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Lesson One – How to Look Like A Human
Terezi Pyrope had skin the color of a drowning victim, eyes like the special effects in a cheap horror film, and horns that looked like giant pieces of Halloween candy and were also undeniably horns, which were not a thing that human beings had on their heads.
Dave Strider draped a towel over her head and rubbed his nose, considering the effect. “Yeah, I think it’ll work.”
She frowned at herself in the bathroom mirror. “But I still smell like the wrong color to be human! Towels do not a human make.”
“Nah, look, we’ll tell everybody that you’re my cousin from Kruzukistan and you’ve got a bunch of horrible wasting diseases so they sent you here to die slowly in the Houston heat like they used to do back when people thought TB was romantic.”
He wrapped the towel around her neck and pulled it forward so the shadows cast by her cheekbones made her face look like Death. She asked, “What’s TB?”
“Damn girl, this is why we gotta get you out in the world, I can’t be explaining every little disease to you,” he said. “TB is when you cough up a lung and die.”
“You could be a doctor with that kind of medical knowledge!” she exclaimed, pulling on the gloves he handed her. “Dave Strider, the coolest physiculler in the hospital.”
“All the ladies would be after me, it’d be like human Gray’s Anatomy up in there.” He watched her spin around for him, arms outstretched. She looked like a tie-dyed bag of glass, edges so sharp you could bleed on them and wrapped up in a rainbow’s barf. She didn’t look the slightest bit human. She was not the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He nodded and hopped down from the edge of the sink. “C’mon, let’s go shopping.”
Lesson Two – How to Grocery Shop Like A Human
In retrospect, taking Terezi into the supermarket might not have been the best way to start introducing her to the human world outside of the Strider apartment.
It was night, because trolls and Striders were nocturnal, so when they stepped from the (kind of) dark Houston night into the blazing lights of the All Your Food Needs Here We Accept EBT 24-Hour Kuik-E-Mart, even Dave had to blink a few times before his eyes adjusted. Terezi almost fell over.
He steadied her bony shoulders. “I know, I know, the selection has too many prices and values.”
“Too many?” she breathed. “Mr. Strider, I’ve never smelled so many things in my life!”
And she was off, scuttling around the store to breathe in the scent of generic brand cereal and probably lick every individual carrot.
Dave swore and followed. He caught the eye of the Mexican guy doing the overnight cash register shift and shrugged. “She’s my third cousin from Ezebastan, I don’t think they have grocery stores there.”
“If she eats it, you bought it,” the guy replied, and since this was a distinct possibility, Dave hurried to stop Terezi’s rampage. He caught up with her at the meat counter, where she was clutching the glass and licking it like her spit was acidic.
“So much glorious red,” she managed to say in between swipes of the tongue. “Let’s eat ALL OF IT.”
“As much as eating burgers for the next two months sounds great, I can’t afford twelve pounds of ground beef.” He wrestled her away from the case of monochromatically bloody animal flesh. “Let’s look at cereal or something.”
This was an almost equally bad idea. Terezi insisted on picking up each individual brand of cereal and sniffing the box thoroughly. She declared Cocoa Spheres “scrumptious,” Frooty Circles “decadent,” and Happy Charms “enticing.” Honey-Nut Loopy-O’s were “luscious,” Apple Johns were “piquant,” and even Value 99-Cent Corn Flakes got a “palatable.”
Dave was torn between laughing and wondering if he’d be allowed to set foot in a Kuik-E-Mart again. “If I ever need a synonym for delicious I’ll call you up. And maybe you should try eating some of those before you tell me what they taste like.”
“Who needs to eat them when their boxes are so delicious!” She inhaled deeply of Cinnamon Square Crisps. “I’ve never been anywhere with so many colors in one place – “
But she stopped and turned slowly, sniffing the air, then dashed to the end of the aisle and around the corner. Dave followed, shaking his head. Taking her to a paint store might have been a better idea.
He found her in the soda aisle. “This is even better than human cereal,” she gasped, holding one hand to her heart as she surveyed the shelves of rainbow-colored carbonated sugar water. Eagerly, she went to grab a bottle of Hawaiian Punch.
Dave saw it happen almost before it did, like they were back in the game and he was the Seer of Clean Up on Aisle 4. As Terezi swiped the bottle of acidic red drank that Hawaii had probably disowned, her cane hit a bottle of Voltage Mountain Dew, which tipped and hit an array of 7-Up, which fell gracelessly to the cement floor, taking a rack of Mr. Pibb down with it.
Pressurized liquid sprayed everywhere as bottles exploded, drenching them in multicolored sticky soda. The night shift guy appeared and groaned as Terezi started to cackle. “Get your asses outta here!” he snapped. “Dumb kids.”
“Check it dude, won’t happen again,” Dave told the unlucky employee as he pulled Terezi away, both of them sliding the mess of soda.
Outside he shook his head and sighed. “And that was a lesson in how NOT to shop for groceries.”
