As Sasha sped into the parking lot for Oakview Apartment Complex, nearly rolling over the car in the process, Evelyn was seriously regretting her decision to not ride with Melanie.

“You just rebuilt this!” Evelyn said, starting to wonder if the seatbelts worked in Sasha’s car as it plowed to a stop at the door.

“And I don’t want to have to wash the interior again!” Sasha said, killing the engine and getting out with Aygylaana as he opened the trunk release, “Help me get your shit out of here.”

Evelyn crawled out of the car and shakily stood up, taking a moment to herself before walking to the back of the old car.

“Do you have a key to her apartment?”

“Not with me,” Evelyn said, grabbing a few bags of snacks as Melanie’s car cruised into the parking lot and to her spot before getting out and walking over to them.

“Can Eve stay and help me with my new TV?” she asked Sasha, “Pretty please?”

«I can’t take this bullshit from a dipshit,» Sasha muttered in Russian before looking to Evelyn, “Sure.”

As the four took the bags up to Melanie’s apartment, the Cygnian was overjoyed at the marathon she and Evelyn were gonna sit and watch over the weekend.

Eventually, they made it to Apartment 5D, where the door wasn’t completely shut, so Sasha pushed the door open with his hoof.

“I thought I locked it!” Melanie said as they went in.

“For that to actually work, the door need to be closed all the way first.”

The interior of her apartment had an open main room with two rooms in the back. Every wall was covered in artwork that struck varying nerves and likely prevented most sane people from getting a good night’s sleep. The island was covered with paper, an unfinished project, her laptop and drawing tablet, and a set of paints and brushes, though the counter top at the wall was empty enough for the groceries to sit at and the refrigerator had enough space for the sodas.

“People… actually pay you for this?” Evelyn asked, looking at a picture of either an incomplete black hole or a set of very bloody female genitalia.

For her state of mind, she chose to opt for the cosmic side and pretend it was a black hole.

“Do you like it?” Melanie said to Evelyn as she wondered what the picture was of.

“Uh… maybe?” Evelyn said before asking stupidly, “What is it?”

“Red Space!” Melanie said, giving Evelyn no clarification whatsoever.

After going to school with Melanie since they were kids and, by some miracle, graduating in the same class, Evelyn knew the logical choice was the cosmic one because the Cygnian had let on, quite frequently, that she didn’t know what a period or menstrual cycle was.

On the other hand, the internet exists and even Melanie knew how to use Google.

“Give me… some context?”

“Some guy wanted me to draw a picture of a black hole in space, but if everything were red instead of black! I ran out of watercolors, though and I think I made the black hole too narrow.”

“Oh thank God,” Evelyn said in relief, “You could just tell them you’re not looking directly at the black hole.”

“That works!” Melanie said before looking at Evelyn in confusion, “What did you think it was?”

“To be honest, I thought it was a vagina after a period. I’m sorry.”

“Ew! I don’t do porn! I do spacey and weird stuff!”

Evelyn looked around the room with that new information in mind as Sasha went to his apartment across the hall with Aygylaana.

“That makes it a little better…” Evelyn said, “I guess.”

Meanwhile, Sasha and Aygylaana were in his apartment.

“This is nice,” she said, sitting down on the futon.

Sasha’s design tastes were better shown here than in his house. Hardwood flooring in all four rooms, a lack of standard ceiling lighting in lieu of pole lamps, recessed lights, and studio-style lights that provided illumination when the curtains over the large window in the room were closed. The furniture was all of a modern-minimalist styling, and a few rugs were laid out. Aygylaana propped her feet up on the ottoman and looked around, seeing a table with a laptop running next to a can of soda.

“Were you here recently?”

“I came here a week ago to pull some files from the laptop I use to reprogram Scion cars with. It took a while to get what I needed, so I ended up staying the night,” he said, going through a Tupperware bowl filled with tagged USB drives, “Dammit, it must be on an optical disc!” he said, closing the bowl and putting it up before going into the bedroom.

After a few moments, Aygylaana followed Sasha into a dark blue room with no windows. The pole lamp and desk lamps were on, providing some degree of illumination as Sasha sifted through a stack of CDs and DVDs.

