“I’m going to be a cute alien.”
“But you’re not an alien?”
“When I go into space I will be though.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Theresa spent most of her childhood dreaming of a life somewhere else. Daydreams, nightdreams, in between dreams, they all involved climbing inside a spaceship, feeling the rumble of the rockets underneath and blasting off away from everyone and everything she had ever known.
Her best friend Tessa (people called the two of them TnT for short) was always skeptical, both of the requisite emergence of technology that would allow Theresa to have the opportunity to go to space and that doing so would accomplish what she wanted. But the thing about wannabe aliens is that perseverance is locked into every drop of their blood, so Tessa’s questions only served to harden Theresa’s resolve and force her to imagine solutions.
“Theresa, you are by definition an Earthling, a human being of a by the Earth. This place. Right here.”
“Oh my sweet friend,” Theresa said as she consolingly placed a hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you have such a myopic point of view on our universe. Look up into the sky and make yourself aware of all the stars and all the planets that must be going around those stars. Somewhere out there – in fact a LOT of places out there – there are others. To them, we are the aliens and surely in sum we are outnumbered.”
Tessa had heard this argument many times before. It was full of hope for the benevolence of existence and the certainty that the known world’s inhabitants sucked. Tessa believed neither. For her, Earth was home, had always been home and would always be home. She liked her parents and her friends, even those who would in a heartbeat decide to board a rocket ship and never see her again. She saw the good in most people and tried to keep an upbeat outlook on the possibilities humanity possessed.
“Okay, so you go up to Mars or Enceladus or whatever and fine, we accept you are now officially designated as an alien. But how do you know that what I and my fellow Earthlings call an alien will focus their like 46 eyes on you and decide in their alien brain that you are what we think of as ‘cute’?”
Theresa took her customary moment of quiet reflection that most often involved staring at the ground and covering her mouth with her hand. Tessa shifted her feet in awkward anticipation while she waited. She had been through this a thousand times and knew the response took anywhere from five seconds to five minutes to compose. This time just 10 seconds.
“It’s inherent,” Theresa said.
“Inherent? To the aliens?”
“Naturally. I mean, look at me. What member of the universe would not understand this is the very definition of cute?”
“Seth Thompson.”
Theresa had spent the entirety of 9th grade history staring at the back of this kid hoping he would notice her, but never realized the flaw in trying to get attention from the side without eyes. She employed tactics such as coughing every five minutes during a class period and placing her fingers on her temples as she mentally implored Seth to turn around and say hello. Seth was completely oblivious, and during the entire school year spoke to Theresa only to borrow a pen on the third Friday in March.
“How dare you.”
Three years on, Theresa was not actually mad about Seth Thompson, but about what he represented – a tiny, but inescapable flaw in her logic ONE TIME that Tessa continues to bring up whenever she needs an argument atom bomb.
“Check mate, my friend,” Tessa said through a huge smile.
“You can’t just drop a Seth Thompson and declare victory. He’s exactly what is not on Europa. He’s not there! NASA sent a probe and everything. We KNOW this to be true. In summary, the Europans, AKA my alien homeys, will take one look at this chica and declare C-U-T-E.”
Tessa rolled her eyes and considered whether to press on with what she knew could be a winning line of logic if she kept at it long enough. But it was Saturday on Earth, and the sunshine that rained down outside was far too enticing to miss.
“Earth walk?” she offered.
“Earth walk.”