Twelve

Some nights, Grace falls asleep to the sound of Agnes and Ximena murmuring in her ear. Those are usually the nights Yuki has to work late, so it is just Grace in the room that smells like burnt embers and luck oil. Yuki’s roommates have odd, disjointed schedules, so she never knows who might be home or out in the city. Sometimes, she prefers the solitude. She hides under Yuki’s covers and listens to her friends talk.

Some nights it’s Raj and Meera. They tell her about the customers at the tea room, about how it is not the same without her. There is still space being left for her in Portland, and she feels it through the phone, even though they are miles apart.

“We miss you, Space Girl,” Ximena says, and the sentiment echoes from the other voices with her. Grace sticks her head out of Yuki’s window and looks at the moon and thinks, It is the same one. We are all under the same one. “Love you,” and the words echo again.

“So much it hurts,” Grace tells them. When Grace needs it again, the words and the feelings from home, they will be there.

Most mornings, she wakes up in Yuki’s bed to sunlight and the smell of pressed petals. Yuki lies next to her, and when Grace reaches out, she can touch. The girl in the bed is tangible. Grace traces the blooming flower behind her ear as she sleeps.

This morning, Yuki is still asleep while Grace reads her email. The “Dear Applicant, your application for the position of DATA SCIENTIST at the GIDEON SCIENCE INSTITUTE has been reviewed. You were a highly qualified candidate, but unfortunately we have—” lights up the screen. She does not read on to see why her high qualifications do nothing to even get her in for an interview.

She swipes it away angrily, and it disappears from her inbox. Good riddance.

She knew the Gideon Science Institute by reputation. They were one of the few in the field that prided themselves on diversity in science. They had a mentoring partnership with two of their local public schools. The vice president was the first Latina woman in a leadership position. They had women astronomers of color with long lists of achievements in conjunction with the institute’s work. They were a good company.

They employed one Black astronomer and had no Black people on their executive board. Grace almost wishes she could swipe the email to hell again.

Instead, she sets her phone to the side. She has an idea, better than giving more energy to this new rejection, and this idea requires Yuki be awake. Yuki’s body goes squished and soft when she curls up in her sleep. Grace’s eyes roam over the hills and valleys and wonders how long it would take to explore all of its terrain. Longer than the summer? Months beyond? Years?

“You’re staring at me,” Yuki murmurs, opening one eye. “Like what you see?”

Yes, Grace thinks. I want to look at you. I want to touch you. I want to kiss you, my good thing. I want to replace the bitter taste of rejection on my tongue with your acceptance.

“Can I kiss you?” Grace asks, propping up on one elbow. “You’re just—”

Yuki smirks, closing her eyes again. “I’m just what, Grace Porter? Don’t be shy.”

Her teasing words are warm. “Shut up,” Grace says. “You know you’re hot.”

“Oh, I’m hot, huh?” Yuki stretches, all of that skin beneath her T-shirt and sleep shorts on display. “You should probably kiss me, then, before I get scooped up by someone else that wants to marry me after a few drinks.”

“Probably,” Grace says. She leans over Yuki, feels her body heat and heaving chest. Her face is bare and wrinkled with sleep. Grace’s honey curls tumble between them, reaching out like tendrils.

Grace kisses her. She is afraid, terrified, but she is also a Porter. So, she kisses Yuki, who tastes like sleep and salt thrumming heat. Grace’s fingers skim over Yuki’s ribs, her dimpled thighs, her soft dough belly. It is their first kiss since that night in the desert, and Grace sinks to the bottom of the ocean with her siren, and the water does not burn her throat.

When they pull back, Grace reaches for her phone again. “I have an idea,” she says. “Well, Meera had an idea. Have you ever been here?” She shows Yuki the screen.

“The Rose Center for Earth and Space,” she reads. “I’ve never been there. You want to go?”

Grace looks down. She picks at the skin on her wrist, little starbursts of pink and red that ground her and distract from her vulnerability. “I want to go with you,” she says. “You have your radio show. I have—” she gestures broadly “—this.”

“Okay, Sun Girl,” Yuki says, rolling to her feet. “Let’s go, then.”

On the train, Yuki situates herself behind Grace. “What are you—” she starts to ask, but then there’s Yuki’s warm hands at her waist, Yuki’s nervous, uneven breath in her ear, all while she tries to keep them steady.

