I didn’t really want to go inside because it was the Wednesday Powwow, which was the insanely corny and culturally insensitive 1950s name they still used for the weekly assembly at Madison High. I mean, really?
The big problem was that I was the afternoon assembly. Or the star of it, anyway. Since I’d come back to school from underwater training, the principal had approached the Mars One directors and my folks to get permission for me to talk to the other kids. Everyone thought it was a great idea. Terrific PR, a learning experience, blah-blah-blah.
I wasn’t crazy about being the center of attention. I wasn’t exactly shy, but my ego still fit into the box it came in. Even being part of this mission hadn’t made it swell. The mission shrink said I was “remarkably well balanced.” If she only knew the stuff that really went on inside my skull I’d get kicked off the trip.
Which Izzy would love.
But I had a great game face. I looked like Joe Middle-America. A healthy, reasonably intelligent, reasonably sane, reasonably okay-looking, reasonably talented sixteen-year-old who some media fruitcake decided should be the “face” of Mars One.
Me.
I mean, it was nuts. There were better-looking people going. Even the other teenage guy, Luther, was hotter than me—or so Izzy’s friends kept saying—and both of the teen girls, Zoé and Nirti, were smarter. Actually Zoé was freakishly smart, so maybe she didn’t fit into the equation.
Herc and I both knew why I was picked, though, and it had nothing to do with me being the average guy on the mission—or the Everybody, as our mission PR guy kept saying. It wasn’t that.
It was because of Izzy.
Because of Izzy and me.
We’d been in love since we were twelve. If I weren’t going, then you could bet cash money we’d end up married. Our chemistry was perfect. People saw us together and they started to smile, even if they were having a bad day. Maybe we glowed, I don’t know.
We tried to keep our relationship on the DL because it was hard enough between us knowing that there was a sell-by date on what we had. But it got out, because no matter how smart we tried to be with our social media we weren’t sly enough. Our bad. Now we were the star-crossed lovers. Paint that in big letters across the sky. That phrase, in one form or another, had been on every news feed, print magazine, cable show, and meme since the story broke.
I was the handsome hero who was going off to conquer a new world.
Izzy was the tragic heroine left behind with a broken heart.
I’m not joking, the media people put it like that. Actually they made it sound even worse than that. There was even an e-book out called The Girl He Left Behind. Completely unauthorized, but it had pictures of both of us and all sorts of wild stuff about how this was the greatest love story of the twenty-first century. We got offers from forty different producers to do reality shows, and after telling each other we would never in a million years do something like that, we caved. They put a whole bunch of zeroes on those offers. Izzy would be set for life, and I’d actually be able to donate a big chunk to the Mars One project.
Making tough and complicated decisions like that was part of why the principal and teachers at my school wanted me to talk to the kids in the Powwow. To try and stop the rumor mill from grinding us all down. Like that was going to work.
The other reason was better.
They wanted me to cut through the crap that was all over the Internet about what we were doing and why. The mission PR people put together a 3-D presentation for me with all the right talking points. I agreed as long as the whole thing wasn’t about Izzy and me.
She promised me it wouldn’t be. Her smile looked like molded plastic when she said that, though.
“Why are you making that face?” asked Herc as we approached the door.
“What face? I’m not making a face.”
“Yeah,” he said, “you are.”
“What kind of face?” I demanded.
“Like you haven’t taken a good dump in two months.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder. “You got to lighten up, Tris, or you’re going to explode long before you crash-land on Mars.”
He was laughing as we went inside the building.
I wasn’t.
And for the record, I don’t make faces. He was way wrong about that.