Entry 68

The next two weeks passed in a whirlwind of lessons. Ven brought me to Blaue's cockpit everyday and taught me something new. He let me plot simulated trajectories. He showed me which buttons did what. And he taught me some basic equations I would need to know if Blaue was out of commission. Let me tell you, that last part was a bit tricky. I could only learn some of the equations since I don't know calculus. Ven was rather shocked that I didn't know calculus. What normal sixteen-year-old girl knows calculus? I was only in the 10th grade for goodness sake, and I hadn't even finished Algebra II before I was abducted.

Basically, Ven did not give me a lot of time to think about that we were rapidly approaching our destination. In fact, he was unusually tact. He rarely mentioned our destination at all, so as to not remind me of my brother's impending departure.

But he was also keeping me separate from John. I would be lying if I said I didn't notice. My days were busy learning everything Ven could teach me (which was only a fraction of all I needed to know to captain my own ship), but in the evenings when I came to the table for dinner and didn't see John there the truth would hit me. John was leaving, and he was avoiding me during the time we had left.

I pushed my dinner around on my plate one night, across the table from Ven. Once again John had not waited for me to eat (or maybe he was going to eat after I left). I mashed the pink peas on my plate, wondering why John didn't have the decency to at least socialize with me some.

Ven was watching me with his dark eyes, his own food forgotten. If I had noticed his gaze, I would have noticed the sympathy on his face. It wasn't a feeling I usually attributed to Ven, but there it was.

"Carlee," he said softly. I looked up and was startled by the sympathy on his face. "You really should eat."

"It's just odd tasting," I responded. "I'm trying to get used to whatever this alien food you feed me is."

"Put some salt on it," Blaue said cheerily, appearing in one of the chairs. "Ven says salt makes even the most alien food tolerable."

"I already salted it," I sighed. To appease their watching eyes, I took a bite. However, Ven was still watching me.

"Tomorrow I'll make sure we get permission to eat at a real restaurant," Ven said. "Then you can eat some organically grown food."

"Are we docking with a space station tomorrow?" I asked.

"No, we're landing on the planet," Ven answered.

My fork fell to my plate with a clank. Tomorrow? We were landing on the android planet tomorrow? John was leaving me forever tomorrow?

"Carlee, are you alright?" Ven asked. I shook my head and burst into tears.