MIMIC

A lone student sat in the classroom.  He’d arrived early because it was important to see the expression on the face of each student as they arrived.  

Suddenly, the homeroom bell sounded and Delaney waited for the others. 

The teacher, Mrs Evans arrived first.

“Oh hello,” she smiled upon seeing Delaney.

“Hi,” he smiled back

Mrs. Evans looks at a list.

“What’s your name?”

“Delaney Ryan.”

“Ah yes here you are,” Mrs. Evans notes.

Welcome to Prescott High.  

“It says here that you transferred from Roswell High?  See any spaceships?” 

She laughed as she said it, which told Delaney that she merely asked in jest.  

Delaney smiled again as a way of conveying that he understood the joke.   

He’d done his homework on social studies and had become acquainted with the human psyche. .  

Delany Ryan had an eidetic memory and he’d spend hours watching the news. 

The news seemed to express emotion.  You could read it on the faces of those who reported it, and those who’d witnessed it and especially those who survived it. 

Soon the other students began filing into the classroom, giving Delaney a new subject to study.

The people came in laughing almost prompting Delaney to laugh as well, but he held back.  He was taught however not to be too hasty because he would appear too hasty, and acting desperate would lessen his chances to form bonds.

One of the girls smiled at him, and he knew to smile back but not too openly.  He formed his face into the nervous smile he’d seen as he watched an afterschool special about young love.  

The girl threw her head back and laughed.  A sideways glance at Mrs. Evans, prompted him to frown. 

This was a mean girl.  His calculations were confirmed when another girl laughed along with her.

“Shelley, you are sooo bad,” one of the girls whispered. 

“He looks like a real nerd,” another girl laughed.

Clearly Shelley was the leader of the mean girls.  Her followers were those who saw an opportunity to join the bully in order to avoid being the target. 

“O.k. class, take your seats please,” Mrs, Evans said. 

The noise in the room slowly died down as Mrs. Evans began calling out names.  

One of the boys in the class, obviously the class clown, made some infantile remark as his name was called out.

After all were accounted for, Mrs. Evans introduced Delaney to the class.  

As he looked around, one particular student caught his eye.  

He saw something like sadness in the boy.  It looked almost like fear, but not quite. 

The others were easy, the smart ones, the pretty ones and the jocks, they were clear.  But this boy was different. He was hiding something.  

The morning passed by with relative ease.  Delaney was the most intelligent of all the students, so he had no problem in math,  science and English.  

He had to hold back more than once because he knew more than the teachers, but it was important that he didn’t follow his natural ability to correct everybody.

At lunch time, Delaney entered the cafeteria, and scanned the room.  There was the boy he'd learned was Jonah Hall.  He knew he’d be sitting alone.

“Hi do you mind if I sit here?” 

Delaney had to work to smile and soften his voice.  

He’d caught some odd looks from the others when he’d answered questions in algebra.  If he acted too smart, and robotic he would be ostracized by them and he’d learn nothing. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Delaney saw the mean girls sitting with their male counterparts, the jocks and they were looking over at him and giggling. 

Delaney was not built for jockdom. He was slight stature and had an inability to catch or throw with anything that resembled accuracy.

“Sure,” said Jonah, eager for companionship.

Jonah didn’t seem anxious to talk in front of the class, but when a teacher did call on him, he was invariably wrong in his responses.

The rest of the class sniggered and giggled, causing Jonah’s face to turn an odd shade of red.  

Delaney looked at the boy now and decided that Jonah would be interesting to get to know. 

Delaney was intrigued by him

“I see you have trouble with the math,” said Delaney, feigning compassion. 

“I could help you with that if you want.”

“Ahh ah o.k.,” Jonah stuttered.  

“Ok, I can come to your house after school and--”

“NO!”, shouted Jonah, cutting him off.

“I--I mean, sorry, um, my house is being painted and the fumes make it hard to concentrate.”

Delaney watched as Jonah stared down at his tray of food.  .

“Ok we could just meet in the library.”

“Oh oh ok,” said Jonah who was now sporting that funny shade of red on his face again.

Delaney knew that he’d picked the right person to befriend.  

After school, Delaney went to the library, but his new friend was nowhere to be seen.  He waited for an hour, before leaving the library and going home.

This was going to be a bigger challenge than Delaney had first thought. 

