Chapter 2

Kestrel Kaspar had a pretty good idea that she had just made a new friend, and no idea at all that she had just made the biggest decision of her life. Again.

It had been a long time since Kestrel Kaspar had a friend. Except for…no, that didn’t count.

But, maybe that’s why she had decided to talk to the strangest man she had ever seen. Or maybe it was curiosity, or maybe it was pity. He did look very pathetic in his dripping wet clothing with his name on the back of his shirt.

Or, maybe it was a gamble on him being as out of touch as he looked—that he wouldn’t know any better, that he wouldn’t be afraid of her, that he wouldn’t be angry with her.

No matter the reason, she had done it. And now, after scooping up her new SolLar umbrella, she was making her way through familiar shadows under the boardwalk, feeling excited and anxious. She clomped through gross puddles of unknown origin without caring, she swept away strands trash that dangled from above without worrying and she walked quickly between tarred poles without looking.

She was on a mission now, a mission she had given herself, and a mission she had no idea how to complete. She had promised Oswald she would bring him something, but she wasn’t specific. She just said he’d like it—she promised he’d like it.

“What a stupid thing to promise,” she mumbled to herself as she turned a sharp corner behind a rusty steel wall, “promises should mean something.”

She knew she had used the promise as an excuse to leave, because she was feeling a little overwhelmed, and as a trick to get him to stay, because she was feeling excited to have a friend. She knew she had to leave, and she knew she really wanted him to be there when she got up the nerve to go back. So, she promised.

The path she wound around would have seemed like a labyrinth to anyone else. She hurried through darkened passages made of old shipping containers and security fences, she walked between slick old pylons that held up the glimmering world above. She ducked under low-hanging cross-members and hopped over piles of discarded commerce.

She was thinking about the first time she saw Oswald, thinking about the way she had to calm herself down before she called out to him. It was weird that she had a visitor to her little trash kingdom, and what a weird visitor it was. Sure, there were trouble-making teens in their SolLar outfits occasionally, and there were the patrollers rolling through to escort them out, but there weren’t a lot of…Oswalds.

 There weren’t a lot of tall, wildly underdressed, wet, bearded, smiling, shoeless men hanging around. But it was the smile, more than anything, that had caught her attention. The rest was weird, and she could get down with weird, but that smile was compelling. There didn’t seem to be a lot of smiles in her world. She wanted to smile more, and maybe he knew the secret.

The sound of the VRcade was getting louder and that meant she was almost back to her ‘workshop’—she called it that because ‘home’ would have been a lot sadder considering what it looked (and smelled, and sounded) like. But it was where she kept all of her things and it was where she slept, and ate and, to her naming credit, worked on things.

She also gave herself a little credit for where she had picked to put it. She said “location, location, location!” out loud to herself as she rolled the big, eight-foot diameter disc that used to be a pizza shop sign, and was now her front door, out of the way. She sometimes made a lot of noise down here—the work part of workshop—and the VRcade was the loudest place on the boardwalk. She rolled the metal and plastic pizza back into place once she was safely inside.

Plus, those idiot teens would get carried away in their little VR helmets and drop all sorts of things through the cracks. Trangs, sure, but also lighters, blades, vids, phones and sometimes even keycards.

She knew the keycards could be the real prizes, but she had never gotten up the courage to put one to its fullest usefulness. She liked to picture herself as a sleek and sneaky cat burglar, silently pillaging one of the resort penthouses, but picturing it was as far as she had ever gotten. Her imagination was up to creeping across rooftops, but her will wasn’t quite there yet.

She flipped on the lights. It had been a little discombobulating to live in neon light originally, but she had gotten used to it. She didn’t have much of a choice—regular light bulbs and stylish, sophisticated lamps didn’t end up discarded under a boardwalk as often as blaring signs pointing reveling people toward games or rides or tours or junk foods.

The lights came on quickly and showed her the entirety of the almost circus-tent shaped space. Tarps and towels and ripped solar and netting all came together to form a drapey canopy over all of her things. She did her best to separate the floor plan little areas for different things, because if she was going to live in a trash apartment under the boardwalk, at least it wouldn’t be a studio trash apartment under the boardwalk.

She looked around her workshop, trying to figure out what to bring back to her new friend. This made her feel excited—a new friend! A friend at all! But nothing she was seeing felt right. Then she started feeling the pressure of time—he wouldn’t wait forever. He might even be gone already. After all, he had done a weird martial arts maneuver when she had tried to touch his head, and that couldn’t be good, couldn’t be terribly friendly. She felt sure that people who did weird martial arts maneuvers didn’t just hang out waiting for strange urchins to bring them back vaguely promised baubles.

She was feeling ashamed about that, remembering it now—trying to touch his head. She thought that if she had blown her chance to have a new friend, that was when it had happened. But she also remembered wanting to close the distance between them, physically and interpersonally. She wanted to accelerate the process, she wanted to be close, right away. She may have beefed it, she was realizing.

She slid out a drawer from an old ticket-taker’s booth she had dragged down here years ago. This was where she kept her most precious tiny things, because giving tiny things a place to be makes them feel special—protecting something makes you care about it.

He probably wouldn’t want an engagement ring she had found buried in the sand one night, and from everything he had said so far, he probably wouldn’t know what to do with any of the keycards she kept rubber-banded together.

She dragged her fingers lightly through more shiny trinkets, but none of them were right. What would an alien want? What could a smiling stranger make use of? What would impress this weird out-of-place man?

