A philosopher, a psychologist, and an extraterrestrial walk into a chocolate bar …. Jass Richards

shook her head again.

      Spike zoomed out again. And showed the screen to X once more.

      “I must have really taken a wrong turn.”

      “Ya think?”

      Spike glared at Jane.

      “Maybe we can find a library,” Spike suggested a minute later, “show her some star charts or something.”

      “Okaaay.” There would be star charts online somewhere, but Jane was ready for another pit stop. “Get directions to the nearest one”—she nodded to Spike’s tablet—“here on Earth,” she said redundantly. Or not.

      While Jane made inquiries at the library’s front desk, Spike and X glanced at the books in a nearby cart that were waiting to be shelved. X picked up a Curious George book and started to flip through. She burst out laughing. Then she picked up Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, flipped through, and laughed even more. Spike grinned.

      “So they don’t have any star charts,” Jane said, joining them at the cart, mildly distracted by X’s laughter, seeing which book she’d had in her hands, “but they have several first-year astronomy texts. You might recognize something.”

      “Okay.” X set Hawking back onto the cart. Beside Curious George.

      Jane led the way to the astronomy stack, scanned the books, pulled out one hefty text and then another and then another, putting all three into Spike’s waiting hands. They went to a nearby table and sat down.

      “Why don’t you just flip through and see if anything looks familiar?”

      They watched as X flipped through, stopping at the photographs of various star systems here and there, but apparently not recognizing anything.

      “Where the hell am I?” She closed the third book with some finality. “If you just gave me your coordinates—”

      “Our coordinates?”

      “Well, not your coordinates, though that would be just as useful. I meant the coordinates of this planet. Earl.”

      “Earth.”

      X didn’t register the correction. “If you gave me the coordinates, I could figure out how to get home. It would take me some time, it’s not that easy, but I could do it.”

      “What coordinates?” Jane asked. At the risk of appearing like an idiot.

      X looked at her like she was an idiot. “The space–time coordinates. The coordinates of Earl’s location on the space–time continuum.”

      Jane and Spike look at each other.

      “I don’t think we know that,” Jane said.

      “Well, not us we, but—” Spike felt oddly obliged to defend—

      “No, I meant ‘we’ as in ‘us Earthlings’,” Jane clarified.

      X looked incredulous.

      “You don’t know your coordinates? How can you not know your co­­ordinates? It’s where you live. You don’t know your own address?” X looked pointedly at both of them.

      “Well, it’s not a problem if you’ve never left home, is it?” Jane said.

      “You’ve never left home? How old are you?”

      “Look, it’s getting late,” Spike said a moment later. “What say we find a hotel for the night, and then come up with a plan.”

      “Good idea.”

      They left the stacks and headed back for the door.

      “You know,” Spike said to Jane, “I used to have an uncle named Earl.”

      “Oh yeah? What was he like?”

      Spike thought about it, then shrugged. “He was a man.”

      6

      They pulled into a parking space near the hotel’s front office and got out of the car. In the space next to them, some guy was saying goodbye to, presumably, his wife and young son. A taxi had pulled up behind a parked SUV.

      “Now, you be a good boy and look after your mom until I get back.” The man had bent down to look eye-to-eye at his son. The little boy nodded. Satisfied, the man stood up, tousled the boy’s hair, and started tossing his luggage from the SUV into the taxi. The woman, clearly Good Housekeeping meets Cosmopolitan—an ironic, if not downright disturbing, combination—held onto her son’s hand.

      Spike stopped, one hand lazing on the knapsack strap on her shoulder, the other resting in her pocket. Jane and X stopped with her, Jane holding her travel bag and laptop, X holding two pizza boxes with two bags perched on top.

      “Are you retarded?” Spike asked the woman.

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “I’m just wondering why you need a child to look after you.”

      “I don’t.” She tightened her grip on her son’s hand. In case the crazy lady made a grab for him.

      Spike turned to the man. “Then why did you tell your son to do just that?” She knew damn well he wouldn’t’ve told his daughter to do just that.

      “What?” He didn’t have time for this.

      “Do you think your wife is retarded?”

      X looked sharply at Spike, then at the man and then at the woman. And then at Jane. All to no avail.

      “No, of course not!” The man didth protest too much.

      “The problem is,” Jane began to articulate Spike’s concern—one of Spike’s concerns—“the boy will over-generalize. He’ll grow up to think that every woman needs to be looked after by a man.”

      The two of them stared at her blankly. X had given up. Staring.

      “Which word didn’t you understand? ‘Over-generalize’?” Jane asked. “ ‘Problem’?”

      The woman pointedly ignored her. She gave her husband a quick peck on the cheek, then tugged her son away, back toward the safety of their hotel room. The man got into the taxi, and it drove off.

      “Is it any wonder,” Spike said as they continued on their way to the office, articulating her other concern, “that somewhere between five and fifteen, when a boy realizes, when it registers, that his mom is female, and retarded, she becomes subject to contempt or dismissal?”

      X opened her mouth. Then closed it.

      The three of them entered the hotel lobby, which was dotted with guests coming, going, perusing the tourist pamphlet display. X looked on with curiosity as Jane and Spike checked them in. Once the process was completed, the young man hurried around the counter to take—he stopped, confused. None of them had a suitcase he could carry. Especially not a suitcase that only he, a slight man who had never worked out in his life, could carry.

      “Down the hallway, on your right,” he said, then put his hand on the small of Spike’s back, applying a bit of pressure.

      She stopped. And spun around to glare at him. “Are you steering me?” she asked loudly.

      Everyone within hearing distance turned to look. Which meant everyone in the lobby.

      “What?”

      “Do you think I’m a frickin’ car?”

      “What? No!”

      “Then what’s your hand doing on my back?”

      He couldn’t say.

      “I’m not blind.”

      He