The next morning, Delaney waited outside the homeroom but Jonah didn’t show.

Maybe Delaney had scared him off.

He went through his memory of the whole interaction but couldn’t find any reason that the boy might have been afraid of him.

He knew that students often spent time in each other’s homes after school, so it couldn’t be that.  

For the first time, Delaney didn’t have an answer.

The day passed by without issue.

Delaney laughed and smiled and frowned when he knew it was appropriate.  He ate lunch alone, something he was used to but his thoughts kept returning to Jonah. 

The next day also came and went without an appearance from Jonah, and it looked like Delaney was going to have to find someone else to  be friends with.  This wouldn’t be a challenge because the next day, he would sign up for an afterschool program called the tech club.   

Delaney knew everything there was to know about technology and even things that the other students couldn’t possibly know on the subject.

As Delaney took his seat in algebra the next morning, something caught his eye.

As he looked over, he saw Jonah who in turn looked at Delaney.  There was an odd colour on the side of his face.  Sort of purplish and when Jonah caught him looking, the odd red hue came slowly up.

“What happened to you, dummy?’ Markus, the biggest of the jocks, teased when he spotted Jonah?”

“Your ole man kicked your ass again?” 

With that Marcus, predictably guffawed at his own observation, and slumped in his seat.

Delaney continued to watch as Jonah’s face turned a deeper shade of red.

He heard the boom of Mr. Cowan’s voice.

He looked at the Algebra teacher’s face and saw the look of anger.  

If Delaney was going to penetrate Jonah’s world, he knew he needed to appropriate the same look of anger.

Jonah looked at Delaney and saw the looking over rage, Jonah looked at him shyly and gave a small smile of gratitude.  

Later in the cafeteria, Delaney asked why Jonah wasn’t in school.

“Um, I tripped over a can of paint and smashed my head on the door jamb,” answered a mortified Jonah.

As Delaney recalled the earlier comment made by the oafish Marcus, he knew that Jonah was not being truthful, but didn’t pursue it. 

They ate lunch together that day, and worked in the library after school where Delaney helped Jonah conquer the various math problems. 

“You see,” said Delaney, “the answer isn’t as important as the actual formula.”

The next algebra class, Jonah seemed a little more confident in his answers, and even though he still got a couple wrong, he’d gotten a couple right too.

Jonah showed a different emotion on his face than he’d previously shown.  

That night, Delaney studied his slides and found out it was pride and something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

He’d studied and practiced every night,

Delaney sat at the table with his brother and sister.

It was the end of their first week of studies and it was time to report what they’d learned to the ‘rents (as he’d heard the other’s call them at school).

The parents walked into the dining room.  Immediately the siblings took out their cell phones and removed the chips. 

His sister, Destiny began.  

She spoke of schoolgirl crushes and her face glowed with the promise of young love. She also talked about the latest magazine article about ‘what Not to wear this season.’  

Clearly she’d blended in well with her peers.  

Next was his brother, Dante’s turn.  Dante, was of a large build so it was natural that he’d fall in with a group of jocks, and as he relayed the brutish manliness, and a fight in the school’s quad.  The look on his face was unmistakably rage and pride.  

Finally it was Delaney’s turn.

He worked his face into how Jonah looked when he began to rise up a little.  But there were remnants of  another emotion that just couldn’t be duplicated.  

The parents frowned.  Not sure whether it was a positive or negative emotion that Delaney meant to convey. 

They rolled through the list of emotions but couldn’t put their finger on this emotion.  

How would they be able to penetrate the human race without knowing how to mimic every emotion that was humanly possible.  

The parents picked up the chips from the cell phones and plugged them into the laptop.  

The family studied the look on Jonah’s face but nobody was able to recall what emotions lay behind his eyes.  

The call was made and the family piled into the call headed back to Roswell.  

The Mother ship would meet them at three hundred hours and they would be bound for home. 

The next day at Prescott high, life carried on as usual.  

The students wondered what happened to the super-smart boy named Delaney, especially Jonah.

The bullies still picked on Jonah now and then.  Mostly to make themselves seem more relevant than they actually were.  

Those bullies who pretended that they were the school heroes, would never know, that young Jonah, was the real hero.

It was his emotions that the alien Delaney couldn’t read therefore the mission to take over earth was aborted.