Alien in My Pocket #5: Ohm vs. Amp by Nate Ball

My Secret Roommate
    W hen a pint-size alien from outer space crash-lands his spaceship on your bed during the middle of the night, your life can get pretty messed up.
    You can never go back to the way it was.
    My little blue alien and I argued constantly for two straight months as we tried to repair his junky ship. We fought like two crabs in a bucket.
    Then we ran out of steam.
    And we learned to get along.
    I guess you can get used to most things that at first seem to be the absolute ruin of your life, like summer school, tuna fish, and spelling quizzes.
    I had grown comfortable with Amp, and he had gotten used to me.
    The fact that Amp wasn’t much bigger thana stick of butter helped me keep him a secret from my parents and little brother. He also had an invisibility trick that came in handy more than once and the ability to erase people’s short-term memory.
    The only other person on Earth who knew about Amp was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Olivia. And she had gotten so used to Amp that it was a minor miracle she hadn’t blurted out some funny story about him to my parents.
    As the ambassador of the human race, I think I had done a pretty spectacular job. My cat hadn’t eaten Amp, I hadn’t stepped on him, and most important of all, I’d convinced him that attacking our planet was a bad idea.
    See, Amp is the lead scout for the planet Erde. The Erdians are planning on taking over Earth, but because of me, Amp understood that attacking this planet was a major mistake. Compared to the average Erdian, we were simply too big to be defeated.
    So, as we made slow progress in repairing his ship, the Dingle , we became friends—if it’spossible for a human to be friends with a hairless, three-fingered, Smurf-colored alien.
    But now the time was fast approaching to get Amp back home to cancel the Erdian invasion. The future of Earth and Erde depended on us. We both knew it, but we didn’t talk about it much.
    Mostly, we spent our time eating junk food and watching scary movies on my mom’s laptop.
    Amp was crazy for horror movies, the old black-and-white kind. Dracula. Frankenstein. The Wolf Man. Creature from the Black Lagoon . We were working our way through a deluxe set of twenty-four classic horror movies on DVD that I had borrowed from Olivia’s grandpa.
    One night, Amp and I were up late—as usual—enjoying SweeTarts and Ritz Crackers while watching The Mummy (starring Boris Karloff), when our cozy little situation got crazy.
    As is often the case, it all started with alarm bells.

Sound the Alarm
    â€œH ey, what’s that noise?”
    â€œEh?” Amp grunted absent-mindedly. He was lying on his side next to the track pad on my mom’s laptop, rubbing his stuffed belly, totally absorbed in the movie.
    I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with the computer in front of me.
    â€œHey,” I said, gently poking the back of his head with my pinky finger. “Can you hear that?”
    â€œI can hear you interrupting the movie,” he said. “Now shush.”
    â€œSeriously,” I said, poking his shoulder now.
    â€œKnock it off, Zack,” he said, shrugging his poked shoulder.
    â€œC’mon, Amp, listen.”
    â€œQuiet!” he said, waving his hand at me. “Themummy is coming. I love this part!”
    I slapped the space bar and paused the movie.
    â€œWhat are you—?”
    â€œCan you hear it now?”
    We both listened in the silence. It was a faraway tinkling, buzzing sound. Or beeping. It wasn’t the kind of sound I had ever heard before.
    â€œThat sounds pretty dang alien to me,” I whispered.
    He jumped to his feet and held up his hands to silence me as he strained to hear the noise.
    â€œOh, that’s not good,” he said in his strange, high-pitched voice.
    â€œWhat exactly do you mean by ‘not good’?”
    â€œDoes it mean more than one thing?” he asked.
    â€œAmp,