Page 5 of Overgrowth

There was a long pause. Both my housemates stared at me, Lucas in disbelief, Mandy with a strange sort of acceptance, like she’d always known this moment would come, yet had managed to almost convince herself it was a joke, a cosmic impossibility.

In my lap, Seymour purred. His world, at least, was unchanged.

“What?” I asked, as the silence became too much to bear.

“You’re joking, right?” asked Lucas. “When you say you’re a—I can’t believe I’m saying this with my actual mouth, out loud, where people can hear—when you say you’re a space invader, you’re joking. Because we’ve always let it slide. People have weirder nervous habits than claiming to be from another planet, and it’s not like you were hurting anyone. But now we need to know.”

This time, the silence was mine to meter out as I saw fit. I held it, letting it linger, trying to figure out how to respond—how I was supposed to respond. Usually, questions have a right answer. In customer service, questions always have a right answer. There’s right and there’s wrong, and it’s difficult to mix them up.

People don’t work that way. With people, something can be the right answer once and the wrong answer every other time, forever. With people, the right answer changes.

Some things should be constant. I took a breath, frowned, and asked, “What do you need to know? If I was telling the truth?”

“Yes,” said Lucas.

He said it so quickly, and with so much certainty, that I couldn’t stop myself from shooting a wounded glance in his direction. “You think I’m a liar?”

“The first time I met you, you showed me a picture of your cat and told me you were a plant from outer space,” said Lucas. “Remember? I thought it was cute. I thought you were kidding.”

“You asked me if I photosynthesized,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “You fed me some line about mimicry and hiding among the local population and not being a biologist or a botanist and so not really understanding how you function, just that you do.”

“It wasn’t a line.” I knew it wasn’t a line. I had always known. Since I was a child, I’d known some things were true and needed to be understood, even if I’d been missing some of the words and concepts I needed to properly explain them.

“That’s the thing,” said Mandy. “I went to college with this guy who swore he was a vampire. He even used to buy cow’s blood from this independent butcher. He drank the stuff like it was coffee—cream and sugar and lots of ostentatious sighs of pleasure. And then, one day, he wasn’t a vampire anymore. He was a business major instead. I guess somebody told him being Dracula doesn’t get you a seat on the board of a Fortune 500 company.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You’re consistent, ” said Mandy. “I’ve watched people walk away from you for being the weirdo who says she’s an alien. It doesn’t change your story. It doesn’t make you stop or double down. You have blonde hair, you have blue eyes, you came from outer space because you’re scouting for an invasion, you like oatmeal more than is healthy for an adult of any species. So I guess what we’re asking is not… it’s not whether you’ve been lying to us. It’s whether you’ve been telling the truth.”

I couldn’t quite see the difference, but the way they were watching me made it hard to doubt that they saw a difference, somehow. Somewhere in that nest of words, the contradiction had resolved itself enough for them to feel like they deserved an answer. I took a breath.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been telling the truth. I am the vanguard of an invading species of alien plant people.”

“You keep saying ‘invading,’” said Lucas. “Is there any chance that’s shorthand for ‘coming in peace’?”

“How do you know?” asked Mandy. “You look human. You do human things. You used the last of my tampons last month.”

“I just know,” I said, addressing the second question first. It was frustrating. I buried my fingers in Seymour’s fur, taking comfort from his tactile reality. “I walked into the woods when I was a little girl, and when I came back out, I was an alien.”

“What, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing?” asked Mandy.

That sounded right. It sounded… true, in a way I’d never been able to quite put a finger on. “Sort of,” I said. “The book got a lot of things right. It got a lot of things wrong, too.” It never mentioned the flowers with wings for petals, the way their centers would yield under fingers, sticking and clinging. It never mentioned their lures, or their place in the life cycle of the organisms they served. Maybe most importantly, it claimed “pod people” could only live for five years before they withered away.

That part of the story scared the crap out of me when I first read it, back in high school. I’d spent the better part of a year waiting to wither and die, before my boyfriend at the time had pointed out that five years from the point of replacement would have had me dead when I was eight, not sixteen.

I’d rewarded him for calming my fears by having sex with him for the first time, further distancing myself from the sexless, short-lived pods of Finney’s novel. But the image had still haunted me, and kept haunting, and probably always would.

“This is ridiculous,” said Lucas. “We’re not having this conversation.”

“You’re the one who asked me to log off early because we needed to talk about whether our housemate was an alien,” said Mandy calmly. “Roxanna will be here soon, won’t she? Don’t you want this resolved before your girlfriend shows up and makes things even more complicated?”

“Roxanna doesn’t make things more complicated,” said Lucas.

“Roxanna asked me if I’d considered the possibility that I might have schizophrenia,” I said.

Lucas paused. “What?”

“Last year. She said she’d been talking to you about the whole ‘alien plant person’ thing, and you’d told her I seemed to really believe it but it wasn’t hurting anything, and she was ‘concerned.’” It was difficult to explain how terrible her “concern” had made me feel, the way it had dropped my stomach toward my feet and turned the whole world gray and sticky.

