The three weeks wore on. I didn’t always have fun. It was my vacation, after all. I had worked to earn my vacation, back on Earth. I was supposed to be having fun, not wasting my time teaching alien kids. Why was I here? It was my vacation! But at times I halfway enjoyed it, which was odd because I never really had an interest in children, alien or human. But the kids were cute, the concepts were easy, and I spent the rest of the day reading, or swimming in the indoor pool adjacent to the large building, or walking the halls, peeking into the windows at other classes. Once I saw another class, older then mine, with a frizzy-haired woman in the front reading aloud from a book. “X plus five equals eight,” she read.

“X equals three!” was the enthusiastic response. I could hear it even from outside the room, and I could hear it even when I kept walking far away. Sure, they were too loud. The impact of their voices left my head ringing after the four hours were over each day. I didn’t even get relief during nap time with the younger kids, because then the room echoed with their snores.

But it wasn’t that hard to teach them because they could be eerily quiet if I told them to, and they always did what was asked of them. I just told them things from a textbook the head Intercepter gave me, and wrote the numbers and letters on the board and gave them basic math problems. And really before I knew it, three weeks was almost over. It was my last teaching day. The day afterwards I was going to fly back to Earth. When I opened the door that morning, they were sitting at their desks, waiting for me. “Hi, guys!” I said. Because even if I didn’t really love them or even didn’t really like them, I still talked to them. The room filled with their greetings. “Hi! Hello! Good morning!” When the chaos died down, we did some basic math, wrote our names and then I read them a story about giggies, which were some kind of insect found on this planet or something. I didn’t understand it but it seemed like my students did.

At ten minutes until my time was up, I closed the book. “Alright, guys,” I said. “I’m going to go back to Earth tomorrow.” I thought about what else to say. Should I warn them not to be so loud for the next teacher? But I didn’t have time to say anything else because one little child in the back started crying, his bawls echoing in the room. That was like a signal for the rest of them, and then they all started crying, these huge tears about two inches in diameter just streaming down their face like mini waterfalls, and gathering in puddles on their laps, then dripping to the floor. I sat on the desk and just waited with them, and pretty soon the whole floor was slick with tears, and then the bottoms of my shoes were wet.

But I didn’t really like them and I wanted to leave and I wished that I had spent my own vacation how I wanted instead of baby-sitting a bunch of crybabies. And it was’t until I started crying myself that I realized that I maybe did like them, and I wanted to stay, and I was glad I had spent my vacation with them. And we sat and we cried, and the pool of tears in the room rose and rose, until the sides of my shoes were wet, and then the tops of my shoes, and then the hem of my pants, until I finally got up and waded to the door, and closed the door on the sound of their sobbing, and then squelched down the hall to the office where I was supposed to sign out and officially finish my time in this place.