Triangulum. Masande Ntshanga

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СКАЧАТЬ a cup of tea for her mom and telling me she’d promised herself not to spit in it. Not that I’d asked.

      I sat back on the kitchen chair and watched her leaning over the basin. Part’s legs could be found in an old dentist’s waiting-room magazine, I thought, preserved from the ’80s, like the ones I’d seen in a box of Mom’s old things. Her Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt hung past her cut-offs. Her feet were slender, and if the tiles were cold, she didn’t show it.

      “You mean extraterrestrials?” she asked.

      “I didn’t see them, but yes.”

      “I see.” Using two fingers, Part pulled the lid off the kettle, releasing steam.

      I decided to try something else, before I lost my nerve. “Do you want a girlfriend?”

      “I don’t know. Does that happen?”

      “I learned about it in Life Orientation.”

      Part laughed. “There’s also Litha.”

      I sighed. Part liked to provoke me, I knew that, but I could also tell we were both scared. I dropped my head onto my forearms, reminding myself of all the ways I looked better than she did. I stopped when I reached the ones I’d made up. I breathed out.

      Part stood and rinsed the strainer over the basin. Then she turned around and dried her hands down her sides. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

      “Do you?” I looked up from my forearms and attempted a smile. “Then say yes to me.”

      “Yes, I do,” she said, “and yes, yes to you, too.”

      Then I got up.

      That’s how Part and I first got together, that afternoon. The second time it happened, I told Part my theory of how my mom had been abducted.

      The two of us headed down to the library on Alexandra Road behind the shut-down theater. We walked around the rusting cannons that sat baking on the lawn by the dried-up water fountain, ignoring the other students. I let Part walk in in front of me, absorbing the sunlight so I could savor the gust from the air conditioning in the lobby when we went inside.

      We checked our bags and passed single-file through the glass doors into the main part of the library. The air was even colder here, which I liked. Under the flicking fluorescent lights, we curved into the adult section on the right, where I pulled out a hardcover with UFO Diaries embossed on the front.

      I handed it to her. “I first found a copy of it when I was 12. It was in Mom’s things. I’d snuck into the guest room, where we kept her clothes before Dad packed them up.” Since then, I’d often come back here to read about people like me and Mom.

      Part squinted at the cover. “These people could be insane.”

      “I don’t know. Look.”

      I opened the book and she leaned over my shoulder to look, close enough for me to inhale the aroma off her skin. Thinking of my own scent, I told her to wait; I tried not to blush as I walked to the bathroom, where I tamped my armpits with damp toilet paper. I pressed it over my eyelids and between my legs. Then I washed my hands with the sweet puke-like soap from the dispenser.

      I found Part sitting cross-legged in the non-fiction aisle, the book open on her lap.

      “I don’t know,” I said, “one night she was around and one night she wasn’t. The window in the living room was open. I mean, who vanishes like that?”

      I sat down next to her and she looked up at me, the book’s cover sticking to the insides of her thighs. I didn’t mention the other connection I had to it. That I’d found the first copy at a time when I felt foreign inside, breasts aching for the first time, and with new underarm hair. I looked taller, too. I felt like there was an exit from being a child and alone. Feeling noticed, as well, and not having a pill prescription.

      “Like, aliens?” Part smiled, and I felt more stung than I’d expected. She looked down and opened the book again, creasing her brow as she read.

      “Like that, huh?” she said.

      “Like that.”

      I only met her father, the policeman, after I met his gun—an automatic 9mm.

      Part’s dad was out that afternoon, somewhere in town. She had the gun between us on her mother’s bed.

      Looking at me, Part laughed and said, “Put it in your mouth. It still has my saliva on it. It’ll be like a kiss. Or even better.”

      Outside, the light was golden and had stuck itself to the windows, hiding behind the synthetic curtains, and there in her mother’s room, on her bed, we were two humming spirits in a movie about desolation, where life was two people and death was everything else.

      “It would be even better with gingivitis,” Part said.

      Taking the gun back, a stream of my saliva, our saliva, our kiss, fell on the bed, and then without warning me she stood in front of the dresser and raised the gun, pointing it at the wall.

      I could hear her mom’s voice mumbling through the wall from the living room, talking and laughing to herself.

      “Imagine how easy it would be,” Part said. “She wouldn’t know what happened. Her head should be here, somewhere.” Part aimed, made shooting noises with her mouth. Then her arms fell limp at her sides. “I’m done. We should listen to In Utero.” She opened the door to her room, still holding the gun in her hand. “We should do it loud, so she can hear.”

      I got up.

      “Now come closer.”

      I went closer and her hand fell on my shoulder; her mom laughed again.

      The next week, when I told her a third time about Mom’s abduction, Part looked up at me for a moment, then reached for my hand and told me she believed me. For the rest of the afternoon, we paged through UFO Diaries end to end, going through each sighting, taking special note of locations and dates. This was a day before Litha came back from an out-of-town trip. Part told me she suspected his fosters might be thinking of taking him back to the children’s home.

      The two of us met him after school at the alcove in the park.

      “Most of it was us driving around Hogsback,” he said. “My fosters and I were meant to meet my biological uncle, but he stopped calling when we got to town. It happened the same way with an aunt a few years ago. It’s about money.”

      Part and I watched him push his fingers through his hair, his dreadlocks trimmed into a new mushroom bob.

      “So what did you do?” asked Part.

      “Not much, except drive to Hole in the Wall and eat ham sandwiches.”

      “Did anything fun happen?”

      Litha shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t call it that.”

      Part patted him on the shoulder, half-joking and half-meaning it, like she often did. I looked across the field to the red roof of the public hospital, СКАЧАТЬ