“He’s not my dad,” she said. “He’s a genetic component, a spermatozoon. It doesn’t matter who he is. His contribution’s done.”
KEAGAN
Sunday, February 24, 9:48 a.m.
I kissed up Nari’s neck from her shoulder to the spot beneath her chin that’s so ticklish. She squirmed beneath me, giggling, then laughing harder until she started doing that quiet gasping thing she hates but is cuter than a puppy and a baby hippo being best friends.
I moved my weight to my elbows, hovering above her with the blanket pulled up over us. The flannel snagged on the sandpaper that was my recently shaved head. Her long dark hair spread out in a tangle across my pillow. The T-shirt she wore—mine, my first uniform tee from my job at the pizza shop, now super soft and faded from half a million washes—was wrinkled.
I pressed the tip of my nose into the hollow beneath her ear. “How late can you stay?”
She ran her hands up my bare back. “Forever.”
“Aw!” I pulled my head back and batted my eyelashes. “I’m blushing.”
She leaned up to inspect my cheeks. “Liar.” Then she flopped her head back onto my pillow. “But really, ten? Or whenever. They think I’m at Bells’s, so…”
So I leaned down and kissed her some more. This time there was minimal giggling.
Later we lay on our backs, her head on my shoulder, me staring at the water damage above my window and she at her phone. Ah, Nari and her phone. Or should I say d0l0s and her phone? They, whoever “they” are, say the average person checks his/her/their phone every three minutes. I saw that somewhere or someone told me or who really cares, but basically most people are totally addicted to their phones. A-dick-ted. But while most people are, I don’t know, playing games? Scrolling through Twitter? Making a Snapchat story about the number of rainbow marshmallows versus clover marshmallows in their cereal? Do I sound middle-aged yet? Ha ha. Nari calls me a Luddite, but I don’t hate technology. And even my grandma tweets now. So it’s not really my premature elderliness either. More that if I’m going to waste my time, I’m going waste it by, like, staring at nothing or going on a hike or playing an Xbox game with Bells that we’ve both already beat. I’m a purist like that.
Anyway, my point.
My point is that Nari stares at her phone as much as or more than most people, but it’s not like she’s taking quizzes to find out which Disney princess she’d be post apocalypse based on her dessert preferences or anything. No, she’s doing d0l0s stuff involving…uh, yeah. Coding? Minor espionage and extralegal social justice on the Darknet with the members of her oh-so-secret Internet Relay Chat group? Or reading the news. She reads lots of news.
“What’re you looking at?” I tapped the back of her phone with my free hand.
She locked it, brought it to her chest, and sighed. “Secrets.”
“Scintillating secrets?”
She flipped over onto her stomach, rested her crossed arms on my chest, and grinned. “Scintillating?”
I lifted my head to fold my flat old pillow in half, propping myself up a little. “Five points?”
“Seven-five.”
“Kick-ass! You can tell I’m happy from my dazzling smile.”
Nari shifted her head off her arms to lay her ear on my bare chest.
“Seriously, though,” I said. “What’s up?”
Another sigh. “It’s just so unfair.”
“What? State?”
She scoffed. Probably because we’d gotten an altogether expected and respectable third at State. I even placed ninth in the backstroke. Career best and a rather satisfying end to my swimming tenure, if I say so myself. I was going to miss swimming. Not the getting-ninth-place part. That was cool and all, but I don’t have that competitive organ that people like Nari and San and Reese have. Though Reese’s is more, uh, combative? Not so much violent, more like aggressive. Reese versus Bland Mediocrity. What I liked was the team part. Winning together, losing together, pushing ourselves so hard during peak that at least five of us puked together. You know, camaraderie.
But I digress. “Right. Not State,” I said. “Bellamy.”
She sat up. “Yes, Bellamy! Jesus, do you know how rich her dad is?”
“No. Wait. Do you?”
“Rich rich, Keagan. Private islands rich. Island-za. Plural.”
