“Hey, namesake!” said the drake to the barkeep

Just as I was entering the taverna, I nearly bumped into someone; the someone managed to dodge, with a ballerina-like grace.

“Sorry,” I whispered towards the floor. A hand grabbed my sleeve, and I tossed up my chin, startled. Eva and I stepped away from each other. She pointed a finger at me, I pointed a finger at her, I cracked a smile, she broke into laughter; I felt like that laughter was brushing coal dust off my somber mind.

Eva’s yukata was yellow with pink peonies, as opposed to my pink one with yellow sunflowers. But the patterns and hues were exactly the same.

On a shared impulse, we both surged forward again, and, not letting me change my mind, Eva pulled me into a hug that seemed absurd, uncalled-for, and maybe even highly inappropriate to some, like what I’d done on the square... A hug that seemed just right for the occasion, if only for a moment; I was thinking about coincidences and of how great, great, GREAT it was when the coincidences in question were pleasant, stupid, and with flowers on them. Then I thought of how nothing was ever a coincidence to a physicist, and everything could be explained. Probably.

She pulled away. “You’re going to the bathhouse? Now?”

“No, later, I wanted to eat first.” Although, in truth, my appetite was gone.

“Pity. I could have used some company.” She mimicked scrubbing her back with a long-handled body brush.

“You’re going now?”

Yes, she was, and she had to do it soon; for Eva, even this was a tad late in the evening. Everywhere around the world, bakers were the first to rise up. Always. Always earlier than the big ball of hydrogen and helium in the sky.

“Pineapple bun day tomorrow,” Eva promised, rubbing my shoulder in a goodbye gesture, poised to leave.

I thought: while we sleep, the best people on the planet are baking pineapple buns for us worse people to wake up to. I thought that, and felt like hugging her, but didn’t.

There was a hollow place inside of me. A cold and bloodless place.

“Oh, I forgot to ask. Did you book time at the observatory? To look at the stars?”

His cheek, so cold when I’d pressed my nose into it.

“I— Not yet. I’m working on it.”

Eva took the levity with her.

The special was canceled, and I experienced a rush of relief. No matter how delicious Frank’s cooking always was, I felt like tonight I would have tasted ashes instead of home. Something was off.

From behind the counter, Frank apologized for the snag, saying that they simply didn’t have all of the necessary ingredients at hand, as well as explaining why they’d ended up not having them. Yes, he was right, the logistics and the remoteness were crap. Which was bad.

But the island was a calm and isolated place. Which was good.

“You win some, you lose some.” I concluded diplomatically.

Frank still had a guilty look about him. “Yeah, but—”

“It’s okay.”

I ordered a glass of lager. He served me a glass of lager. I didn’t order any food but arare. Frank put a small platter of warm popiah on the counter before me.

“On the house.”

“It really is okay, Frank.”

Yet something else wasn’t. Not knowing why, I couldn’t stop thinking about the heavy black string of broken lights. Of how only one lantern at a time would shine on it, only one, just one — before flickering out and never shining again. Of the prolonged delay after it would go out. Of the whole process repeating and repeating. I couldn’t stop thinking about how bloodless Wakuu’s face had seemed as he observed the string.

I felt unsettled for no good reason. The overall atmosphere in the taverna seemed weirdly somber too; not the lively one I’d already gotten used to. In the background of my mind, I kept on trying to figure out the real reason, and failing.

But it wasn’t just me; everyone looked ever-so-slightly detuned. Chaem sat alone at one of the tables, brows drawn together, lips pinned; not looking up. Not eating.

“We already pinged Theo,” Frank said seemingly out of the blue; my ears registered the shuffling of a scoopful of nuts which he was transferring into a bowl, from a humongous sack in the corner. “He’ll do a gig in a bit.”

Huh? But Theo and his trusty guitar performed here Fridays to Sundays. Today was Thursday. My former Screaming Day.

A plate in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, I gave Frank a quizzical look as I was sliding off the stool.

“Rafi said he’d fix them, but he got in touch just now, and there’s some kind of an emergency, I think.” Frank nodded sideways.

His back to us, squatting over a pair of upturned and dissected speakers, Frank’s brother Noah yanked a wire and gave a strangled sigh, one that I also heard very distinctly.

A realization washed over me.

