I couldn’t see Graham’s face, but I felt him shift in his seat, twisting to look down at me. The plane was a little more than half full—an artifact of the undersold flights taking off from airports everywhere, I was sure, although that endless, twisting security line might have had something to do with it. Half of our fellow passengers might still be back in Seattle, trapped in the Byzantine web of supposed safety, unable to move either forward or back until the TSA decided they weren’t a threat.

“You’re really worried,” he said. “What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.” I closed my eyes. “Everything. What people are going to do when the aliens get here. What the aliens are going to do when they get here.”

He stroked my hair. “You’ve been here for years. You haven’t done anything that bad.”

“I jaywalk sometimes.” I wanted to tell him about the way people viewed crowds: how as long as less than seventeen percent of the members of a group were female, the men wouldn’t be bothered by them, but as soon as they hit eighteen percent—or, heaven help us, more than that—they became a problem. How people thought of a crowd that was one-third women as female-dominated, how a group that was one-third Black was thought of as anti-white, and so on, and so on. Everyone in the world is the product of their local culture, the good parts and the bad parts at the same time, and we can’t get away from it.

The culture I grew up with said being an alien invader was a bad thing, and my choices were going to be turning my back on the people who made me or betraying the human race. That was a little worse than jaywalking. That was a little more difficult to see as simple.

Graham let me be an alien because I was an alien when we met, and because, as he’d said, I had never done anything to hurt anyone. I didn’t even squash spiders. I didn’t like very many people, but my misanthropy was the harmless kind, too gentle and reserved to actually cause a problem. I could hate the world as much as I wanted. I was never going to set the thing on fire.