How To Break Up With An Alien (19 page)

My alarm buzzed loudly, waking me up just in time to get away from the crazy dreams.

My door whooshed open and an Elmo pajama clad Elijah ran into my room jumping onto my bed with full force. "You are awake! And you get to be the princess at the ball!"

"Yeah, El." I rubbed his head full of curls while he buried his drooly face into my stomach.

"Morning."

I grabbed my glasses from the dresser and slid them on before I looked to see Ace standing in the doorway. Whoever picked out his clothes obviously had more of a fashion sense than I did. He was already dressed in a pair of jeans that had the fake faded look to them and a gray turtleneck sweater molded to his upper body, and obviously covering his temperature control suit. I remembered him saying something about Jen telling him this was earthly fashion. It may have not been my style, but I would have to thank her for finding something that made Ace look so good.

"Good to see that you two are up so early." I yawned.

Elijah jumped off the bed and ran over to Ace's side. "We have been up playing airplanes!" He focused his big blue eyes up at Ace. "Mr. Ace, you should come out of Alex's bedroom more often!"

Ace glanced down at Elijah, and then looked back up at me. "Maybe I will, Elijah. Maybe I will."

"Yeah!"

Elijah ran down the hallway and I could hear the blasting of the TV from the living room.

"Obviously you aren't as cool as Saturday morning cartoons." I smiled, slipping out of bed.

"And obviously I'm not going to take another step into your room and have your stepfather lecture me."

"He lectured you?" I threw on a hoodie over my nightshirt. Ace may have seen me a million times in my pajamas, but I didn't want to walk into the kitchen with everything just hanging out.

"Not in so many words." Ace looked behind him and gently placed a kiss on my forehead when I got to the doorway. "He basically said it wouldn't be proper for us to be alone in your room together, so I had Elijah come get you."

"Nice."

"How did you sleep?"

It was a simple question, but one that I really didn't know the answer to. I couldn't make sense of any of my crazy dreams. Why would I be walking into other people's dreams and why would Simone be there? It all didn't make sense.

I wanted to ask Ace how he slept, if he even did, or what he found out at Circe, but I felt something in my pocket before I could think of what else to say and it knocked me off course.

"Great," I muttered, feeling my phone vibrate in the front pocket of my hoodie.

We walked into the living room and Ace took a seat on the couch behind Elijah. Mom was already sitting at the kitchen table, typing away, and Brian poured himself a cup of coffee.

One of the four cats living in the house ran out from underneath the coffee table. Spunky, the gray Persian, stopped her running long enough to hiss at Ace and then pounce on the sleeping tabby cat, Whiskers, near the front door.

Brian shook his head, looking up at Ace and me. "I don't know what has gotten into those cats lately. I'm sorry."

Ace smiled. "Don't worry about it, sir. I'm sure they just aren't used to me yet."

Brian nodded, taking that as a good enough answer, not knowing that Ace had probably tried to eat each one of them at one point before I stopped him.

"Morning kiddo."

"Morning Brian," I muttered, leaning one hand against the couch and pulling out my phone. I slid it open and looked down at the text.

Hey, want me to do your hair and makeup today for the dance? I don't work until 2
.

Simone always had the coolest smoky eyes and I always told her that I wanted her to teach me how to do it. But it was the first dance I actually was going to, so I agreed to let my mom do my hair and makeup. She was a hair dresser before she became a writer, so it kept her happy and I knew she would do a decent job.

Sorry, mom is doing my hair and Ace is here, so we are going to hang for awhile
.

Boo, come see me before you head off to the dance?

Will do.
I responded.

With that I slid my phone back into my pocket. Hopefully Ace would be okay with a little detour before the dance.

***

My mom quit doing hair a few years ago. Sometime after she married Brian and right before she signed her first book deal. This would explain why I had the same Bettie Page style cut with short bangs for the past few years.

"So how are we going to do this?" Mom ran her fingers through my hair.

I didn't go in her bedroom a lot, mainly because it grossed me out to think of her and Brian naked in bed together, but when I did it was usually for her to do my hair. The master bedroom was huge and painted the same color as the Mediterranean Sea. They had a giant four poster bed flanking one wall with long silk curtains hanging over the Spanish windows behind it. Opposite the bed stood a sitting area with a green chaise and a few copies of Dr. Seuss books that mom would read to Elijah before bed.

Going into the master bathroom was a large walk-through closet, and I sat on the other side, in the in-suite bathroom, facing the giant mirror with the whirlpool tub to my back.

I shrugged. "I don't know. Whatever you think will go with my dress."

"I guess we can just start with some curls and go from there?" It sounded like a question, but before I could respond mom had already started clipping up chunks of my hair and turned on the curling iron.

"So, what are the boys doing in the other room?" I asked, hoping that Brian wasn't being his usual creepy self.

"Who knows?" Mom took a section of my hair, wrapping it around the curling iron. "Brian is probably talking Ace's ear off or Elijah is begging him to play."

"So does that mean that Brian likes Ace?" I looked at my mom's reflection in the mirror.

She paused for a moment and then let the curling iron go, an auburn curl falling down on my shoulder. "Well, we are just getting to know him, honey."

"So, you are saying that you don't like him?"

"Oh, Alex, don't be so dramatic. I never said that. It's just hard for a mother to see her little girl growing up and making big decisions in her life. Like going off to college in the southwest for an older gentleman."

I rolled my eyes. "Mom, I'm not going to Arizona just for Ace. Dad is there too, and besides..."

"They have a great public relations program," we both said, practically in unison.

