Among Us

I think my mom’s new boyfriend is an alien in disguise.

I haven’t told her yet. She’d tell me not to worry and that it was all in my imagination: she says that to me a lot. But I’m pretty sure about this one. He doesn’t mind when he comes to pick her up for a date and her hair’s still in curlers and she’s wearing that skin gunk on her face; my guess is he secretly likes seeing her like that because she resembles a woman from his home planet.

He always brings her back home right on time, too. I’m in bed by that time but I know because I always stay up waiting to hear the car in the driveway and then I check on the digital clock. He’s practically right on the minute every time, and none of her old boyfriends were that punctual. I don’t know any normal people who are that obsessed with being on time, so you can see what I’m getting at. (By the way, the babysitter doesn’t like this behaviour either. Although in her case I think it’s just because she doesn’t get paid as much.)

And last week, he invited Mom and me to his place for dinner. Mom was all impressed that he could cook, so impressed that she didn’t even look worried about what it was we were having: “cod with spinach”, he called it. I know cod is a type of fish, but this didn’t look anything like the fish in fish n’ chips, so I didn’t trust it one bit.

“He just isn’t used to kids, is all,” Mom said to me later. “He doesn’t know what kind of things kids usually eat.”

Doesn’t know what kind of things humans usually eat, I thought. But I didn’t say that. She would’ve just gotten mad at me.

What would an alien want to do with my mom, you ask? Well, I haven’t been able to prove anything yet, but I have my suspicions.

Okay, one suspicion. I think he wants to impregnate her, so that she’ll have a half-alien baby. There’s probably loads of aliens here on Earth doing the same thing to their girlfriends, so that eventually they can take over our planet with their half-alien army. That makes sense, right? I bet they make movies about things like that all the time.

All I have to do is figure out some way to reveal him for who he really is. I’ve been coming up with various plans; my favourite is the one where I push him into the swimming pool and his disguise melts off. The only problem is that I’m not entirely sure it would work, and if it didn’t, I’d get grounded for sure. Also, we don’t actually have a swimming pool.

I’m also looking for the chance to trick him into eating some normal food, something that’s not one of his stupid recipes. My guess is that our food is actually some kind of poison to him, and he’ll either die or give himself away. Mom’s only been dating him for a couple of weeks, so I haven’t had a good opportunity to try this yet. If they insist on seeing each other as often as they do now, though, I’m sure I will soon.

At the very least, I wish I could come up with some proof so that Mom will believe me when I tell her that he’s an alien and then maybe she’ll dump him. I guess he’d just move on to some other woman, but that’s not my concern. I mean, I can’t save the whole world.