Earth Girls Aren’t So Easy
Chapter Four: A Fly in the Web!
Somewhere in Middle America, Sunday evening
Jenny’s pale blue eyes were locked in place, focused on nothing in particular. Her chest rose up and down slowly, a thin wisp of frozen breath escaping from her lips each time. She didn’t move. She couldn’t move. All she could do was watch the spiral.
Spinning… faster… deeper… spinning… watching… spinning… deeper… fassster…
B’nak faced Nicole, whose eyes were as blank as Jenny’s. “You have done well this time, humanoid female.”
“I serve and obey the Kzzrk Empire.”
“It’s… you have to put the emphasis on the second part of the… oh, never mind. You have pronounced the word sufficiently, humanoid female.”
“I serve and obey the Kzzrk Empire.”
“You will continue to carry out your orders. You will return to this place in three Earth solar cycles. You will again bring us an attractive humanoid female who is of your own age. You will let no one know that you serve the Kzzrk Empire.”
“I hear, and obey.”
B’nak turned to the beautiful blonde, who was still mesmerized by Q’nan’s mind ray. “Hey, Q’nan! Turn that thing off before you melt her brain! We’re going to need her.”
Q’nan set his X77 aside as Jenny’s arms fell to her sides. He shook his head. “Again, I don’t want to stress this, but there are three billion humanoid females on this planet. There are no shortage of stars in this galaxy, B’nak.”
“This one is good-looking, though. And she’s not resisting the mind ray at all.”
“Some minds are weaker than others? That’s usually how it works with this old tech.” Q’nan scanned the darkness beyond the edge of the field, still wary after their last near-discovery. “Still, we should get her on board and get that bracelet on her before the ray wears off.”
“This worked perfectly! If we keep telling them to find humanoid females more attractive than themselves, who knows what we might end up with?” B’nak rested his stubby leg against the ship’s ladder, lost in the fantasy. “The entire ship filled with the most beautiful mind-slaves the Core Planets have ever seen! And now that we have two of them out gathering new subjects? I bet we’ll be back home before my boss even notices I’m gone.”
“I thought you used vacation time?” Q’nan’s antennae twitched, a sure sign that he was about to lose his cool. “You just up and left?”
“What else could I do? I used up all of my time off when we went hunting Tomesh. I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass us by just because of a stupid bureaucratic rule like that.”
“Humanoid female,” said Q’nan, trying to project authority in spite of his growing anger. “You will enter the ship and await further instructions. Obey!”
“Yes. I hear and obey.”
B’nak let her pass, then attempted to follow her. His companion intervened, grabbing the shorter alien by the midsection and pulling him off the rungs, the two of them landing in a painful heap at the base of the ladder.
“You didn’t mention this earlier?” Q’nan’s antennae twitched. “You didn’t even think to mention this earlier? Why do you never mention anything earlier, you… you… never-mentioner!”
B’nak rolled away and picked himself up off the ground, brushing away the dirt and grass. “Ow! I didn’t mention it because you always act like this, that’s why! Stop worrying! The whole point of taking two Ouiaiia bracelets was so that we could get back home with plenty of time to spare.”
“Stealing two Ouiaiia bracelets. And if they notice that you left, they’re going to wonder if you quit, and then the first thing they’ll do is check to see if you stole anything on your way out. Which you did, B’nak! The bracelets, the brain smoother… the map! Oh, Pkrar! Please please please don’t tell me there’s another copy of that map they can use to follow us!”
“Okay.”
“B’nak! Tell me there’s no copy of that map!” He chased the other alien up the ladder. “You never said there was another map! B’nak!”
Later
Jenny was naked. Her arm was raised straight ahead in a mindless salute. Blonde hair framed her beautiful blank face. The iridescent bracelet fit snugly around her wrist.
“Humanoid female, do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You will serve as an instrument of the Kzzrk Empire.”
“I hear, and obey.”