“Nari. You said Bells told you not to—”
“I didn’t do anything. Not yet. I just—”
And my door swung open. No knock, no heavy footsteps, just “Good morning!”
I yanked the comforter up to our chins, covering Nari’s and my bare, um, everything. “Uh, good morning, Mom.”
“Hi, Paisley,” Nari said, blushing. Though on a scale of parent-mortification from one to set me on fire, this was barely a three. Three-point-two, tops. Meaning we’d been through worse. Oh, had we been through worse.
My mom leaned against my doorframe. “You guys have a good night?”
Dear God.
Nari smoothed her hair with both hands and nodded.
“Use protection?”
Yup. There it is.
“Because I haven’t checked the box in the bathroom in a while, and if you need more condoms, just—”
“Mom.”
“Keagan, I know some people find it embarrassing, but if you’re prepared to have sex, you should be prepared to talk about the logis—”
“Mom. We get it. We got it. We’re good. Okay?”
“O-kaaay,” she sang as she turned back into the hallway, voice receding as she continued, “I don’t want no gra-and-ba-beeees,” to the tune of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Then, from the kitchen, she yelled, “Not yet! Someday in the future? Ten years? Fifteen? Fine!”
Nari curled into a ball on my bed, burying her face in my comforter. I got up to close the door.
Again, three-point-two. Because no, this was not the first time Nari had stayed over. And no, this was not the first Sermon of the Prophylactics, as Nari affectionately called them, that we’d suffered through. Though, for the others—one Nari titled The Pill, or Thanks, We Already Know Where Babies Come From, and another, less prevention-based, that she called Mechanics: Don’t Be Selfish Just Because the Media and Entertainment Tell Everyone That’s the Default If You’re a Guy—we were both fully clothed. And not in my bedroom. Or in my bed. Okay, four-point-seven. Maybe a solid five.
But that’s my mom. And my dad. It’s the peer-parenting thing they do. The mostly hands-off, friend-parent vibe they’re always aiming for. It’s cool. For the most part. The trust me and treat me as an equal part? Grand. The walk in on me and my girlfriend in bed sans knocking, then start up a convo about condoms part? Less grand.
I closed my bedroom door. “Uh…sorry?” I crossed back to my bed. “Yeah, I’ll go with ‘sorry.’ ”
Nari sat up, mouth open, hands on her cheeks in a spot-on impression of The Scream by Edvard Munch. “Wow,” she breathed.
“Hey.” I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “At least it wasn’t as bad as Anatomy. There was no diagr—”
“Erh! Erh! Erh!” Nari sounded off, mimicking an alarm.
I laughed. “Okay, okay. Never to be repeated.”
Eyes wide, she mouthed, Ever.
“Ever,” I said. “Promise.”
She crawled out of bed, pulled a fresh set of clothes—neatly folded leggings, flowy shirt, even a different pair of shoes—from the bag she’d brought, and started to change.
“Leaving?” I asked.
“Dressing,” she countered.
I watched her. Which sounds totally creepy, but I wasn’t watching her watching her, more like waiting for her to fill in her own blank. The one that started with “I just—” and ended with something along the lines of “did a little hacking, cyberspying, morally gray digging using less-th
an-legal means.”
“You gonna make me ask?”
She finished buttoning her blouse and pulled a hairbrush from her bag. “Nothing big, okay? I just poked around a little. Answered some questions.”
“Questions like?”
Using the black screen of my ancient desktop as a mirror, she brushed through her long hair, then bound it up in a knot with an improbable twist of her wrist. “He wouldn’t even notice. It’d be like one of us buying a pack of gum. Freaking pocket change.”
