The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [98]
That was enough to ruin things personally for Andrew, then and there.
Bari had been right again, as always.
And Andrew, regretfully, decided to do what he did best:
27.
Andrew Is Not an Alien
The obscure configuration of a slender shadow stood still before Andrew Erlandson’s bathroom mirror. It was confoundedly obscure, to Melony, as it would be to anybody after downing over two medium-sized bottles of E&J brandy with a new drinking buddy.
Drinking buddy.
She couldn’t believe she’d been allowing herself to drink. Like this and during an occasion such as this one, when her intentions behind the evening’s date were to remain inquisitive and aware and unbiased. For that matter, she’d gotten rather sloshed at The Crow Job Friday night, when she was first personally introduced into all of this, under the assumption that Andrew Erlandson was an alien.
Yet, apparently, Andrew wasn’t an alien after all.
Did that make it okay to be drinking?
The things Andrew had told her were nothing like she’d anticipated. They were neither incredible or fantastic, at least compared to the norm of earthly things, and they didn’t reveal any ultimate hidden secrets hidden beneath the guise of humankind’s superficial awareness. They brought Melony down to Earth with a mixture of disappointment and relief but with a lingering skepticism somehow. Andrew had stripped himself of the fanciful awe surrounding his nonhuman mysteries, made himself into an average guy with a past of outlandish but explainable circumstances, and lowered her professional expectations just enough to make him far more accessible to her romantic curiosities. It was a dangerous and frightening concoction, but so was brandy and coke.
Somehow, though, what Andrew had told her didn’t entirely ring true. But perhaps this was due to the utter let-down of how he was supposed to have been otherworldly and all.
She could hear Andrew out in the kitchen. He was talking to himself again.
Melony dowsed her face with cold water over the bathroom sink, resurfacing to meet her own glare within the wall mirror in front of her. She would go to great lengths to sober up about now, if only she could think of how to go about it. Anything for a comfortable frame of mind.
A little while before, anything could have happened.
Now, anything of a different sort could happen still, anything more down to Earth than she’d feared.
She wasn’t afraid anymore of that anything, but as she gave her face one last tidal wave splash of water, she found herself fearing all over again, fearing that certain anything of a different sort, and what it could ever be.
***
Melony had remained quiet and studious throughout the greater portion of the time Andrew shared with her the sugar-coated and carefully condensed tales of his life’s extraordinary highlights. He told her of the father he never knew and of the way he knew about him. Of his mother waiting in excess of several years, before she was engaged to be remarried to an inevitable stepfather for Andrew, after the pain of unexplained loss drifted into a celibate dormancy until the day arrived for her to accept the fact that her husband would never resurface from beyond stagnant yesteryear.
Andrew told Melony of an imaginary friend named Bari, and how Bari would spend time with him whenever he needed her to be there, whenever he closed his eyes and wished really hard for her to appear to him when he was all alone. No one ever saw Bari but him, regardless of the numerous episodes of his attempting to prove her existence.
No one ever saw, that is to say, but those unfortunate ones who blatantly threatened bodily harm to Andrew.
And in the aftermath of such instances, nobody believed what Andrew’s assailants saw, anyway.
And those were just human threats.
This most interesting friend had supposedly protected Andrew from threats of another nature also; by Andrew’s testimony, one had to assume that for every imaginary friend there were evidently