“Your mind and body belong to the Kzzrk Empire.”
“I hear, and obey.”
“You will return to the humanoids. No one must suspect that you serve the Kzzrk Empire.”
“I hear, and obey.”
“In three Earth solar cycles, you will return to this place. You will bring a humanoid female who is of your age, and who is as attractive as you are. You will not bring the humanoid female who brought you here tonight. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I hear, and obey.”
B’nak grinned, in a way that only the Kzzrks themselves would recognize as a grin.
Q’nan did not share his enthusiasm.
Somewhere in Middle America, Monday morning
Nicole obeyed.
She was in her bed. She looked at the clock. Still thirty minutes to go. Thirty minutes to get a few more winks in. But…
…but where was I last night?
It was like her brain had turned into a gigantic Chinese finger-puzzle. The harder she tried to make herself remember what happened on Sunday night—or Saturday, or Friday, for that matter—the more her memory seemed to rebel against her. Nothing happened, it lied to her. As if she’d gone to bed on Friday night and slept like Rip Van Winkle for three straight days.
She sat upright in bed and scanned her room for clues. Clothes from the laundry bag were draped over chairs or piled on the floor, so she’d at least been up and about—and dressed for it—for at least part of the weekend. There were, as far as she could see, no empty bottles of Colonel Stephenson’s nasty cheap bourbon lying around, and the neon-red bottle of Kamamalu Lava Rum was still on the same shelf, untouched, exactly where she’d left it a month ago. Coming up empty, she examined her own body, worried that she would find mysterious bruises or, like in an old horror movie, find herself covered in someone else’s blood.
But neither was the case. She was fine, aside from being pleasantly sore below the waist. Her clit hummed with a happy memory it refused to share with the rest of Nicole. Had there been a guy? Her magic wand was in its usual spot on the bedside table, within easy reach for those nights when Nicole really needed to get laid and Charlie was out of town. Now that the bastard had decided to break up with her… well, who could blame her? Spending an entire weekend holed up in her room, boozing and binge-watching and masturbating to Vampire City’s Clay Colton sounded like a good idea, even now, and she briefly pondered taking yet another day off to do just that. Again.
Again?
Yeah, it’s pretty obvious, Nicole. You didn’t finger yourself this sore.
Twenty minutes to go. She closed her eyes and waited for the pleasant feelings that came with a quick nap to wash over her, but they refused to do so, probably because her brain was still stubbornly trying to remember the weekend’s events. A few fruitless minutes of tossing, turning, and sticking her head beneath the pillows only made things worse, and with a heavy sigh, she threw her sheets aside and sat up. She sent one of the pillows sailing across the room, then the other; the act didn’t make her feel any better.
“Maybe Jenny can fill me in,” she said to the wayward pillows.
A new thought appeared, and she frowned. Jenny always had plans. Jenny always knew where the party was. Jenny always had an extra red cup in her hands. If she’d really spent the weekend drunk out of her mind, Jenny was the reason.
“I’ll kill her,” Nicole decided. “I swear to God. Why do I always listen to her?”
Meanwhile
Jenny obeyed.
She was walking through outer space, which seemed absurd—somehow she didn’t need a spacesuit or a helmet, or even regular clothes—and the planets she strolled by seemed far too small to be real. Either they’d gotten smaller, or she’d gotten much, much larger, but which was which wasn’t clear.
A cute little pink rocket pulled up next to her. It was a convertible, with the top down, and Nicole was behind the steering wheel. The brunette waved at her. She was wearing a space helmet.
“Hey! Wanna ride?”
Jenny wasn’t sure where she was headed. Outer space was very big. “I don’t want to take you out of your way,” she said, even though a ride in that speedy rocket sounded like a lot of fun. It reminded her of the toy rockets at he fairgrounds, the ones that bobbed up and down as they went round and round.
Round and round...
“You have someplace to be.” Nicole became Extremely Serious for some reason. “You must obey.”
