Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  “Oh, so now you’re Sherlock fucking Holmes. Whatever, Mae. Also, for the record, trust me, I am a lot more mad at you.”

  Sometimes, trying to talk to Hannah is like attempting to solve the Riemann hypothesis. My sister is a pure mathematics conundrum.

  “You have to stop this, Nah. It’ll get bad again—it already is! I know it’s so, so hard. Everything is mostly horrible right now. No one understands more than me! But, Nah, what would they say if they knew—”

  As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them.

  Hannah looks at me like I am a waste dump being sent back to Earth. She looks at me like she wants me to disappear.

  “Fuck you, Mae.”

  Abort mission. Abort.

  “Nah, I didn’t—I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t say things in the most helpful way. I know that. I’m sorry. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

  Hannah turns around, starts crossing the parking lot in the direction of the T. Her legs are so long, I’d have to run to catch up to her. I want her to choose to stop. To not make me always have to run after her.

  “Hannah!” I yell.

  She doesn’t turn around.

  I watch my sister stomp away, arms wrapped around her against the cold, and I think I know what it would be like to be on a space walk and have your tether break.

  All you can do is float in the darkness, watching the light slip away.

  * * *

  If my sister were a weather system viewed from the ISS, she would be great big storm clouds sweeping over the face of Earth, covering whole landmasses, blocking out the sun.

  More and more I keep thinking about the Little Prince’s rose and how he left his planet, Asteroid B-612, even though he loved her, because she was impossible to live with. No matter what he did, it wasn’t enough. And she was always waving her petals, so to speak—saber rattling, raring for a fight. Snapping at him. Refusing to accept his help. Totally self-absorbed.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck on Asteroid B-612 with Hannah.

  Honestly, I am growing very tired of it.

  And I don’t like being cursed at.

  Or walked away from.

  And I don’t like being lied to.

  I found a postcard. I don’t know when it came in. Why she didn’t tell me. And I can’t even say anything because I found it when I was going through her stuff, looking for more pills to throw away. Why would she keep that from me? Their last words to us. As though, by rights, they belong to her more than they do to me. She is part of them. She is made up of their genes. So maybe they are more hers.

  But maybe the worst part of finding that postcard was: What was the joke Dad was going to tell me?

  It might make me insane, never knowing.

  I don’t need to be the center of attention—I never have been, and it’s not a place I like to be. Nah always needed that, needed applause and good jobs and people blowing kisses. And that’s fine. But right now, when we’re all trying to figure out how to deal with Mom and Dad being gone, suddenly it’s become about keeping Hannah okay. Everyone tiptoeing around her, worrying about her depression (because that’s what they think the whole problem is), knocking on her door, wringing their hands. Uncle Tony trying to ask about school, meeting with Hannah’s teachers. It’s the Hannah Show, and we all have front-row seats. And I want to stop going.

  Aunt Nora keeps trying to do all this nice stuff for us, and she has no idea we’re both lying to her face every single day. Hannah, because she’s using, and me, for not telling my aunt and uncle what’s going on. Not telling them there are drugs under their roof and a drug addict sleeping on their bed. They deserve to know, but I’ve got one more card to play. And then, I don’t care if it’s disloyal and Hannah never talks to me again, I’ll confess. Everything. I’m scared that they’ll send her away somewhere, that her life will be even worse, but I have to take that chance. For her.

  I want her to make Mom and Dad proud. Not turn into my bio mom. Because that’s what she is going to become, maybe for life, isn’t she? Isn’t that what happens when you can’t ever stop? And how am I supposed to deal with that? What am I supposed to do?

  So I have to fix this. I have to fix her. I have to work the problem.

  But how do you fix someone who has broken into a thousand pieces?

  The data is terrible. My sister is refusing to go to the counseling sessions; the school has called about her ditching. After I confronted her today, she shut her door and refused to come out.

  So I do the only thing I can think of: I call Micah.