I grabbed a pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt from the pile of laundry on the back of my desk chair. It was a shirt from State sophomore year. The screen-printed swimmer decal was starting to crack, which was a total bummer as it’s my favorite of my very many swim tees, since sophomore year was the season I first qualified to actually swim at State. It was also the first year San scored first in diving, so double favorite? Because I’m one of San’s proudest fans. Like, I’ll proudly tattoo GO SAN and the Olympic rings on my forehead if—no, when—he makes that dream come true. He will. Which might make a friend of lesser moral fiber than myself jealous or at least a little competitive if not slightly bitter, three things I’m solidly not. Mostly because swimming is not my capital-D Dream. It was a thing to do that I for the most part enjoyed. But truthfully, I don’t really have any dreams or even goals, for that matter. Maybe to have a job I like that pays me more than I need to cover my bills? So I don’t have to work two jobs like Bells’s mom or pick through the stack for whatever’s most urgent and/or overdue like my parents do some months?
Wow. That took a turn, right? Where’d this even start? My T-shirt?
I pulled the shirt over my head. “He wouldn’t notice what, Nari?”
She paused while applying fresh mascara in the computer screen’s reflection and looked at me. “Paying for her tuition, Keagan.”
My eyebrows rose. “He wouldn’t notice a quarter-million dollars?”
“Island-za, Keagy. His vacation home in Jackson Hole cost twenty times that much.”
“Great! Then all Bells needs to do is call him and ask.”
Nari tilted her head and arched an eyebrow at me.
“Why is that not the answer?” I asked. “She’s his daughter. He’s her father. If he really has that kind of money, why wouldn’t he help her out?”
“It’s not that simple, Keagan. She doesn’t want to. And why should she have to? He bailed. He’s gone. Why should she have to beg for anything from the guy who abandoned her? Plus he filled out that paperwork. Or one of his minions did, at least. Which means he knows she’s trying to go to MIT and has still done shit-all.”
“So, a couple phone calls, then.” I smiled. “Okay, maybe some light coercion.”
She pursed her lips, utterly unamused, then carefully packed yesterday’s clothes into her bag. I waited for her to argue with me, to push her point. Which she didn’t….Well, know that saying about hindsight?
She finished tucking her stuff into her bag and turned to me. “Which wins, waffles or pancakes?”
I grinned. Apart from the vocabulary thing, Which Wins was my favorite of our games. “Pancakes. Perfect pillowy pancakes.”
She opened my door and started down the hall. “You think alliteration will trick me? Waffles win, no contest. Built-in mini syrup troughs!”
I followed. “Scrumptious circular sugar stacks!”
“Sugar stacks? Foul. Point deduction. Automatic waffle win.”
BELLAMY
Sunday, February 24, 2:30 p.m.
There are an estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, roughly ten percent of which are terrestrial. A minimum of 1,500 of these are within fifty light-years of Earth. Taking observable conditions into consideration, such as quiet versus active stars and mass and temperatures comparable to Earth’s, one of the closest terrestrial planets with a possibility for human habitation, however slight, is Ross 128 b, located a mere eleven light-years away. But as a light-year, a unit of distance calculated using the speed of light in a vacuum, i.e., how far light travels in one year, measures approximately 5.88 trillion miles, those eleven light-years set Ross 128 b around 64.68 trillion miles from Earth. Which means that traveling at, for example, 36,000 mph, the speed at which the New Horizons probe left Earth’s orbit, it would take current technology around 1.8 billion hours, or nearly 205,500 years, or, at eighty years per, over 2,500 human life spans to reach it.
In other words, the obstacles between us and the colonization of another Earth-like planet, between us and shifting the course of human existence, expanding it beyond the confines of our singular planet, are utterly insurmountable. The stuff of fiction and wishes. But I don’t believe in wishing. For progress. For change. Just as I’ve never wished for my life to change. Not because I’ve never wanted anything, like narrower hips or higher cheekbones, or possessions like my own car or a Celestron CPC 1100 Catadioptric telescope, or different circumstances so my mom could make more money and quit her second job. I want those things, but I won’t wish for them. Because wishing is passive. And impractical. And a substitute for actual effort. I’d like to have my own car, but I can ride the bus. It’d be nice to own a Celestron telescope, but I can use the equipment at the university where I take courses after school and during the summers. I don’t like that my mom has to work such long hours, so my plan was to pursue my passions into a career where I’d make enough money that she wouldn’t have to.
