The Girl Who Fell to Earth Read Online Free

returned home to the Pacific Northwest after a brief stint in New York, where she had gone hoping to find a place in the leggy lineup of Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, but failed. Gale was staring into the fishbowl of Buzz Aldrin’s gold-plated visor and wondering if she’d ever get another chance to get out of this town.
    That’s when a “good-looking, kind of dark-skinned guy” slid into a seat a few booths down from where she was sitting. He was young and bedraggled, and looked very, very lonesome. Gale watched him through the smoke of her cigarette, leaving it to burn down to the butt. He looked frightened, eyes wide but cast down into a box of Tide laundry detergent. Gale recognized the look of shock: it was the stock-still stare of a spooked horse, eyes rolled and very still. She wondered what she could do to calm him. It took Matar a few minutes to notice Gale staring at him. When he finally did, she blushed and raised her whole head to the cigarette for a drag, “like a little goat trying to eat a tall tree,” Matar noted.
    Someone put “Satellite of Love” on the jukebox over the rumble of balls and pins and waxed pine. The lyrics were simple. Almost simple enough for Matar to grasp the chorus as Gale mouthed it silently to herself, tapping her foot in time on the polished floor. She went back to her magazine while he earnestly studied her from across the room. She wore black clothing he’d never seen before, tight at the hips and low at the bib. Her hair was sandy yellow, like sixteen-karat gold dulled down in the fog of cigarette smoke. She had it folded into two loose plaits, reminding him of his boyhood dream girl, Samira Tawfiq. He concentrated on her mouth as she lip-synched the song. The words from the jukebox were hard to recognize, but when he read them from her lips they were clear, simple, comprehensible. “I love to watch things on TV.”
    Gale felt Matar’s eyes on her and kept a thousand-yard stare on her Marlboro. As the song trailed off at the end, she stabbed out her smoke and met the brown boy’s gaze straight on.
    A hyped-up group of jocks burst into the alley and headed toward the table Gale sat at. Without looking at them, she slid out of the booth and sidled over to the young man with long wet hair and pink bell-bottoms. “Mind if I sit with you?” she asked in a put-on kind of tough. Matar smiled dumbly back up at her. “What’s the matter. Are you shy?”
    This question flummoxed him.
    â€œNever mind,” she said, tossing her copy of Life and her soft pack of cigarettes onto the table. Matar was dazzled by this real American girl, and he desperately wanted to talk to her. Just sitting down beside him, Gale had put Matar at ease for the first time since he had landed. At the table where Gale had been sitting, the crowd of rowdy guys in numbered shirts was hooting “Happy Birthday.”
    â€œToday is . . . birthday, me,” he lied.
    â€œWell, then, we’ll celebrate!” she announced and trotted to the bar, returning to the table with two squat brown Rainier bottles and sitting back down across from him. Matar hesitated at the bottle. “Oh, crap. Did you want a glass? I’m sorry.” Gale went back to the bar for a cold glass. Her posture was one of a hostess, graceful and attentive, like his mother pouring coffee for her visitors. Despite the fact he knew it was alcohol, Matar couldn’t refuse when Gale poured him a glass and raised her own bottle to him. “Welcome, stranger.”
    He liked how she spoke naturally to him. Without globbing her words as if he were a deaf person. “So where you from? Are you Mexican?”
    â€œArab.”
    â€œOh, which country?”
    â€œOnly. Just. Arabia.” He smiled politely, not wanting to become embroiled in geographical explanation. This conversation was turning out to be much more complicated than Matar had