I didn’t want to see Ellie.
As I waited for her on my back porch, staring out at our barn, I knew I had no logical reason to be mad at her. I didn’t know why I was calling her a slut, either. All she did was sleep with Rick, who just happened to have crabs. It was just her bad luck.
“Hey,” she said as she came around to the back door.
“Here,” I said, handing her the plastic bag with the lice kit in it. I didn’t look at her.
“Can I use—um—your barn?”
“Uh.”
“Are you seeing weird shit too? Is that why you’re not looking at me?”
I looked at her. No transmission. “Seeing what shit?” I stared right into her eyes. Nothing. She stared into mine and I could tell she was disappointed, too.
“I don’t know how to describe it. Just weird shit. I was talking to Kyla this morning while we made some trail mix for the party and I looked at her and could see all kinds of strange shit.”
I just shrugged as if this wasn’t happening to us. As if I didn’t have anything to talk about. As if ignoring it would make it go away. I shrugged because I didn’t trust Ellie and I didn’t want to share a weird accidental superpower with her. I shrugged because so far, shrugging had worked for me in every other weird aspect of my life.
“Hello?”
“What did you see when you looked at her?” I asked.
Ellie frowned. “A bunch of people related to her—like her grandparents or something.” She paused. “Maybe I’m just hung over, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go to the barn.”
The barn wasn’t like Ellie’s barn on the commune. No animals. No hand tools. No lice-infested hippie families moving in or out. It was an artist’s studio. It was well lit with skylights on the north side. It still smelled of oil paint even though Dad hadn’t painted there for thirteen years.
I flopped myself on the couch and Ellie pulled the lice treatment box from the bag and read the instructions while making a gag face the whole time. “You know what I thought about last night?” she said. “I was looking at the stars and I thought that maybe they’re actually Jupiterians.”
I looked at her like I didn’t follow. Because I didn’t follow.
“The lice, I mean. Maybe they’re really aliens from Jupiter or another planet and they gather information from human beings by hanging out on their heads or, in this case, in their crotches.”
“Seriously. Are crotches not the most important parts of human beings?”
“I thought you said heads and crotches.”
“Exactly. Heads and crotches. The most important parts of human beings,” Ellie said.
“So they go from human to human gathering information about what?”
“Everything! I mean, isn’t everything they need to know in those two places?”
“Does this mean you aren’t going to kill them?” I asked.
“Shit no. I’m killing them right now. I just think it’s possible. Right? It’s possible that lice are really aliens from some other planet.”
“Sure,” I said. Anything was possible, even lice-spies from another galaxy.
And though we were both laughing and joking, all we were really thinking about was the transmissions.
“Are we going crazy?” she asked.
I still didn’t trust her. I don’t know why. It was like some curtain had dropped between us and I couldn’t really see her or remember who she was or why we were friends or why I ever liked her. I just wanted to get back to Darla’s darkroom.
“Are we?” she asked.
“Maybe the Jupiterians are driving you crazy.” I waved her off. “Go kill them. You’ll feel better.”
She stopped at the bathroom door and said, “I saw Rick with a woman yesterday.”
“Shit.”
“It was Rachel’s mom,” she said.
“Shit,” I said. “Were they, like, together? Like, together?”
“Yeah. I saw them making out through the window of Rachel’s RV. The guy is a scumbag.”
I said, “He’s a scumbag who probably just passed those Jupiterians on to Rachel’s mom.”
“Who will then pass them on to Rachel’s dad.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I guess it’s all one big karmic circle.”
“Shit,” she said. Then she bit her lip in that way she would when she was thinking hard about something. “Do you think I’m a slut?”
“No!” I said. With an exclamation point. I protested. I exclaimed. I lied.
“I feel like a slut,” she said.
“That’s bullshit. You slept with one guy.”
“A bunch of times.”
“So?” I asked.
“While he probably slept with a bunch of other people,” she said, her lip quivering a bit. “Well, not probably. I mean—uh—obviously, right?” She held up the box of Jupiterianicide.
“And this makes you a slut how? As I see it, it makes Rick a slut.”
“But he’s a guy, so that’s okay,” she said. “And now it’s ruined, you know? I should have waited but I didn’t and now… this!” She shook the box.
“You are not your virginity. You are a human being. The state of your hymen has nothing to do with your worth. Okay? They’re fucking with us. They’ve been fucking with us since the beginning of time.”
“Hymen? Shit, Glory. That’s deep.”
“The world is fucked up,” I said. “Go. Get rid of the infiltrators.”
She closed the bathroom door and I could hear the water running. She swore and ran a lot of water. I took a picture of the empty box she left on the coffee table. I called it Be Careful What You Wish For.
I wondered if I looked at a Jupiterian if I could see its future and its past like I could see the future and the past of the mourning dove and the people at the mall. I wondered if I looked at Jasmine Blue Heffner if I could see Ellie’s future.
And why couldn’t we see each other? Why was Max Black the bat doing this to us?
Ellie came out of the bathroom walking as if she’d been riding a horse.
“So what did you see?” I asked. “When you looked at Kerry?”
“Kyla.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what I saw. I saw some weird movie in my head—like in my imagination or something.”
“You said you saw her grandparents?”
“I don’t know who they were. They were related, though. They looked like her. They were dancing. And then I saw Kyla holding a baby. I don’t know if it was her baby. She was older. It looked like her baby,” Ellie said. She laughed. “It’s just the beer, right? I got pretty tanked last night.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’ll go away.”