What I believe in are real actions facilitating real solutions. I believe in processes, in making observations, formulating hypotheses, gathering data, developing theories. I believe in identifying problems and designing solutions. In taking steps, such as from our current interplanetary travel technology toward the near light-speed technology we’ll need to expand our species’ reach. Such as from my current circumstance with its big goals and financial restrictions toward a future with bigger goals and fewer restraints.
MIT was my solution. It was my next step. Was.
“What would you name your direwolf and what color would it be?” Nari asked.
“Throat Opener,” I said, “and black. So the blood wouldn’t show.”
“Nice.” She reached for the tray of Oreos on the coffee table and took three. We were at my apartment, watching the first season of Game of Thrones for maybe the seventh time while we waited for everyone else. On the screen, Tyrion rode the elevator up to the top of the Wall.
“You?” I asked, though I already knew her answer.
“No wolf,” she mumbled, mouth full, and together we said, “I’m Daenerys.”
She stuffed another cookie into her mouth and smiled at me, cream filling and black crumbs in her teeth. “Minus the ‘sold into marriage by my dick brother’ thing, of course,” she continued. “Death by molten crown is cool and all, but screw character development. I’d have taken him out first thing.”
“What about Drogo?”
She shrugged. “I’d arrange that business myself. Or find a less rapey and gruesomely tragic way to get my dragons.”
“So it’s all about the dragons, then.”
“Obviously. Bitches with dragons get shit done!”
Nari is the original reason we’re friends, which is unsurprising as Nari is the reason for a lot of things. We met in Ms. Mitchell’s second-grade class when Nari noticed we both had the same Star Wars folder and decided we should be best friends by declaring, “We’re best friends now.” Ten years later, we still are.
She took a few more cookies from the tray, split one, and licked off its filling. Her knee bounced, shaking the couch.
“Nervous?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Anxious.”
“Near synonym.”
She rolled her eyes and popped the licked cookie halves into her mouth. “Excited, then.”
“About what?”
Nari
shoved two whole additional cookies into her mouth and chewed. And chewed. And chewed.
“Was that necessary?” I asked.
She finally finished chewing and swallowed before leaning over to loop her arm through mine. “Patience, dearest Bellamy. All will be revealed in good time.”
“Fine. I’ll wait,” I said, and she gave me a sloppy kiss on the cheek.
Nari seems a contradiction. The polished way she dresses and her self-possession are at odds with her humor and tendency to eat cookies until she makes herself feel sick. I’ve wondered what it’s like to be able to tailor oneself for different circumstances. Narioka, the daughter and student; d0l0s in the IRCs; Nari, the friend and girlfriend; Dr. Okada, Narioka Diane, and whoever else she decides to be, while I’m only me.
The door opened and Keagan and Santiago walked in. Keagan leaned over and kissed Nari before sitting in the narrow space between us on the couch. Santiago pulled a chair over from the kitchen table and set it by the end near me. They both wore beanies over their shaved heads. San smiled at me, arched one thick black eyebrow, and nodded toward Nari in silent question. I shook my head to answer that I didn’t know what was going on either.
“Where’s Reese the Piece?” Keag asked, and Nari elbowed him in the ribs.
He flinched, knocking into me. “Hey! She said she’s taking it back! Owning it.” “Reese the Piece” is a nickname Barret Tundle gave Reese when she turned him down after they went on a date freshman year. It rhymes, so it stuck. Which is a proud testament to the intelligence of Barret and his friends. “Besides,” Keag continued, “I didn’t say a piece of what. How about Reese the Piece of Molten Titanium?” He said the last two words in the dramatic voice of a wrestling announcer.
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