Alien Diplomacy

everything perfectly other than me and Eugene. We were both washing out, and neither one of us could afford to.
    What made this worse was that Amy hadn’t even had to take the class. Oh, sure, she’d come from money and I’d come from covert ops masquerading as dull middle class, but it still wasn’t fair. I’d saved the world in the double digits, easy, and yet, here I was, the Class Dunce.
    Amy had breezed in, spent about an hour with Lockwood, and bam, there she was, already approved and back in the Alpha Centaurion Embassy, all snug and secure and not being picked on.She’d tried to help me, but I wasn’t really excited about studying this stuff when I was released from the prison that was this class, and all it had done was make us snap at each other, so she’d given up, and I’d resigned myself to spending time in Hell every week for the rest of the foreseeable future.
    Class droned on, and I reminisced about the days when I was happy and carefree, killing parasitic superbeings for a living. Or when I was averting intergalactic war. Running away from scary creatures, both human and extremely not, that were trying to kill me. Saving the day. Those days were only three months ago, really, but they seemed like a lifetime away, especially when I was in the Washington Wife class.
    It didn’t help that my husband and my two best male friends had both insisted that I take the stupid class in the first place. With Jeff, Chuckie, and Reader aligned against me, I had nowhere to turn. That my husband was the head of the A-C Diplomatic Corps, Chuckie was the head of the C.I.A.’s ET Division, and Reader was now Head of the Field for Centaurion Division made the directive to attend sort of unavoidable.
    Oh, sure, they’d insisted after I’d inadvertently insulted the Prime Minster of England, but how could I have known he wasn’t willing to admit that the Rolling Stones weren’t half the band Aerosmith was and never would be?
    Lockwood droned on, and I surreptitiously checked my watch. Fifteen more minutes and I could escape. If only A-Cs weren’t deathly allergic to alcohol, I’d get drunk both before and after this class, but, sadly, I was restricted to nothing harder than Coca-Cola or iced tea. I never wanted to risk Jeff not being able to kiss me. Him kissing me was still on my Top Three Things To Do At Least A Dozen Times Every Day list. Kissing tended to lead to my other top two things to do. My mind wandered happily to our sex life and stayed there.
    “The President’s Ball is in two days,” Lockwood reminded us, yanking my mind away from Pleasure Island. She had a happy smile for all, until her eyes hit the back corner where Eugene and I sat. We got a pitying glare. I was kind of impressed. I didn’t know how you learned that look, but Lockwood had it down.
    I’d spent much more time learning how to imitate my mother’s intimidating smile. I was getting really good at it. Pity that, so far, it hadn’t worked on the diplomats, lobbyists, or politicians I’d run across these last few months.
    My mother being the head of the Presidential Terrorism ControlUnit had come as a shock two years ago. Sure, she’d been lying to me my whole life, but it was pretty cool to find out that my mom was basically the Annie Oakley of antiterrorism. In my new career as a diplomat, however, my mother being the head of the P.T.C.U. wasn’t a threat; it was a liability, because many of the people I had to deal with knew her, and, therefore, were more than happy to tell her how I screwed up.
    “Please remember that while you haven’t finished the course yet, I expect all of you to do us and your spouses proud, and charm one and all.”
    Class was dismissed, and the others all wandered out in groups, happily chatting about what they were going to wear, who they planned to cut dead, who was the “get” politico to hang with. Eugene and I looked at each other.
    Eugene was the husband of the junior senator from New York, who was on the rise. The woman was an animal, meaning she was just what Washington ordered. Eugene, however, was a sweet, mild-mannered man who looked like an actuary because he was. He was of average size, average looks, and average intelligence. And he, like me, had fallen in love with, in that sense, the wrong person at the right time and ended up here.
    “We’re doomed,” he said finally.
    “Dude, you speak the truth.”
    We got up and headed for the door. “You two,” Lockwood said