When you get kidnapped and come back claiming to be an alien, lots of therapists want to talk to you. Lots of people want to do lots of tests, all aimed at being the thing that magically cures the abducted girl. I guess they thought there was a book in me, or a couple of books, if somebody got really lucky. So I’d seen doctors, and I’d listened to diagnoses, and I’d watched my mother and my grandparents beat themselves against the locked doors of the mental health community, trying to prove there wasn’t anything about me that needed fixing.

It wasn’t until after my grandmother died that I’d learned part of the reason behind her standoffishness. Her mother and older sister had been schizophrenic, and in both cases, they’d been institutionalized because no one knew how to help them live their best lives. For her, having me come out of the woods claiming something she knew couldn’t be true had to have been like looking backward through time, staring into the moment where everything had changed, and not for the better.

But I didn’t have schizophrenia, and I wasn’t a pathological liar, and I wasn’t any of the things Roxanna liked to ask about, always smiling sweetly, like her love of lizards and Lucas made up for the invasive, offensive things she said about my mental health. I was just someone who knew the truth. It was no better or worse than the people who knew God was real or the Earth was flat or whatever.

Well. Maybe it was better than the people who knew the Earth was flat.

Lucas scowled. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Alec has schizophrenia,” said Mandy mildly. “He does okay.”

Lucas paused again. The poor guy’s view of reality was taking a beating today. “What?”

“He’s medicated to keep him from hearing things, and he can’t drink without worrying about drug interactions, but he’s schizophrenic, and he’s been schizophrenic since before you met him.” Mandy flashed Lucas a dazzling smile. “Hi. It’s not the bigotry party hour in here. It’s ‘figure out whether Stasia has been telling the truth, and if yes, figure out how we’re going to protect her’ o’clock. Thanks for joining us. I’m your host, Mandy Reyes, and the aliens have made contact for what is either the first or second time.”

“Not just the second,” I said. They turned to look at me. I shrugged, resisting the urge to squirm. These were my housemates. These were my friends. They understood me better than any other humans in the world, except maybe Graham, and he was off in Florida, counting alligators in the Everglades and not thinking about the people he’d left behind.

Would someone tell him about the signal? Somebody had to. There was no way anyone connected to the scientific community wasn’t going to hear about this. He’d come home when he heard. He would come home when he heard. He had to come back to me when he heard. Because this was only the beginning. I knew it, all the way down to my bones.

My bones. My God, my bones. Would someone report me to the authorities? It wasn’t like I’d ever been quiet about my origins, but I’d never really been worried about getting arrested for… for… for illegal immigration before. It didn’t make sense to me how humans could think of each other as against the law, especially given how often land has changed hands across the countries: no human life is illegal. I, on the other hand, came from very far away, and I definitely hadn’t paused at the border to pick up a passport. Could I be detained?

Could the proper authorities tell I wasn’t human? My doctors had never noticed, but I’ve never been really sick, either. No MRIs, no invasive scans of my head or gut. I could be carrying a whole alien ecosystem in the space beneath my skin, and the doctors who’d given me flu shots and gynecological exams had just missed it, because they hadn’t needed to rip me apart in the course of looking.

“Stasia?” said Mandy gently. “What do you mean, ‘not just the second’?”

“Oh. Um.” I rubbed the side of my face. My skin felt like skin, human skin. Was it going to change, or was I always going to be an alien in human skin, feeling wrong no matter how I looked at things? “You mentioned Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Most of it isn’t right, or it’s half-right, like some of the facts were missing. When we fell here—”

“Fell?” asked Mandy. “You didn’t land?”

“This is ridiculous,” said Lucas. “What are we even doing? I should go get Roxanna.”

“You do that,” said Mandy pleasantly. “We won’t be here when you get back.”

He looked stung. “Why not?”

“Because we have two choices right now: we can hunker down for the aliens to arrive, knowing nothing, or we can take our friend, who’s never lied to us about anything else, seriously.” She looked back to me. “Stasia has always been incredibly upfront about all this. Maybe it’s time for us to start listening. Maybe if we do, we’ll be okay, no matter how this plays out.”

“When we fell here,” I said, more slowly, “we didn’t pick where we landed, and I think it took longer for some seeds to find a safe place to germinate. I don’t really know the mechanism. I sort of know what it wasn’t, but it’s more instinct and… sense of how this goes than actual fact.”

“She has a feeling she’s an alien, and now we’re going to use her to try to benefit from the invasion,” said Lucas. “Am I the only one who sees the issue with this?”

“What is your problem, Lucas?” demanded Mandy.

“Aliens aren’t real,” he said.

“We just made contact.”

