John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

It was her last human thought. She was diving into the water. She was curled around… who was this? Eli. The dim echo of a name, something more ancient and unpronounceable, lived at the base of her brain. It didn’t matter. She could feel the slide of his scales over hers as they slipped deeper into the lake, into the pull of the current, together.

When they found her bicycle leaning against a pine near Little Spindle, Annalee did her best to explain to Gracie’s mother. Of course, her mother still called the police. They even sent divers into the lake. The search was fruitless, though one of them claimed that something far too big to be a fish had brushed up against his leg.

Gracie and Eli had summers, three perfect months every year, to feel the grass beneath their feet and the sun on their bare human shoulders. They picked a new city each summer, but they returned most often to Manhattan, where they’d visit with Annalee and Gracie’s flummoxed mother in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and try not to stare at their beautiful host with her running-water skin and river-green eyes.

When fall came, they shed their names with their bodies and traveled the waters of the world. The lake hated to give them up. She threatened to freeze solid and bind them there, but they were two now—sinewy and gleaming—monsters of the deep, with lashing tails and glittering eyes, and the force they created between them smashed old rules and new arguments. They slipped down the Mohawk to the Hudson, past the river god with his sloped gray shoulders, and out into the Atlantic. They met polar bears in the Arctic, frightened manatees near the Florida Keys. They curled together in a knot, watching the dream lights of jellyfish off the coast of Australia.

Sometimes, if they spotted a passenger leaning on the rails of a freighter by himself, they might even let themselves be seen. They’d breach the waves, let the moonlight catch their hides, and the stranger would stand for a moment—mouth agape, heart alive, his loneliness forgotten.

The first aliens arrived in Milledgeville, Ohio, when I was still in diapers. By the time I’d graduated into the frilly pink dresses my mother put me in for elementary school, you saw them around occasionally, strolling down Main Street or picnicking by the bandshell in the park. They’d bought into a rundown neighborhood in the east end of town—primarily Polish and Estonian to that point, though once the aliens began picking up mortgages over there, most people just called it Bug Town. This was lazy thinking, because the aliens didn’t look anything like bugs, but what are you going to do?

I never really had much personal contact with them until their kids started showing up in my high school classes. There was grumbling, of course. But who was going to tell a hulking seven-foot alien his kid couldn’t come to school? And so I studied Great Expectations and home economics in the company of creatures not of this Earth. Which sounds more dramatic than it really was. We all got along well enough in class, even if we did keep to our own sides of the lunchroom.

Which is where it might have ended if it hadn’t been for my best friend, Joan Hayden.

The first thing you have to understand about Joan is that she had poor taste in boys. Everybody agreed. First there’d been Luke Jackson, a disaffected former jock who’d been kicked off the football team when he showed up at the homecoming game half in the bag. After that she’d taken up with a guy named Jimmy Ford, violating the unspoken divide between the kids in calculus and the ones in shop. That was about the time Joan got clumsy—started slipping in the shower and running into doors—so when she worked up the courage to send Jimmy packing, we all agreed that she was well shut of him.

Which brings us to Johnny Fabriano, where this story really gets underway. Johnny looked like a refugee from The Wild Ones—black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, and a greasy DA that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. He’d dropped out of high school the day he’d turned sixteen and had spent the last five years hanging around Red’s Billiards Parlor, cadging cigarettes and hustling pool. He was a dead shot, and rumor had it he’d won his car in a hotly contested game of eight-ball with a gearhead from Brookton. The car itself was the envy of every would-be greaser in town—a chopped ‘49 Mercury coupe painted a glossy midnight purple with stylized tongues of yellow and red flame licking at the hood and fenders.

Joan had already gotten a reputation for being fast—undeserved, I have to put in, and if anyone knew, I did, because Joan confided everything in me. She’d moved in next door when we were both in second grade, and we’d been joined at the hip ever since, sharing every joy and affliction, from scraped knees to first periods, which when Joan’s made its debut, I remember how jealous I was—until mine happened along two months later, inflicting such misery upon me that I have never envied anyone anything ever since, or almost never, anyway.

Joan had grown up in a Pentecostal church, daughter to a strict disciplinarian who saw himself as the earthly agent of the Lord. And if at one level Joan rejected all that, at another level she still believed. You never really escape your childhood training, I guess, and it was this division in Joan’s personality that ultimately caused all the trouble. For while Johnny Fabriano was a perfect candidate to give her father apoplexy, he was also a young man with an agenda of his own.

You see where this is going, of course, and it’s not a happy place. But when the alien got involved, his good intentions only made everything worse. Good intentions usually do.

My name is Nancy Miller, by the way, and it’s nice to meet you, I’m sure. If you haven’t already figured it out, this story isn’t really mine to tell, but my mother always called me Chatty Cathy, so I suppose it’s only natural that it should fall to me in the end. And it’s important that you understand that I wasn’t always on the scene. Much of what follows is reconstructed from secondhand reports, with all the bias and self-interest inherent in such accounts. In short, these are the facts as I understand them. If you want the truth, you’ll have to sort it out for yourself. You always do, I guess.

So cast me in a supporting role: plain-faced confidante and collaborator to the beautiful lead. Joan really was beautiful, too, which is to say blond and buxom in the slightly zaftig mold then in fashion. She inspired plenty of interest among the boys at Milledgeville High, but as I’ve already said, she never returned the affections of the boys who might have brought her happiness, if happiness was even an option for her, and I think it probably wasn’t.

Certainly it wasn’t with Johnny Fabriano. Like I said, he had an agenda of his own, and if, on Joan’s part, he was calculated to infuriate her father, then there’s some small irony that had it not been for her father they might never have met in the first place. Sometimes just stopping for gas can change the entire course of your life, and that’s exactly what happened when her father decided to swing their old Caddy into Staley’s Gulf station one September Sunday after church.

Gas stations were full-service back then—the days of pumping your own fuel were still decades away—and while Mr. Staley fussed with the Caddy’s tire pressure, Johnny’s ‘49 Merc roared up to the neighboring pump. Both Joan and her father knew the car, of course—who hadn’t seen it around town?—and Joan at least knew its driver by reputation. What she didn’t know was what a sweet smile Johnny had. But he did, I can vouch for that myself, and when he turned his head to look at Joan, he passed one to her, like a gift.