“Is this okay?” Yuki asks, and though no one in this crowded train car is paying them any attention, Grace feels like they have a blinking sign over them. Look Here, it says.

Grace nods, voice caught. She keeps her eyes on the window, and in the reflection, she can see Yuki’s short black hair, her glittering eyes, her chin resting in the dip of Grace’s shoulder. She watches Grace and holds her when she jerks at a sudden lurch. She catches her, like one could catch a falling star if they stood in just the right spot.

“Got you,” Yuki says, and she leads Grace to their destination.

The Rose Center for Earth and Space is a joy. Grace holds Yuki’s hand tight and leads her down their Cosmic Pathway and the Hall of the Universe. They sit in the Hayden Planetarium, and Yuki leans across the chairs to settle in Grace’s lap. Grace finds herself rambling in awe about the Digital Universe Atlas, whispering about the star clusters and nebulae and hungry galaxies.

She looks down to find Yuki staring at her, eyes wide. Suddenly, Grace wishes she hadn’t pulled the front of her hair up. She feels open and raw, exposed like a live wire. Is this how Yuki must have felt, letting Grace into her innermost sanctum of the radio station? This is Grace’s domain, at home amid the things that venture into the endless abyss, and this is her letting Yuki in. Letting her see.

“Too much?” she asks. “You can tell me to stop. I forget not everyone cares about this stuff like I do.”

“No,” Yuki says, wriggling into a more comfortable position. “You’re good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“Teaching.” Yuki gestures around them. “Making me interested in the faraway things.”

Grace narrows her eyes in thought. “You think so?” she asks. Professor MacMillan wasn’t initially a teacher. She didn’t have a passion for it. She was a researcher at heart. She wanted to open things up and understand the writhing pulse of the cosmos. She did not want to be constrained to teaching its basics in a lecture hall. “My mentor always said astronomy was romantic, and I think I agree. I can’t help but want other people to see that what may seem out of reach and untouchable is actually—” She cuts herself off. “Am I rambling?”

“It’s actually what?” Yuki prods. One of the little barrettes in her hair has gone crooked, and Grace reaches down to straighten it. They are blissful and giddy and entangled. Yuki’s denim overalls scratch rough against Grace’s bare thighs. Her little upturned nose is blush pink.

Grace married a very cute girl.

She blinks down at Yuki. “It’s everywhere,” Grace says. “It’s in our skin and our hair, and it turns our midnight blue blood to rust red.” She presses fingers to the dotted freckles across her cheeks. “We are birthed from its dust and ashes the same as those hulking masses in the sky.” Her words rush together, embattled on her tongue. Yuki listening so earnestly makes her loose and flushed and impassioned. It makes her want to tell Yuki all the ridiculous notions of the universe she keeps tucked under her breastbone, out of sight but thumping just as steadily as her beating heart. “How can anyone think we are not evidence of the thumbprint of the galaxy?”

“Holy shit,” Yuki says. She laughs, bright and loud. Loud enough that some of the people turn to look, and Grace glares at them. “Grace Porter, you are magnificent,” she says. “You are the best astronomer there has ever been.”

Grace rolls her eyes. “Too bad I can’t use you as a professional reference.” She thinks of the email she swiped angrily into her trash file this morning.

“Why can’t wives be references?” Yuki asks. “I would tell them that you, Dr. Grace Porter, are the best Black, lesbian astronomer they will ever have the pleasure of meeting. It is their honor to be in the same field as you.” She wrinkles that pink upturned nose. “And fuck them, also.”

Grace laughs, shoulders relaxing. She laughs, and the screen in front of them flickers. The short film is about to start, but she can’t look away from the glinting, sharp girl in her lap. “I think that would be an excellent reference, actually.” She looks away for a moment. “I would say the same about you, you know,” she says, quieting her voice. Yuki meets her eyes. “I don’t know that I’ve ever called anyone magnificent, but if I did, it would be my Japanese wife, who is one of the smartest people I know. History is lucky to have you as its orator.”

“It’s my turn now,” Yuki says. “You showed me your big, bad cosmos. Next, I want to take you on a monster hunt. We can make it a group trip.”

“I’ll hunt monsters with you,” Grace says. “I bet Porters are great at monster hunting.”

The big screen in front of them turns on, and the opening credits for the documentary start to roll. Grace doesn’t see them, though, because she decides that this day will not be about studying the cosmos. This day will be about how the sun feels against her skin. About how Yuki is soft and malleable to the touch. About how she tastes like berries and melon and the red wine they sneaked in, and her lips are stained with it, too.

