Attention: ALL
Subject: Evening Menu
Entrees: Vegan lasagna, spicy greens and brown rice, shepherd’s pie
Sides: Sweet corn muffins, salted asparagus, tomato salad
*Dessert* Moon pies and berry sorbet
I tried to keep my resolve hot until my next session with Viveca. I had hoped I’d catch Andrek in our quarters, since no one knew how to hate on the RC like he did, but he never showed, so I passed time relabeling the vials from Joule and imagining new flavor combinations. Eventually, I took my restless bones to the gym, sending a message to Viveca to meet me there.
All the washrooms had adjacent gyms, though I found I preferred the ones designated for disabled people only. They smelled different, less sour, and the machines tended to get wiped down more completely than the others.
At this time of day, it was usually pretty quiet, and I had the whole gym to myself. I sped through the recommended weight training—we were all supposed to do at least twenty minutes per day—then selected a stationary bike, because I liked the feel of speed without the stress of impact from running on the treadmills.
I rode hard, my hands tight on the handlebars. A couple of people came and went, including Danny, but after a short greeting to me, they only talked to each other, and I was free to think my own thoughts. The faster I pumped, the further I got from the cramp in my heart that kept begging me to “do something” already.
Sweat soaked into my jumpsuit, and I hopped off long enough to zip myself free, then climbed back onto the seat. My freckled legs turned pink from exertion, mottled and blotchy like paint spatters, and my waves frizzed like I’d been run through with electricity.
I would tell Viveca exactly what I’d realized the memorial needed to be. A dance was an epically bad idea, like, I might as well have suggested we prance through the courtyard wearing flower halos. It was a ridiculous, childish idea.
Her ideas weren’t great either, but we could tweak them together and figure out something darker and more meaningful. A statue wasn’t such a terrible plan, maybe, if that showed Faraday reaching toward the stars but cut short, never to arrive.
But how? Show the gunshot wounds, the black pool of blood spilling from her chest?
I gagged at the image, hot tears springing to my eyes, and my feet slipped from the pedals. No statues then, but something else. Once I convinced Viveca what we needed to do, she’d use her giant brain to come up with a hundred new answers.
Probably.
I’d have to get her as angry as I was first, which shouldn’t be too hard.
Especially since Viveca already seemed sparky enough to set fires with her fingertips when she burst into the gym. She looked like she always did—shiny hair, glossy lips, unnaturally-tidy jumpsuit—but something about the set of her jaw or the shine in her eyes was like a storm cloud rolling out in front of her like a red carpet. Even her elbows looked extra pointy as she stood in a power pose.
“I thought we had an understanding,” she said, each word sliced razor thin.
“Huh?” I wiped my face on a towel and pushed myself up straight on the bike. It was annoying how she managed to knock me off guard so effortlessly, but part of me was relieved I hadn’t been wrong about her mood.
“I told you to give Joule time.”
“What do you think I did?”
“Then where is he?”
I climbed down and wrapped the towel around my head. “At work, probably. Same as Andrek. It’s not their day off.”
“You haven’t seen Andrek either, then?” Her voice was thin, almost shrill, soaked with desperation, and it filled me with icy worry.
“I left before they did, but—”
“You left them there alone?” She grabbed my shoulders, digging her nails into my skin. I didn’t think she was trying to hurt me, or knew she was doing it, but I didn’t like it. She was shaking. “What if something happened while they were g-jumping? I can’t believe you just left them!”
“Viveca, try to calm down, okay? Have you messaged Joule?” I dragged her hands from my shoulders and held them. Hers were large, and still so soft, but mine were strong from working resistant dough. “We can sort this out, I’m sure.”
“He was supposed to meet me, and I waited, but he…” She pulled away and scrambled for her tablet. “I should have thought of that first. I don’t know what I was thinking. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
I rocked on my feet, unsure how to help. Joule had implied that she was autistic too, but I’d never seen someone like her, as put together and self-assured as she was, crack so fast. I was always halfway there, so I got it, and I knew this was the real her, who she was beneath the perfect masks she kept. My masks weren’t like hers, painted with ambition and genius, and I tended to wear mine slippery and loose, making sure I had nothing to prove.
