The Bargaining Path

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  When I awoke the next morning, the sun was shining cheerfully through my window. I turned over in my bed, smiling at the memories I could only vaguely recall from the night before. The details of what happened before and after Caspar’s story were lost on me, but that tale stuck with me. I squinted in the light, rubbing my eyes, thinking about Caspar more than I should have been. I loved the time we spent together. I loved how we could talk well into the night, how we were so comfortable forfeiting control of ourselves that we could sit and smoke Black Beauties together without fear of the darkness they brought. Of course, that darkness was so peaceful and so beautiful; the only light in it came from stars. The Pangaean sun was dazzling, but the Pangaean stars had no beauty equivalent. They were tucked away for the night, and the sun had taken their place, but…

  My eyes shot open, and I sat up, my heart having plummeted out of my chest. It was far past dawn; in fact, it was closer to midday. My classes began before dawn, and my hands-on medical training began at midday.

  “Shit!” I exclaimed, and I threw myself out of bed and began scrambling about, searching for my black pants, my button-up shirt, and my lab-coat. I found the first two, but the third was nowhere to be found.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” I screamed as I ran all through the house, trying to remember where I had taken it off the night before. Because I was running around frantically, and because I was still so drowsy from having just awoken a few minutes earlier, I could not focus my thinking into trying to remember, so I stopped, closed my eyes, and tried to think.

  I had come home, eaten dinner, argued with Brynna about letting James come home, folded the clean laundry that was out on the line in the backyard after she ordered me to do so, and then I spent the rest of the night at Nick’s, until I came back at ten to “go to bed,” but really so I could sneak out with Caspar. But when had I taken off my lab-coat? Surely before I ate dinner. I had sewn up sutures that day, and there had been blood on the sleeve… Blood on the sleeve! Laundry!

  I had thrown it into the sink, and Brynna had said she would wash it in morning before she took Penny to school and went to work. But had she hung it up to dry?

  Sure enough, there it was, out on the line in the backyard. Instead of taking my time to run down the stairs, I hopped over the railing, landing gracefully, with very little impact, on the hard ground. One of the coolest parts of Pangaean evolution was the ability to jump from high places and barely feel the impact, let alone be damaged by it.

  I was pulling on the sleeves of the lab-coat as I ran up the stairs and into the house. As I ran out of the door and locked it, I hurried to the coffee vendor outside of the university, got a cup, and then speed-walked the rest of the way to the infirmary, drinking the coffee as quickly as my desire not to get third degree burns in my mouth would allow. When I came barging through the door, all of the Pangaean doctors and all of my classmates turned to me.

  “I am so sorry.” I said, and I wondered if I should give an excuse, though ‘I was out all night with the King’s son, but we didn’t do anything. Well, nothing except get high on Black Beauty and talk about prophecies’ would not necessarily lessen their obvious irritation.

  “Ms. Olivier, you were not in your class this morning.” The head Medice, Dr. Miletus, told me, and her disapproval and disappointment was plain. “Have you begun a new beauty regiment that requires sleeping until noontide? If so, you might want to consider a change of employment.”

  “No. I am so sorry, I was up late last night studying for the test in two days, and my sister is still really sick, and she won’t take Tonics unless you pour them down her throat, and…”

  “Though I admire your determination to help your sister, your compassionate nature that yielded such determination, and your intellectual perseverance in staying up well into the night to study for a test that was actually two days ago, I require attendance at all lectures and timely arrival at Training as soon as your midday rest concludes. This is the third time that you have been late, and the sixth time you have been absent. Ms. Olivier, I would like for you to leave today, and come see me tomorrow in my office. Is that understood?”

  Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit, shit, shit.

  “Yes.” I said, and I turned away, because tears were welling in my eyes. I was so embarrassed, and I was so angry at myself for being so lazy. I had only started training two and a half months earlier, and I had missed six days of work total, and been late to three others. I don’t know how I hadn’t realized that my absences and tardy arrivals were stacking up, but I hadn’t realized it. Some days, after spending all night with Caspar, I had just been unable to get up in the morning, but after being warned that if I kept missing classes, I would be expelled from the program, I had taken to showing up late. Dr. Miletus, with whom I had had a contentious relationship since I first entered the training program, had steadily grown more irritated, but she had never told me to leave. I had never been to her office before. Like a little kid who had gotten sent to the principal’s office, I walked, my heart heavy, my eyes full of tears, to where Nick was working in the field. He wasn’t there, so I went looking for Allie and Quinn at the gym where the army training was underway.