  “Hello?”

  A girl’s voice. I look at the screen, thinking—but, no, definitely Micah’s number.

  “Hello. Can I please speak to Micah?”

  “What?”

  It’s loud in the background. A party, probably. It’s Friday night, after all. Well, it’s only four in the afternoon there, but surfers get started early.

  “Micah. I need to talk to Micah?”

  “Oh, right, yeah, uh—he’s kinda … busy.” Laughter. Hers. “Hold on.”

  Even though I’m not there, I want to go stand in a corner and hide, or see if they have any good books on their bookshelves. I have been to three parties in my life, these kinds of parties, and I did not like them at all. Sometimes it’s very clear I do not belong on Earth.

  The longer I wait, the more it occurs to me to wonder what it could be that Micah is so busy doing. What her laugh meant. A knowing kind of laugh.

  Oh god.

  “Hello?”

  Micah is out of breath.

  “It’s Mae.” I don’t feel like greeting him properly right now.

  “Hey. Hey. Uh. Hold on.” The sound of the party fades a bit, like he’s gone into another room. “Sorry. Is everything okay?”

  I am feeling weird.

  Nah is the one who gets … vibes. She calls them that. Very unscientific. But I am feeling—Mom says it’s like someone’s walking over your grave. And I am feeling not good about that girl who answered the phone. Her laugh.

  “Mae? Where’s Nah? Is she okay? She hasn’t been calling me back the past few days.”

  I take a breath. This is Micah. My big brother. Who is like a moon that revolves around my sister, lighting her up, Nah the center of his world. Vibes are not hard science, and I am going to go with what I know. And what I know is that Micah loves my sister more than anyone in his world. At least, that’s my working hypothesis based on previous evidence.

  “She’s in her room,” I say. “Listen, Micah, Nah would kill me if she knew I was calling you, but I need your help.”

  I tell him everything. The pills, the night with the broken bottle of bourbon. The ditching.

  “You’re wrong about the pills,” he says. “She only had a few left. And she said that was it, she just needed to take the edge off—”

  “These are new ones. Percocet.”

  He curses. “Did you check your aunt and uncle’s cabinet?”

  “There’s nothing there. And I can’t ask if they’re missing anything.”

  “She probably just asked your cousin to hook her up if she didn’t take it from them. I know you’re worried because of all that shit from before, but this is different. She’s had a rough time. Go easy on her, and if she starts screwing up at school, then worry. She just needs to chill, and this helps.”

  I am not a person who throws things, but I’d really like to now. At him.

  “How can you say this—you saw how it was before! This is exactly what it was like before she went to detox and all that.”

  “Look—I know you two are close, but she doesn’t talk to you about this kind of thing. She told me she just needed to get through these past few weeks—”

  “Wait, you knew and you didn’t tell her to STOP?”

  “Whoa. Hold on. Yes, I know. I’m her boyfriend. And I’m not going to, like, tell on her to her sister. She’s okay. I’m checking in. She’s just sad, Mae. You gotta lay off her.”


  “I’m certain she’s on something every day. She had—has—a serious addiction, and you’re being extremely irresponsible in your logic right now. Nah’s becoming reclusive, temperamental, she won’t eat, she’s making very bad choices—”

  He blows out his breath in a frustrated way, which I resent, I really do.

  “Mae. Dude. Chill. Your parents just died in a really fucked-up way. You’ve had to move to a new city across the country. Nah and I are going to be apart for months.” He sighs. “And she’s still having a hard time about … you know. What happened in March.”

  What happened in March. We use all these euphemisms, as if not saying abortion somehow makes Nah hurt less. I think everyone just wants to pretend it never happened. But it did. I think it’s part of why she can’t get better. I don’t know how to make him understand. Mom said that part of why people are sometimes intimidated by me or don’t understand me is that I need to be more vulnerable. She said even astronauts have to wear their hearts on their sleeves sometimes. I told her that would medically disqualify me as a candidate, but I know what she meant.

