When Colin turned twelve, his parents moved to a more expensive part of the suburbs. He'd grown up in an area that essentially looked the same as the new one - stucco buildings done up in strange colour roofs, prickly fan-shaped plants poking themselves out from behind walls. The gates were the same dull wrought black iron, the bars on the windows were the same. The doors were the same white stain-resistant paint. It was the roads that twisted different, even that wasn't all that hard to adapt to.

But to move at any age is to induce a lot of questions. Colin was old enough to evaluate what he heard his parents say and what he had begun to notice on the busride to and from school. Walking on the sides of the streets he could see them. They looked almost normal at a distance, but when the bus came closer and passed by Colin would feel the doppler effect of bizzarity striking him. There were Xenos on the streets now, waiting at public bus stops. You could see them a mile away. They would stick out of crowds and just begged attention. It was two families of them, he found out later, who had moved to his old neighborhood. They'd tried to enter into Colin's school, but the board and the parents had put up a protest to it. The school was safe, but some families had gotten antsy. Like his own.

Behavior is learned, it's not something people always have control over. As time wore on, Colin did as all the boys on the bus would do. Passing one of the Xenos around a corner, the windows on the bus would clack down and a wave of half-eaten soggy food would make the exedous from overheated lunchbags and boxes into the street. There would be jeering, face making, and the boys would move like water sloshed in a container from one side of the bus to the other to continue making fun as they drove away. The girls would laugh and yell most of the insults over the boys' shoulders. Eventually, the driver would threaten to stop the bus and without any sort of rationality to their fear, the children would calm down and return to their seats.

Colin was a normal boy. He was raised a Rulerist, as his parents were. He had never travelled particularly far in his life- the south seas on family vacations had been his limit. Sometimes his parents fought, sometimes he fought with his parents. He had posters of heros and movies and girls up on his bedroom walls and music about teenaged alienation to listen to. His clique of friends was his own. They would go back and forth through downtown on weekends, pretending to be dangerous.

So there was no clear reason as to why Colin's behavior changed. When he was asked, there was no way he himself could explain it. Certainly, the pro-Xeno propaganda made its rounds. On the way back from the supermarket, there would be a flyer under the windsheild wiper of the car. In the mailbox, an orange photocopied pamphlet would be waiting some weekends. Before they were taken down, there were posters put up by some students in the school. Avoidance was futile, influence was permiated in all aspects of life. His parents would ask themselves why, oh why had they let him see that sort of thing throughout his life. In truth, they couldn't be called at fault. There's only so much public broadcasts to remember the troops fighting for their rights could do, only so many times they could tell jokes around the diner table before the meaning left them.

Maybe to Colin it started as rebellion. Two years ago, the Xenos had left his old neighborhood and were missing from the busrides to and from school. A year ago, he'd begun to walk back and forth on his own, sometimes coughing on a cigarette that someone offered him. There were only people on the streets, nothing out of a gradeschooler's crayon drawings anymore. Colin was fourteen now. Everyone wants to be different at fourteen.

His parents were both worried and not worried. Colin was a short boy, but strong from racing back and forth for years in gym classes and afterschool sports. The shirts that used to display his favourite companies and clever sayings were now turned inside out and drawn on in skipping crude marker with inflamatory pro-Xeno emblems. His hair, which had been sandy blonde like his mother's, was begining to be scattered through with a bad dark dye job. The cuffs of his jeans were torn up with scissors, left in painfully artificial tatters. He insisted on taking off his shoes whenever he could. At first, his father and teachers had to argue with him for hours to put on shoes to go in and out of stores, buildings, resturaunts. Colin would glare up at them in the hurt defiance of his age, but there was never an argument valid enough to stand up for him.

Makeup put on hastily around his eyes with an obvious lack of experience gradually became a more frequent part of Colin's daily getup. His teachers would write home reporting he had begun to refuse to take part in daily prayer. Colin's friends found the change intoxicating. New students would avoid him with a sort of distanced awe. The boy was respected- the boy was popular.

The day he tore and restitched an old pair of flannel pajamas into a set of crude anthromorphic ears and a tail that he could tie about his waist was the day his parents began to schedual regular psychologist visits for their son. The psychologist and Colin got along well, he gloating over the 'punishment' which had been handed to him and the psychologist happily able to report back to his parents that there really was nothing wrong with their son.

Postive of what he was, Colin began to keep a personal journal which locked with a small flimsy tin key. He kept the key on a knot of string around his neck, showing it off hanging outside his shirt. The contents of his journal were the subject of lunch table conversation- he would report without fail each day what he had deeply pondered the night prior.

"I was obviously meant to be a Xeno," he announced to his friends with a showy glance over his shoulder, wondering if a teacher maybe was listening. "I'm their most important supporter in our neighborhood. I'm planning on going to a meeting of their resistance this weekend- unless my damn parents lock me inside again."

Colin was a fourteen year old boy just like every single other in his city, his neighborhood, his street. Colin was so fantasticly special, no one could ever understand. Colin wanted to be an Alien.

He was sure he was having a vision. He'd snuck a sip from the liquor cabinet downstairs and his biology was different after all. Lying on his bed, upside down with his head over the edge and his bangs touching the floor, Colin looked at the far wall. His eyes unfocused, the music pounding over his headphones obviously helping this along. There was someone calling to him from outside his neighborhood.

It was the nagging disent that had been plaguing him in school for weeks. He was saying over and over that he was going to go to the Xeno half of the city and meet up with the leaders of the resistance there. But he had never even tried thus far. The paranoia was that maybe someone who was also in on his movement would actually go there before him and know more about the situation than he did.

So he had to go. Unfocused on the opposite wall, he thought about the girl in the song he was listening to. He'd had a girl like that once- of course he had. He'd loved her so much he could never have possiably lived without her. And she left him standing there alone and forsaken. The hardest part of Colin's life was facing the reality that vague crushes who later on actually got boyfriends did not count as relationships. But he was exempt, obviously. He was special. There was, of course, a girl out there who was thinking only of him and the day he would come walking into the Xeno part of town. She would shock and terrify his parents and teachers. She'd wear nothing at all and be shorter than him, but thin, with breasts that would bounce when she came running to try to ride the bus with him, only to be pushed back by the school officials. And she would chase behind like some sort of pet-

The knock on Colin's bedroom door interupted the daydream. Throwing himself back onto the bed and rolling into the blankets, he faced away from the door and pressed his lips together, his mind rattling down the tracks of What Ifs. What If his mother came in to kiss him goodnight and smelled his breath? What If she then called his father and What If-

"Sleep tight, sweetheart," His mother's voice barely peered around the edge of the door, wishing him good night before it clacked shut again.

Colin lay there a few moments in the darkness, listening to the repetition of his music's base concept and lyrics. And he had to agree with them- he obviously did not belong. No, he couldn't live in this type of a life. His parents gave him no freedom, no privacy.

So it was settled. He'd leave for the Xeno end of the city tonight. Where he was so obviously meant to be.