Silence. The silence, that’s what derailed the atmosphere. The lack of music. Usually, Fishensips was full of it. Rhythmic, energetic yet not clingy, uptempo, and very danceable. The occasional karaoke nights were the booziest and loudest. Yet right now the speakers lay broken, so we the visitors were a bit broken too. Who would walk into a bar, bringing their own entertainment with them?

Every now and then, I could hear a quiet, nervous, and fragmented murmur of a conversation, the rare shuffling of feet underneath tables, a dart popping into the board, a dart bouncing off the board. The only semblance of rhythm: the creaky, metallic taps as the knife in Chaem’s hand was repeatedly stabbing either something on her plate or the plate itself.

“This is a wake,” she mumbled with contempt in her voice when I sat down next to her.

“Yeah. But Theo’s coming. He’ll throw a pinch of life into it.”

I took a piece of popiah, dunked it into chili sauce, putting a bit too much zeal into the process, and shoved it whole into my mouth, expecting the piece to be crunchy and thus loud, hoping the crunch would fill the silence in my ears, overpower what was in my head. It wasn’t crunchy. But the sounds I made because of how hot the innocent-looking orange slime turned out to be, made up for this lack, somewhat.

“Oh ghodfff nevah unvereshtimate hoommade fssshh.”

Intrigued, Chaem stopped stabbing and asked if she could take one.

“Yuff hewp yoshelf,” I managed to say and hissed again. “Howsh thingsh?”

“Eh,” replied Chaem and hissed too. “Shosho. Oof. Sh-ou know that kid who can’t feel pain?”

“Hmm?”

“The no-pain kid. He can’t feel pain. What’s that thing called when someone just doesn’t feel pain?”

Death..?

“Congenital insensitivity to pain?”

“That’s the one! Anyway, he was on that show with peppers, and he ate the hottest one in history, and just sat there like, ohhh I feel slightly warm, but other than that, nothing, no, only warm.”

I remembered. The ‘kid’ in question was about forty-five.

The pause and the self-harming continued for some time after. This type of pain, along with the hissing, helped.

Just as I was about to assume that Chaem’s limit on idle conversations had been reached, she spoke, wiping a dot of chili off her lower lip, “So what’s happening, are you going out with him or what?”

With eyes not just like saucers, but more like the eyes of a person who’d tried chili for the first time, I stared at her. Was she not allergic to gossip?

The battle clashed. Facetiousness won, and hoo-boy was the winner a worthless idiot this time.

“With the kid who can’t feel pain? No, he’s a bit too old for my tastes,” I said and snorted.

Chaem’s lips folded into something resembling a beak of a very fed-up and very judgmental waterfowl.

“I liked you better when you were blunt ... Why do you guys do this?! Like. I’m being serious, and you’re joking your jokes. This isn’t the first time!”

I didn’t need to ask whom she meant by ‘you guys’, nor was I experiencing an urge to give a detailed explanation in response to something she might have been posing as a rhetorical.

“And how you’re both laughing at your own jokes. So weird.”

“Just tired and feeling goofy,” I lied, leveling my tone. “Sorry. As for your question, Wakuu implied that he was not against the general idea. But it’s not like either of us has a lot of time to spare right now. It’s fine, I’m in no rush.”

“What about, like, a hook-up. A quickie.” —hot stuff!

Tilting my head and peering at her, I sighed. “Have you met us?”

“I have. You kids need to loosen up.” However, the very next second, Chaem’s gaze softened. Instead of standing her ground, she retreated from it fully. “I get why you wouldn’t be interested. I don’t mean your upbringing, even. I mean—” She shrugged and gestured somewhere and nowhere. The skies, the lighthouse, the sea, even the mainland, anything would have worked in this context. “Stuff.”

“Stuff,” I agreed, nodding.

“Speaking of stuff. Gotta bounce.”

Shut up, pun-generator, shut up, pun-generator.

Alone again, nursing my beer, I sat back at the counter. But the barkeep was busy, and the whole establishment was emptying, so I had to settle for listening to my own thoughts, and it was the lousiest entertainment. I kept my eyes on the door.

Wakuu stumbled in a few minutes later, accompanied by the severely reduced ‘gang’. Today it consisted only of one of the local doctors, Yuri, and Surya the marine biologist.

Taco’s human, Luke, was not with them. Neither was Kenny; perhaps helping his father Jack make full-fat yogurt back on the ranch. Ben had left yesterday, to camp and meditate on the other side of the island, in solitude. Pablo was considered a part of the gang and would usually join, too, but not every time. Certainly not during emergencies like the one on the square... On the square, Wakuu must have been waiting for them.

