By: Emma Xing

It was a normal day at school…or so I thought. As soon as the new student walked in the classroom, I noticed something was wrong. She seemed confused from our classroom. She also seemed fascinated by the doorknob. Then, she took out a small notebook and scribbled something in it.

The girl also had strange clothing on. She had bright red hair and was wearing a winter jacket and winter pants. Strange. It was scorching hot outside and in the classroom, and everybody was wearing summer clothing.

Since nobody was really paying any attention to her, I decided to introduce myself before class started.

“Hi, I’m Emma, are you new here?” I asked her. I held out a hand for her to shake. She stared at my arm and awkwardly held out her arm the same way.

“I’m Nova,” the girl replied. She spoke with an accent that I never heard before. I shook her hand which made her even more confused. Nova pulled her hand away and scribbled down something in her notebook again. I peered at her notebook and noticed she wasn’t writing in English. In fact, she wrote in a language that I’ve never seen before.

She caught me peeking and immediately stuffed the notebook back in her bag. Slightly embarrassed, I led her to an empty desk that was next to mine. Nova stared at the desk and the chair for a few moments. She turned around and watched me sit in my chair. Only then did she sit down. There was definitely something strange about Nova.

But before I could ask her anything, the bell rang and class started. During the whole class, I couldn’t help but notice that Nova wasn’t paying attention at all. Instead, she kept scribbling in that mysterious language in her notebook. Instead of characters or letters like most languages this language was mostly in squiggly lines. There were a lot of shapes, like circles and squares. I took a mental note to go to the library later to find this language.

When class was over, I decided to investigate Nova, since she obviously was completely confused about everything. I walked up to her banging on her locker.

“Nova, I was just wondering, uhm, where do you come from?” I asked her as I showed her how to properly open the locker.

“Oh, uh, I uh, come from Mars,” she whispered. I froze.
“What do you mean Mars?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to study Earthlings to see if they behave differently than Martians,” she replied. Without another word, she stuffed her backpack in her locker and walked away, leaving me stunned.

Who is this girl, and is she really from Mars? I had to investigate further.