Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  So, instead, I tucked my hand into the pocket of his coat. It was patched and worn, and my favorite. I crave hugs from Keagan when he’s wearing that coat. “Carpentry?” I asked.

  He cleared his throat. “Is that stupid?”

  “Of course not.” I snuggled up closer. “Will you restore our dream house?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  I took a slow breath through my nose. “It is.”

  He didn’t say anything, just leaned his head against mine, and we sat like that, the faint glow of our campfire growing fainter and fainter in the distance at my right, until I reached over with my other hand and slid it up under his jacket and shirt.

  He jumped, laughing. “Cold! Cold.”

  “For now,” I said, and turned, leaning in to kiss him, making him move his arms so I could fit myself into them, pushing him back into the sand and dry grasses so I could lie on his chest, hand moving lower, lower, lower down the pane of his stomach. “My hand is cold for now.”

  He smiled against my lips.

  BELLAMY

  3,100 Miles or Less Than an Inch

  “I don’t think they’re coming back with firewood,” Santiago said.

  Not looking at him, I blushed. “Alone at the fire again.”

  He smiled at me, then glanced back at the tent. The inside had been lit by a flashlight moments before, but it was dark now. Santiago looked at me. “You never got your turn.”

  “You either.”

  “Very true.”

  “So,” I said. “Five years.”

  “You first.”

  I shook my head. “Too many variables.”

  He got up and scooted his chair closer to mine. “Humor me.”

  “Well.” With the fire burned down to coals, the cool night air heavy with moisture and our voices low, I felt encapsulated. “I guess I want to be started on my doctorate. Or maybe working on a master’s? I’m not sure what the best path will be. I’ll have double-majored in physics and mechanical engineering during undergrad and will probably continue with engineering for my doctorate. Though maybe something more specific like robotics. Or biomechanics. Plus biology and astronomy.”

  “And kinesiology and botany and geology?”

  “And entomology and meteorology.”

  San breathed a laugh.

  I smiled. “How do I choose? It’s all fascinating.”

  He reached over, slid his hand down the length of the inside of my arm, and laced his fingers with mine. My gut twisted. My pulse sped, thanks to a flush of chemicals I couldn’t remember the names of right then. I tried to stop smiling and feel calm, but I physically couldn’t.

  “What else?” he asked. He stared at our hands. “After you learn all the -ologies, that is.”

  “Um.” My thoughts were muddled. Santiago played with my fingers like he was testing their feel, learning the shape and fit of my hand in his. “I can’t really say. I hope by then my mom will have been able to quit one of her jobs. Or have found a better-paying one altogether. Her expenses will go down once I’m out of the house, so…” I shrugged. San settled his fingers back in the spaces between mine. I squeezed his hand. The light from the fire’s coals faded further. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head with my free hand and stared at the embers, letting my vision lose focus. “She thinks she’s failed me.”

  “Your mom?”

  I nodded. I’d never said that out loud before. Not since she’d told me so the night Nari proposed this plan. I was surprised by how much it hurt to say it. “And not just because of my dad and MIT.” I cleared my throat. “Even though she’s done everything for me my whole life.”

  We listened to the waves lapping at the shore for a few beats. Quietly, San asked, “Is that why you agreed to this?”

  “Initially. Which is pretty illogical. Since if she knew what we were doing, she’d…”

  “Kill you and the rest of us in a fit of rage?”

  I laughed. “Probably something a little less violent. And permanent. But yes.”

  “She won’t find out,” he said. I looked over to find him already looking at me. “This is going to work, Bellamy. I can feel it.”

  “You can’t actually—”

  “Yes, I can,” he insisted, smiling. “I don’t care if it’s unscientific and unprovable. I can.”

  I exhaled a deep breath and leaned my head against his shoulder. “Thank you.” I don’t usually like analogies. Say what you mean and spare the extra words. But I didn’t have the right words for this. The tenuous joy of San’s hand in mine. My anxiety about the next few days. Fear that we’d fail. Fear that we’d succeed. Guilt about lying to my mom. Guilt for crimes I’d already committed, like helping Nari set up the fake identity for the bank account for diverted funds. Shame that Foster had hung up on me. Excitement that this could be the answer to my problem. All while knowing that this one big risk would change the course of my life either way. My feelings were like puzzle pieces, each from a separate picture and with edges that didn’t fit.

  “What’ll you tell her when this works?” San asked.

  When, not if. “I don’t know. Seems too early to worry about that.”

  “No vendas la piel antes de matar al oso.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Don’t sell the skin before killing the bear.’ Like, don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

  “Exactly.” I pulled my knees up and snuggled deeper into my chair. “Your turn.”