Pursing my lips, I tamped down the worthless ‘two and a half PhDs walk into a bar’ as the door closed behind them; a couple more setups attempted to climb over the first one, each of them cringier than the last, and I swiped them off as well.

Yes, this symptom was familiar. And alarming. Always the same song: the worse I felt, the more frantic that internal joke-generating process. Sometimes I’d notice the latter before connecting it to the former. No surprises; this was the entire modus operandi of sad clowns, after all.

Mindfulness helped.

Wakuu sent me a small smile and a short wave of his no-longer-shaking hand.

That helped too. Albeit only a little; I was longing to witness his usual smile instead — a big, wide, sunny, and sweet-dorky grin — while suspecting I’d not be seeing it tonight, and feeling a tad heartbroken over this suspicion. Besides, the very next second as even the small one dissolved, I realized he was just putting on a brave face, literally; a shadow hidden in his gaze — a hint that he was once again forcing himself to be responsible, act casual, look normal.

Brooding eyes... Brooding. By God, this word. The stupid, stupid word. Worse than a dead metaphor, worse than a cliché; the foundation of so many cardboard facades. It had accumulated such a thick layer of clown makeup — with eyeliner prevailing — that I was surprised to find I still remembered what it actually, humanly meant.

Nothing good.

My preconceived notions continued to be trampled, reality continued to cackle at my attempts to generalize, my hypocrisy continued to be called out.

Yuri asked him something, Wakuu gave a soft shake of the head. She and Surya proceeded to the pool table, Wakuu slid onto the stool next to me. Our shoulders touched.

Brooding. Counterproductive? Yes. But sometimes, nothing worked. No joke funny enough, no pun silly enough, not enough energy for slapstick. Brooding. The meekest type of rumination, brought on by fear, by helplessness in the face of things that could be neither influenced nor changed; an inescapable burden of reality weighing on the mind, launching you into loops that no common rationalization could pull you out of; impeding your day-to-day life, ceasing your limbs, sapping the joy out of your face... In civilized society, turning you into either a sight most unsettling or a sight most alluring, depending on the insight and self-awareness of the person observing. Either ‘They’re so mysterious! I need to admire them from afar’ or ‘Stop bringing people down. Get yourself together. Be entertaining. Don’t be gloomy, what are you, a hormonal teenager?’

Or invoking what this particular observer felt.

I remembered Eva pulling me into a hug; no questions, no inhibitions. I wished I was like that. Like Eva.

Wakuu’s shoulder was no longer touching mine.

I wished we both were a little bit more like Eva.

“Hey. Are you fee—”—ling it too right now?

“What can I get you?” Interrupting, Frank materialized in front of us. “And why so gloomy, Mr. Alien Hunter? Cheer up. Theo is on his way.”

While ordering a drink, Wakuu spread his fingers on the bar counter, palm down. It crawled towards mine in slow motion. It crawled and it crawled, as inevitable as death, up until the whorl of his pinky was around my pinky, then straightening up, sliding down, and up, and down, even slower.

Biting on my lower lip, I had to fight not to push my legs together; a shiver went through my body. I could not recall it reacting with such burning intensity even to outright groping and nipple-twisting accompanied by tongues shoved into mouths.

In normal circumstances, and if it was anyone else sitting here, I would have called them ‘damn smooth’, but as I turned my head and looked at Wakuu, I got another reminder that it wasn’t that. Neither seduction nor flirting were his priorities right now. It was about a simple human touch, about reluctance in regards to seeking it out, and the doubts brought on by ‘is this a good enough reason to seek it out or am I a goddamn wuss who should just man up and deal with this stupid shit on my own’.

Adulthood sucked. Adulting was nothing but stress, responsibilities, anguish, stress, loss, despair, self-awareness, stress, existential dread, stress, and inhibitions.

Wakuu’s gaze was pained, but he continued fighting and pretending. Like the responsible, restrained, educated adult that he was, one raised by a responsible, restrained, and educated woman, and still enveloped in the ghost of her....Come to think of it, alcohol was our only universal compensation for being officially declared adults. But what’s the point of chugging down an inhibitions-remover if said inhibitions return in force once you sober up, and the older you get, the less of it you can stomach?

Ugh, whatever.

I grabbed the glass, finished my beer, let my palm dive under his, hooked my hand around his wrist, squeezed my fingers around his fingers, lowered my head to his shoulder, and rubbed the top of my head against the cheeky earring-cat who also didn’t object to any of this.