“I must obey,” Jenny agreed, without knowing why. Something tugged at her feet, and she looked down to find that she was hovering over Earth. She’d gotten so distracted by Nicole that she’d forgotten all about Earth and its gravity, and now it was too late to escape it.
“Nicole?” But the rocket was long gone and Jenny, all alone, began to fall faster and faster towards the planet’s surface, her skin glowing a bright pink as she continued down, down down…
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
“Mmmnnnn.” She opened her eyes and rolled onto her side, left arm fishing for her little alarm clock. It took three blind tries before she managed to swat it into temporary silence. A part of her still wanted to apologize to Kallie every time she slept in like this. Her roommate had nothing but afternoon classes and hated being shaken out of a deep, drunken sleep by Jenny’s alarm every morning. But Kallie was long gone, an early dropout, and there was no one else in need of a morning apology.
BZZT
She immediately thought of the alarm clock—it was still five minutes into snooze mode—before remembering her phone. It buzzed again, sending a surprisingly wonderful vibration through her ass cheek and on through the rest of her body, and she considered keeping it there, letting it buzz away with whatever messages it was trying to tell her about. The world being what it was, she had no doubt that some girl, somewhere, had already tried pressing such a phone against her cootch, just to see what would happen. What it would feel like. There was, guaranteed, a video of it somewhere online.
“God, I need to get laid,” she moaned. The stream of messages had stopped, and she pulled the now-inert phone out from under her and flipped it over.
Missd u lst nite. Colin’s text, fast and sloppy, just like his lovemaking. Appropriately, he followed the text with a selfie of his admittedly magnificent dick. It rose above his prone body like a not-so-small flagpole.
Come over. She preferred a good fuck, or even a bad one, to spending the rest of the morning in MarCom 201. Colin had morning classes, but he’d blow them off for her, right? Right?
There was a pause in messages, a sign that he was deciding between options. When the phone buzzed again, it did not make Jenny happy. Cant gt clas gota keep grads up see u tonite?
Better a late fuck than no fuck at all. See you then! After a beat, she added Love you XOXOXO, even if she wasn’t feeling it at present. Colin had many ways of making her forget that he was a big, dumb meathead. Starting with the meat between his legs, of course, but also his big, strong hands, his talented tongue, and his surprising dedication, so rare among Southern Wisconsin boys, of making sure that she got off before even thinking of his own needs and desires. Was there any other boy on campus who went down on their girlfriends? Who even knew how? Jenny couldn’t picture a single one.
She looked down. She was getting wet just thinking about it. Not enough to soak the bedsheets, but enough to leave behind an incriminating damp spot. “I need a shower,” she declared, and the promise of it proved more than enough to propel her straight out of bed and across the chilly linoleum floor.
Soon
“Dammit.”
She had a hot shower, her favorite soap, a morning and a bathroom all to herself, a hot boyfriend, and a level of horniness beyond belief, but the chances of a mind-blowing shower orgasm seemed to be receding by the second. She pulled her hand away from her crotch and scowled at the shower head, letting the water sting her face. Self-punishment, maybe. Or a way to jar her memory into action.
She couldn’t remember anything about Sunday. Not a thing. Not a single fucking thing.
Her horniness washed down the shower drain along with the suds of her favorite soap and, for all she knew, those missing memories. It wasn’t like her to forget things. Not only was she not eighty years old and senile, she was also the one person in her social group who remembered everything about everything. Names and dates came naturally to her, and Jenny was a smashing hit at bar trivia.
And now the girl who could remember the exact dates of treaties signed in 1783 couldn’t recall what happened just 24 hours ago? Twelve hours ago? Confused, she turned away from the blinding shower spray and reached for her soap, intent on at least finishing the shower, hoping that senility wasn’t settling in. She could at least check in on herself later in the day, to see if she remembered taking a shower at all. That was a…
The fuck?
