Our trip from Jeff’s house to the hotel had been easy enough: despite our fears, there were no officers waiting on the road to start a car chase, or stationed in the hotel parking lot to arrest us. No one had said a word as we’d walked across the lobby in our little group of five, headed up to our rooms, and collected our things. Going back had been a calculated risk, part bravado and part necessity. We didn’t want to be scared away from our luggage—and more, we needed to know how deep the hot water really was. In the absence of an arrest, we’d assumed we were in the clear.

Getting into the airport had been just as easy. Graham had called for a ride while Jeff hid his van in the woods behind the hotel, where it might be found tomorrow and it might be found never, but either way, it wouldn’t be in the parking lot attracting attention. Confirmation numbers in hand, we’d sailed through security, answering the intrusive questions from the TSA and smiling, smiling, smiling until our faces hurt. Smiling like we weren’t terrified, like there wasn’t a patch of dark green skin on my arm, hidden under the sleeve of my sweater, but there, marking me finally and immutably as what I had always claimed to be.

I was an alien. I was not of this world. And one way or another, I was going to have to reconcile that with a lifetime lived among these people, who had been my friends and my family and my home. For the moment, however, I couldn’t focus on that. I needed to focus on getting home, back to Lucas and Mandy and Seymour, who was only a cat and couldn’t understand any of this.

Jeff had gotten it worse than I had with the TSA. I looked white, even if I was a vegetable, and I was better at smiling like nothing was wrong, while he was a surly Asian American man with a bandage on his cheek. There had been a moment where I’d been sure the TSA agent was about to ask him for a doctor’s note clearing him to fly, but then Toni had blown him a kiss and called him “darling” in a voice like treacle, and suddenly we’d been in the clear. It was almost offensive, seeing the power of the white woman at work. We might have to live with misogyny and the patriarchy and all that fun bullshit, but because we’d been placed on such a high pedestal of purity and innocence, our approval could take a dangerous fellow and turn him into a nice guy.