“Alright,” Sasha said, “I’ve got six operating systems for you to choose from. They’re all built off of a preexisting operating system for binary compatibility, so enjoy what you will. The ones labeled Arch are based off of bleeding-edge software. Essentially, it’s more of a kernel with a UI instead of an operating system, but the upside is you’ll have firsthand access to any new software the community pushes out. The ones labeled Fedora are based on an OS that I generally load onto computers that I sell and refurbish sometimes, as well as things I have sitting around for general use. It’s a day-to-day system that you can get the most mileage out of and still have tighter security than banks claim. It’s a full OS with decently modern software, but not quite bleeding-edge, so you’ll be on the same level as everyone else, more or less. Lastly, the ones labeled Debian are based on what I use for servers, project hardware when I’m bored, or when I’m making a new fork of something. The software on them can say latest release, but be a decade or more out of date, so… emphasis on stable. Really, these two are only used for things like an x86 cable box I made for a fourth grade science project or for getting something from 1995 running again. It serves no real purpose in normal use for me, but I keep it around.”

“What is Gnome, Maté, KDE Plasma, and Trinity DE?”

“Desktop environments. Gnome sucks in my opinion, but the other three are pretty good. What I generally run on my computers is Maté because it’s intuitive, but Plasma and Trinity are both good too. Really, it boils down to the same choice you make when you make breakfast. They all do the same thing, they’re just made by people who have different thoughts on how things should look, feel, and act. As far as your new laptop is concerned, all four should run without trouble, but I don’t like what Gnome uses as a display server anymore by default, not to mention it isn’t very configurable unless you’re willing to waste a week of your life in dependency hell by looking for shell scripts online or reconfiguring Gnome and hoping it doesn’t become unusable from the GDM’s perspective.”

“Why do you even keep that one?”

“I have a few scripts on the server in my attic to avoid wasting time on it. Really, though, I only keep it around for people who think something has to look like Microsoft or Mac, otherwise they don’t know that the Applications menu is where your programs are, or that the blue button with a document is your damn word processor.”

“Are the differences in software extensive enough as to include the name?”

“For trademark and copyright reasons, LibreOffice Writer is not Microsoft Office Word and the button with four squares is your main menu, not the one that, very clearly, says ‘Main Menu’. Only the extremely smart or extremely dumb can figure it out for themselves.”

“You- I must- how do you not murder those around you? I will try Plasma.”

“I may have replaced them after doing so,” Sasha said, looking away, “Read into that what you will. Anyway, three left: Stable, contemporary, or bleeding-edge?”

“Bleeding edge,” Aygylaana said as Sasha began putting the discs back in a CD tower and grabbed a USB drive, “What are the other two rooms for?”

“The one across from this one is a junk room that just has old laptops and my washing machine in it. The building has a laundromat in the basement, but it was more convenient to just get a portable unit, dehumidifier, clothes rack, and fan and keep in there. The other room is the bathroom which… is usable.”

“Why did you buy a house as well?”

“Six months after I moved into the building, I found a Geo Storm. Manual 5, naturally aspirated, sixteen valves with twin cam, converted to rear wheel drive,” he said, smiling at the memory, “It was just over a grand and I’m not passing up anything like that. I’ve outran cops in it. It just wasn’t easy to keep two cars here, so I bought a house where I could fill the yard up with fun shitboxes. As for how, let’s just say the government doesn’t wanna lose my brains. When I graduated high school, the FBI offered to buy me a house in a gated community. Two bed two bath, open floorplan with a loft, paid in full plus utilities and internet service. I didn’t take it after finding out that everything I do pisses off the HOA to no end. To this day, they’re still keeping that door open and that house is still for sale.”

“You should have taken the offer.”

“If I did, I couldn’t have brought you home. Not to mention that I wouldn’t have been allowed to have more than two vehicles on the property. That’s not even getting into the nitpicking where your grass has to be a certain length, obligation to go to meetings, tickets for ‘uglifying the place’. Jean Reynolds can go fuck herself, and she can fuck herself hard!”

“We should go before I piss myself!” Aygylaana said, cackling with Sasha as they headed to the car.

“I just heard all of that,” Evelyn said, pulling a TV out of the box, “I’ve lived with him since we were five. Is it bad if I don’t know how to feel right now?”

“Well, if something bothers you, sometimes the best thing you can do is to just be happy,” Melanie said.

“How did you do it?”