Grace tastes the universe bursting on Yuki’s tongue, and it is—magnificent.

It takes nearly five hours to drive to Lake Champlain. Five and a half, if you count the coffee pit stops and the pee breaks and the way they have to pull over and combine all the change from their wallets to get through the toll, because no one carries cash.

Grace spends most of it smushed in the backseat, legs entangled with Sani. Dhorian spreads across both their laps, and Sani pretends like he’s not stroking his neck and his back and his shoulders while he sleeps.

“Cis men take up so much space,” he says huffily, tracing Dhorian’s little gold hoop earrings. There’s a matching gold ring in his nose, and it makes him look a little otherworldly. “Does he think he can sleep like this for five fucking hours?” He scoots a little, probably trying to get feeling back in his legs, and his mouth comes right next to Grace’s ear. “Porter,” he says quietly, “at the next stop we’re tricking Fletch into letting me drive.”

“Hey,” Fletcher says, eyes up in the rearview mirror. “I hear plotting. I thought we agreed you are not allowed to drive my dad’s car. You ran straight through a red light last time.”

“Maybe the red light ran straight through me,” Sani snipes, digging out his headphones. He shuts his eyes. “Wake me up when we get there, or the world decides it’s time to eat the rich. I’m not picky.”

Yuki turns around. “You holding up back there?”

“Seems that way,” Grace says. “I still can’t believe we’re going to look for a monster. What kind is it anyway? Loch Ness?”

Yuki makes a face. “Hey, Genius Girl,” she says. “That thing is supposedly in Scotland. We’re going to the border of New York and Vermont. Wanna see?” She holds out a map with circled areas of interest. “These are all the places where the thing, they call it Champ, has been spotted. We’re going to hit up the spots closest to this side of the state border.”

“Why not go into Vermont?” Grace asks, staring at the meticulously marked map.

“Too many white people,” Yuki and Sani say together, though Sani keeps his eyes stubbornly closed. “I’m not here, carry on with the monster mash.”

“Seriously?” Fletcher says incredulously. “You know the ‘Monster Mash’ from American fucking Bandstand but not Egyptian Rat Screw?”

“I’m asleep,” is the only reply he gets.

Yuki rolls her eyes and shoves the map toward Grace again. “We’re gonna split up around here, I think. Me and you, then Fletch, Sani and Dhorian if he ever decides to wake the fuck up. Why is he so tired?”

“Twelve-hour shift in the ED, then he took an Ambien,” Fletcher says. “I don’t think he factored lake monsters into his plan for today, so he might just stay in the car and get eaten.”

“If anyone’s getting eaten by a lake monster,” Yuki says, “it’s going to be me. Are we there yet?”

They are there according to the signs as they near the lake area. The trees are thick and green and lush, and the ground is sprouting with weeds and flowers. Fletcher parks his dad’s car a little way back, and they sit, staring out the windows.

“There is nothing here but undiscovered bodies and maybe, like, some water pollution,” Fletcher says doubtfully. “What will your radio listeners think about the scariest monster of them all—humans contributing to climate change?”

Yuki elbows him sharply and gets out of the car. Grace follows, eyes immediately tracing the long line of trees up and up and up, reminding her of being a kid and looking up at orange grove trees.

“There you go,” Yuki says quietly. Grace has heard her voice often enough to know when there’s fondness in it. “You’re always up in the clouds, Grace Porter.” She tilts her head back, too, hand shielding her eyes from the sun. “What do you see up there?”

Grace squints. “They remind me of home, I guess,” she says. She inhales, and the air smells like lake water and grass and sand and wood.

Behind them, Sani is trying to wake Dhorian up, keeping his voice low as he apologizes for the early hour. “It’s the boss’s fault,” he says. “She wanted a lake monster, so we gotta see a lake monster, babe.”

Dhorian groans, loud enough that the sound carries. “Do you think the lake monster will let me nap? Do you think it will take pity on me?”

Yuki snorts. She bumps her shoulder against Grace’s. “These trees must have nothing on the ones you have back home,” she says. “Those big Oregon redwoods—”

“Not those,” Grace says thoughtfully. “I grew up in Florida,” she explains, “in a little hippie town called Southbury. My mom’s family owns an orange grove there.”