He rubbed his cheek against my hair and put his other hand on top of this loop-to-loop knot.

“May I ask you something personal?” I whispered towards the rows of bottles.

“Anything,” he whispered in the same direction.

His reply, its pleading tone, startled me.

Like two halves of a bascule bridge’s span, our heads and upper bodies angled away from each other, two mirrored movements slow and smooth, opening only far enough to let the tall boat of apprehension pass through.

Feeling his breath fan my cheek, I turned to meet his eyes, catching the tail end of that long, pained exhale right on my lips. His gaze snapped down to my mouth and back up.

Our physical proximity, the closeness, and the intimacy of the moment blocked any air from entering my lungs.

Now, with this, and with my heart rate spiking, I was having even more trouble formulating the question.

Still didn’t know how to pose it. I went with one that was more of a statement. “Something deeply unsettled you. Out there. Yes?”

Pulling our hands away just as slowly, we untied the finger-knot. Wakuu straightened up and reached for his drink.

“Yes,” he admitted — and backpedaled right after taking another sip, “Something stupid, irrational, and juvenile.”

Angry at himself for being human.

Responsible adults were not allowed to counterproductively brood.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Yes, I actually— But—” He did and he didn’t. His shoulders tensed. His thigh was no longer pressing into mine. “I would not bore you with it.”

Human in his fear of being a bother. Forgetting that we were social animals above all, that we must never give up on being social animals, no matter what.

“I once stared at a wall for two hours straight while holding a soggy taco in my hand, and didn’t get bored. The taco wasn’t even that dope. Try me.”

Wakuu pursed his lips together to hide the tippy-tappy of a smile that played across them.

“Was it a mushroom taco?”

“It might have been.”

He threw another glance at my face. I wondered how it would feel to cup both of his cheeks in my palms. How I would feel if we rubbed the tips of our noses together. Another glance. I wondered if he was wondering the same thing.

“The reason is stupid. Juvenile. Irrational,” Wakuu repeated. “I saw something insignificant and allowed myself to feel something I did not care for. I will get over it.” ‘Allowed’ himself. As if we ever had any control over existential dread.

I waved at Frank, Frank answered with his eyebrows before approaching with the rest of Frank and taking my order.

When he’d moved away, I asked, “That thing you saw, was it the lights?”

“Yes.” Wakuu lowered his voice. “How did you know?”

“I guessed. So, a question, a gloopy one. Kinda,” I said, just as acutely aware of every single sound around us. Most of them were being produced by Frank.

“I’m listening,” Wakuu said in a whisper even quieter than mine, watching Frank drag an almost empty container out of the mini-freezer.

“If an asteroid the size of Tosaka collided with our planet, what would happen?”

A thunderous rockslide of frozen fruits into the blender followed.

“A world-ending event.”

With both palms, Frank cupped and squeezed two halves of a lime; a small creaking noise broke through his throat.

“Complete devastation. Right?”

“Yes,” Wakuu replied almost breathlessly.

With a chiming thud, Frank threw the empty container into the sink.

“And if it was possible to attach some kind of uuuhh thrusters to that asteroid and make it gently descend and land on the surface of the planet, let’s say somewhere out in a desert, what would happen?” I asked while Frank was pouring rum and soda into that blender. The glug-glug mixing with the pshhh sounded oily somehow.

“Hardly anything.”

Frank poured a bit more rum, scratched his temple, yanked one of his dreadlocks, and tipped the rum bottle yet again. He put it away and got a paunchy glass.

“Maybe just some glass?”

“I suppose.”

“Yes.” I nodded while observing Frank secure the lid over the blender. “Anyway, that’s triggers. That’s how triggers work.”

Frank pressed a button. The blender chainsawed the silence, making me and Wakuu flinch, turn towards each other, and lock eyes again. He gave a tiny, confused shake of the head.

“I need to attach thrusters..?” he said in his normal-volume voice meant to outshout the blender.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said in my normal-volume voice, studying his gaze and reading the true reasons for his reluctance. “What I’m saying is, the reason doesn’t matter. The reason is hardly ever the real reason. Forget the reason.”

“But—”

Frank pressed the button again, popped the lid, and poured the frozen slushie into the glass.

“How about I get balls-to-the-wall drunk, this way you can talk about it and also feel more secure,” I pitched on impulse, “because I won’t remember jack in the morning.”

