I hate guarding
the aliens. It’s, like, so boring! I’m not allowed
to take my eyes off the video monitor and my supervisor won’t
even let me talk on the phone. It’s not fair and doesn’t
make any sense because there are Marines with rifles in guard
towers all around the refugee camp who get paid to
watch and the transport ships that keep landing to unload
more aliens have guards watching, too. It’s not like I can’t talk and
see the monitor at the same time! I tried explaining that
to my supervisor but he just confiscated my cell phone and
wouldn’t even answer when I tried arguing about it, the rude
bastard. Just wait ‘til I tell my mom! She works for the
doctor in charge, which means she’s pretty important (which
also sucks because if she didn’t, I wouldn’t be here). Adults
are so frigging stupid.
My life was perfect two
weeks ago. If I could go back in time, I’d choose that Friday.
I was finally over at Jenny Cooper’s house (yes, the Jenny
Cooper!) after trying to get in with her crew for months
and I was excited because now my summer was set and I’d get
invited to all the cool parties. We were in the kitchen with
the radio blasting, mixing margaritas and, like, dancing
and goofing around and someone had just lit a joint when
the announcer interrupted to say that a spaceship had begun
orbiting Earth with aliens onboard and suddenly my cell phone
was ringing. I wanted to cry because I knew it would be mom
saying come home because the news meant she had to go be
with her geeky scientist friends to work on their dumb secret
project and it’s just my luck that the government would ruin everything by
picking that afternoon to make contact with aliens.
But mom ruined
it even more by saying I had to go with her. I was,
like, mom, I can’t believe this shit, are you serious? And
she said yes, the government was moving all the scientists
and military people responsible for the aliens to this special
camp in Nevada and that their families had to go with them
because they’d be gone for months and the government couldn’t,
like, risk any leaks. So I had kind of a tantrum right there
in Jenny Cooper’s kitchen and started screaming and crying
and I think I might have broken stuff I was so upset. I know
Jenny was pissed but before I could apologize, this military
guy came to the door and made me go with him in this black
van to the airport. I had to board a plane with my mom and
her geeky friends for this three hour trip and there wasn’t
even a movie or anything and I ended up here and it sucks
because I have to stay in this stupid refugee camp in Nevada
all summer and they won’t even let me out to attend Burning
Man, for Christ’s sake!
Oh, and! I’m
not supposed to call them aliens. They’re refugees.
Can you believe it? First they show up and ruin my summer
and now I’m supposed to pretend they’re from, like, Viet
Nam or something. At first it was cool because all the
networks sent reporters to cover the story and celebrities
kept showing up to shake hands with the aliens (excuse me—refugees)
and do commercials asking for donations. But that only lasted,
like, five minutes before there was this earthquake
or hurricane or something in Mexico (or somewhere) and suddenly
everybody was more interested in that. The only thing left
to look at since the celebrities left (besides the aliens)
are the Marines and yeah, some of them are real hotties but
they never say anything and won’t look at me even when I
wear my jean shorts with the flag patch on my ass. (Of course,
I can’t wear that to work. Mom got me this dumb summer job
with the security company that has the contract to guard
the alien dormitory and they’ve got this really gay cop-wannabe
kind of uniform. It’s so gross, I hate wearing it.)
So I work from,
like, ten at night until six in the morning watching this
monitor showing the dormitory hallways and exits because
even though everybody knows the refugees are here, they still
have to be protected. (From what? I asked my supervisor. Angelina
Jolie? That was when he decided he didn’t like me.)
I leave work at six and sleep until one or two in the afternoon
then make lunch for mom when she comes back to the trailer
after helping the head doctor run tests on the aliens. Mom
says they need to run these tests before the aliens are released
into Earth’s general population. To do what? I ask. Find
jobs at Walmart or something? and my mom says yes that’s
more or less the plan. But not until she’s sure they aren’t
carrying some disease that could kill us all. Well, can’t
you, like, just call the planet they’re from and ask? and
my mom says they tried that but couldn’t get a response.
(I guess they’re not answering the phone up there on Mars
or wherever. Which tells me that alien leaders are no different
from ours. Once in charge, they stop answering questions.)
I ask my mom why the aliens couldn’t get jobs teaching us
how to travel to other planets and stuff and she says the
refugees are from the lower classes of their society and
so don’t have any smarts about spaceships or curing cancer
or building awesome laser guns and I say if that’s the case,
then why are we bothering to help them? Then mom gets upset
and calls me a selfish little bitch and I stay in my bedroom
and play on the computer until it’s time to go to work.
So, I’m still
upset from my fight with mom and have some pot left over
from the party at Jenny’s so I decide to go get stoned. I
wait until my dumb-ass supervisor takes his lunch then go
outside to this area behind the dormitory building that’s
a kind of loading dock and, once the Marine patrol passes,
I light up and take a great big toke of weed and look up
at the stars. It’s, like, really clear in the desert. As
I start to get high, I feel a little better. I usually do.