This wasn’t a meltdown. I didn’t think, anyway. She was un-masking.
Did she want my help? If she was letting me see this on purpose, then I felt honored. But if she wasn’t, would she be embarrassed about it later, or act meaner when she realized all I’d seen?
Others could come into the gym at any moment.
“Come with me,” I said, circling an arm around her waist but not quite touching her. “Let’s talk in the sauna.” And I thought it was more a testament to how off she felt than how convincing I was that she followed me into the closed cedar room, letting me seal us inside alone without taking her attention from her tab.
There was a public comm on the sauna wall, the screen thicker than the one at home, I guessed to protect it from the humidity in here. I went to it and messaged Andrek, telling Viveca what I was doing as I fumbled through the commands.
The guys were fine. They had to be.
Right?
To Andrek, I sent, “You okay? Haven’t heard from you all day,” and because I’d caught Viveca’s worry like a contagion, I sent another to my dad asking if he’d seen or heard from Andrek.
My message to Andrek went unread, but I heard from Dad immediately.
“He asked for the day off, but he’s been in the office anyway. Hope all is well with you kids! Love you, bean.”
I showed it to Viveca, but it only aggravated her. When she heard from Joule, though—a puffy-eyed video message apologizing and promising to meet her for dinner—she listened silently, slumped for only a second, then jumped to her feet and began stripping down to her underwear.
Whatever was going on in her beautiful head, I took it as a sign she was on her way to recovery and the crisis was averted.
Or so I thought until she started muttering and pacing, and I could only catch a third of what she said because it was so fast. What I pieced together sounded like something out of a spell book, plus cuss words in at least six different languages. Suffice to say she was madder now than she was worried before.
I didn’t understand, but I also didn’t want to change subjects to the memorial until she was in a better mood, or at least not upset about a boy. Our boys. And more fully clothed, because every cell in my body screamed for help, and I couldn’t not look at her unless I closed my eyes. There was no room in my head to get mad at Andrek and Joule too. She took up all the emotional space and air, so the only thing I could do was sit and witness.
It felt wrong somehow, seeing her this exposed without an explanation, literally and otherwise, but also it was possibly the most enchanting I’d ever seen a human be.
Her hands, which I’d been not-so-secretly obsessing over since we first met, the ones she used like expert props most of the time—they were loose at her sides and doing this fluttery thing every few seconds, which looked extra amazing because her nails were painted a metallic rose, and they caught the warm light like falling glitter. And her walk, usually so precise, either ship-commander stiff or dancer-lovely, it was neither of those but both of them too. Like there were all these different versions of her walks, but they’d been pinned to a wall, separately labeled, and now she was unhitched, set free, and she was all herself at once.
I’d never seen her knees before, and I was astonished to see they were a little ashy, as were her elbows. Not cracked, but drier, a few inches of perfectly human skin.
She was so heart-stoppingly beautiful. Now more than ever.
I didn’t turn the sauna on. That turned out to be a good decision, because Viveca and I stayed for nearly an hour. Sometime between me admiring her knees and her finally sitting down, I found the translator key in my brain to interpret what she’d been muttering about.
She was, really truly, upset with Joule, but he’d only been the tip of what was bothering her.
“He’s supposed to come by to see me, every morning if he didn’t stay the night. That’s our agreement, and it’s been our routine going on three years. He knows. He knows.” Viveca lifted her long legs onto the cedar bench and squeezed her arms around them.
I got what she was on about. Routines were important. And agreements between partners equally so. Joule was her rock the way Andrek was mine. More than a rock, they were the spikes blocking the dam, keeping the right things safe inside. Three years was a long time to lean on someone.
“Do you think, maybe, we could cut them slack? New relationship energy can be so heady.” I glanced sideways to see what her face was doing. It was blank, though. Unreadable. “They’ll come around once we talk to them about it.”