“Where did I get this?” She lifted her arm and examined the shiny bracelet clamped around it. Memory problems or not, it certainly hadn’t been there on Saturday. “Okay, either I got super drunk last night or I’m going crazy, because this shiny…”
…shimmering… spinning… pretty…relaxing… beautiful… spinning… shimmering… deeper… deeper… serve… obey… obey…
…bracelet was something I picked up at the mall last week. It looks good on me. I’ll have to find an outfit that goes with it.
She finished her shower in a much better mood, humming softly as she toweled herself dry and admired, for the millionth time, the pretty bracelet from the mall. What a find! She couldn’t wait to show it to Nicole.
…so deep… spinning… shimmering… obey…
Nicole is really busy right now, she sighed. Didn’t she say that she had a new boyfriend? That, and midterms, were enough to keep anyone busy. No, Nicole could wait. She’d run into the brunette eventually, and she could tell her about the bracelet then.
“Besides,” she said to the room, and to the long-departed Kallie, “I can take care of myself just fine.” As if to prove her own point, she picked out a tight skirt and a cute top and headed out the door, off-again on-again October cold fronts be damned.
Later
Nicole threaded her way through the crowded quad. It was noon, but the mental fog she’d spent the morning flailing through was still just as dense and confusing. The two boring lectures were nearly as much of a blur as the events of the past week. She clutched her notebook, hoping that whatever notes she managed to take down in Professor Chan’s class would be enough to get her through the midterms. In the crush of students streaming from class to class, she struggled in vain to pick out Jenny. Which was also weird. Jenny had a habit of finding her, not the other way around, but Jenny had been a ghost all day.
“Hey. Nicole, hey!” She turned to find a guy standing next to her, his face beaming with a smile that was a little too creepy for comfort. The fog lifted ever so slightly as she looked him in the eyes.
“Ohh… hey. You’re… um, Paul, right?” Is it Pete? It’s Pete. Dammit, Nicole, names. What does he want, anyway? “Um, can I help you with something?” Come on, she thought. Pete, Paul, whatever. Where the hell is Jenny?
He looked at her as if she’d said something ridiculous. But instead of offering a correction, he moved uncomfortably close to her. “Hey, are you okay? I missed you. I was hoping we could… you know… maybe I could take you up on your offer. Even if I didn’t email Richards about it.” His smile grew larger, and his eyes gave her what passed for a sexy glance.
Oh. OH. EW.
She took a step back. “Okay! So… this is me, slowly backing away. I don’t really know you, Paul, or… Pete or… whatever, and honestly I don’t even remember where I know you from, but this is a little weird, so I’m going to go to class now. Hoping you’re not going to go all weird and try to murder me. Because that would suck, you know?” She looked at him and tensed, not sure what to expect as a response. Thankfully, he didn’t try to reach for her and press his body up against hers like one of those frat house creeps. He looked genuinely shocked. Like he’d been in the middle of a totally different conversation with a totally different girl and somehow she’d suddenly appeared right in the middle of it.
“Okay, I’m gonna go. Maybe work on those pickup lines a little bit, Paul. Bye now.” She turned and walked with purpose towards a group of football players standing in front of Marin Hall. She gave a quick glance back, half-expecting him to be right behind her and for her to have to drag half the football team into an ugly lesson about campus stalking, but instead he was still exactly where she’d left him, feet rooted to the ground, staring straight ahead instead of at her.
This day is officially, completely, one hundred percent totally fucking weird city, she thought, as she made her way to Palmer Hall, trying to put as many people between herself and Paul as possible.
Meanwhile
Now it was Paul’s turn to be in a fog. Nothing made sense to him. It was like he’d just had a conversation with a totally different girl. Or a pod person. Or a robot. Or… well, anything but the sweet and loving woman he’d just spent the past few days with. If anything, her expression was more hollow now than it had been on the first night when she showed up at his door.