But that only lasts until I remember that I forgot to prop
the door open behind me and now I’m locked out and the only
way back inside is past the sentries at the front door and
I know they’ll smell pot on me and I start to get all paranoid.
Will they shoot me if they know I’m wasted? Then I start
to freak out and go all shivery like that time I did too
many ‘shrooms with my cousin Sara and we ended up in the
Emergency Room getting our stomachs pumped together. (It
made us closer, yeah, but it still kind of sucked.)
I’m thinking about
all of this when the door opens.
I’m in that really
freaked-out place people get into when they’re too high,
so the squeak of the hinges sounds like some monster screeching.
And I feel like puking and screaming and peeing my pants
all at once but I don’t. Which is good because it’s one of
the aliens that steps out and I’m supposed to be guarding
them and doing all those things at once would be, like, totally
unprofessional. So, I try to man up and be all security guard-ish
for this alien female. And I’m, like, what are you doing
out here? And she tells me she comes out here all the
time after curfew and that tonight’s the first time she’s
ever, like, encountered anyone else, so she assumes I must
be doing something I’m not supposed to be and she’s
all, what are you doing here? So we’re at kind of
a Mexican stand-off (which is such a weird expression because
Mexicans are such totally mellow, non-confrontational people).
I decide to kind of relax and see if that helps the situation
any. I’m on break, I say and wait to see what she
says.
And she stares
at me almost like she can see inside me. And you know those
big nostrils that they have? (Like, I’m assuming you’ve seen
the aliens on TV, same as everyone else.) Well, she leans
forward, her bald head touching mine and her blue skin jiggling
with all that extra flab they carry around (being overweight
is so gross) and she takes a good long sniff with nostrils
the size of golf-balls and says I smell different from the
others. (And so by now, I’m like totally paranoid. It would
be just my luck to end up bumping into the biggest alien
snitch in the dormitory but it turns out she isn’t interested
in being a fink.) She says I smell relaxed, which
is a good thing because most of the humans she’s met have
been very tense and she says this causes her people to be
frightened. So I tell her, yeah, I’m pretty mellow and she
says that’s good because it reminds her of this place back
on her planet called a do-em where she says they gave
everybody medicine to be relaxed and I ask what a do-em is
and she looks at me kind ¬¬¬of funny and says it’s home.
Then she says that she and her friends sneak out here all
the time to enjoy themselves and that next time she’ll bring
some of them so we can hang and I say cool and slip back
inside and return to the computer screen at my desk.
Next day I’m really
excited because I start thinking about what the alien said
about how back home they take “medicine” to be relaxed. And
I think maybe she can turn me on to, like, some really wicked
alien drugs and that maybe being out here all summer won’t
be so bad after all. So, I’m daydreaming about all of this
while mom and I are having lunch and I’m not paying attention
and she has to repeat herself when she says that the doctors
have decided the aliens are more or less healthy and that
we really have nothing to worry about regarding diseases
and stuff. Does that mean we get to go home soon? I
ask and mom says we’ll be staying until they’re sure the
aliens are fitting into society okay, but that that might
end up happening sooner than anyone originally thought. And
I’m, like, so jazzed by the idea of getting home before summer
ends and hanging out with Jenny and like that.
So the next night
I’m out at the loading dock waiting for my new friend when
the door opens and out she waddles with two other chubby
blue alien chicks. And they’re, like, hi, how are you? and
I’m friendly even though they’re overweight and have no fashion
sense at all. Not the kind of girls I’d be seen dead with
at school but out here in the middle of Nevada, it’s, like,
totally different. (Especially if you’re, like, alone and
don’t know anybody and want to score some drugs.) So I turn
them on to some pot and we all get high and they start giggling
and jibbering amongst themselves about do-em this
and do-em that in their funny language and I’m trying
to follow along when suddenly I see headlights approaching
and I know it’s the Marine mobile patrol. So I get them to
duck behind the dumpster with me and suddenly the car stops.
I think we’re about to get busted by the Marines until we
hear footsteps crunching through the gravel and then the
sound of a guy pissing. And by the way we all look at each
other, I can tell that guys from their planet must do it
the same way because suddenly we’re all, like, stifling giggles
and trying hard not to make a sound. Then one of the alien
chicks makes a gesture like she wants to borrow my lighter
so I give it to her and she sneaks away for a minute or so
before coming back. Then we head inside. I make it all the
way back to my desk before the patrol car explodes.
