“We? You mean me?” Mel looked at me. “I make the dough now.”

“I can’t cook,” Lisa said. “I let them take care of it.”

“You make a mean Kraft macaroni and cheese,” Steph said.

Lisa smiled at Steph. “That’s right, baby.”

She was pretty with that smile, but even as I thought that, I felt a prickling of jealousy. I opened the Diet Coke and realized she hadn’t given me a glass or any ice, and then I realized I’d sound like a princess if I asked for some. I drank it straight from the can, the bubbles fizzing so sharply on my tongue that I could taste the chemicals.

—

The movie we watched was called It Came from Outer Space. It was about an amateur astronomer who spots a meteor striking the desert near a small Arizona town.

“This is a rare cinematic masterpiece,” Lisa said dryly. “It’s different from most 1950s sci-fi movies. They were almost all about people freaking out over nuclear war or Communists secretly invading America. You know, Invasion of the Body Snatchers stuff. This one is about aliens who don’t actually want to harm us. They crash-land here on accident and need to repair their ship before they go home.”

“Like E.T.,” Mel said.

“Sort of,” Lisa said. “There’s also some mind control and kidnapping.”

The film began with the astronomer—a white guy in a tweed suit whose name I immediately forgot—driving out to the desert, searching for the crashed meteor. His fiancée, Ellen, who was impeccably dressed 1950s-style, went with him in his convertible.

“Steph said you want to be an astronomer?” Lisa said to me.

The astronomer on-screen was clambering over the lip of the meteor crater. “Yeah,” I answered. “But if I were him, I would not go climbing into that hole alone.”

Despite the movie’s extremely tenuous connection to actual science, I was enjoying it. Lisa said parts of it had been filmed in the Mojave Desert, and the alien-like Joshua trees and craggy rocks, shot in black-and-white, had an otherworldly quality. In one scene a telephone repairman climbed to the top of a telephone pole and listened to the strange alien sounds coming through the wires, which made me think of that Jodie Foster movie Contact. When the aliens finally showed up, they were magnificently bizarre creatures with tentacle-like limbs and one giant, bulbous eye—and they left trails of glitter instead of footprints.

“It’s a gay allegory,” Mel said suddenly. “The aliens are drag queens.”

Lisa laughed. “Just you wait.”

Toward the end of the film, the astronomer followed the glitter trail through Ellen’s apartment (she had been kidnapped by the aliens) to a closed door. He flung it open to reveal an empty closet.

“Look!” Mel cried, pointing at the hangers. “She’s out of the closet!”