She feels Yuki’s eyes on her, but she is looking up again. She’s been looking up her whole life, it seems, at one thing or another. “I used to climb the trees,” she says, like recounting a dream on the verge of being lost to morning. “You weren’t supposed to, and Colonel had my hide every time I got caught. But the best oranges were the ones at the top.” If she closes her eyes, she can feel branches scraping at her palms and arms, wounds to deal with later. But they were worth it, to find that perfect fruit, to hide in the trees that were big and strong enough to hold her.

She opens her eyes and clears her throat, swallowing down her most vulnerable memories. “Are we ready to monster hunt?”

“Born ready,” Sani says. They turn around, and Dhorian has pulled himself up, and with sleepy eyes and languid hands is braiding Sani’s hair into a high bun.

Fletcher tosses Sani items from the truck. “Three waters, Fletch.”

He wrinkles his nose. “You know the amount of plastic—”

“Normally,” Sani cuts in, “I would let you do this. I promise I would. But it’s 7 a.m., and if you want me to stay awake to Scooby-Doo this shit, I need to be hydrated. Dhorian, do you agree?” He turns his head a little, and Dhorian makes a little annoyed noise.

“Fletch, I get it. Climate change, polar caps melting, plastic in the oceans.” He yawns, hiding it in Sani’s neck. “But I’m very thirsty. I promise to recycle it. Or compost it. Or whatever it is you hipster Brooklyn yuppies do.”

“I’m from Queens,” Fletcher says, but he does throw three water bottles at Dhorian’s head.

“I really worry about them,” Yuki says absently. “They’re so weird.”

“What does that say about you, then, ringleader?” Sani asks sulkily. “Give me the map so I know where we’re going. God knows these two can’t read it.”

“I can read a map,” Fletcher says, but shrinks under the gaze. “On my phone. To be fair, you didn’t specify.”

Sani turns away from them. “I am filled with regret.”

“You,” Fletcher argues, “do not get to be filled with regret.” He bends down and nods toward Dhorian. “Get on before I change my mind,” he says, and Dhorian climbs onto his back, happily burying his face in that long hair.

Yuki hands one of the maps to Sani, who looks it over with a keen eye. “You want us to hunker down on the other side of the lake?” he asks. “The green circle?”

Yuki reaches up and tucks an errant strand behind his ear. He glares at her, but allows it. He reminds Grace so much of Agnes, it hurts. “Yes, please,” Yuki says. She turns to Fletcher and Dhorian and kisses the side of their heads. A soft, little thing that passes between them like a thank-you. “Sorry you’re tired,” she says, “but you know. Lake monsters.”

Dhorian gives a sleepy little cheer before they follow Sani along a diverging path. “Lake monsters! Fuck—Fletch, don’t run me into goddamn branches.”

Grace watches them, Yuki’s own little orbiting universe. “How long do you think Fletcher will carry him?”

Yuki pulls a ball cap out of her backpack and slips it on. “Whole time,” she says. “We’re codependent like that. You need a hat? I have Yankees and my college alma mater.” She holds out a white-and-blue hat with BARNARD printed along the front. “That’s, like, letterman jacket material right there,” she tells Grace.

“Oh, well, if it’s that serious.” Grace slips it on and strikes a pose. “Do I look ready to face the supernatural?”

Yuki holds out her hand, and Grace grabs it. “Born ready. Now, c’mon, I wanna see how murky the water is from the docks.”

It smells out here, like nature, like earth. Their shoes leave imprints in the ground as they make their way to the water.

“How did you find out about this monster?” she asks.

Yuki looks away from her map. She leads them down a rocky, gravelly path, getting closer to one side of the lake. “Sometimes listeners will write in,” she says. “Like, if they’ve heard of something local or have seen something themselves and want me to check it out.”

“And you do?” Grace asks, fingers firmly intertwined with Yuki’s as they stumble over rocks and fallen branches. “What if it’s a hoax? What if it’s dangerous?”

They break through the trees. There’s more sand than dirt here, like a little beach with sprouting, grassy weeds. She can feel the grit start to sift into her shoes as they make their way to one rickety dock out of many.

Yuki takes her shoes off and nods for Grace to do the same. The wood is summer-warm under the soles of her feet. They settle at the end, legs dangling over dark blue-green water.

“Grace Porter,” Yuki says, as if minutes haven’t passed since they last spoke a word. “Are you doubting my ability to spot supernatural bullshit?”