She wasn’t nearly as repentant as she should have been. “Human grocery stores are boring if you’re not allowed to touch the food!”
“We humans have a little thing called human hygiene that means the humans kick you out of their human stores if you explode human soda all over their human floors,” he told her.
She shrugged, clearly not grasping the gravity of the situation. “You can do the grocery shopping if you think I’m so bad at it, Mr. Coolkid!”
He wanted to grab her and say no, you don’t understand, I can’t keep you in my apartment forever, the neighbors already think we’re crazy enough with all that puppet shit. He wanted to say you’re living on the human planet now so you have to at least pass for a functioning human, even if that means living life moving around so nobody gets too close a look at you because that’s better than hiding inside a building for the rest of your life. He wanted to shake her and say you’ve watched every episode of Judge Judy ever produced and you haven’t tried drawing on my walls with chalk for at least two weeks and the bags under your eyes weren’t half that big when you first got here and you were always pointy but now your angles are so sharp I’m afraid to touch you.
Instead he shrugged too and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Let’s try something else then.”
Lesson Three – How to Go See a Movie Like a Human
Movies were really Egbert’s thing, but Dave figured that movie theaters were dark and you didn’t have to talk to anyone or touch anything in them, and if he couldn’t get Terezi to shut up, well, it was probably too late for many people to be there anyway. He shelled out the twenty bucks for two tickets to some action flick that would probably be both so bad it was good and full of bright enough colors and sounds that Terezi could enjoy the sensory overload.
The theater had more people in it than he would have liked, but they sat in the back row and ate popcorn soaked in fake butter from a bucket the size of a trash can as the previews played. Watching Terezi eat was always interesting, since she kind of mangled everything with those fangs of hers. At least he’d taught her to brush her teeth like a human a couple of months ago, although she needed a new toothbrush about every two weeks.
The movie started, and with three explosions in the first ten minutes things were going well. Terezi cackled at the wrong parts, although Dave had to admit the guy’s face was pretty funny when he was about to get curb-stomped for pissing off the wrong gang.
Enter the hero, a tough trash-talking wrongfully imprisoned ex-con with a motive for revenge and the balls to carry it out. Terezi clearly sympathized with him, judging from her cheers when he shot the first drug runner who had helped murder the hero’s family. Dave personally felt that the love interest’s performance was superior, since the role obviously catered to her acting strengths of screaming a lot and lying around on couches in skimpy bathrobes.
Terezi wasn’t happy with her, though. “Why is the movie setting them up to be flushed?” she demanded way too loudly for human movie theater etiquette. “His sense of justice is too strong to let it slide that she was the girlfriend of the guy who killed his family. Blackrom would be the only way for it to work!”
Dave shushed her. “Yeah, well, humans like all their romance romantic, and we don’t think hate fucking is usually part of a good relationship.”
She snorted and liquidated another handful of popcorn, but shut up, saving them getting kicked out of the second establishment of the night.
The movie was pretty shitty (John would have loved it). Dave was bored half an hour into it and (whoops) looked like the couple in the row ahead of them were too, judging by the way they were macking on each other. He guessed it was lucky Terezi hadn’t noticed that yet, because who wanted to explain human PDA, but she was fixed on the screen.
Although eventually they got to the inevitable (not hate fucking) gratuitous sex scene, and okay, Terezi had probably seen human screwing plenty of times with the amount of TV she watched, but watching it on a huge screen in a dark room with people making out right by them and, hey, throwing Terezi pretending to be a human in there too just kind of made it weird in a way Dave really didn’t want to think about. He went for another handful of popcorn at the exact same time she did and their hands bumped and he snatched his back and shit, now she must figure something was up with him even though it wasn’t, he was totally cool with all of this.
He put his hand back on the armrest like nothing had happened and then fuck, Terezi decided to put her hand on the armrest too, a little lower down but their hands were definitely touching even though she was wearing gloves but there clearly would’ve been some skin-on-skin action going on if she wasn’t.
He mentally ran through his options of What To Do When An Alien Girl May or May Not Think You Are Currently On a Human Date When You Actually Aren’t Not At All: 1) Ignore it and leave your hand where it is because hand touching is probably totally normal in troll culture so what are you even losing your shit over; 2) Move your hand somewhere else, like your lap or maybe out of this movie theater; 3) Move your hand so it’s actually holding hers which is actually not even an option because this girl is not an option no matter what she looks like in the morning with her hair sticking straight up out of her head, wearing one of your old t-shirts which is five sizes too big on her.
Option number two then, because hand touching might normal in troll culture but people who were not on dates didn’t hand-touch in human culture and what the hell else was this night for. He yawned and pretended to stretch and then put his hands in his lap, which is the opposite of what people usually did with that move. He didn’t look over at Terezi, but after a minute she also moved her hand off of the armrest.
Neither of them ate any more popcorn for the rest of the movie.
Lesson Four – How to Avoid Getting Mugged Like a Human
A couple of skinny teenagers walking home at midnight was stupid, and he knew it was, but he didn’t have money for a cab after going to the movies.
