Fourth Expansion

After a peaceful summer of staying at home
With my grandparents and Celia, binge-watching way too many reality shows, eating ourselves into late-night comas, and generally wasting time pretending to be human, my second year at the Alien Academy loomed large. I’d nearly lost my opportunity to attend there—to learn who I really was—last winter and had barely managed to meet the terms of my probation and finish year one.

I felt as if I was starting fresh this September, with a clean slate. If only Headmistress Antrinsk shared my opinion. She held me to a high standard, one I could only pray to attain. And the new year held many surprises. One of my classes was called Pilot Training. After my survival class last semester, the title worried me a little. Were we to learn how to fly earth-bound aircraft, or something else…like the type of craft that might take me to another world? Something told me it was not going to be a pleasure jaunt to intergalactic outlets or anything.

Add to that the possibility my dad was somewhere around and had tried to contact me. I remembered him, but nothing in my childhood had prepared me for the idea he was not from this planet. If he truly was out there and wanted to reconnect, would he look the same?

I still didn’t know who or what I was. What planet I came from or what that meant to my future here or elsewhere. Sometimes, this whole ordeal was overwhelming. Too much for this small town girl from Earth. Did I have a destiny to fulfill? Something I might or might not be up to? Or perhaps being part alien was simply like being German or Russian—merely an element of my makeup and not especially relevant to anything more than myself.

But with three princes as my steadies, I had to wonder if there was more to me than Zoe Zimmerman, student and denizen of Earth. Would Pilot Training offer a way to my real home? Was Dad there? And with all the arranged marriages my fellow students seemed subject to, did he need to approve of mine?