  “They’re with Augustus today, so they won’t be out until at least the fourth chime.”

  It hadn’t even passed one o clock yet, and I just wanted to cry harder, because I had no one to complain about my troubles with.

  “Is James here?”

  “Yeah, but he’s training, too.”

  “No, I’m not.” James came around the corner, wiping his sweat off on a towel that he then threw over his shoulder. “Smoke break. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” He came outside, and immediately, I broke down into tears and threw my arms around his grossly sweaty midsection.

  “Hey…” He said softly, running his hand down the back of my hair, “What happened, baby? Is everything okay?”

  “I am such a fucking fuck-up, James!”

  “What?” He asked, “You are not a fuck-up. You could never be a fuck-up. What are you talking about, sweetheart? Tell me what happened. Did something happen in school today?”

  “No, nothing happened at school. Nothing happened, because I wasn’t allowed to go.”

  And I told him everything. I told him about how I had been sneaking out with Caspar and how I had been late to or absent from my classes and was probably going to be kicked out of the Medical program before the day was over. At a few points in my tale of self-inflicted woe, I cried so hard that he had to gently tell me to take deep breaths.

  “And now you and Brynn are going to be so disappointed, because I was doing so well, and now I’m not, all because I was being so stupid, James.”

  “You’re right.” He said, and I looked up at him, horrified that he had just confirmed my fear. “You were being stupid. But neither Brynn nor I could ever be disappointed in you, Vi. Not unless you decided you wanted to change from Medical to Comfort Services, in which case, I would find a nunnery on this damn planet and send you there promptly…”

  I laughed at that, and he smiled, too, as he grasped my hand.

  “When you go to your meeting today, you need to tell Dr. Miletus that you’re going to get your act together. You’re going to be there every day. You’ll stay there all night long, if that’s what you have to do to make up the work. Are you willing to do that?”

  I nodded.

  “I just have to tell Caspar…”

  “No. You don’t have to tell Caspar anything. Caspar needs to leave you alone, Violet.”

  “James,” I said, “Don’t hate on him because he’s Adam’s son. He’s a good guy. We have fun together, and…”

  “You have fun together? You get high together, Violet. Experimentation is fine, especially here, because as far as I know, nothing you’ve been doing is deadly. It’s not like you’re sitting around eating Peace Fruit all night and having a really bad experience the following morning like I did. A
nd while I think this is still just experimentation and nothing more dangerous than that, it is interfering with your work. It is getting in the way of you achieving the one thing you told me and Brynn that you wanted to do more than anything else in the world. It has to stop.”

  “But we just sit and talk, and…”

  “And you can’t do that without the drugs?”

  “Of course we…”

  I stopped, because I was unsure if we could or if we could not. Was I so honest with him because I was comfortable with him knowing everything about me, or was I telling him all of those deep, dark secrets because I was high? Was that feeling of comfort that I felt with him the result of the drugs?

  “I don’t know what to do, James.”

  “Do everything I just said, and unless you do get kicked out of the program today, do not, for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, tell your sister about this. If she finds out that you are sneaking out with Caspar and smoking Black Beauties until two in the morning, she is going to spontaneously combust. Or she will make you spontaneously combust. Okay?”

  “Trust me, I won’t be telling her any of this, and unless I give her a reason to suspect that something is up, she won’t go into my mind.”

  “Alright. Come get me if she finds out and gets out of hand.”

  “I will.”

  Before I left, I hugged him again, keeping my arms around his neck for a long time.

  “You’re the best pseudo-dad in the entire world. I wish she would let you come home.”

  For a long time, he didn’t say anything. But then, he kissed my head and rubbed my back.

  “Thanks, baby. You and Penny are the best pseudo-daughters in the world. Even though there is no ‘pseudo,’ except in the biological sense.”

  “Yeah.” I said, and I smiled as I realized that he was right. “There’s no ‘pseudo’ with you either, unless it’s in the biological sense.”

  “Good. Now go to bed without supper, and no TV for a week, and you now have to clean the entire house from top to bottom, and blah-blah-blah. Most importantly, go to that meeting today, and ask for another chance. If you’re humble, and truly apologetic, there’s no way she can say no. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay.”