Chapter Text
The summer heat in Texas was a living thing, thick and mean, pressing down on the back of Stanley’s neck like a hand he couldn’t shake. He’d been outside for less than ten minutes, and already his shirt was sticking to his shoulders, the blonde strands of his hair plastered to his forehead despite how he tried to slick them back.
Not that it mattered. No one was looking.
Stanley Snyder was eleven years old, tall for his age but skinny in a way that made him look more like a scarecrow than a boy. His mother said he’d fill out eventually, that the Snyders were late bloomers, but Stanley didn’t much care about that. What he cared about was getting out of the house before his father’s second beer of the afternoon turned into a third, and a fourth, and the quiet grumbling in the living room became something louder.
So he’d slipped out the back door, past the overgrown garden his mother used to tend before she stopped having the energy, and into the thin stretch of woods behind their modest home. It wasn’t much of a forest, more like a few acres of pines and oaks that separated their property from the old highway, but to Stanley, it was everything. It was the only place where his chest didn’t feel tight. The only place where he could breathe without counting the seconds until someone yelled.
The trees here were old, their roots buckling the earth in thick, knotted cords. Stanley knew every one of them. He had a favorite climbing oak near the eastern edge, a fallen log that made a perfect bench, and a small clearing where the sunlight fell in golden sheets during the late afternoon. He’d spent countless hours here over the years, pretending to be a soldier, a spy, an explorer in a world no one else had ever seen.
Today, though, something was different.
He noticed it when he was about halfway to the clearing, a smell. Not the usual smell of pine needles and dry dirt and the distant sweetness of his neighbor’s honeysuckle vines. This was sharper. Metallic. Like the time he’d touched his tongue to a nine-volt battery on a dare from a kid at school.
And underneath that, smoke. Thin and chemical, not like a campfire.
Stanley’s feet slowed. His heart, which had finally started to settle after the walk, picked up again. He knew he should probably go back. He knew that strange smells in the woods could mean anything, a brush fire, a car accident on the highway, something dangerous.
But Stanley had never been very good at listening to the voice that told him to be careful. That voice had never kept him safe at home, after all.
He crept forward, moving quieter now, his sneakers pressing into the soft carpet of fallen needles. The trees thickened for a moment, then opened up into his clearing, and Stanley stopped so fast he nearly tripped over his own feet.
The clearing was not empty.
In the center, where the sunlight always pooled like honey, there was a thing. It was round and dented and about the size of his father’s pickup truck, though it sat low to the ground like a pancake someone had dropped. The metal was a dull silver-gray, but not like any metal Stanley had ever seen, it seemed to shift colors when he moved his head, picking up greens from the trees and blues from the sky. One side of it was cracked open, a jagged hole that leaked thin wisps of smoke and that same sharp, electric smell.
And leaning against the side of the thing, coughing and muttering to himself, was a boy.
Stanley pressed himself behind a pine trunk, his breath caught somewhere between his lungs and his throat. The boy looked about his age. Maybe a little smaller. His hair was a wild mess of white, not blonde, not gray, but pure white, like snow or powdered sugar, and it stuck up in every direction. He wore what looked like a jumpsuit, mostly white with some black and teal accents, but it was smeared with dirt or grease or both.
The boy was facing away from Stanley, muttering in a language Stanley didn’t recognize. It sounded strange, fluid and quick, with clicks and hums that didn’t belong to English or the Spanish he sometimes heard at the grocery store.
Stanley should have run. Every movie he’d ever seen, every book he’d ever read, every story his mom had ever told him about strange things in the woods, they all ended with the same advice: Don’t get close.
But Stanley didn’t run.
He stepped out from behind the tree.
The boy must have heard him, because he went rigid. The muttering stopped. Slowly, very slowly, he turned around.
Stanley’s first thought was: Those aren’t human eyes.
The boy’s eyes were large and completely black. Not dark brown, not black in the way some people’s eyes looked black from a distance. No, these were the color of obsidian, of the space between stars. There was no white, no iris, no pupil that Stanley could distinguish. Just endless black orbs set into a pale green face.
Above those eyes, behind the goggles that sat on his forehead, two slender antennae rose from the boy’s head. They were maybe ten inches long, pale green and they were moving, twitching slightly, like a cat’s whiskers catching a breeze.
Stanley stared.
The boy stared back.
For a long, terrible moment, neither of them moved. Stanley could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, loud and stupid. The smoke curled up from the crashed… whatever it was. A bird called somewhere in the trees.
Then the boy’s antennae flattened backward against his hair, and he said, in a voice that was scratchy and tired but unmistakably young, “Are you going to scream?”
Stanley opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
The boy’s shoulders relaxed a fraction. “That’s better than screaming, I suppose. Screaming would attract attention. I’ve already attracted quite enough attention with the…” he gestured vaguely at the crashed vehicle “...landing.”
Stanley took a step closer. Then another. His fear was still there, buzzing under his skin like a trapped fly, but curiosity was louder. It was always louder.
“That’s a spaceship,” Stanley said. It wasn’t a question.
The boy blinked. His antennae twitched. “Yes. Well. It was a spaceship. Now it’s a very expensive pile of debris.” He frowned at the cracked hull, then back at Stanley. “You’re not running.”
“No.”
“And you’re not screaming.”
“Guess not.”