Grace sputters. There is nothing to indicate that anything beyond pollution-mutated fish and wiggling seaweed lives here. Maybe that is what someone saw, sitting on this same dock. Some shadows and fish moving in the water.

“I don’t doubt you,” she says finally. “I just don’t get it, I guess. You don’t know what’s out there. You don’t know if anything is out there. All you have is the word of someone who listens to your show.”

“Just some weird, lonely insomniac with delusions of grandeur, right?” Yuki shoots back, her voice dry as she stares at the water and not Grace.

“I didn’t say that,” Grace says. The sun reflects off the water, off Grace’s hair. “I just don’t get it,” she repeats. “The other stories I’ve heard you tell on your show, they sound like stories. I mean, they sound like stories that have been around for a while, you know? This,” she says, waving a hand at the vastness of the lake, “is different. There’s nothing mythic here. It’s just a—a campfire story, right?”

Yuki is quiet for a long moment. They both stare out at the water, at the little island way out, like there they will find all the answers they’re looking for. Her feet dangle over the side of the dock and hit the edge on the way back. Thump, thump, thump, she goes. Like a beating heart. Thump, thump, thump.

“What about the stuff up there?” Yuki asks, voice low. “The stories people tell about the stars and the moon and constellations. What’s the difference?”

Grace leans back. “The stars and the moon and the constellations are real things,” she says. “Physical and observable things. Things made of mass and matter and energy. Real things.”

“They are,” Yuki agrees. “And then people create mythos from them, for them. They create stories as a way to understand something that is so much bigger and blacker and more expansive than we can comprehend.” She wrinkles her nose. “Do I believe that sirens lure men into the sea to watch them drown?” she asks. “Do I believe there was a time where I had four arms and four legs and two heads, and that I was cut in half as a punishment?”

“Yuki—” Grace interrupts, fingers gripping the edge of the dock tight enough her knuckles bulge.

“I don’t know,” Yuki says abruptly. She looks at Grace. Her fingers reach out, stopping just shy of Grace’s hair, frizzy under the cap from the humidity. A small lake breeze blows, and the strands blow, too, as if completing what Yuki does not. “Do I believe the sun favored you enough to turn your hair that shade of honey? I don’t know, Grace Porter. Maybe it’s just a story, or maybe I think it’s true.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“The story is,” Yuki barrels on, “there’s a monster in this lake. People have said it looks like a reptile. They don’t know, maybe a serpent. There’s a guy that wrote a book about the thing. Says it resembles something prehistoric, and maybe this thing has been lurking under the waves for millennia, waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Grace asks before she can stop herself. She feels foolish for questioning any of it, because isn’t she here because she followed her own creature, her own siren?

Yuki shrugs. “I don’t know. They call the fucking thing Champ. Maybe it’s waiting for someone to find a better name.”

Grace breathes out, shoulders slumping. “So, people have seen it?”

“The guy that emailed me said he saw it,” Yuki says. “Said he couldn’t sleep, which—” She throws a wry look at Grace. “That’s kind of the point, you know? So, he couldn’t sleep, and he’s just driving. He said he just drove, until he ended up here. Didn’t know where he was driving to when he started.” Yuki kicks at the wood dock, where it begins to buckle from age.

“I’ve always wondered about that,” she says quietly. “I’ve had a few listeners say that’s how they found my show. Can’t sleep, get in the car and drive. Fuck around with the radio until somehow, they land on me. When I can’t sleep, I’ve ridden the train before. It’s stupid, riding it alone late at night, but. Sorry,” she says suddenly, to Grace. “None of this is what you asked me.”

“Tell me,” she says, her voice rough. Her hands claw into the warm planks beneath her thighs. “I’m listening.”

Yuki looks down at the water beneath them. It shimmers blue-green and dark. The water is a swamp-like mystery, and Yuki stares at it like she can see straight through.

“The walls blur so fast, you don’t notice that when it’s rush hour and the train is packed. Sometimes it’s just me in an empty car, and it goes by so fast, I can’t even recognize my own reflection.” She shakes her head, and the fringe under her ball cap shifts into her eyes. “I wonder if it’s the same when you’re driving. So tired that you can feel it, like, like a cloak or something.” She looks at Grace. “Have you ever felt like that?”

