. It was an accident. I promise. We didn’t mean to.”

  Rachel stood up and wrapped Coya in a hug. “It’s okay,” Rachel said. “It’s okay.”

  EIGHT

  Classes the next day were uncomfortable for everyone, the teachers especially. They didn’t know how to deal with aliens in the classroom, and they kept interrupting their lectures to make sure that words weren’t going over their heads. AP U.S. History was the worst, because the teacher felt like he had to go back and give the backstory on everything, so while we should have been talking about the Civil War, the professor first thought that we should talk about what the South was seceding from, which meant that he had to talk about the formation of the country, which meant he had to talk about everything all the way back to the pilgrims. We were an hour into class before we got back to the Civil War, with only twenty minutes to cover such weighty topics as slavery and states’ rights and economic disparity.

  “Do you know economics?” the professor asked.

  No.

  “Do you know money?”

  No.

  “Let’s take this lecture back a little bit further.”