“You’d do that.”

“I’d totally do that for you.”

Frank placed the cocktail on the counter in front of me and ebbed away.

“No, there’s no need. It’s way too radical a measure. Besides, it’d still be me talking to you as if I was your p— Uh.”

Yep.

“Oh come on.”

Considering the proposal, Wakuu took another small sip of his drink. I took a mighty tug of mine.

And got a brain freeze.

Shrieking, hissing, and mentioning mothers under my polar breath, I was louder than the blender.

“Curl your tongue and press it to the roof of your mouth,” Wakuu instructed in a calm, quiet, and composed tone of voice.

“Spit it out first!” someone else yelled from across the hall.

“Does anybody have anything warm?!”

“No, she needs to put some fabric over her mouth!”

“Yuri is here. Yuri can help.”

“Wha—?”

“Suck on your thumb, now, now!”

Everyone pitched in, as if it was the most exciting thing ever, while Frank looked like he’d accidentally murdered me. He offered about half a dozen apologies in a row. What a dead evening, I thought, already unthawed because I’d followed Wakuu’s advice right away, and it had helped.

“Thank you, I’m okay, perfectly fine,” I announced for everyone to hear, then, quieter, added only for Wakuu to hear, “Thank you.”

Either Yuri or Surya used a pocket-sized speaker to create a pocket of music between the dartboard and the pool table, but the hall was spacious, and hardly anything was reaching here. We glanced towards them once, and stayed put.

I proceeded to tackle the boozy slush in small sips.

“Okay. Where were we. Wanna talk about it?”

He did and he didn’t. “Don’t you sometimes wish you were not conscious of the self?”

“All of the time. I wake up each morning and all I can think about is, I wish I was a mountain goat.”

His hand dropped down, so did mine. We fumbled for each other blindly, hooked our index fingers level with the bar stool seats, and let go. A shared, silent chuckle.

Still not explaining how his distress was related to the lights (but the reason still didn’t matter), Wakuu said, “I felt an odd kind of loneliness, a hard one to describe. Not even like one in a crowd. It was bordering on dread, I felt as if— I felt pointlessness. As if even if the whole crowd in question greeted me and we proceeded to make friends and throw a party, this loneliness would not be gone. Besides, a while later they were greeting me, and we were already friends.” He gestured to the pool table. “Yet it kept on refusing to dissipate for some time. Instead of easing up, it was growing.” Before I could offer my two coppers, Wakuu trailed away and asked, “What actually causes that feeling in adults? The basic version.”

“The feeling of being alone in a crowd?”

“Yes.”

He’d called on me to generalize, which I cautiously did, with this caution painting my voice gray, rote. “In adults it could be any one reason out of a whole array of them, it could be several.” I told him that, more often than not, it was only a symptom of some serious emotional dysregulation. Depression, social anxiety. It could be a learned belief in one’s own exceptionalism. Even self-absorption and hubris. “The most common, though—”

“Yes?”

“Fear of intimacy. I don’t mean sexual intimacy. Not literal nakedness, but the complete nakedness of the mind. The intimacy of opening up and being vulnerable with someone. The intimacy of someone seeing you for who you truly are. When life has taught you that it might lead to you either being rejected or misunderstood, or accepted only for parts of you, not as a whole, or to you being treated as a bother, or used as a means to an end, or mocked and ridiculed. You’re conditioned. When you grew up in an environment where every type of naked is taboo for one reason or another. When you are subconsciously convinced that even if you find the courage to do it, to try it, you will never find the right person, because there is no right person. You clamp down. You’re in a crowd, surrounded by people, but,” I raised my hands to do air quotes, “your brain goes, ‘Everything is shit. Why try,’ and makes you feel that. That it’s pointless, everything is pointless.”

“Have you ever felt it?” he asked, and I could see that he was asking something else.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Of course. Do you still feel it right now?”

“Only a little.”

“Is it dissipating?”

“It is.”

We both grew quiet.

Mistaking our temporary and wistful silence for an awkward one, Frank decided to pitch a conversation topic. Settling himself opposite Wakuu, he demanded, “Hey, are aliens real?”

Barely a beat later, Wakuu replied, “Of course.”

“Then where are they?” Frank gestured around, as if lamenting the absence of intelligent extraterrestrial life in this establishment specifically.