“It was all just a joke,” he grumbled. It had to be that. It’s not like she was just mad at him. She was literally pretending that she had no idea who he was! Just a fucking sorority prank, and you were the stupid sucker who paid the price.
He made his way to the Men’s Dorm and his own room. He gave the door an extra hard slam, prompting a complaint from someone down the hall. By this point, he’d worked himself into a righteous storm. “You stupid fucking idiot. You fucking fell for it. Fell right for their fucking bullshit.” He flopped down on the twin bed, sheets still unmade from the time when he and Nicole had… “Fuck me. I knew it was too good to be true. Gamma girls are probably laughing their asses off at me now.”
He looked up.
No. It didn’t make sense. Any of it. Nicole wasn’t in the sorority. Had never talked about the sorority, never expressed the slightest desire to join the sorority, didn’t seem like the kind of girl who would come within fifty feet of Gamma House even if she were on fire and the sorority girls were lined up on the front porch with buckets of water in their hands. She hadn’t taken any pictures or video of Paul, and besides, any leaked footage of him fucking a gorgeous woman like Nicole could only make him a campus legend, not a pariah.
Is she psychotic? Is she on drugs? What drug makes someone super-awesome and sexy and then… just not? Mood swings? Multiple personalities? Just a quick fling with me because her boyfriend dumped her?
Girls did that, after all. Hell, everyone did, or at least that’s what he’d been told. Get dumped, go out, find someone else and fuck their brains out. Scratch that itch. Feel like you got one over on your ex. Dump the someone else the next day.
But she didn’t do that. They’d gone on a date after hooking up. A full on date, and when it was over she asked him up to her room, and they had even better sex the second time around. That wasn’t how rebound sex worked. Was it?
“Like you’d know anything about that, Paul.” Like anyone he knew would know. Half of the guys he hung out with were still virgins, for fuck’s sake. The only rebound sex they’d ever ‘experienced’ was the streaming kind that came with a bow-chicka-bow soundtrack and huge fake boobs.
Maybe I should call dad? No. NO, ew. EW. Okay, that was out. How would he even begin to explain it? “Dad, when you were in college, did a half-naked girl ever show up at your door in some kind of trance?”
“Yes, son,” his dad would say. “And let me tell you, this is why drugs are bad. And now I’m going to spend the next two hours on the phone with you, telling you the exact same story about marijuana I told you in high school…”
There had to be someone he could call. He patted the sheets around him, searching for his phone, before remembering that he’d left the contents of his pockets on his desk. Sure enough, there it was, sitting right next to…
That fucking mystery phone. It all started when I started messing with that weird phone.
The weird phone that was only the tip of the iceberg. Nicole, remembering nothing about walking to his room in her underwear but seemingly not caring. Nicole’s bracelet, the one that made his weird phone blink. The way she’d freaked out when he suggested taking the phone to Lost and Found. Even she couldn’t explain why she’d done that.
It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
“Have you ever been hypnotized?”
“Me? Like, you’re getting sleeeeepy hypnotized? Not that I remember. Then again…”
“Well, that doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
But it did, in a way. If Nicole really was in some kind of hypnotic trance, or at least not in her normal frame of mind, why the hell would she end up at his room, of all places? She didn’t know him. There was a very good chance she’d never been to the Men’s Dorm in her entire time at Southern Wisconsin. And yet, she’d gone directly to him, in her underwear, probably straight from her bed, in the middle of the night, just coincidentally right after he’d gotten the phone to start blinking and flashing. The same phone that exactly matched the color of her bracelet. The same phone that began blinking the second it came near that same bracelet.
He picked it up. Turned it over a few times.
What he was about to do was either the most pathetic, stupid, useless thing ever done in the face of rejection ever, or it was about to plunge him into a world of some crazy espionage mind-control conspiracy Jason Bourne shit that could end with him getting killed. Or way, way worse than killed.
Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. One blink.
Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. Another blink.