“How do I do what?”

“Be happy when something bothers you?”

“Oh, when we were still in school, the teachers said I was scatterbrained or something, and I didn’t really get it, so I started drawing in my notebooks. They told me I wouldn’t graduate and my parents talked to Sasha, then everything they tried to teach me turned into art classes.”

Evelyn wasn’t sure that Melanie had a solution, but she did have to concede to the fact that the Cygnian could make it on her own, even as dumb as she was, just with her own talents and the people around her. Thinking more about the topic only made Evelyn feel a semblance of something she hadn’t felt since she was seven or eight that felt… oddly good.

After they got the new TV on the entertainment center, Evelyn grabbed a can of Pepsi, “Do you have any clothes you need to wash?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I have a key to Sasha’s apartment. Do you want me to wash your clothes while I’m here?”

“That’d be great!” Melanie said.

Before she could contemplate anything else, Evelyn took the basket of dirty clothes to Sasha’s junk room and started filling up the small washing machine with Melanie’s clothes.

“Is he right?” she asked herself, setting a timer and emptying the dehumidifier into the shower stall, “Sasha thinks that everything only happens because of some guy on his lunch break, but Melanie says things happen because they were made to happen,” after a moment, she snapped out of her train of thought, “Screw this! I’m gonna ruin my weekend before it even starts if this keeps going.”

“What makes you think that’s a bad thing?” Sasha asked Aygylaana, taking a swig out of a bottle of vodka as he passed a red minivan, “Fuck off, ya cunt!”

“I just think that there is absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent such a collision,” she said, drinking some of Sasha’s vodka, “I hope you do not mind my saliva.”

“I didn’t mind it last night when your tongue was halfway down my throat, so I don’t think I’ll mind if it’s in my vodka while I’m driving through town,” he replied as she grabbed a handful of salt from a bag of Epsom salt that Sasha had in the back seat, “What are you doing?”

“I think you call it drugs,” the Egnadian said, “Would you prefer that I wait until we are back at your house?”

“Absolutely,” Sasha said, “If we’re gonna be doped up, I wanna have a box of Slim Jims around.”

“Is that how most Terrans do it?” Aygylaana asked, getting rid of the salts.

“Most people don’t do drugs and generally, the only people who eat Slim Jims are either stoned or a hungry trucker. I mean, everyone likes them occasionally, but the people who generally eat them are either stoned or drive a truck.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Are you thinking what I am thinking?”

“Damn straight!” Sasha said, swerving across oncoming traffic and into a convenience store parking lot.

As they were going into the store, Sasha and Aygylaana were both making terrible suggestions for what they should do at his house.

“Alright, you can’t have a good trip without Slim Jims and soda!” he said in Egnadian, getting a shopping cart and going through the store.

“We have soda, no?” Aygylaana replied in Egnadian.

“You need a bottle of Coca-Cola if you’re gonna do this right. I’ll get some for the each of us because you and salts? Not a good combination. I know that now.”

Soon, Sasha and Aygylaana were back on their way to his house.

As the day trudged on, Sasha and Melanie were conducting their days in very different manners. One was getting high on space crystals while the other was helping with house work and setting up a new TV.

“I think that does it,” Evelyn said with some degree of satisfaction, pushing the old TV into Sasha’s apartment, “We are ready for the Camp Oaks Marathon!”

“Weekend-long Girl’s Night, here we come!”

“If you could keep the place cleaned up until this weekend, we can start as soon as possible!” Evelyn said, “Mind driving me back to Sasha’s?”

“No problem!” the Cygnian said, “Why not your house?”

“Because my car is at Sasha’s,” Evelyn said as they started walking to her bug.

“Do you think he’s okay on his own?”

“Honestly? No. And I don’t think that Aygylaana is gonna do him any favors,” she said, pulling her messy hair back, “He can get so caught up that he forgets to eat. Then there was the time we had to force him to bathe, Mom had to drive him to the ER once.”

“Really?”

“He almost died. Several times.”

“Is she only gonna make it happen again?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn said as they got in the Volkswagen, “I’m hoping that won’t happen, but I’m more than sure that it will.”

As the car purred through the city, Evelyn and Melanie were dealing with the problem in two completely different ways.