The boy tilted his head. The antennae mirrored the movement. “Fascinating. The statistical probability of a first-contact scenario resulting in a fight-or-flight response is over ninety-eight percent. You’re in the two percent.”
Stanley didn’t know what “statistical probability” meant, but he understood the gist. “You’re an alien,” he said. He was close enough now to see the fine lines of the boy’s jumpsuit, the way the silver threading seemed to glow faintly in the afternoon light. “Like, from space.”
“That is generally what ‘alien’ means, yes.”
“Are you going to eat me?”
The boy looked genuinely offended. “Eat you? Why would I- no. No, I’m not going to eat you. What kind of primitive social programming-” He cut himself off, took a breath, and seemed to recalibrate. “No. I am not a purely carnivorous species. Not that it matters. I’m not going to eat you.” A pause. “Are you going to eat me?”
Stanley laughed. It came out startled and a little hysterical, but it was a laugh. “No. Dude, no. We don’t eat people.”
“Good. Then we have established a baseline of non-cannibalism.” The boy’s antennae perked up slightly. “I’m Xeno.”
Stanley blinked. “That’s… your name?”
“It’s one of them. It’s the one I’m giving you. Names are complicated in my language.” He waved a hand. “You can call me Xeno. What’s yours?”
“Stanley Snyder.”
“Stanley,” Xeno repeated, sounding out each syllable like he was tasting them. “Stanley. That’s a good name. It has a solid phonetic structure.”
“Thanks,” Stanley said, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. He was looking at the spaceship again, at the strange writing etched into the metal, at the smoke still curling from the crack. “What happened? Did you crash?”
Xeno’s expression flickered. For a moment, he looked less like a strange alien creature and more like a kid trying very hard not to cry. “I built it myself,” he said quietly. “The propulsion system was supposed to be stable. I calculated the trajectories three times. But the atmospheric density here is… different. Heavier. I didn’t account for the drag coefficient.” He kicked at a loose stone with the toe of his boot. “I’m stranded.”
Stanley didn’t know what a drag coefficient was either, but he understood stranded. He understood being someplace you didn’t want to be, with no way out.
“Can you fix it?” he asked.
Xeno looked at the spaceship. The smoke was thinning now, fading to nearly nothing. “Maybe. I designed it. I know every component. But I don’t have the materials I need, and I don’t know anything about this planet’s resources, and my parents aren’t coming to get me.” The last part came out flat, almost rehearsed. Like he’d already accepted it.
Stanley thought about his own father, sitting on the couch with his beer and his temper. He thought about how many times he’d wished someone would come get him, and how no one ever did.
“I could help,” Stanley said.
Xeno’s black eyes widened and his antennae shot straight up. “You want to help me?”
“Yeah.” Stanley shrugged, shoving his hands in the pockets of his shorts. “I mean, you’re not gonna eat me. And you’re stuck. And I know this area pretty well. If you need stuff, I can probably find it.”
Xeno stared at him for a long, long moment. His antennae slowly lowered, curling forward slightly like they were reaching toward Stanley. Then, very softly, he said, “You’re strange, Stanley.”
“You’re one to talk.”
A tiny smile tugged at the corner of Xeno’s mouth. It was the first time he’d looked anything but scared or exhausted. “Fair point.”
They stood there in the clearing, the crashed spaceship between them, the summer heat pressing down like a held breath. Stanley should have been terrified. He’d seen E.T., he’d seen The X-Files with his mom when she thought he was asleep, he’d read enough comic books to know that aliens were unpredictable at best and dangerous at worst.
But Xeno didn’t seem dangerous. He seemed tired. And lonely. And maybe a little bit like he hadn’t expected anyone to be nice to him.
Stanley knew that feeling.
“Okay,” Stanley said, making a decision the way he always did, fast and final. “Here’s the plan. You hide your ship. Cover it with branches or something. I’ll come back tomorrow with food and stuff, and we can figure out what you need to fix it.”
Xeno blinked. “You’re… you’re just going to come back?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I’m an alien.”
“So?”
Xeno opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. For someone who talked like a dictionary, he seemed to have run out of words. Finally, he said, “You’re very strange, Stanley Snyder.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Stanley turned to go, then paused. “Hey, Xeno?”
“Yes?”
“The antennae. Are those real?”
Xeno touched one self-consciously. “Yes. They’re sensory organs. Why?”
“No reason.” Stanley grinned. “They’re just kind of cool.”
He walked back through the trees before Xeno could respond, but he heard the alien boy let out a small, surprised laugh behind him. It was a nice sound. Light. Like something that hadn’t been used in a long time.
—
Stanley’s father was asleep on the couch when he snuck back in through the back door, the afternoon light turning the living room gold and thick with dust motes. His mother was in the kitchen, washing dishes in slow, tired circles. She looked up when he came in, and her eyes softened.
“There you are,” she said. “I was starting to worry.”
“Just exploring,” Stanley said. It wasn’t a lie, exactly.
She nodded, and he could see her debating whether to ask more, whether to push. In the end, she didn’t. She never did anymore.
Stanley went to his room and closed the door. He sat on his bed, looking at his hands, and thought about black eyes and white hair and a boy who’d crashed to Earth because he was trying to go somewhere else.
He thought about helping him leave.
And for the first time in a long time, Stanley Snyder was excited about tomorrow.