Tap-tap-tap, tap, tap-tap.
The phone buzzed and buzzed and flashed just like before. “At least you’re consistent,” he said to it. “Sure, sure! Stop blinking, go back to being useless! At least you still have battery power.” It wasn’t like he could plug it in or anything. Once it was dead, it was dead, and at least then he could chuck it into the trash and pretend the whole thing never happened.
Unless, by that time, he was dead as well.
He sat down on the bed to await his fate, and laughed in spite of himself.
Palmer Hall, Room 200c
“Well, I think the story is pro-feminist, not anti-feminist, because… the elephants are like symbols of fertility, and they’re talking about abortion, which way back then was like totally not a thing people talked about.” Janice, who had clearly not read the assigned text, or possibly any Hemingway story ever, fumbled her way to the end of her answer to Professor Kale’s question. Nicole rolled her eyes. For the millionth time, she looked down at her notebook, which was covered in crazy-person scrawls.
‘Where did I meet Paul? Gotta find a faculty advisor. Ask Jenny about Paul. Ask Laura about Paul. Ask Laura about Mrs. Brown. Did I get drunk on Friday? Buy tickets to Homecoming. Buy ONE ticket to Homecoming. I hate Charlie! Who the fuck is Paul? He’s kinda cute. Get Paul’s number?’
“Ms. Cutrone? Would you care to respond?”
Nicole looked up, her face already turning red. It wasn’t the first time she’d been busted by Professor Kale. “I… I’m sorry, I…”
Professor Kale rolled his eyes. “I asked if you agreed with Janice’s rundown of Hemingway. You did do the assigned reading for today, didn’t you?”
She had. “Well, no, I don’t agree.” Janice shot her a dirty look, which she happily ignored. “Most scholars will tell you that Hemingway specifically referred to white elephants, not just elephants, because he wanted to emphasize that the man has never had to deal with an expensive unwanted burden, which a white elephant is, and that’s why he selfishly wants her to have an abortion. Because he’s afraid that for once in his life, he’s going to have to pay for something he did.”
“That’s a good summary, Nicole.” Professor Kale smiled, and Nicole felt redeemed. “But Janice isn’t wrong, either. The elephant is a symbol of fertility, even in this story. Can anyone tell us why that’s important here? How does Hemingway merge those two ideas?”
Nicole readied her hand. She knew the answer, but she didn’t want to be that much of a teacher’s pet. No, she’d wait until Kale grew tired of everyone else staring off into space and then she’d let him call on-
Her hand shook. Her entire arm shook with it. Alarmed, Nicole forgot all about elephants, her eyes settling on the iridescent bracelet around her wrist. It seemed to be glowing as well as buzzing. The buzz shot up her arm with the speed of an electric shock, and with much the same effect, passing through Nicole’s upper body and stomach and settling in her abdomen. Her clit buzzed in pleasant response.
“Hey.” Someone was asking her something. Someone a million, billion miles away. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” she said. Or tried to say. It dawned on her that her lungs had never provided the extra air needed to form words, nor had her mouth opened to allow them out. To everyone else, she was just sitting in her chair, acting weird, arm shaking as her pretty, pretty bracelet took control of her mind.
Control of my mind? Where the hell had that thought come from? She wasn’t…
You serve and obey the Kzzrk Empire.
CharliePaul entered her again, and again, only their dick was even bigger than she remembered, filling her more than any man ever had, or would. The sensation filled every cell of her body like helium, lifting her to her feet, making her drift towards the door. Her notebook and pen clattered to the floor, forgotten. Behind her, Professor Kale made sounds that meant nothing to her.
“I serve and obey the Kzzrk Empire,” she said, in a voice that was too low and hushed to be understood.
I hear, and obey.
She entered the hallway, gracefully, lost in a dream. The campus was full and yet deserted, empty except for her, except for her destination. Wordlessly, she floated across the quad and down to the Men’s Dorm.