Evelyn was contemplating what would happen if, and when, things began plummeting while Melanie thought that Sasha living with someone like who Evelyn grew up with would be the solution, rather than the problem. She thought that Aygylaana being Aygylaana would show Sasha what it was like to live with Sasha.

“It’ll be okay,” Melanie said, comforting Aygylaana, “You even said it yourself, she’s just like him.”

“I also said that they could both OD and die in the rabbit hole.”

“Don’t be such a Negative Nancy!” Melanie said, smiling as she put her hand on the tiger’s leg.

“You’re right,” she said, smiling before focusing on a reflection of her green eyes in the window, “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

“Why would a Terran fuck an animal?” Aygylaana said, eyes squeezed shut as bits of Slim Jim, spittle, and a blue-green powder fell off her face, “Phla’naghsian is a terrible high to have end.”

“If it wasn’t for Catherine the Great’s perverted tastes with wild animals,” Sasha said, equally doped before chewing on a Slim Jim and guzzling a soda, “That fucker shoving a stallion in her pussy made me get born in Soviet Russia!” he threw up on the radiator behind the couch, “I wanna feel that.”

Aygylaana got up to get another bottle of soda, but fell on her face as she walked through the doorway.

“Are you okay?” Sasha moaned.

“Eu,” came the muffled reply as the front door opened and Evelyn walked in.

“What the hell happened here?” she asked.

The interior of the house was covered in some kind of powder and a mix of excretions that Evelyn really didn’t want to think about, as well as shattered glass, scorched places, and a general wreckage of the area, mixed with a near-sweltering 27°C , according to the thermometer on the doorframe between the dining area and living room. While the fans weren’t running, the smell was terrible, almost like a rotting corpse, but worse. As if the busted window on the front of the house didn’t say enough, it didn’t take much to find the origin of the smell as she walked in the living room and was blasted by a wave of death-smelling heat as the fan came on to circulate the air.

“Did you vomit on this?” Evelyn asked before seeing Sasha’s actual physical condition, “Oh my God, are you okay? Melanie! Get the hell in here! Sasha, are you alright?”

“Geh-me so-more planakhsian,” he muttered, “A-was amazing.”

“Are you serious right now?”

“Aygylaana, what happened?” Melanie said, running through the crap on the floor to check on the Egnadian, beating her on her back at her lungs, “Can you hear me?”

“I fucked a cactus,” Aygylaana slurred in Egnadian.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Melanie asked in Egnadian, panicking.

Aygylaana looked up at Melanie, revealing just how dry her body was, and giggled, “Slim Jim.”

Melanie hurried to the sink and filled a bowl with water, “Turn off the heater!”

“Sasha’s burning up!” Evelyn said, aiming a fan at him, “Get me some ice!”

Melanie filled a Ziploc bag of ice and took it to Evelyn before setting another bag of ice on Aygylaana.

“Do you think they’ll be okay?” Evelyn said as soon as she was confident his fever had broken.

“If they took Blanashan dust, then they should be okay after they sleep it off,” Melanie said as Aygylaana’s head fell into the bowl of water and she began giggling again.

“How do you know that?” Evelyn asked before thinking Aygylaana could drown, “Get her out!”

“She’s fine!” Melanie said, holding Evelyn back, “Sometimes, before my parents went back to Cygnus, I would go back with them during summer vacation and I had a friend that liked to take Blanashan dust. He’s okay and doesn’t do it anymore, but he had to go to bed after it wore off.”

“Could they die?” Evelyn said as Aygylaana started snoring loudly.

“They just need sleep,” Melanie said.

“Please help me clean them up,” Evelyn said, getting Sasha out of his clothes.

After a lot of time and effort, Evelyn and Melanie had gotten Sasha and Aygylaana cleaned up and put in bed.

“I’m surprised they didn’t wake up,” Evelyn said.

“They were in super-fast overdrive mode. They’ll sleep through anything right now.”

“I’m gonna call their cleaner,” Evelyn said, dialing up Sasha’s housekeeper.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Ms Andrews, this is Evelyn Colbert, Sasha’s friend?”

“Oh, hey!” she said, “Is everything okay?”

“Sasha got a girlfriend and they went on a bender together,” Evelyn said, “Do you think you could come over? They’re sleeping it off right now, but don’t worry about waking them up.”

“How bad is it?”