When Grace can’t sleep, she counts. She counts tiles and stars and the number of cars that pass once she relegates herself out to the balcony. When Grace can’t sleep, time does not blur so much as stand still. It is frozen, as Grace is. Her eyes prickle and her chest aches and sleep hovers just out of reach, just like the stars that meander across the sky.

“Yeah,” she says simply, blinking fast. “I think I get it.”

Yuki nods, and maybe she can hear how much Grace does truly get it. Maybe lonely creatures can hear it in other lonely creatures. That thing in their voices that says, I am like you.

“So, he was driving, and he ended up here,” Yuki finishes with a shrug. “Says he sat on a dock and stared out into the water and something stared back. Something else was awake and hiding in the dark. I don’t know,” she says again. “It’s just a story he told me. But I wanted to see. I wanted—I wanted him to know that I was listening and believed him, so here we are.”

That’s all Yuki says for the rest of the time they sit there. The sun beams steadily, and they sit, and they wait, and they watch. Yuki stares resolutely out into the water, her fingers tapping an incessant, infrequent beat.

Grace finds herself wanting to tell Yuki stories about the moons orbiting Jupiter, named after the god’s lovers. She wants to tell Yuki about vain Cassiopeia, condemned to the sky, and the eagle Aquila, who threw thunderbolts in Zeus’s name. Maybe she can see it now, the thin line that connects fact to a story passed down.

She extends her hand in the space between them and hopes that a tentative touch serves as a story of its own. She waits, and Yuki reaches out, too, their fingers tangled together over warm wood and under a vast sky.

“Find anything?” Yuki asks when they get back to the car.

Sani shakes his head, lifting his sunglasses to reveal a bruise from training that seems extra dark in the sunshine. “It seems as if our monster was quiet today,” he says. “Fickle little things, aren’t they?”

“Aren’t we all?” Yuki sighs, lugging her and Grace’s backpacks into the trunk.

“This was the most peaceful and relaxing monster hunt we have ever done,” Dhorian says, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s do more like these.”

“What?” Fletcher starts, rolling over carefully so he hovers over Dhorian, teasing. His long hair has been braided, little leaves and flowers tucked in the strands. “You didn’t like breaking into funeral homes like that one time?”

“Something touched me,” Dhorian whines, and Sani laughs, jumping off the top of the car. “There were cold spots all over that place, and something touched my leg. I’m Black, I don’t do ghosts.”

“You felt a presence?” Grace asks, curious as she leans against the car. “You really felt something?”

Yuki raises her eyebrows, a satisfied smirk pulling at the edges of her mouth. “You sound intrigued,” she points out. “Maybe there’s more to these stories than you thought, huh?”

The ride back is sleepy and hushed. Yuki hunches over her phone as she tries to format a script for the next episode of her show. Dhorian goes back to sleep, pillowed once more in Sani’s lap, his hoodie under his head.

Sani and Grace watch slime videos on his phone. “I watch these after a match,” he says quietly. “Too much adrenaline gets in my system, so this weird shit helps me calm down. I tried ASMR, but I don’t like strangers whispering in my ear, you know?”

Grace smiles, eyes locked on lime-green slime that gets molded and folded and poked and prodded. “Yuki says you’re good,” she says, “at the MMA fighting thing.”

He shrugs, but his eyes crinkle, pleased. “I found this trans-inclusive gym in Brooklyn,” he says. “It’s been good. You should come watch me fight. Sometimes you just need to punch shit out, you know?”

“Seems healthy,” Grace says. But she thinks she sees the appeal. She can’t punch the uncertainty or the guilt or the fear folded inside her. But she would like to. God, would she like to. “But yeah, I want to come.”

Sani makes a satisfied noise and looks back at his screen. “Good.”

She goes quiet, working up the courage to ask the question that’s been growing in her.

“Do you think,” she starts, voice low to ride under the sound of the car and the radio, “Yuki really believes in this stuff?”

Sani turns his head to squint at her. “Believe what?”

She makes a frustrated noise. “This. The show, the—we drove five hours in the middle of the night to watch a lake. There’s no—even if there was, it wouldn’t come out if it knew we were watching, right?”

“Ah.” He nods. “You asked her, didn’t you?”

“Asked her what?”

With one foot he kicks the back of Fletcher’s seat, and the car lurches. “Turn the music up,” he demands. “We’re trying to have a private conversation back here.”

“We genuinely could have died,” Fletcher says, but he hovers over the radio. “Any requests?”

