“Nope. There are like, atleasta hundred.” With a quizzical look, Jude picked his cellular phone back up and typed something rapidly with the pads of his thumbs. “Oh. My bad. There are actually over seven thousand languages. I guess I wasn’t technically wrong, though—that’s at least a hundred.”
Al, who had spent a full day teaching himself all branches of human mathematics earlier in the week, was aghast.
“That ismany!” he said, eyes wide. “How many do you speak?”
It stood to reason that if Jude spoke multiple languages, Al would have picked up on it with his telepathy, but how could he only speak one if there were over seven thousand on the planet? Perhaps Jude had somehow created a barrier against Al’s telepathy without realizing it. Perhaps he was more enigmatic than he—
“Uh. Just English,” Jude said, interrupting Al’s thought. “I forgot most of my high school Spanish, although I can still orderarroz con polloat Mexican restaurants like a champ. Oh! And I knew a kid in eighth grade who was an exchange student from Brazil and he taught me a bunch of swear words in Portuguese. I bet if I thought really hard, I could remember some of them.”
“I feel confusion, Jude. I can understand different species having different words, but how do humans become acquainted with other humans if so many speak different words than each other?”
“Eh.” Jude shrugged. “A lot of them don’t. Personally, I prefer to be acquainted with as few humans as possible. The last time I bothered to make a friend—not counting you—he tried to get me to go see his stand-up comedy routine at an open mic night.” He shook his head solemnly. “Learning more languages would just make it more likely to get peer pressured into something as awful as that again, and I just can’t take the risk. Better to just stick with the pleasantly small social circle I’ve already got.”
Al did not understand the majority of what Jude had just said to him, but he was beginning to learn that sometimes it was better to just let Jude say things and not question it, as oftentimes Jude’s explanations only served to confuse Al further. He did, however, make a mental note to avoid stand-up comedy and open mic nights—whatever those were—just to be on the safe side. The language stuff he’d research on his own.
“And speaking of my small social circle,” said Jude, checking the time, “Corbin’s gonna be here soon.”
Al tried to not feel frustrated by the lack of specificity that defined the word “soon,” but he wasn’t sure what was worse—English, or the way that humans told time. He understood hours, minutes, and Mississippis, but once it came to days, months, and years, things began to get muddy. When Jude had tried to explain the concepts to him, Al had pointed out that the earth’s revolution around the sun did not exactly equal 365 days, thus rendering humans’ current time-telling methods problematic. Jude had said something then about “leap years,” and Al had decided then and there that human time telling was ridiculous and not worth the effort.
“Al.” Jude snapped his fingers in front of Al’s face, and Al jumped, unaware that he had distracted himself by thinking about calendars and the irritation it caused him.
“Were you getting irritated about calendars again?” Jude asked with a knowing smirk.
Al scowled. It was possible this was not the first time this had happened in the middle of an unrelated conversation. “I am pleasing the number five.”
Jude furrowed his brow in confusion, then burst into laughter. “Do you mean you’re pleading the fifth?”
“Perhaps…” Al’s scowl deepened. So he wasn’t great at English slang and idioms yet. Who cared? It was not a source of frustration, and he was decidedlynotpouting about it. “But since you said words on the subject, I feel necessity to remind you that there are more efficient ways to measure your Earth years.”
“If our method is so awful, go find one of the other ones and use that instead.”
Al stared blankly at Jude for a solid five Mississippis.
“Not all humans tell time the same way?” he asked quietly, terrified of the answer.
“Mmmhm,” Jude hummed, casually bobbing the leg flung over the arm of the chair up and down. “When we’re done here, we can go back home and learn about the Chinese New Year.”
Al briefly considered standing up and walking out into the middle of the desert to bury himself in the sand.
“That does not make me feel joy, Jude,” he said flatly.
Jude nodded sympathetically. “Sorry, babe. Them’s the breaks.”
Al was so overcome with distress at the inefficiency of human beings that he did not bother to mention he had no idea what that meant.
“Anyway,” Jude said, clapping his hands and swinging his leg back over his chair, sitting the right way for approximately three Mississippis before seemingly deciding it wasn’t comfortable and tucking that same leg underneath him on the seat. Al had known Jude for a week now (he wasnotthinking about how arbitrary the concept of a week was), and he didn’t think that in all that time he had ever seen Jude sit in a chair properly. “I’m sorry to interrupt your existential crisis about how time is a lie or whatever, but Corbin for real is gonna be here soon, and we need to go over our backstory one more time.”
“Jude,” Al said with a long-suffering sigh. “I am already knowledgeable of the backstory. Why do you insist on having me say these things that we have already discussed?”
“Because the last time you assured me you knew our backstory, you told Ezra that your car broke down when you were driving to Albuquerque from Greece.”
“The fault was not mine in that instance!” Al said defensively. “You did not tell me that Greece and Alberkerkakay have lots of ocean between them, or that cars do not drive on water. It does not make sense that so many places on Earth are far away from each other, yet you do not have efficient ways of reaching them.”
“When are you going to just accept that humans are not efficient creatures?” Jude grinned fondly at Al. “We’re inefficient, silly little creatures with bad calendars and bad communication skills.”
“I am very aware of these things,” Al assured him, “but I feel hope that perhaps if you can learn how to make your efficiencies better, you can make Earth less stupid.”
“Yeah, good luck with that one, bud.” Jude grimaced a little, then bent over to pluck his—Al believed he referred to it as a “backpack”—off the ground.
