Page 40 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

I rushed to the kitchen to retrieve my abandoned suit. I stepped into it quickly, fastening the material at my hips, letting the top half hang heavy around my torso. There was no way I could fully go back inside the suit—not with the way I was breathing rapidly, shallowly, on the verge of a panic attack.

When I reentered the office, Lola glanced at me half-dressed and squeaked. Then she averted her eyes and opted to stare just to the left of me. I stood in silence, waiting for Lola to speak first.

“It’s my wrist,” she said. “I think I sprained it when I fell.”

Lola held her right arm out. We both winced when we saw how it had swelled to twice its former size. She wiggled the tips of her fingers with a hiss.

“Okay, I definitely sprained it.”

Lola continued to avoid looking at me, and it stung.

“There’s a first aid kit in the bottom drawer of the desk. It’s probably over a decade old, and the painkillers are surely expired, but there should be a bandage in there. A, um, white thing that comes in a roll,” she added, finally meeting my eyes and noting my confused look.

I shuffled to the desk and found the kit.

“I don’t suppose you know how to wrap a sprained wrist?” Lola asked with a raised eyebrow. “Or a, uh…sprained…tentacle?”

She shifted awkwardly, reaching around her middle and twisting her hips until she could grab the small rectangular comms deck from her back pocket. “Here. I need you to do this.”

Lola pulled up instructions, and I read through them three times straight. I needed to get this one thing right.

When I was finally ready, I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“May I touch you?” I asked.

Lola flinched and my heart dropped. But then she said, “Yes,” through gritted teeth.

With a gentle steadiness, I supported Lola’s hand with my own and used my tentacles to gently wrap the bandage around her tender skin. When I was done, Lola wriggled her fingers again, but her eyes stayed dry. I must not have messed up, which was some relief—at least I hadn’t caused her even more pain.

There was a long silence. Then: “You’re an alien. A real-life alien.”

Lola

There was a segment in the Roswell Falls Gazette that my Grandma Gladys had loved to read every Sunday. It was an advice column, where people would write in with their problems, and an anonymous columnist named “Sally” would issue their best assessment of the situation. Sometimes the advice sounded good to me, and other times it seemed ridiculous. I wondered what the advice-giver would have to say if I wrote in about my particular problem.

Dear Sally,

I seem to have accidentally hired an alien to work in my family’s restaurant. I found out and then made a fool of myself by tripping over my own two feet. I sprained my wrist and had to ask the alien (yes, a real alien!) to wrap it for me. He was gentle and sweet, and he assured me that he came in peace—whatever that meant.

And, maybe this isn’t relevant, but he’s kind of hot even though he has green skin and green hair and tentacles (yes, real tentacles!). But his eyes look the same when he’s not in his disguise, and the more I look at him, the handsomer he seems. Which is weird, right?

Oh, also, I’m supposed to cook for a pair of judges next week to win a contest that would earn my family’s failing restaurant (did I mention it was failing before? Because it is.) enough cash to save us from having to shut down. (For now.) But now I can’t cook at all because of my wrist, and I think I might have a crush on an alien. A real-life alien.

What should I do?

—Stressed in Roswell Falls

I was too delirious with pain to be sensible. Everything was jumbled—a heady mixture of fear and pain and piqued interest.

Kal was an alien. Not Ohioan, not in a cult, and definitely not Amish. He was an extraterrestrial. A sentient being from another planet. That explained so much about him, somehow, but also nothing at all.

It kind of made sense, right? With as much time as we’d spent together, I had noticed some peculiarities, like how Kal moved as if he didn’t quite fit his body, and how he knew what some things were, but was completely clueless about others. Kal had also shown up in the middle of a shift looking for a job that he didn’t have any experience in, which was especially strange.

Come to think of it, he probably wasn’t looking for a job at all.

Plus, there was that freaky incident not too long ago, where the electronics went on the fritz and my brother and I had heard a loud boom.

How…how could I have missed the signs? I could have blamed my parents for raising me to be a reasonable, well-adjusted person who didn’t believe in conspiracy theories about aliens being real. But I was simply too busy to think too much of Kal’s eccentricities, and too charmed by him to care.