“She thinks I’m crazy,” I said, and grimaced. “You know, I don’t mind when you call me crazy, because you’re sort of … stating a fact, not using it as a reason I’m not good enough to do something I want to do. Roxanna uses it like a brick to hit me with.”

“I call you crazy because you think you’re allowed to eat my cinnamon toast,” said Mandy easily. “You’re not crazy. Your people will be here any day, and they’re going to eat us all. I only ask that you let me watch when they chow down on Roxanna.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, through a smile, and followed her down the hall toward the stairs that would take us to the basement craft room.

Nobody improves an evening like Mandy.

Nobody expects me to be happy about hot-gluing eight hundred sequins to a mantis-shrimp ball gown like Mandy, either. She busied herself with stitching on the larger pieces, occasionally pausing to hand me another packet of small, shimmering “scales” and point to the patch of fabric that didn’t look enough like an explosion at the bling factory. She didn’t talk much, and neither did I. We were both content to be doing something and, better, to be doing it together.

Lucas had been Mandy’s friend first. They met in college, where they were both in the same anime society. Weird costumes and flashy cartoons are their points of commonality, and have always been enough to bond them into a tightly functional unit. Before Roxanna, he would have been down here with us, gluing sequins and probably throwing chunks of sculpting foam at Mandy’s head. I had come later, when the three of us had started frequenting the same comic book shop.

Three nerds in a house. Two human, one alien plant invader. One “oh, she’s kidding about the plant thing,” one “it’s not hurting anyone either way,” and me, who sometimes couldn’t make up my own mind about whether I was kidding, or whether I was supposed to be doing something to get the world ready for the invasion.

Mandy tossed me another packet of sequins. Right: I was supposed to be doing something. I was supposed to be gluing these down.

I got back to work.

3.

By the time we stopped for bed, I was properly exhausted. Better yet, Lucas and Roxanna were already in bed, having returned from dinner and retreated into his bedroom without bothering to say good night to us. That was fine by me. I brushed my teeth, collected my cat, and slipped into my own room, Seymour purring in my arms.

I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. That should have been a sign that things were about to get ugly. Most nights, sleep comes slowly for me, assuming sleep comes at all.