“No.” He shook his head, hard. “We just intercepted a hoax. Or this Vornholt guy is trying to manufacture a hoax. You’ll see. This will play out for a while, soak up some news cycles, and then get unmasked as the pile of shit it is. In the meantime, you want to pump Stasia for information about her little fantasy world, and you don’t want to think about the way it’s going to change things. Because it will. It will change everything. ” He gave me a look, half-pleading, half-sympathetic. “Once we make her tell us how her game works, it won’t work anymore. Everything she does will be proof of her humanity, and we’ll have to think hard about how seriously she takes this, and whether we owe it to her to help her find, well, help.”

I put Seymour on the floor and stood. I didn’t think before I moved, but once I was moving, it seemed like the only possible response to the situation. Mandy grimaced.

“Stasia, don’t go,” she said.

“I don’t think you need me here for this conversation,” I said. “It feels like you’re talking about me, not to me, and I don’t have time for this. Not if the armada is coming.”

“That’s the problem,” said Lucas. He sounded frustrated—but under the frustration, there was fear. “The armada isn’t coming. The armada can’t be coming.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re humans !” He stopped, looking startled by his own vehemence. Then he straightened, cleared his throat, and continued more quietly, “Because you’ve been telling us this whole time that you came from outer space to conquer the planet, and we laughed at you, and oh my God I can’t believe I’m saying this, this is ridiculous, but you realize if you’ve been telling the truth—which you haven’t been, because you can’t have been—that makes me, and Mandy, and Graham, and Roxanna, and anyone else you’ve had a conversation with in your lifetime, complicit in aiding the invaders. We’re traitors to our species and our planet if we knew what you were and never told anyone.”

“No one would have believed you.”

“Just like we didn’t believe you.”

“You mean you didn’t believe her,” said Mandy. We turned to look at her. She shrugged. “Believe everything that isn’t actively trying to eat your face. That way, when it shows up and does try to eat your face, you’ll at least know what it is. I always believed you, Stasia. I just didn’t think it was important.”

“Me being an alien wasn’t important?”

Mandy shrugged. “People called my grandparents ‘aliens,’ but they were American citizens before they died. You’ve been there when someone asked me where I was really from, and got pissed off when I kept repeating, ‘Pasadena.’ If you’re from outer space, why should I care? I just want you to take me to your place for Christmas. I’d like to see the Milky Way from the outside.”

“You’re both insane,” said Lucas.

“Way to judge,” said Mandy.

I shook my head. “I can’t change… anything. Lucas, I’m sorry this is making you uncomfortable, but I never lied to you. I always told you exactly what I am, and I always told you the invasion was coming. What you did with that information is on you. It’s not on me.”

It couldn’t be on me. Over the course of my lifetime, I’d told hundreds of people—maybe even thousands—what I represented. I’d never been able to explain how one lone, human-appearing girl was supposed to jump-start an invasion, but I’d known telling them was the right thing to do, that I had to tell them, that I had to keep telling them, even when I knew they wouldn’t believe me. It was a compulsion that had defined my life. That still defined my life. If someone asked, or even looked like they might listen, they needed to know what I was.

“Oh my God.” Lucas rubbed his face with his hand. “Mandy, talk to her. Stasia, whether I believe you or not, you need to think long and hard about saying this to anyone else.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because for at least the two days it takes to discredit that transmission, people are going to be looking for someone to blame. They’re going to be scared, and they’re going to be credulous, and they might take you seriously.”

I frowned. “So?”

“So do you really want your kneecaps broken by someone who thinks the patriotic thing to do is to strike against the invasion before it gets fully underway? I don’t want to visit you in the hospital. You need to be careful.” Lucas looked at me solemnly. There was no levity in his face: for better or for worse, he meant every word he was saying. “Even if this is all a joke you don’t know how to stop telling, you need to be careful. Otherwise, you’re going to be dead.”

He turned on his heel then, heading for the door. Mandy stood.

“Lucas—” she began.

“Stay home. Watch a movie. Keep each other safe. I’m go ing out.” With that, he stalked to the door, wrenched it open, and slammed it behind him. Mandy and I watched through the window as he stormed down the front walk to the driveway, disappearing from view.

A few seconds later, we heard the car door slam and the snarl of the engine turning over. Lucas peeled out, and we were alone. Silence reigned.

Finally, Mandy looked at me and asked, “What do you need?”

I needed the invasion to come faster. I needed it to change course and go find another planet to plunder. I needed to know I was right about myself. I needed proof that I’d been delusional all along, and the planet where I lived wasn’t about to be in danger. I needed so many big, complicated, contradictory things that I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like all those needs were sticking in my throat and cutting off my air.

There was only one good solution for that. “I need to talk to Graham,” I said. Hearing the words aloud made it possible for me to relax, just a little, allowing the truth of them to sink into my skin.

Mandy nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be in the craft room if you need me. All those sequins still aren’t going to glue themselves.” She turned to head for the stairs.

In only a few seconds, I was alone. No: not quite alone. Seymour twined around my ankles, making the weird hiccupping chirp sound he always made when I seemed unhappy. I laughed a little, bending to scoop him into my arms.

“Come on, weird cat,” I said. “Let’s go call your daddy.”

He purred all the way to my room.