Page 32 of Rizzed Up By My Alien Neighbor
Last week, I caught him watching the stars. Not just glancing up.Watching.Like he knew them. Like they were old friends. I watched him from my upstairs window—just him, standing barefoot in the grass, face tilted skyward. For a second, I saw grief on his face. Real grief. Not the kind you manufacture for sympathy but the raw, gutted kind. The kind you only get when you’ve lost something that mattered.
I’ve worn that look. I know it intimately.
And it’s not the kind of thing a con artist can fake.
That’s what gnaws at me.
If this was just some eccentric weirdo with too much tech and not enough social skills, I’d report him, block his number, whatever. But Richard’s not dangerous. He’s not calculating. He’s...lost.
And my gut tells me he’s hiding something big. But not because he wants to hurt us.
Because he’s scared of what would happen if we knew.
I close my laptop and glance at the window again. His lights are on. Faint bluish glow leaking through the blinds. The kind of light you don’t get from a regular lamp. The kind of light that vibrates faintly at the edge of hearing.
Sammy’s already back at the window, spy binoculars in hand.
“Don’t press your face to the glass,” I mutter. “You’ll leave prints.”
She ignores me.
“He’s calibrating his heat emitter again,” she reports. “Or maybe it’s an alien waffle iron.”
I shake my head, half-laughing. “What are we even doing?”
“Investigating an extraterrestrial infiltration,” she says seriously. “Duh.”
“Right. Naturally.”
But despite the sarcasm, I can’t stop watching either.
Because something about Richard isn’t adding up.
And I have a feeling... it’s about to subtract us from the equation.
I’m staring down the list in my hand like it’s an execution order. Because in a way, it is.
Six addresses. Three apartment units. Two small storefronts. And one—Jesus—one bakery.Thebakery. Clarissa’s Sweet Hearth, the one that smells like heaven and cinnamon even in the middle of July, the one that’s fed this town from the same weathered storefront since nineteen sixty-whatever.
I read the name again. Slowly.
Clarissa Mendoza.
Her daughter did Sammy’s birthday cake last year—blue frosting unicorns so detailed they looked like sculpture. Clarissa hugged me when I picked it up. Called memija. Gave me a free loaf of pan dulce “just because.”
And now I’m supposed to slap an eviction notice on her door like it’s just business.
I feel sick.
I press the back of my hand to my forehead, breathing shallow in the dim hallway outside Lipnicky’s office. His door is still cracked behind me, that air-conditioned hiss wrapping around his voice like smoke.
“Tell her it’s the market,” he’d said. “Tell her it’s not personal. And remind her the lease was month-to-month. Perfectly legal.”
Perfectly legal. That’s his mantra.
He says it like it’s comfort. Like morality’s just a blip in a spreadsheet.
When I’d tried to argue—when I brought up how many people rely on Clarissa’s kitchen for groceries, jobs, community—he didn’t even frown. Just smiled that calm, practiced Lipnicky smile and said, “Vanessa, you’re doing good work. Don’t make me question your fit here.”
