A few seconds later, we heard the car door slam and the snarl of the engine turning over. Lucas peeled out, and we were alone. Silence reigned.

Finally, Mandy looked at me and asked, “What do you need?”

I needed the invasion to come faster. I needed it to change course and go find another planet to plunder. I needed to know I was right about myself. I needed proof that I’d been delusional all along, and the planet where I lived wasn’t about to be in danger. I needed so many big, complicated, contradictory things that I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like all those needs were sticking in my throat and cutting off my air.

There was only one good solution for that. “I need to talk to Graham,” I said. Hearing the words aloud made it possible for me to relax, just a little, allowing the truth of them to sink into my skin.

Mandy nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be in the craft room if you need me. All those sequins still aren’t going to glue themselves.” She turned to head for the stairs.

In only a few seconds, I was alone. No: not quite alone. Seymour twined around my ankles, making the weird hiccupping chirp sound he always made when I seemed unhappy. I laughed a little, bending to scoop him into my arms.

“Come on, weird cat,” I said. “Let’s go call your daddy.”

He purred all the way to my room.

3.

Zoom was all fucked up. After the third time my call dropped without connecting, I started to wonder whether it might have something to do with the alien transmission. Not in the sense of “the aliens are screwing with the internet”—the aliens weren’t close enough for that, and I didn’t think they knew enough about Earth communications to be jerks on that kind of micro level—but in the sense of “everyone on the planet is talking about this, and that probably means the network is overloaded.”

I leaned back in my chair and glared at the screen. Glaring has never been known to fix network connectivity issues, but there’s always a first time. We’d never received signals from an extraterrestrial source before, either.

The structure of the thought hit me a split second after the thought itself. I forgot to glare, suddenly sunk in an existential dilemma even more frustrating than my Zoom issues. Were “we” receiving our first extraterrestrial signal? Did I have any right to include myself in that group, given how much of my life had been spent willfully denying inclusion? Or had “they” received their first extraterrestrial signal, while I’d received proof that I was no longer going to be alone in a world filled with complex, confusing mammals?