Where the Forest Meets the Star - Glendy Vanderah Page 0,3

didn’t wait, stretching the hot white goo to her mouth. The marshmallows vanished in short order, and the girl roasted another batch as Jo carried supplies into the kitchen. While she quickly washed dishes, she decided on a new strategy. Bad Cop clearly wasn’t working. She’d have to gain the girl’s trust to get anything out of her.

She found the girl seated cross-legged on the ground, Little Bear happily licking melted marshmallow off her hand. “I’d never have believed that dog would eat from a human hand,” she said.

“Even though it’s a human hand, he knows I’m from Hetrayeh.”

“How does that help?”

“We have special powers. We can make good things happen.”

Poor kid. Wishful thinking about her grim circumstances, no doubt. “Can I use your stick?”

“For marshmallows?”

“No, to beat you off my property.”

The girl smiled, a deep dimple indenting her left cheek. Jo punctured two marshmallows with the stick and hovered them over the fire. The girl returned to her lawn chair, the wild dog lying at her feet as if she’d miraculously tamed it. When the marshmallows were perfectly brown on all sides and sufficiently cooled, Jo ate them straight off the stick.

“I didn’t know grown-ups ate marshmallows,” the girl said.

“It’s a secret earthling children don’t know.”

“What’s your name?” the girl asked.

“Joanna Teale. But most people call me Jo.”

“Do you live here all alone?”

“Just for the summer. I’m renting the house.”

“Why?”

“If you live down this road—which I’m sure you do—you know why.”

“I don’t live down the road. Tell me.”

Jo resisted an urge to contest the lie, remembering she was the Good Cop. “This house and seventy acres around it are owned by a science professor named Dr. Kinney. He lets professors use it for teaching and graduate students use it while they’re doing their research.”

“Why doesn’t he want to live in it?”

Jo rested the marshmallow stick against the fire-pit rocks. “He bought it when he was in his forties. He and his wife used it as a vacation house, and he did aquatic insect research down in the creek, but they stopped coming here six years ago.”

“Why?”

“They’re in their seventies, and his wife has to be near a hospital because of a medical condition. Now they use the house as a source of income, but they only rent it to scientists.”

“You’re a scientist?”

“Yes, but still a graduate student.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m done with the first four years of college, and now I take classes, work as a teaching assistant, and do research so I can get a PhD.”

“What’s a PhD?”

“A doctorate degree. Once I have that, I can get a job as a professor at a university.”

The girl licked her dirty, dog-drooled fingers and scrubbed them on the blackened marshmallow stuck to her cheek. “A professor is a teacher, right?”

“Yes, and most people in my field also do research.”

“What research?”

Relentless curiosity. She’d make a great scientist. “My field is bird ecology and conservation.”

“What do you do, exactly?”

“Enough questions, Ear poo . . .”

“Earpood!”

“It’s time for you to go home. I get up early, so I need to go to sleep.” Jo turned on the spigot and pulled the hose to the fire.

“Do you have to put it out?”

“Smokey Bear says I do.” The fire hissed and steamed as the water conquered it.

“That’s sad,” the girl said.

“What is?”

“That wet ash smell.” Her face looked bluish in the fluorescent kitchen light filtering through the window, as if she’d become a changeling again.

Jo turned the squeaky spigot handle to off. “How about you tell me the truth about why you’re out here?”

“I did tell you,” the girl said.

“Come on. I’m going inside, and I don’t feel right about leaving you out here.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“You’ll go home?”

“Let’s go, Little Bear,” the girl said, and the dog, improbably, obeyed.

Jo watched the alien changeling and her mongrel walk away, their fade into the dark forest as sad as the wet ash smell.

2

The alarm woke Jo at four, her normal time on the days she traveled long distances to her study sites. In the light of a small lamp, she dressed in a T-shirt, button-down shirt, cargo field pants, and boots. Not until she turned on the fluorescent stove light did she remember the girl. Hard to believe when she’d thought of little else during her restless first half hour in bed. She looked out the back door at the empty chairs circled around the fire pit. She flipped on the front porch light and stepped into the screened room. No sign of the girl.