Page 11 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

For the first time in a long time, I got to do something on my terms.

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It wasn’t long before I stumbled on another sign: “Welcome to beautiful Roswell Falls, the friendliest town in the universe.”

Seeing the sign, I couldn’t have been happier. Of all the places I could have possibly landed on Earth, I landed right outside of the friendliest town in the universe! I peered past the sign to a strip of road flanked by gleaming white sidewalks, wooden benches, and massive planters full of even more flowers. Lines of buildings stood at attention, humans milling about.

I sucked in a breath. It was my first time seeing humans in their natural habitat, and I needed to blend in, be inconspicuous. I steadied myself on the signpost and waited until my breathing had calmed.

I could do this. I would do this. A lifelong dream fulfilled.

My eyes were drawn to a building with a bright yellow facade and chipped hanging sign that read Southern Charm. I sounded out the words, testing my language skills, feeling them on my tongue. I liked the way the words pulled my tongue forward, my lips pursing with the pronunciation.

There were people standing out front—quite a few of them, all smiling and engaged in conversation. Laughter and the pleasant hum of many people speaking at once trickled from the open door. And the most amazing smells filled the air. Sweet and savory, so aromatic that it was dizzying. My mouth watered as I stood there, and my stomach grumbled. I grabbed a packet of nutritional supplement from my bag and shoved it in my mouth. It was dry and tasteless as I chewed, and nowhere near as appetizing as the smells coming from the yellow building.

I simply had to go inside.

Steeling myself, I walked past the crowds of people. Think like a human, act like a human, repeated like a directive in my head.

Generally speaking, the higher-ups would prefer if terranauts didn’t reveal themselves as extraterrestrials to local communities. Unfortunately, we had a fairly long history of getting caught by exactly the wrong types of people on the rare occasions we did get caught. Spiritualists who thought we were gods, conspiracy theorists with unsettling obsessions, and military units.

I walked up the steps one at a time. As I reached the front door, a gust of wind swelled behind me, detaching a piece of paper taped to the glass. It whipped around in the air before landing squarely against my face. I flailed, caught off balance, and managed to catch myself. I wrestled the paper from my face and held it to my chest. Without realizing it, I had made it inside.

“Can I help you?” A young human woman smiled at me from behind a stand. A tag on her shirt told me she was called Al, and that she was happy to serve me. She looked at the paper crumpled in my hands and said, “Oh! You’re interested in the job! I’ll introduce you to the manager.”

“Follow me.” Al, who was happy to serve me, waved for me to follow her. And although I didn’t know what in the universe she was talking about, I followed.

Lola

Sometimes things go so poorly that life decides to throw you a bone. Which is great…except sometimes you weren’t ready for the bone, and then you’re like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this bone?

Anyway, that bastard finally did it. My chef, Julian, quit on me mid-breakfast shift. After threatening me for months, that spineless pig actually followed through with something for once.

I would have been happy about this development if I wasn’t entirely screwed. Because, as luck would have it, Southern Charm was busy for the first time in months.

See? Life threw me a bone, and that bone bonked me right on the head.

I was peeking out of the kitchen like an anxious meerkat every few minutes, trying to determine how deep in the shit we were going to be. Based on the full tables and the groups of people I could see waiting just outside the front of the small restaurant, the answer was pretty deep.

This was the type of thing my dad would call “a good problem to have,” which was an overly optimistic way of looking at a problem—a trait that ran in the Maloney family. It was also an extremely inconvenient problem to have because I was down a chef with a full house and one server. Despite being a trained chef, I typically spent my days working between Front and Back of House, alternating between dealing with customers and my chef’s bad attitude.

Sweat gathered on my forehead as I worked the flattop grill and tried to keep orders straight. Everything was a mess because Julian preferred chaos over systems, and getting on my nerves over trying to improve. It was a wonder to me that he’d ever gotten the job in the first place, because Julian wasn’t particularly nice to Dad either. But in a small town like Roswell Falls, connections meant everything—and Julian was the youngest son of one of our older family friends. Being a good person was optional, it seemed.

Al, my cousin-slash-server-on-weekends, called out another order from the pass-through, and I cursed under my breath. Why did it feel like the whole town was in my restaurant?

I was being unfair. It was the first sunny weekend we’d had in a while after an uncommonly rainy May. People wanted to get out of their homes and spend time doing things other than chores. And now, everyone—and I do mean everyone—wanted brunch.

As soon as Julian jumped ship, I marched to the office, grabbed a piece of paper, and aggressively scribbled a Now Hiring sign with permanent marker. If he wanted to come crawling back here to beg for a job, Julian would be out of luck. After slapping the sign on the front door, I grabbed an apron, tied my hair back, and got to work.

Those egg benedicts weren’t going to cook themselves.

Back when I was younger, and Southern Charm had a regular stream of customers, the kitchen was staffed with a chef, a line cook, and a dishwasher. The way things were going, we’d trimmed the Back of House team down to just a chef with myself as part dishwasher, busser, server, and general manager. That thing about wearing many hats at work? Yeah, that basically defined my life at my family’s restaurant.

And now I could add the head-chef cap to the tippy top of my teetering tower of responsibilities. (My head-chef cap was a ratty University of Tennessee baseball cap, in case you were wondering. Go Vols.)

I rang the bell that indicated an order was up, and shouted to Al when she came to pick it up. “How’s it going out there, Al?”

“Can’t complain!” my cousin called back, whisking the plates onto a tray. Even though Al was technically a nepotism hire, she was also one of the best servers I had ever worked with. Quick, graceful, good on her toes—and if she were to break down, I knew we would be up the creek without a paddle. She was hanging in there, though, which meant I could, too.