I remember this one time my math teacher and I were in the classroom. I was the only member of the puzzle club, held where he would mark his tests after school. Sometimes, he gave me the answer key and told me to mark some of his quizzes. They were filled with symbols I was too young to understand, looping and twirling like some exotic language, but I always stayed there. I might’ve been in that classroom longer than I was at home, the nooks of the math class more familiar to me than anything else.

Sometimes he would fill out puzzles with me. One day, he brought one himself. It was a spaceship, with cartoon aliens on it. I pointed to one of the aliens. It wasn’t like the others. It had a third eye compared to the others’ four and was a paler shade of green. I asked him why it was different. 

“It might’ve been a human once,” he suggested. 

“What?” I replied. “But a human doesn’t have three eyes.” 

“Maybe it could, if it stayed with the aliens long enough,” he said. “With all the time it’ll become accustomed to the new planet. The green will rub off on its skin.” I didn’t say anything to that, but noticed how my math teacher’s glasses reflected his eyes in the light of the projector, four irises on bright green.

The last day of February, I came into the classroom and he was gone. He had been fired, apparently. There was nobody to supervise the puzzle club, so I left. I went home on the bus, my hands wanting to go through the instinctual motion of placing the puzzle pieces, assembling the picture, seeing what belonged to what. Looking through the bus window, I thought he might be right about the aliens, all the streetlights against the dark sky zooming past like satellites, comets, shooting stars.