“Things are so tense in the house right now. Promise me this: keep the peace with Gabe. I don’t need a repeat of last night.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep things easy. You have my word.”
Last night, things had gotten so annoying that Alison and Cynthia fled the house. But first, in the kitchen, Ernest shook the notebook at Gabe: “The log. Where’s the log? No entries?”
“You haven’t been entering either,” Gabe said.
They’d been loading the dishwasher together; the door hung open, slopped with a few bits of food.
“I’m an adult with things to do. I put you in charge, remember?”
“OK, well, I’m a teenager with equally important things to do.”
“No, Gabe, the point is that I asked you, the last few days when I saw the ship dumping and vibrating and otherwise being a pain in the ass, to record it diligently in the notebook. And do you know what you said to that, Gabe?”
Gabe’s shoulders slumped and he didn’t meet his father’s eyes.
“You said, ‘I’ll do it, Dad,’ and then I check on it and the thing’s blank besides my first entry. How do you explain that?”
As if the dishwasher contained all the answers, Gabe stuck his head down and fiddled with the arrangement of the cups.
“Gabe?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I didn’t want to record it, OK? Not if it’s going to feed your paranoia.”
“I’m not paranoid; I just want to document this like a scientist. I just want an orderly, fact-driven document that captures the experience of having a trespassing alien disk pooping on my lawn.”
“Oh my god, I get it, OK? Hand me the notebook.”
Ernest passed over the notebook.
“First of all, it looks like, well, not a scientific document at all. This notebook is ugly.”
“Oh, please. Fine, let Alison draw a spaceship on the cover. Something like she drew for her shoes.”
“It needs a title. It’s totally random otherwise.”
“How about . . .” Ernest found a Sharpie and started to write in bold letters on the cover: THE ACTIVITIES OF THE UNWELCOME VISITORS FROM JUPITER: AN ALLEN FAMILY LOG.
“Speak for yourself! They’re not unwelcome by me or anyone with an open mind.”
Their voices continued to batter, and Cynthia felt a headache coming on. She gave up on trying to get work done in the den and jogged upstairs to knock on Alison’s door.
“Do you hear the beasts feasting on all that testosterone?”
Legs crossed on the bed, Alison looked up from her notebook. “Trying not to but—”
“Do you want to take a walk with me?”
“It’s OK, they’ll stop soon enough.”
“Even if I let you get a soft drink in a color insulting to nature?”
Alison’s eyes brightened. “Ooh, like what?”
“A Slurpee or a Pizzee or whatever. Let’s walk to 7-Eleven.”
“Really? A Slurpee isn’t technically a soft drink, but OK!”
“Whatever it is, it’s definitely not good for you.”
Once inside the convenience store a few blocks away, Cynthia stood mystified in front of the mixing vats, all three churning a different hue of sweet slush. She gripped one of the black levers and started to twist.
“Oh my god, Mom. You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
“No, I don’t.” Cynthia quickly retracted her hand. “I’ve never seen this before. Every time you kids came in with a Slurpee, I never thought about the machine that makes it.”
“Watch and learn.” Alison grabbed the biggest cup available.
“No, no, no. Smaller size than that. That one.” Cynthia pointed to the adult small.
“Is this for me or for you?”
“It’s for you. This is a good size.”
Alison sighed but accepted her mother’s decree. She pulled down on the black knob and looked pointedly at her mother. “See?”
A shoot of cola fuzz rocketed to the bottom of the cup, and then the machine whined and ceased to drip out anything else.
Cynthia jumped back a little bit. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s like you’ve never seen a machine before. Hold on,” Alison said. She pushed the lever back. “It just needs a minute.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I live in the twentieth century in suburban America.”
They giggled loudly, enough so that the sour-faced man at the register craned his neck to look at them. He’d had a lot of candy bars walk out the door lately, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
Alison pulled on the lever again and a smooth snake of Slurpee emerged. She expertly twisted the cup with her other hand so that it lay in spirals. Close to the rim, she cut it off with a practiced hand.
“Wow,” Cynthia said. “A Slurpee pro.”
“You want one?”
“Just that baby cup. The red flavor. Cherry, right?”
“No, steak.”
They giggled again. “Just fill it up. I’m going to find some Advil.”
On the walk home, they sucked in silence on the straws with the little spoons on the bottom end.
“How’s everything going with Rebecca?” Alison’s best friend from junior high, ever since they’d started high school, had been palling around with an aggressive jock crowd. For friendship-preserving reasons, Alison was forced to pretend that watching them all play grab-ass and call each other fags while drinking Natty Light was an engaging activity.
“It’s fine when it’s just the two of us.”
“But not when other people are around?” Cynthia enjoyed testing her daughter’s openness. It shifted for reasons she could only guess at.
“It’s just this certain crowd she’s into now. This other girl Claire is pretty much her idol because she has a car and knows about all the senior parties.”
“Do you like Claire?”
Long pause. “I don’t think she really likes me. The minute Rebecca isn’t around we kind of just stare at each other, and then she asks me questions about the spaceship, which is, like, the only thing she knows about me. Well, OK, she does like my drawings. She wants me to draw a logo for her scrunchie business.”
“Scrunchies?”
“Yeah, she sews buttons on them, dips them in sparkles. They’re really puffy.”
“Do you like them?”
Alison paused again. “They’re kind of cool. She might start making velvet chokers too.”
“Does she have a name for her business?”
“Tiny Vampire.”
“Well,