Roxanna made a noise that I would have read as sympathy in anyone else. From her, it sounded like a trap. I tensed, waiting for it to snap shut.

I didn’t have to wait for long. “You know, I can sort of sympathize with your coworkers,” she said, earning a sharp look from Lucas as he pulled out of the parking lot. She gave him a soothing pat on the arm. “Sorry, Luke, but you know she’s weird. You know you’re weird, Ana.”

“I do know I’m weird,” I allowed. I didn’t bother correcting her on my name. It wouldn’t do me any good.

“Maybe if you stopped introducing yourself to people as a space invader, they’d be, I don’t know. Nicer to you. Or less inclined to mess with you for fun. You could make this stop.”

“You realize she’d have to change jobs,” said Lucas. His voice was flat. They were going to have a fight tonight, I realized, and while he might never say explicitly that it was about the way she’d spoken to me on the ride home, that would be the cause.

Roxanna knew it, too. She twisted again, shooting me a quick, sharp glare—as if I’d been the one to start this—and said, “That doesn’t make sense. She likes her job.”

“Uh-huh,” said Lucas. “She likes her job. She doesn’t like her coworkers, because they don’t like her. They don’t like her because…?”

“Because she won’t stop saying that weird alien crap,” said Roxanna. Then she paused, sitting up straighter. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I said loudly, in case they’d forgotten I was in the car. “Oh.”

Not telling people seems like a logical idea. That’s what people have been suggesting since I hit third grade and having what my teachers always termed a “rich fantasy life” went from being a good thing to being a sign that something was seriously wrong with me. Who cares if I think I’m an alien plant person? That part’s fine. Everyone has their little delusions. The trouble is the way I keep saying it out loud.

It’s funny how everyone who suggests that sort of silence seems to think they’re the first ones. Like everyone else I’ve ever known has thought, hey, who cares if she runs around telling people she’s not from this planet, at least she knows how to floss. I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut a thousand times, and I tried it for maybe the first hundred, biting my lips and smiling blankly until I wanted to scream.