Sani passes his phone up. “Turn on NAO,” Sani says. “The Saturn album, in honor of our very own space girl.”

Fletcher grumbles but obeys, and music plays through the speakers. Sani waits until it’s loud enough that they can whisper without the threat of being overheard. In the front seat, Yuki remains engrossed in her show draft. “You asked her if she really believes in this shit.”

Grace shrugs. “I didn’t think she’d get so—”

His eyebrows rise. “She read you the riot act, huh?”

“She made me feel very ridiculous for asking, yes.”

“Poor baby. Listen,” he says, “I’m going to tell you something about our feral leader, okay? And it’s weird and disgusting, so don’t think any differently of her for it, okay?”

Grace sits up, alarmed. “Maybe this is something I should be hearing from—”

“Nope,” Sani says somberly. “I’ve let it go on long enough without stepping in and saying something.” He inhales and leans close. “Yuki,” he says, “she cares about people.” There’s a pause as he watches Grace. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”

There’s a moment where Grace’s brain goes off-line, before she elbows Sani hard enough that he falls onto a sleeping Dhorian. “I thought you were being serious,” she hisses.

He cackles, hands covering his face. “Shit, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. You looked so distressed. God. Okay.”

“Can you be serious now?”

“I am, I am,” he says, laughter fading into a wide, but sincere smile. “I am. Really. She believes in people. That’s what this whole thing is really about. She’ll never say that, though, but you learn a lot being friends with someone for as long as we have.”

“But what does that mean?” Grace asks, frustration boiling over. “What does that have to do with sitting on a lake dock for hours?”

Sani shrugs. “I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. It’s just—there are people who write into her show with bullshit. She knows it. But sometimes there are ones that—” He looks out the window, eyebrows furrowing. “I think the people who find comfort in her show, real comfort, are just really, really lonely. Have you ever felt loneliness like that?” he asks. “When more than anything, you want someone to hear, really hear, what you’re saying? Even if it’s a stranger on the radio?”

Yes, Grace thinks. I’m that lonely now, stuck inside my own head. This fading image of my future, folding in on itself from too much weight. Do you hear that? Do you hear me?

Grace wonders at the girl in the front seat. Have you ever been that lonely? Have you ever been so lonely you ask every show if someone is there, if they’re listening?

“Someone wrote in to say there was a monster at the bottom of that lake,” Sani continues. “It doesn’t matter to Yuki if it’s there or not. What matters is she walked through the same woods they did, and sat on the same dock they did. The same sand under her feet. The same seaweed creeping up from under the water, you know?” He grabs one of her hands with rare, genuine solemnity on his face. “Are You There? isn’t about monsters. It never has been, don’t you get it? It’s about people. Every episode is about people.”

Later, days later, episodes later, Yuki talks about Champ, the monster of Lake Champlain.

Grace reads the text at the apartment as she and Fletcher watch a marathon of Love It or List It. She turns the radio show on and puts the volume up, and Yuki’s voice filters through the apartment, fills up all the space between the walls.

“Hello, lonely creatures,” she says into the mic. “Are you there?”

Grace, warm from wine and the open windows and Fletcher squished next to her, thinks, Yes.

“Tonight, I want to talk about what causes us to believe in monsters. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I’ve been thinking about if we have to believe, or if maybe just wanting to, is enough. Someone made me think about this recently, and made me question why it is that this lonely creature created this show, and why lonely creatures listen to it when they could be sleeping.”

Grace listens.

“I think believing in monsters is not what this show is about. It’s not what I think about when I come here to talk to you all. What I think about is, what makes me any different from this terrible thing? What makes me the same? At the end of the night, I do not find myself asking if I truly believe in the sea monster that lies waiting in the body of a lake. At the end of the night, when I pack up and shut off the lights I think, is that me? Am I that monster? In what ways am I the terrible, frightening thing?”

She pauses for a moment, and the dead air only adds to the tension of her question. “Lonely creatures, what makes us so different from the stories we tell in the dark?”

Fletcher sighs, handing the wine bottle back to Grace. “Deep,” he says. They pass a joint back and forth and cuddle underneath a heavy blanket. “That’s some deep shit, bro. Yuki is so deep.”

Grace takes out her phone and thinks about a girl that smells like sea salt and herbs and lingering incense. Her phone illuminates the room like something otherworldly.

She pauses, and then her fingers type out another message.