  I take a breath. I tell him my greatest fear for my sister. “She could turn into my bio mom, Micah.”

  He knows about the meth and social services, about the way they found me in a crib covered in excrement. Dad let me read my file when I turned sixteen. That was our deal. It was a difficult night.

  “This time, Hannah chose to have an abortion,” I say. “But what about next time? What if she doesn’t, and then you guys have a baby that’s all messed up, or you get lucky and have a healthy one like me, but then she forgets to change its diaper because she’s too high? She’d never forgive herself. I’d never forgive her.”

  I’m grateful I exist, grateful that when my birth mother recognized that she wasn’t able to care for me, she gave me a fighting chance to have a better life—which I got. But I’m also grateful that Hannah doesn’t have a baby right now. I’m glad she made that choice. I don’t really know how to reconcile those two things.

  “What the fuck, Mae? That’s not gonna happen. She’s not your bio mom—Jesus.”

  “Really? Because the woman who gave birth to me was the kind of person whose entire life was defined by the drugs she couldn’t stop taking.” And then I say the thing I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. Micah’s being incredibly dense right now. “Listen. I don’t know what Hannah would have chosen to do if she hadn’t been on drugs. I really don’t. And I’m not sure she does, either.”

  He’s quiet for a long time. Then he says, “I can’t even believe you’re saying this right now. She’s seventeen, Mae. We didn’t want a kid.”

  “You didn’t want a kid. Don’t put words into my sister’s mouth.”

  “Oh, so if you got pregnant right now, Mae, you’d have it? You’d give up NASA?”

  “No. I don’t want a kid now or ever, and I wouldn’t give up NASA.”

  “You’d have an abortion.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re judging Hannah for having one?”

  “No. Are you even listening to me? I’M NOT HANNAH. We want different things in life! Micah, you scored a fourteen-ninety on the SAT—why is this so difficult to understand?”

  He lets out a frustrated growl, which alerts me that I am now having to reason with a caveman.

  “This is all beside the point,” Micah says, after a minute. “The pills—she’s just … dealing, Mae. In the only way she can right now. I know you’re not into that scene, but, trust me, her problem is not a problem anymore. This is different. I trust her.”

  “She’s not dealing, Micah, that’s what I’m telling you,” I say. “And if she’s telling you that and you trust her, then she’s manipulating you and/or lying to herself. You should trust ME, the person who occupies the same physical SPACE as her. The SOBER PERSON on the ground.”

  “Look, I bet it’s just your cousin hooking her up. Tell him to stop giving her pills. Problem solved. If her supply runs dry, then she’ll—”

  “Nate would never give her something like that,” I say. “Plus, he’s not into that crap. He’s an actual rocket scientist. He has better things to do than get high.”

  He’s rolling his eyes. I can tell. I can hear. “Then someone at school gave them to her.”

  “She doesn’t know anyone.”

  “Look,” he says, “she’s got some kind of hookup, Mae—someone is dealing to her. That’s the only way to get pills like that.”

  “A dealer? Like, a drug dealer? No. That’s … No.”

  That weird circus girl on the boardwalk is one thing. She and Nah were friends. Dealers make me think of guys in leather jackets and alleys and knives and, oh my god, CARTELS—

  “This could be like that show on TV you guys like!” I say. “The one where everyone is on meth and then those scary guys from Mexico come and—”

  “Mae. Just…” He sighs. “I know you are super … You’re a good girl, and that’s cool, but please trust me when I say that whatever it is you’re imagining is not at all true. Okay? Some kid at school is helping her out, and that’s it.”

  “But that is totally out of my control! How can I find this person, how can I stop them—don’t you see this is a total all-systems fail?”

  He’s quiet.

  “Micah! You have to help me fix this. She’s drowning.”

