Anita sat on the edge of the bathtub, her head in her hands. She’d had to make many choices in her life, and she never thought that this one would be the hardest.
She first realized tht she was different when she was five years old. It was her first day of kindergarten and the children were all put in pairs. Anita remembered her partner, a dark brown girl with multicolored beads hanging from the end of her neat cornrows. “What are those?” the girl asked pointing to the bumps on Anita’s forehead. Her mother had always told Anita that these bumps were lovely and that Anita’s were particularly beautiful because of their rounded shape. The five little mounds over her eyebrows were one of the distinctive features of their people. “Why are your ears so pointy?” the girl shrieked and started to laugh. Only the females of Anita’s species had pointy ears. She was taught that they were a sign of feminity. Anita thought that these few features that distinguished her from humans were to be treasured until she started school.
Looking around at her classmates, Anita realized that they all had smooth foreheads and rounded ears, much different than the other kids she spent time with in the township. She knew about humans before. She’d seen them in the stores and in pictures, but she didn’t realize that there were so many of them. Anita wanted to go to the township school like her friends, but her parents wouldn’t agree to it.
“We want you to have a good life,” her mother would say. “If you go to their schools you’ll be able work at their jobs and move out of the township.”
Her father agreed. “Our schools are terrible. The teachers act like we are still on our planet, but we’re not. We need to learn how to survive here.”
The human children’s interest in her lasted a few days, but as the weeks at school wore on the novelty faded. In the end, all that mattered was the time they spent together outside running around, playing and laughing.
When she was twelve she the tormenting began. The other children laughed and called her names. Back then she only had one friend, a shy girl who was like her. She was the only other one like her in class.
Anita grew up quickly, but all her life she felt like an outsider among humans. She observed their friendships with an awareness of the chasm that seemed to separate her from everyone else. She lived alone and ate meals alone. She got that good job that her parents wanted for her at an advertising firm. They used her expertise to help them advertise to her kind. She was glad that who she was could be an advantage at work, but still felt painfully disconnected.
She didn’t have to feel disconnected forever. Her chance to be part of something bigger than an advertising campaign was on the other side of the bathroom door in the form of two men dressed in black.
Anita gritted her teeth. Her parents had given her a human name because they wanted her to assimilate. They taught her to fit in and to agree. These men were asking her to resist and to fight, but revolution went against everything she knew. Anita closed her eyes and tried to imagine a different world. That’s what the men told her she would be helping them fight for, a place where their species could live where they wanted and be treated as equals. Anita sighed. She’d tried her best, but she knew the humans she worked with every day didn’t think of her as equal with them. She saw it in the stilted conversations she had with them and the way the would stare at her when they thought she wasn’t looking. Was that enough to justify fighting them?
Anita didn’t think so because sometimes she saw kindness in them. There were tiny bridges over that years that some humans tried to cross. She wondered how much of her disconnection was her fault. She was timid and distrustful. She didn’t try hard enough.
Anita stood up. She brushed the creases from her pants. She would tell them no. There were plenty of others like her that worked with the humans. They didn’t need her for a revolution. The men in black told her that if she helped them, she’d change the future of the planet and make her parents proud. They obviously didn’t know her parents. She would go to work tomorrow and pretend she knew nothing of their plans. She wouldn’t help them, but she wouldn’t stop them either.