Page 29 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

The barrage continued.

You’re a screwup, and you always will be. You’re an imposter, a fake. You don’t belong here because you don’t belong anywhere.

I scratched at the exterior of my hu-suit, feeling more suffocated by the second. I needed to breathe. I needed the suit off.

Desperately, I tapped the small spot at the nape of my neck. The suit loosened, unfastening along my spine and over the back of my head. I tugged at it and sucked in a breath as the material sloughed off my body and pooled around my feet.

Sweat plastered my hair—my real hair—to my forehead and dripped down my temples. But I didn’t care; I could breathe again.

I examined my arms under the dim light of the room. It felt strange to see my real self again. The green skin was bizarre in this Earth setting; my tentacles even more so. Another reminder of my otherness. The loneliness I felt was nearly as suffocating as my hu-suit.

The facts laid out before me were bleak: I didn’t belong on Earth, but I had never felt at home on Xaerea either. And if I didn’t have a place here or on my home planet…was there a place for me in this universe? Or was I destined to exist like debris drifting through space with nothing to tether me?

My breath quickened. I was doing it again. Catastrophizing. I wasn’t supposed to do that because it always made things worse. But some days were harder than others.

Not too long ago, I was full of excitement for the sheer newness of my surroundings, the cold shock of an unexpected adventure. But that initial euphoria was wearing off now, and I could feel my mood plummeting. It was never a good thing when I started to feel like that.

I thought back to my strategies—the list of tactics I’d developed to counteract bad thoughts. Breathing. Placing my feet firmly on the ground. Hugging my tentacles around my body, a cocoon that reminded me I was present and I was solid, and that I would be okay. I remembered that when everything feels out of my control, there are still things I can control. I always needed to remember that.

The comms deck was still sitting broken in the bottom of my emergency pack, split into pieces. Maybe it could be fixed. That was something I could do.

I was momentarily ashamed for not thinking of it sooner. Terranauts—true terranauts—would have been trained in basic repairs for such an occasion. I didn’t have that knowledge, but I had time, and I needed the distraction.

I pulled the pieces of the comms deck out of my pack and set them on the floor, kneeling to get a closer look. Turning them this way and that, I fitted them together and found that I still had all the parts. In a pocket of my survival pack, I found a tube of adhesive. That should work.

Carefully, I squeezed a glob of adhesive onto the broken bits of the device and pressed them together until it was whole again. Or, almost whole. Cracked and chipped, but functionally complete.

I pressed my thumb to the power switch and waited for some sign of life.

Nothing.

Just to be sure, I clicked it on and off again a few more times. It lit up, finally, on try three or four. Then it crackled and popped before going dead. Nothing else happened after that. All I could do was wait. Pass time until the morning when I could see Lola again. Lie low, act normal, remember the plan.

I ate a package of nutritional supplement to settle my empty stomach, then folded myself onto the low-slung couch. It wailed ominously from my movements as I shifted on the cushions. Lola was right; it was not particularly comfortable. When a spring poked me mercilessly in the tailbone, I had the thought that even the ground outside was more forgiving.

And so, it went like that for a while. A creak here, a groan there—from both myself and the furniture—as I tried to find an agreeable position. When I turned to my side after a fresh series of flipping and repositioning, my tentacle poked through the crevice between cushions and landed on a hard, smooth object. I tugged at it, but it seemed to be wedged in tight.

The mystery was too much for me. I was tired and bored, anxious to the point of losing my cool, but I had finally found something to attach all of my energy to.

I jumped from the couch and stripped it of its cushions, then snaked a tentacle to the object again. Oblong and rectangular, and relatively thin. Using my suckers for grip, I held onto its edges and leveraged my hand underneath to rock it loose. In retrospect, it didn’t register that Lola had asked me not to touch anything, this included. Another way I wasn’t a typical Xaerean—I was bad at following instructions.

I felt the object loosen, and with a final tug using tentacles and hands, extracted it from the couch. The force of my pull sent me tumbling backwards, slipping on the crumpled mess of my human suit and falling squarely on my backside.

It was a notebook. Well-worn, with yellowed bits of paper poking from the top and sides. I turned it over in my hands and read the front cover. Written in bold, black letters: Foolproof Recipes for a Damn Good Home-Cooked Meal by Gladys Fiona Maloney.

Flipping to the first page, I found a message scrawled in faded ink and began to read. It took some time to decipher, because I wasn’t as familiar with written English as spoken, and the letters looped and tangled on the page.

Eventually, I made out the message until I could read the whole thing. Then I read over it again and again, smile spreading across my face.

I’m a simple woman, and I believe in simple things.

Hot black coffee is the best way to start every morning, cold ice cream tastes best on hot summer days. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And, finally, that every person on the planet deserves a damn good home-cooked meal. Even fools. (Yes, I do mean you, Martie, in case you’re reading this—and I know you are because you’re a nosy Nellie with no sense of privacy.)

This notebook contains all of my favorite recipes, and my family’s favorite recipes. Some of them are new. Some of them are passed down from my mother and her mother before her. They might not all be modern, fancy recipes with foam this and deconstructed that, but I can promise you this: If you follow these recipes as written, you’ll have yourself a damn good outcome.

Love, Gladys

P.S. Martie, before you start your whining, yes, I included the blueberry cobbler.