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"So you're the quiet one," Alex commented suddenly.
Tess looked at him, surprised. She hadn't expected any of their group to drop into the seat across from her at a lunch table, let alone a human.
"Well, the cool kids don't hang out with you unless you're doing something for them, and you'd do anything for them, and they know it, don't they..." He trailed off abruptly, swallowed, and glanced down at his food as if only now realizing what he just gave away.
Tess's eyebrow came up as she studied him, outwardly cool.
"Yeah, well." He held out a hand. "I'm Alex."
She tucked down her surprise, then smiled. Shaking hands was awkward, but tolerable. "So you're the quiet one."
Awkward.
"Yeah, I am," he answered.
Tess really wasn't pining after Max as much as everyone thought she was. She was pining after family and destiny and a home somewhere out there among the stars because she certainly would never have one here.
But then Kyle ceded the bulk of his room and found places in the bathroom to squirrel the little feminine things she liked or needed. "Just don't ask me to buy you tampons," he ordered, friendly but firm.
Tess smiled her best coy smile and closed the bathroom door between them.
Alex understood what it was like being the odd one out, for all he'd grown up with his friends and known them his whole life. "We're practically family."
"Practically." She nodded to herself. "I understand that." She tapped the eraser of her pencil against her open math textbook and sighed. They were supposed to be real family, for all she hadn't grown up with them and had only known them before in another life.
"Want to get out of here?" he asked.
"Skip school?" Tess raised both her eyebrows. "You do remember I'm bunking with the sheriff?"
"We'll tell him it's alien business." Alex screwed up his forehead, really looked at her like he saw a girl and not just destiny and alien business, just Tess.
She yanked on her backpack. "Sure."
Their road trips were short and meant nothing, just running out into the desert for a few hours, down to the next town to check out normalcy where not everyone believed in aliens (but never believed; living in Roswell could give an Antaran a complex).
Tess liked Alex's funny stories and how easily he could do the things that would embarrass anyone else just to make her laugh.
"This is what it used to feel like," he said once, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.
She had to think for a moment. "With Liz and Maria?"
"Yeah."
"What?" Kyle asked, leaning into his bedroom doorway as she filed her nails on the bed. "You two together or something?"
"Or something." She finished a nail, looked up, and gave him the arched eyebrow. It wasn't a mannerism, it was semantics, and it meant, 'Do you really want to go there?'
No, Kyle decided. He did not. He sighed and sauntered out as if she hadn't just run him out of her business, but it was as good as approval anyway. To Kyle, Alex was harmless.
"So what is this thing?" Alex asked, fingers on a...
The book.
"Don't touch that," she snapped.
He raised his hands, Alex Whitman style, harmless and conciliatory. "No problem. Not touching the book."
"It's a book." She got off the bed and went to collect it and put it away.
So many little things that wandered in the wrong direction. Isabel spurned him. Tess befriended him. They drove out into the no man's land of desert and no alien's land of wilderness with a book and powers and the undeniable feeling of always being on the edge of something instead of in the middle.
"You can practice on me."
Tess looked at him. "You'd do anything for them, wouldn't you?" She wasn't asking about them.
Alex just shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked the dust. "Sure." He pined after Isabel, but Isabel wasn't here.
So many little things.
"I'm trying here."
"You're doing fine," she'd tell him, but Alex looked so frustrated, and she wondered uneasily if they should just stop. But one little taste, and she wanted this so bad.
"Let's take some time off school," she suggested, "hit the road for a while."
"What? Like a trip?" Alex gave her the look this time, raised eyebrows but without her cool. This was all incredulous, disbelieving, all Alex.
"We can work on the book, and..."
"We should tell the others. I mean, this is the big breakthrough, and we should all be worki—"
"No," she snapped sharply. She reached into his mind without thinking and changed it.
He stared at her, knowing that something had happened, but...
Tess cursed, once, feelingly. "I'm sorry."
But Alex just looked at her with that quiet little smile. He knew if she needed to, she would do it again.
They went out into the desert, driving and driving and driving.
Sweden.