She rested her head on my shoulder, and I swallowed hard. “It’s not that. And if it is, talking won’t change anything. They’ll be lost in each other for weeks, right when I need Joule the most.”
I didn’t ask her to explain, because it sounded personal and complicated, and the taste of danger sat inside her words the way it had when she’d begged for Halle’s help. Maybe, like me, she wished she could leave the past in the past, but it wouldn’t let her.
Plus, it was impossible to concentrate when her warm face touched my bare shoulder, her silky hair sliding over my back and chest. Hormones were so annoying sometimes.
“Maybe we can help each other through it,” I said. It was a risk, since any moment her masks might pop on and eviscerate me, but I took a chance that they wouldn’t and slipped my arm around her.
She let me!
She even scooted closer, tucking herself against my side. “It’s not fair how easy it is for guys. They do things and say whatever they want, and if they like someone, they put it right out there like it doesn’t matter. Like we won’t be stuck with the consequences for years if things don’t work out.”
I couldn’t argue because it was exactly what had gone through my head last night. Somehow though, I had expected it wouldn’t be the same for someone as pretty and accomplished as she was. So continued my week of being wrong.
“What about Halle?” I asked. I knew it was more blunt than polite right now, but I didn’t see how she fit in. I didn’t get how I was supposed to figure out this whole third-person business either, and I bet she’d designed a system or something. “I mean, I’d like to hear how you and Joule met, and Halle. How did that work?”
She was quiet for a long time. I couldn’t tell if she was choosing not to answer or deciding how to. My fingers wound through her hair of their own accord, and I couldn’t make them stop.
“How we met doesn’t matter,” she started. “We were basically babies in a playgroup. Not babies, really, tweens. We didn’t get serious right away after we hooked up, either. That took time. Halle though, she and I just work, you know? She’s monogamous, so it’s different. Not less complicated, but different than me and Joule.”
Even though I never knew what to expect her to say next, the tension humming between her neck and shoulders buzzed through me. Her lashes tickled my jaw, and the cedar planks seemed to swell with the breath I held.
“You know by now, right? That I don’t hate you? Everyone always thinks that. It doesn’t matter what I say, people hear what they want to hear, but I only hate one person, and it’s not you. Whatever happens, I want you to know.”
Viveca caught my hand, the one tangled in her hair, and brushed her thumb over my knuckles. She tilted her chin as I turned my head, and her face was close, so close that I tasted espresso on her exhalation. Her full lips pushed forward as if her tongue played nervously over her bottom teeth.
Condensation droplets bled into each other as they traveled down the rectangle pane of glass on the sauna door. I was convinced I heard them colliding.
Was “I don’t hate you” her way of saying “I like you?”
I thought I did know she didn’t hate me, or I’d started to suspect it at least. She was nothing like I thought she was underneath. I wanted to know more about her, all the whys of her and what drove her so hard.
I could have kissed her right then and started to learn.
I leaned closer and whispered, “I only hate one person too.”
No! Why did I say that? Why was I not saying, I don’t hate you, either. In fact, all I can think about is kissing you, and I’ll lose my mind if I don’t?
But the words were out, and I was not in control, because my mind was stuck on today’s mission which had nothing to do with her silky hair or her hand in mine.
Her hand in mine! What was I doing?
“That’s what I was hoping we could talk about, actually, for the memorial,” my traitorous, unromantic self said, spoiling the mood like a bucket of mud. “How to make everyone remember my sister but also make sure they hate Brand Masters for taking her from us. To hate everything he stands for and to stop people like him from doing that to someone else.”
She made a noise, something between a gasp and a grunt, and I had no idea what it meant. I only knew that kissing was completely off the table.
Her hand fell to her lap with a soft thud. Then, in front of my eyes, she slipped her masks on. I watched the change, despairing at my horrible non-kissing mouth and what it had done. Her back straightened, brow hardened, jaw stiffened, and, in one fluid motion, she was a mile away, though all she’d done was stand.