“Oof, this question is all wrong,” Wakuu mumbled. He tossed back the rest of his drink, grimaced, and whacked the counter with the empty glass. “Hit me.”

Frank poured him some more, but refused to retreat. “No, seriously, how come they’re not visiting us?”

“They are visiting! The government just keeps it hush-hush, that’s all!” Noah exclaimed.

He took his place behind the counter, passed a screwdriver to his brother, and adjusted his glasses over an angry frown. Without looking, Frank threw the screwdriver into the sink, slapped his forehead, and went to get it back.

“They’re not visiting,” Wakuu insisted. He might have been hoping it would deter Noah; if so, he didn’t noah him very w— Craaaaap.

“Then how do you explain—” Noah proceeded to list several things that could all be easily explained by sleep paralysis.

I didn’t say a word.

“That’s true, I once woke up and saw an entity at the foot of my bed,” someone else confirmed from behind our backs, coming closer. I didn’t turn to check who it was. My eyes were glued to Wakuu’s fingers clenching the liquor glass. Way too hard.

“If an alien wanted to study me—”

“Sleep paralysis?” Wakuu whispered in my ear while they talked to Noah.

“It’s always sleep paralysis,” I whispered back, savoring the wisp of his warm breath, wishing for more, wondering if he was too.

“—scared, and I couldn’t move my anything for some time, then I moved, and the entity left, because I moved.”

“That’s sleep paralysis,” said Yuri, looking exhausted as she slid her tattooed arms over the counter to my right, and grabbed the bowl of arare. “You’re mixing up cause and effect.”

Either they didn’t listen or didn’t hear.

Frank grumbled, pouring her a glass of tap beer, “Nobody keeps anything hush-hush.” Unlike Rafael and Pablo, he and his brother weren’t living together, so I knew that I would not witness another ugly sibling squabble tonight; nonetheless, Frank’s tone indicated that Noah’s obsession with the ‘unexplainable’ was getting on his nerves. He fumbled for the explainable, addressing the physicist again, “What are the scientific explanations?”

Gray, rote. “Distances. A matter of choice, lack of desire to do it. The entire concept of galactic colonization might be laughable for an advanced—”

“How is it laughable?!”

More of the curious and slightly inebriated people were gathering around the bar counter, attracted by the topic. And by the pinch of life thrown into the wake.

Wakuu was a polite and friendly person. Not someone who would ever say, ‘please scram so I might continue sorting through one human brain in this mine skull’. Not someone who would dismiss a fellow human’s lust for knowledge. The distinct breed of academic with zero superciliousness to him. One who would gladly, and with no judgment, offer five accessible synonyms to ‘superciliousness’ at the first request.

He answered their questions in a polite manner, sounding leveled and even more patient than he had been with my gloopy stuff — looking more and more despondent with each passing second.

“—what do you mean, zoo!” objected Noah, indignation personified. “We’re not in a zoo!”

Looking at Wakuu talk, I silently mused on the whole concept of the nakedness of the mind. On fighting against the fear of it. On expressing feelings through comedy.

On replacing feelings with jokes.

“—look, that’s all speculation. I have neither the tools nor the knowledge to prove any of those,” he attempted. His version of ‘would you leave me alone already’ achieved the opposite effect, of course.

Having deemed the other explanations downers, they demanded more.

“But what are the chances of, like, this superpredator civilization?”

“Very low,” Wakuu pleaded. “Extremely, improbably low.”

“Well, that’s great! Are there any more?”

I was already brainstorming ways of pulling him out when, his face cosmic levels of despondent, Wakuu looked into my eyes, clearly signaling ‘help’; he proceeded with the impromptu seminar in an attempt to conclude it. “There’s one more. Not so great. Despite the name. It—” Music interrupted him.

None of us had noticed Theo arrive, pass by us, plug in his own speaker, and settle on his traditional spot with his guitar. For whatever reason, perhaps because Theo was in a foul mood, the song was slow and mournful.

Sunny and Eleanor, the oldest people present, the only two people not interested in why the heck aliens weren’t visiting Fishensips, had moved to the dancefloor a second into Theo playing; they were slowly waltzing now, their faces placid and content. Must have put Ollie into bed to drop by here and get a breather. A date night.

Taking advantage of the situation, I finally mobilized the Girl Saves Boy routine, in order to help Wakuu get away from the questions.

“Wanna dance?” I said out loud, instead of exhaling it into his ear.

He jump-started, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me and himself away to the mundane, the beautiful.