I watch it burn
on the monitor at my desk for a while before my supervisor
bursts into the room screaming at me to evacuate the building
right away and I’m like, duh—you don’t have to yell and
I head home and change into my sweats and make a sandwich
and download some new music onto my iPod before getting to
bed (early for a change). And when I wake up and go for coffee,
mom is at the kitchen table with this balding guy with little
round glasses who she introduces as Dr. Ridley. (I don’t
like anyone who’s older than about twenty-five so I kind
of grunt at the guy and sip my coffee but when he starts
talking and I discover that he has, like, a brain and a sense
of humor, I have sort of a conversation with him.) Turns
out he’s a linguist from some place called MIT (why don’t
they just say “mitt”? Duh!) who’s been brought in to help
decipher the refugees’ native language. He says the refugees
are really brilliant the way they’ve been able to learn English
so quickly but that acquiring their language might encourage
the government on their home-world to respond to our radio
messages.
So I tell him
I’ve learned an alien word: do-em. Dr. Ridley says
he thinks that’s very interesting and asks my mom for a piece
of paper and pencil to write it down (since his notebook
and pen have gone missing from his office). While mom gets
it for him, she jokes that lots of things have disappeared
lately from her lab (which I don’t believe because mom’s,
like, the obsessive-compulsive Queen of Clean—she’s probably
just saying it just to make the old guy feel better). So
Dr. Ridley writes down my alien word of the day and waddles
back to his office to do his lingual thing and I put on a
Tae-Bo DVD. It’s really important to stay in shape.
So when I get
to work that night, they call a meeting of all the guards
on night shift. And this really uptight Marine lieutenant
comes in and starts barking at us about all the problems
they’re having with “containment” in the camp and that last
night’s explosion and all the recent thefts has everybody
concerned about security and he talks in this alphabet soup
of abbreviations and says things like “10-4” and “stand by” in
response to peoples’ questions. So I put my hand up and when
he calls on me I’m, like, aren’t the Marines really
the ones responsible for guarding the camp, so why is he
giving us such a hard time? And he goes all red in
the face and upset and afterwards my supervisor says I’m
a trouble-maker and I’m, like, if I’m such a trouble-maker,
then why not fire me? And he says he can’t because my
mom works for the doctor in charge but that he’ll add a formal
Notice of Reprimand to my personnel file once he finds the
proper forms (which have gone missing from his desk drawer),
then he tells me to scram.
So by the time
I arrive outside later that night, I’ve had enough grown-up
bullshit for one day and I’m totally anxious to see my new
alien gal-pals. But they don’t show up, which really pisses
me off. So I smoke the last of my weed and go back to my
desk (I remembered to prop the door open; yay!). And it’s,
like, really quiet in the hallways, which is surprising since
they have Marine guards inside the buildings now but
there’s no sign of them (which is fine with me ‘cause I don’t
want to get into any trouble for being high at work). So
I’m sitting at my computer screen, moping, when there’s this
knock on my office door and I open it and there’s my alien
girlfriend. And we’re all, like, hi, how ya’ doing? and
I notice that she’s carrying, like, a back-pack and a rifle.
So I’m all, what’s up? and she tells me to look at
the camera by the main dormitory room, which I do, and I
see a bunch of aliens sneaking down the hall and out the
building past two Marine guards who they’ve got hog-tied
on the floor. And the alien girl says thanks and it was really
fun getting to know me and that it’s been just like do-em and
that perhaps we’ll see each other again some time. Then she
hugs me and leaves.
So I get home
after my shift and mom’s awake and drinking coffee at the
kitchen table along with Dr. Ridley and that really uptight
Marine lieutenant from the meeting I told you about and a
guy in a suit from the Office of Science and Technology and
they’re all, like, really upset. And Dr. Ridley stops the
meeting when I walk in and introduces me as the girl who
found the key to the alien language. And I’m all, like, huh?
what? And he explains that he ran something called a
regression analysis on the word do-em and was able
to figure out what it means and use that to decipher the
rest of the language and communicate with the government
of the aliens’ home-world. And they’re all sitting there
staring at me and they still haven’t told me what the word
means and I’m confused so after a moment or two of silence,
the guy in the suit clears his throat and speaks up.
“The alien government
admitted the refugees were actually deported,” he says quietly. “Turns
out overcrowding is a problem in their prisons, too.”
So now that all
the aliens have escaped and are, like, robbing banks and
convenience stores, I get to go home for the summer. (Yay!)
Despite the curfews and martial law, I guess Jenny’s planning
this big Fourth of July bash at her place and she’s asked
me to help organize it. (I’m, like, so jazzed!) I wish those
alien chicks had cell phones so we could invite them, too,
because they’re really kind of cool (even if they are blue
and fat). It’s shaping up to be a great summer. The only
bad thing is that all the soldiers driving around have really
put a crimp in the street trade so I’m having a hard time
scoring pot. You wouldn’t know where to get any, would you?
Here’s my number. Call me if you find some and maybe you
can come to the party. Oh, and don’t worry: I’ll, like, totally
pay you for it. I’ve still got some money left over from
my last paycheck.