Terezi hadn’t said more than two words since they left the theater, but whatever, he was always trying to get her to shut up anyway. This night didn’t turn out so hot, but they could always try again later. Or not. Maybe she just wasn’t cut out to pretend to be a human. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to teach her to be one. A dude who grew up around piles of puppets and refrigerators full of swords might not be the most shining example of human normalcy. She’d probably be better off with Egbert anyway, he was about as typical white-collar suburban American as you could get. If anyone could teach you how to act like a real person, it would be him.
He wasn’t paying any attention, and Terezi must not have been either, because when two wannabe gangsters in clothes three sizes too big appeared on either side of them and herded them into a back alley, neither of them reacted by punching the guys in the face.
But seriously? Their choice of target was questionable. “Dude, I don’t even have any money,” he said. “Why the hell do you think we were walking home, it’s not like we’re trying to avoid a DWI, unlike you guys.” They smelled like they were from the Land of Wine Coolers and Shots.
“Shit, little white boy thinks he can take us!” one of them crowed, and when Dave tried to duck around him, pushed him back against the alley wall. “C’mon then, show off how cool you are! Maybe your girlfriend will like it.”
Dave automatically reached for his sword, and then remembered that they weren’t in the game and it wasn’t socially acceptable to carry swords around in America. It also probably wasn’t socially acceptable to cut people up, even if they were trying to mug you, but he sort of didn’t give a shit about that right now. Apparently one of the wannabe muggers took his gesture as a threat, and sent a wild punch his way that Dave stepped away from. Living with Bro gave you reflexes plenty good enough to avoid attacks from inebriated high school dropouts.
But then the other one went for Terezi, and Dave lunged for him and like the extremely cool guy he clearly was, tripped over a crack in the pavement and fell flat on his face.
Everything could have gone very badly right then. Dave scrambled to his feet but wasn’t going to get there in time and shit way to go dude you’re going to get the blind alien girl’s ass kicked on her first trip out of your house, what a great introduction to humanity.
Except it didn’t go badly, because Terezi pulled the towel off her head and the shades off her face and the sword out of her cane and just grinned at the poor muggers and the darkness just made it scarier. She looked like something straight out of hell. She looked like a demon out to get every drunken gang member in Texas. She looked flawless, and both the guys screamed and bolted out of there like she was going to disembowel them if they stayed a second longer. Which, to be honest, she probably would.
“Wow, Mr. Strider, that was SO COOL,” she said, putting the sword back in the cane. “You really showed me how to protect a human damsel in distress.”
Dave picked up the towel from the ground. “Hey, sometimes you gotta let the girl make the first move, because of human feminism. If we were back in the 1950’s I would’ve had to beat them up, but now I’m allowed to sit back and let you do your thing. Which was a great thing. I mean it was a fine thing. Not a thing a human would ever have been able to do or would really be okay for a human to do, I mean generally dismemberment is frowned upon in human culture but it was still a really cool thing for you to do.” Wow, holy shit, shut up.
He went to drape the towel over her head again, unable to stop talking. “When I say dismemberment is frowned upon in human culture I mean by normal people in alleys, in wars it’s actually generally okay, it’s a fine distinction to make sometimes but this situation would probably fall into the first category. Although on the other hand I’m not sure either of us is a normal person so maybe that would change our case some. Judge, judge, objection on account of the defendants aren’t socially acceptable.”
She grabbed his hand before he could replace the towel. “The judge overrules your objection and suggests you stop taking yourself so seriously.”
“Oh Christ, not this roleplaying shit.” Yeah, she was definitely holding his hand even though there was a layer of towel in there.
“You started it.” There were so many reasons that hand-holding wasn’t okay, and he couldn’t remember any of them. “Anyway, I just saved your pale human butt, so I reserve the right to roleplay anything I want to.”
“Usually in human culture you’re supposed to save that kinda kinky shit for after marriage, but I might be willing to make an exception since you’ve just been introduced to Earth and you clearly don’t have all the nuances down yet.”
She grinned at him again with all of those fangs and said, “Dave Strider, nuances are for boring people,” and then pulled his head down and gave him the most painful kiss that any human had probably ever had. It was like kissing a shark. He loved it.
Lesson Five – How Not to Go on a Date Like a Human
“Good theory, but you might want to work on the execution a little,” he said as they walked on home, gingerly touching his mouth. “I think I’m covered in puncture wounds.”
“You loved it,” she told him.
“You still suck at being human.” He glanced over at her, now covered with the towel again, and tugged it down so her face was less visible. Nothing human had cheekbones like that.
“You can’t expect me to learn it all in one day,” she complained. “It takes most humans sweeps and sweeps.”
He couldn’t argue with that, so instead he said, “We’ll just have to practice again later, I guess.”
She grinned at him, and the streetlight glinted off the kind of teeth no human owned. This was never going to work, but it didn’t seem to matter quite as much as before.