She shut the drawer and huffed. Then, she remembered something, the biggest something she had. She looked behind one of her bumper cars and at the tarp that hid her biggest project ever.

“No.” She was talking herself out of it. It wasn’t ready and he wouldn’t be ready and she definitely wouldn’t be ready for all of that. “No,” she agreed with herself.

She stopped and thought about their conversation, thought about the things he had said and the things she had learned from them. He really had seemed absolutely clueless about everything, and it didn’t seem like an act. She thought about how lucky he was that a patroller hadn’t spotted him. And how lucky he was that he didn’t know anything at all.

“He really might be an alien,” she was talking to herself, trying to shake loose some idea, “but aliens can be friends, I guess.”

She realized she needed something that would help him. She needed to help him, for some reason. She did want to impress him, and she hoped she had made a friend, but more than anything, felt a deep desire to help him, to do…something. She wasn’t sure, but it felt very important.

She grabbed a big white tote bag and a big black marker and knelt on the floor. She flattened out the bag, brushed away some dirt and bit the cap off the marker. She held the bag taut with one hand and held the marker above it while she looked away and thought up something to write.

“Welcome to Earth,” she read it back when she was finished carefully filling in the letters.

“Perfect,” she said as she held it open and looked around for anything that could make up her alien gift bag. She threw in a couple mystery trangs, hoping they’d have some (but not too much) left on them. She threw in one of the blades that had fallen through her ceiling and an illuminator that came from the same place. She added a few snacks she had grabbed off a blanket someone had set up too close to her pier and an extra canteen. She even threw in a vid, because if he were as clueless as he’d let on, he’d get a kick out of it.

But, she needed something else. She needed something that would give him an idea of what he was dealing with. Or, at least something that would pay off her ‘Welcome to Earth’ joke. She ran behind a counter that used to be in an ice cream shop and opened one of the ice cream wells. She kept anything that would burn in there because it would stay dry there. But, some of that fuel would be priceless info for him. She threw a ‘Pitts: City on the Rise!’ pamphlet into the bag and made her way back to her pizza door.

She stopped in front of some shelving. She found one more thing, a pair of things actually, and shoved them into the bottom of the bag. She had been saving them, but she knew deep down that day, the day she’d been saving them for, wouldn’t come. And she never could have used them, but she hoped Oswald would. For his sake.

She powered down her neon lights and waited for some noise from above to cover the sound of her rolling her door open, then she sneaked through, and rolled it back shut again.

She really hoped he’d still be there, right where she had left him. She hoped he’d be smiling too, she really did like seeing someone smile at her for a change. No, more than that—someone smiling with her.

She started off in a hurry, because she was excited to get back and felt like he’d leave if he had to wait too long.

He’d leave. Those words stuck in her head and slowed her legs down. She needed to be rational, she told herself, she needed to really think about what she was doing. “He’s probably gone,” she tried to say nonchalantly, to match her slow pace. But the pace wasn’t slow because she was feeling cool, the pace was slow because she wanted to savor this.

These might be the last few minutes she had a friend. She might be on her way to discover her friend (and their friendship) was long gone. That’s why she had slowed down, to slow down time. “You can’t slow down time, you can only put off which bus you get on.” It was a strange quotation for sure, but one that she had thought about for a long time.

She kept walking. She swung the bag around, hoping he’d like it, hoping he’d still be there to like it. “Welcome to Earth,” she said again. She thought it was funny, at least, she thought maybe Oswald would have, too. He liked jokes.

She ducked under poles and slipped between gaps in fences she had memorized a long time ago. Her little trash obstacle course posed no challenge to her anymore, but she still remembered why she had put it there, what it was supposed to do. She wouldn’t let herself forget that part.

She got more excited the closer she got. She got more hopeful, too. She knew, somehow, he’d still be there. She knew, somehow, she really did have a new friend. An extremely weird new friend.

“But what if he left?” she asked herself, out loud.

“He doesn’t have anywhere to go, I don’t think. Plus he did seem fine staying there, and he kinda seemed lazy. Or just like, cool to hang.” she answered herself, out loud.

She felt better. For a second. She continued to talk to herself to make sure. Leaning back and forth with each side of the conversation.

“Ok, but, what if some shitty teens came and messed with him?”

“He’d be fine, he’d just tell ‘em to buzz off or some other weird alien term and they would because he’s tall and dressed weird. Teens hate that.”

“Ok. Ok. But, what if they had a blade and tried to stab him?”

“He’d do some cool karate to them like he almost did to me.”

“Ok, true, true.”

“Oooh, maybe I’ll get back just as that’s happening. That would be fun to watch.”

“Definitely.”

She had sufficiently convinced herself that wanderlust and teens were no threats to him.

But, she thought of something else that might be a little trickier to deal with. She had to continue the debate.

“You know a patroller could come. Probably would come—they go through there all the time, that close to the water and the tourists.”

“Plus, he stole that umbrella, no doubt someone told a patroller about that.” Uh-oh, she had taken her own side.

“So, either A: a patroller is coming right away, or, B: like, pretty soon after that.”

“Yeah. One might already be there, really.”

“Shit. I’m right.”

She lost that argument and felt nervous in her chest and hands. She twisted and crushed the strap of the gift bag she had prepared for him in her clenched fingers and picked up her pace. She wanted to help him, she wanted him to be ok. She wanted her friend to be fine.

And then she heard a loud clang.