“The ground level is trashed and a window at the dining area is busted, but I’ll take care of that.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Thanks. I’ll leave the door unlocked and I’ll go ahead and leave some cash under the doormat in an envelope for you.”

“Thank you,” she said, ending the call.

“I’m going to the bank in the morning,” Evelyn said, counting out five hundred dollars from her glove compartment and hiding it under the welcome mat before seeing a brick that had been tossed on the front porch, “What the hell?”

Almost twelve hours later, Aygylaana woke up somewhat and groggily trudged to the master bathroom, filled the bathtub with cool water, and went back to sleep in it, waking Sasha in the process.

“Mm-wuh?” he said, groggily sitting up and seeing Aygylaana asleep in the bathtub with one leg hanging out, «Trap it in a cup, I’ll be there later,» he said in Russian.

Feeling how dry he was, he took off his clothes and went downstairs, hoping that there was some soda in the house.

«Why am I asleep in this many clothes?» he muttered in Russian, taking off the t-shirt, athletic shorts, and underwear he had on before going downstairs with a full bottle of soda that didn’t survive the trip.

He belched before falling onto his waterbed, falling asleep immediately.

The next morning, Evelyn woke up before her phone’s alarm went off, so she tapped the dismiss button and rolled over, hoping that she could get a break for the first time in… thirteen years.

“Oh shit,” she muttered, sitting up and blinking, “Yesterday happened.”

After a moment, she finally pulled herself out of bed and trudged downstairs.

Downstairs, an older tiger was cooking breakfast and getting ready to leave as she sipped her coffee.

“Hey, Mom,” Evelyn said, walking into the kitchen and getting a biscuit.

“There’s my baby girl!” the older tiger said, a southern accent notable in her voice, as she hugged Evelyn, “Did you sleep okay last night?”

“Careful, I’m sore.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” her mom said, letting her go.

“Yesterday, I had to drag Sasha and his girlfriend up a flight of stairs after they vomited on everything. Now my everything hurts.”

“I’ll pray for him,” Evelyn’s mom said, “Call me if something happens or you can come to the church. I’ll tell Mrs Janice to pray too.”

“Thanks mom,” Evelyn said, eating another biscuit as the older tiger left.

It was already 8:00 AM when she woke up, so her dad likely took her younger brother to school and Evelyn’s baby sister was probably in their grandmother’s room, still asleep.

Despite showering as soon as she came home the previous night, she still felt rather ripe, so she started getting ready for the day, adding a morning shower into the mix for this particular morning.

On the other side of town, Sasha was waking up, naked and alone in bed.

«What the fuck happened yesterday?» Sasha said in Russian.

As he sat up, he felt a dull pain in his chest and what could best be described as a moderate hangover.

“Shit,” he said, getting out of bed and going over to the closet, only to find that Aygylaana’s clothes had been put away and she was in the bathtub with most of her body submerged in water.

“I must’ve partied hard last night,” he muttered, taking out his jacket, fedora, and a random shirt and blue jeans as his phone rang.

Eventually, he made it downstairs to the kitchen without waking her up or breaking his neck. Looking around, he found a bag of bacon cheeseburgers from Sonic on the counter next to the stove.

“Fuck yeah.”

Immediately, he took some Ibuprofen and washed it down with a bottle of beer.

About half-an-hour later, Evelyn pulled into Sasha’s driveway, wondering if the two of them were even awake yet, so she decided to test that theory by knocking on the door.

Hopefully she could find out why they threw a brick threw the window if she was lucky.

“Sasha, it’s me,” she said.

“Come in,” came the exhausted reply several moments later.

Walking into the living room, she saw Sasha hunched over, holding his head, and eating a sandwich from the wrapper.

“Glad I have a key to your house,” Evelyn said, “Where’s Aygylaana?”

“Still sleeping,” he said, pointing upstairs as he finished the burger and let the wrapper fall to the floor, “What happened to the window?”

Evelyn sat the brick on the coffee table, “Do you not remember anything?”

Sasha slowly looked at the brick and then to Evelyn, “Take a-wil’ guess.”

“One day, you’re gonna go on a bender that’s gonna involve you eating Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, and I won’t be there to stop you. Ya might have a brain that everyone envies, but you act like my dumbass brother.”

“Fuck, Eve.”