I shivered involuntarily as air rushed in to replace her warmth. It was too late to take back what I’d said, and she was unreadable again. It had me queasy trying to figure out how to recover.
Autism alone couldn’t account for the many facets of Viveca, though that was definitely one part of her too. She contained multitudes, and her masks were armor for things I had no way of knowing yet.
I scrambled for a towel because I was suddenly feeling all my skin. “Do you get what I mean? I don’t want to lose sight of Faraday, who she was and all she’s done, but we have to take that farther, because she can’t anymore.”
She zipped her jumpsuit so quickly I was surprised she didn’t catch her hair in the tracks. With her back to me, she asked in a voice tight enough to snap, “What made you think of this? Did Andrek say something? Are you sure you can trust him?”
“What? No, what?” I wrapped the towel around my middle. It was impossible to believe we were holding hands a minute ago, because I couldn’t bring myself within a foot of her now. “It’s something that occurred to me during therapy. That we can’t lose focus on why she’s gone.”
“How do we do that?” Our reflections met eyes on the dewy glass.
I looked down. “I don’t know yet.”
“Then we can’t stop it from happening again.”
I felt like she’d punched me in the ribs. Of course we couldn’t, like, literally stop greedy assholes from existing, but we could at least try to keep them in the frame so history recognized them. Right?
“I had another thought too. Like, we could gather stories about her. Not only from trustees. Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much for our final plan, but you never know.”
“Are you talking target audience research?” She spun to face me, her expression shining with intensity. “Or are you hoping to go through her correspondence?”
This may have been the most stressful conversation of my whole life. I swore I’d had a full year’s worth of emotions in minutes. “Yes?”
She measured her breath, sharp in, long out. “Fine, okay, right. We can do that. And I can send it to you if you really want it. If you’re ready.”
I shook my head, lost again. “Send me what?”
“Her correspondence.”
Ice and fire chased through me. “You have that? That’s…” I shouldn’t read it, even if she did. Faraday was always messaging people, me, her fiancés, her fans. That was too much. Like reading a diary. I wrung my hands helplessly.
Viveca cocked her head, seeing me spiral. “I need you to know something first.”
“I’m not ready,” I blurted.
“But I have to tell you—”
The comm, which had been swirling a screensaver but was still open to my messages, beeped an alert. On came a video message request from my mom. Weird.
“Hang on,” I said, moving around her to open the channel. “What’s up, Mom?”
My mom’s face was huge on the screen until she leaned back, giving me a glimpse of Dad and Andrek past her shoulder. All of them zeroed in on me, then Mom’s eyes narrowed, flicking pointedly toward Viveca.
“Are you busy?” Mom asked. Extra weird.
Andrek covered his mouth, but I could tell from the angle of his eyebrows. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Kinda? We’re—”
“Reschedule,” Mom said, and I saw her hand reaching to end the call. She was in a real hurry. “You need to come to Planning. Straight away, please.”
The screen went black, and I logged out. As soon as I did, Viveca put a hand on my shoulder.
Her touch was light and feathery, gone before I fully registered it. “Can we talk after dinner?”
“Meet me in the courtyard.” It was all I could think to say.
My heart, my mind, my skin, every part of me felt pulled in opposite directions, and I’d already felt off-balance from days of poor sleep. I couldn’t imagine what was going on with my family or why they suddenly needed me, of all people, in their super-exclusive planning department, but it had better be for something fluffy.
I couldn’t handle any more emotional surprises.
I walked through the halls while trying to keep a lid on my bubbling worries. Whatever was happening, my parents would tell me soon enough, so all I needed to do was move forward, breathe, and let my spiking hormones shift out of focus.
When I’d been overwhelmed with classes, family drama, and the antics of my own brain, but there was some collective event to attend, Faraday used to tell me, “You don’t have to clean the whole house. Just make a little room.”
I gulped back the sting of her voice in my head, enduring the added blow that the room I needed to make was packed to the ceiling with missing her.
But I tried. I made a little room.