  “Just give her time, Mae. I’ll be there at Christmas and I’ll talk to her in person about all of it. I promise.” The background noise on his end gets louder. “Hold on a sec.”

  I hear a girl’s voice, soft. “Hey, you. We’re gonna head down soon. You almost ready?”

  A tingling sensation spreads across my fingers. The last time I got this feeling was the wave, and before that, it was when Riley came over and had this look on his face and then he told me his family was moving to China and that he didn’t want to do a long-distance relationship.

  Vibes. Bad ones. Maybe this is data I should consider more seriously.

  “Yeah,” Micah says to the other voice. “Five more minutes.” A door shuts. It’s quiet again. “Mae? Look, I have to go. I’m coming for Christmas, right? And it’s already October, so I’ll be there before you know it and I’ll sort it out. Okay? Just hold tight.”

  “I’m sorry, Micah, do you have something better to do right now than discuss the fact that your girlfriend whose parents just died is maybe suicidal?”

  “Whoa. What the hell?”

  Finally, I can’t stand it.

  “Who was that girl?”

  “Huh?”

  “That you were just talking to. Just now. That girl.”

  A pause, then: “No one. Look, is Nah around? Maybe I should just check in with her for a sec. But then I really have to go.”

  No one.

  No one isn’t no one unless they are someone.

  “Are you cheating on my sister?”

  Another pause. One that is long enough for me to enter the quantum realm, where particles do not follow the natural laws of physics, where anything can happen. Quantum leaps. Where you can suddenly jump from one place—the land of having a big brother who loves your sister and is part of your family—to another: the land where this big brother is a lying, cheating bastard who just might be the death of her.

  Unless I can somehow fix this, my sister just lost her real-life version of the Little Prince.

  “You’re so lucky my father’s not alive, Micah.” This voice, this cold, hard voice, is not my voice. It is the voice of Commander Mae Winters, who is reaching Mach 2, about to put a two-million-dollar plane into a forced tailspin. It is me, suddenly, right now, getting ten years older. “Because if he were, he would tell you to your face what a sorry excuse you are for a human being.”

  Micah loved my father. His dad is a total loser who lives in Michigan and calls him once a year. My dad wrote Micah’s letters of recommendation, checked his trig homework almost every night, and took him hiking up in Malibu Canyon, just the two of t
hem, every Father’s Day. It is the cruelest thing I could possibly say to him.

  He breaks down. Huge, heaving sobs tear through the phone.

  And I don’t feel a damn thing.

  I hang up.

  I don’t have time for his grief.

  17

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 23 October

  Earth Time (EST): 18:00

  Nah is holed up in her room. I knock, then try the door—she keeps it locked now. She doesn’t answer. She hasn’t been eating lunch with me for the past week at school, either. I don’t know where she goes. We’re strangers now. I know my lab partner better.

  I wonder if Mom would say something about energy. She was big on that. Mom would assert that not telling Nah Micah is cheating on her is manifesting as negative energy, affecting my energy field. She would say that Nah is picking up on my deceit on a psychic level and responding by throwing up her own protective energetic barrier.

  I’m starting to wonder if Mom was on to something.

  I also know that, because I can’t rely on Micah to save the day, I need to get my family’s help. It’s time.

  “I’m going to Castaways,” I say through the door, through the atmosphere and debris that separates us all the time now. “Do you want to come? Free coffee. Brownies.”

  Nate has invited me to come study with him tonight at the coffeehouse Ben works at—more accurately, he has ordered me. He thinks I worry too much about Nah and that I need to get out of the house. He has no idea. Ben has the closing shift and is promising free coffee and whatever we want from the pastry case. Sugar and caffeine are excellent motivation for crossing the Charles River.

  If I am being completely forthright, Ben is excellent motivation. It’s been three weeks since that night in the living room, and I haven’t seen him since. The timing isn’t right. But I want to. See him. And my resolve to stay completely focused is wavering.