"Right, I guess I've said that, a lot." I looked down at my hands. After breakfast I painted my nails a bright red color that was called Waitress in Waiting. It looked like I just stuck my fingers in a gallon of finger paint. How girls could keep their nails painted all the time was beyond me. I knew I would probably have them half chewed off before the dance anyway, so I probably shouldn't have bothered.

"I just don't want you to rush into anything."

"I'm not, Mom. I've thought a lot about my decision." I looked back up at our reflection. "When I was in Arizona it was one of the happiest times of my life. I felt like I really belonged there. I would just love to feel like that every day and to be around people with the same interests as me."

Mom nodded, staring down at my hair. "You know when I was your age I met a boy, too."

"I'm not going to be grossed out by this story, am I?"

Mom tapped my shoulder with her finger. "Hush, I listened to you and now it is your turn to listen to my story."

I blew one of the fallen curls out of my face. "Fine, go on."

"Anyways, I always wanted to go to school to be a writer, but I had this boyfriend who joined the Air Force."

I knew where this was going. It wasn't exactly a secret that my dad was in the Air Force or that I was the aftermath of a night in the backseat of a Lebaron.

"So, I followed him to boot camp and eventually followed him to the base he was stationed at. I started beauty school there and planned to do hair to help pay for my college tuition. Then a week after beauty school graduation, I found out I was pregnant."

And there was the kill switch. I was the one that ruined my mother's dreams of college.

"But you know what, Alex?"

I looked up at mom's reflection. She had tears in her eyes and both her hands were placed on the side of my head. "I never regretted my decision for one second. If I didn't follow your father I would have never had you and while I was at the base I wrote my first novel."

Her first novel. The one that got her an agent and the one that hadn't spent a single day off one of the best seller lists. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that she didn't go ahead with her original plan. It seemed to work out better for her this way. Maybe it would for me, too.

She brushed through my new springing curls with her fingers. "I truly believe that everything happens for a reason, and sometimes you just have to go with what your heart wants instead of listening to what everyone else wants."

Chapter 36

Brad Gage lived in the same neighborhood as me. Right down the street. We actually used to even play together the first summer I moved to Winnebago. Then when we started school he realized I was a geek and quit talking to me.

It was almost surreal to be pulling up to his house and see all the girls lined up in their dresses and the boys in their button-down shirts and ties. I'd never had any of this. Since the day I arrived in Winnebago I knew I was different. Not just because I looked different than the WASPs, but because I was different. A colonel's daughter, divorced parents, and now a future alien princess.

Mom let us drive her car for the dance, so I parked in front of Brad's house and locked the door before being greeted by Rachel Johnson in the driveway.

"Oh em gee, you made it! Your hair rocks!"

Rachel was wearing the same cheetah print tube dress with the long red train that I had tried on. It was still a ridiculous dress, but somehow with her long torso, she pulled it off. Except she just had to paired it off with a side ponytail and some converse high tops. Very classy.

"Gee, thanks." I ran my fingers through my hair. Mom had curled most of it and then just pulled half of it back while clipping a bright red flower in it to match my red nails.

"And this is the same guy from last night, right? Ace?" Rachel stared at him as if he were some sort of a statue in a museum. For how good he looked he could have been. While all the other guys wore button-down black shirts with ties to match the color of their date's dresses, Ace wore a three piece black suit complete with a crisp white shirt and red tie. I'd have to say, he looked good in just about everything.

"Yep, same one." I looped my arm through Ace's more for support than anything else. Mom insisted that I wear heels and even though they were only one inch high, I still wasn't very graceful walking in them.

"I heard you and Brody almost got into a fight at the game last night?" Rachel's eyes didn't leave Ace's.

He shrugged. "Yeah, I may have overreacted a bit. Just thought he might have been after Alex." He moved his arm and looped it around my waist.

Brian, mom, and Elijah walked up the driveway just in time to break up the awkwardness. Following close behind them was grandma and grandpa. I should have known they were coming. Grandma never missed one of the grandkids' dances. She showed up to everything, always with an old disposable camera in one hand and an unfiltered cigarette in the other.

Ace quickly glanced up at my grandpa, nodded, then looked back down.

"Is this the young gentleman from Arizona?" Grandma shuffled up the driveway, her voice more gravelly than a country road.

"Yeah, this is Ace." I smiled as Ace pulled me closer.

Grandma looked up at Ace and tilted her head, then looked back at grandpa. "Harold? Doesn't he look like the spitting image of that boy you were in the service with? The one who had the same Egyptian eyes?"

"Mother!" My mom put her hand on grandma's shoulder. I guess Egyptian eyes were the nicest way she could describe Ace's eyes that looked like they were circled in eyeliner. Of course it was not guyliner. He proved that to me once—a time that I would never forget.

"Now I didn't mean anything by it. Just said that he looked familiar, that's all." Grandma pulled her arms around herself and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket.

Grandpa nodded, looking up at Ace. For awhile they just stared at each other and then both nodded, like they relayed a silent message. "Yeah, Marge, maybe a distant relative." He patted grandma on the back.

With good timing, Brad's mom ran over to break up the awkwardness and rounded us all up to take millions of posed photos. Brad's mom looked just like a girl version of him: tall, a little stocky, and in a real need of a trim of her mustache hairs. She even sounded like him as she yelled for all of us to gather around the oak tree near the side of the house.

Our group was composed of Ace, the rest of Brody's usual crowd of vice presidential populars, and me. But Ace and I still made a point of trying to stay as far away as we could from Gemma and Brody. Incase either one of them wanted to start a fight.