Touched by an Alien

to plot how to run Christopher over with a truck.
    A little whining from Martini got Gower to reverse the no napping mandate, and pretty soon everyone but Reader and me seemed out.
    Martini shifted in his sleep, put his arm around me, and pulled me next to him. I wondered whether he was really asleep, but I figured he wouldn’t have let his head bob against the seat and the window if he was awake. I shoved my purse between his head and the window and he snuggled into it.
    Christopher was slouched into the corner of the front seat, Gower was sleeping in the same way across from Martini, and Mom had curled into a ball, using her purse as a pillow. For some reason, all of them sleeping made me more alert.
    I saw Reader look at me in the rearview mirror. “You can snooze too, if you want,” he offered. “I’m fine.”
    I shook my head. “I’d like to, but someone else has to be conscious.” Even though I was bone tired, I was also totally wired and wide awake.
    He grinned. “Yeah, we have to watch over our brothers from another planet.”
    “True enough.” I considered everything that had happened today and was very proud that I was more interested in getting some answers than in freaking out. “So, they have all these things like gates and we sit in traffic?”
    “That’s the way it goes, girlfriend.”
    “Why?”
    He was quiet for a moment. “Some because it helps keep a lower profile. Some because our enemies might not expect it. And some because they want to fit in.”
    This seemed possible if they were hanging with a lot of other male models. Not so likely if they were wandering around with the rest of us. “Does it actually work? The fitting in, I mean.”
    “Somewhat. Jeff’s the best at it, by a long shot.”
    “You just trying to make me like him?”
    Reader chuckled. “No. But of all of them, he’s the most adaptable. Always has been, at least since he was a teenager.”
    I thought about Chuckie for some reason. He was adaptable, too. He’d had to be—the smartest guy in the room tends to draw a lot of unwanted attention from big, mean jerks. Chuckie had grown up into a really awesome adult, which made me wonder if Martini had been similar in childhood. Then again, call it loyalty, call it stubbornness, but it was going to be hard for anyone to prove to me that they were a match for Chuckie’s brainpower.
    The urge to send a text to Chuckie telling him what was really going on was almost overpowering. I mean, even Professor X and Brainiac liked to hear they were right now and again. I glanced at Martini. He was still clearly asleep. And I was plotting to share his existence with someone not in the know, and he wasn’t reacting to it. “How can Martini be napping?”
    “Um, he’s tired?”
    “No, I mean, he’s an empath. He said he was really powerful.”
    “He is. Jeff’s the most powerful empath on the planet.”
    “Impressive. But he’s asleep.”
    “I’m not following you, girlfriend.”
    I tried to figure out how to explain what I meant without sharing that I wanted to let Chuckie in on the Big Secret. Well, per the confusing explanation of A-C hyperspeed ability, Reader was also a comics fan. “Daredevil has to sleep in that whole immersion chamber thing in order to drown out all the sound.”
    “Oh! Gotcha. Well, it’s a little different for the empaths. They have blocks.”
    I sighed. “Really, Martini told me that much already. I don’t understand what they are or how they work. And, is it like in the X-Men, where the mutant powers usually show up during puberty?”
    “I don’t fully understand it all, either, since Paul’s not an empath, but I’ll give it a shot. A-C talents can show up any time before adulthood, which for them is similar to us—around twenty-one. The stronger the talent, the earlier it shows. The average is, like for the X-Men, somewhere around puberty.”
    “So, what happens when the acne coincides with the ability to know how mad your mother really is with your crashing her car?”
    “I’m not going to ask why you used that example, girlfriend. The A-Cs test all their kids when they’re young to spot talent inclination. It’s only an issue for some of their talents. I mean, scientific aptitude doesn’t mean you have to shut anything off.”
    I thought about the fun Chuckie had had prior to college. “Other than maybe your brain.”
    Reader chuckled. “Yeah. So, the empathic-likely get trained in how to block off emotions. It