  San hugged our linked hands to his chest. “I think you already know my answer.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Olympics,” he said, breathing it out like a sigh. “But.”

  “Your parents.”

  “It’s not like they’re wrong.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He was quiet for a moment. He changed his grip on my hand to trace circles on my palm with his thumb. “It’s a long shot at best, right? And the extra training takes time and money. When I could be concentrating more on school and a career.”

  “True. But you’ll dive for Stanford anyway, won’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So…” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. My parents love me. They support me. But they don’t understand why I want to do this. They don’t think I should risk failing to be extraordinary when I could easily succeed at being ordinary.”

  I frowned. “But you’re already extraordinary.”

  He breathed a laugh and kept tracing my palm.

  I sighed. I didn’t know how to argue with something that made sense to his parents but seemed illogical to me. And calling his parents illogical didn’t seem like a good idea either. I wasn’t good at this. Moments like this were the ones when most people lied. They said things like “It’ll be okay!” or “You can do it!” while lacking any evidence that either statement was true. Or “I believe in you,” which isn’t a lie but an unquantifiable opinion with no bearing on the actual outcome of considered events. Even though I did believe in him. But I think San needed to believe in himself, in spite of what his parents thought. Or because of it.

  I should’ve said it anyway. I should’ve leaned over, put my hand on his cheek to turn his face toward mine, told him I believed in him, and kissed him. I didn’t because I’m not a spontaneous person. I, quite clearly, have a tendency to overthink things. For example, in that moment I was thinking, I want to kiss him. But what if he doesn’t want to kiss me? It seems like he does, but we’re also friends. Good friends. Which, if I’m wrong, would be awkward. Horribly awkward, the stomach-tightening sort that comes from a reaction within the right pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. Or if not awkward, then at least complicated. After all, it’s late March of our senior year of
high school. If all goes well, this fall we’ll be more than 3,100 miles apart. So instead I asked, “What else is happening in five years?”

  San unzipped his coat halfway and tucked our cold hands inside it against his chest. The warmth, his warmth, was immediate. I felt his heartbeat through his T-shirt against the back of my hand. “Besides my Olympic fame and your having eight degrees?”

  I grinned. “Yes.”

  “Ah, who knows. I guess I’ll have gotten a degree by then, too. In physical education, maybe? I know I want to coach, so whatever ends up being best for that. And I’m sure I’ll be back and forth from California to home to visit my parents and sisters. And you.”

  “If everything goes as planned, you and I will live on opposite sides of the country.”

  “I know. I’m not looking forward to that part.”

  “Me either.”

  He was quiet. I counted twelve of his heartbeats against the back of my hand. “I’ll miss you more than the others,” he said.

  My lower stomach tightened, and I moved. Twisting toward him, bringing my right hand up to his cheek as I’d imagined doing a few minutes before. Tilting my face up as he angled his down and closing my eyes.

  Our lips met.

  For a beat, we stilled. Lips cold but warming. Soft, hesitant. Then San brought his free hand up between my face and the hood of my sweatshirt, chilled fingers pushing through my hair to grip the back of my neck. Our lips parted, our tongues touched, and we kissed.

  And kissed.

  REESE

  Every Day’s a New Dawn, Obviously

  Tuesday morning. Or “morning,” since it was still dark. And still cold. Because it was still March. I’d rolled against the tent wall in my sleep. Both it and my sleeping bag were wet with condensation. Everyone else was still out, Nari even snoring lightly beside me. Sleeping bag pulled up past my nose, hat yanked down over my eyebrows, I stared at a bead of water tracking down the wall of the tent. Choosing between getting up and going outside or staying in my bag inside what was basically a bubble of exhaled breath was like picking between going to the dentist or the gyno.

  I unzipped my bag, pulled my shoes on, then crawled toward the tent’s door, bringing my sleeping bag with me, draped around my neck like an enormous scarf. I let myself out and zipped the door closed behind me. No one else so much as twitched.

  Some assortment of San/Bells/Nari/Keagan had cleaned the site up after I’d gone to bed: folding the camp chairs so their seats would stay dry, disappearing the food, probably back to the car, disposing of our trash in the bear-proof bins by the road.

  I unfolded a chair, then stood in my sleeping bag, zipping myself back into it before curling up in the chair. If we were going to be doing too much of this, I’d need to invest in one of those wearable sleeping bag things, the ones with armholes and an open bottom.

  Except, no. We wouldn’t be doing too much of this. It was March. Yeah, yeah, okay. But March didn’t only mean it was a ridiculous time for camping, it also meant there were only two months till graduation, and barely five till San, Bells, and Nari left for college, and Keagan left with Nari or wherever he ended up deciding to go. I’d already been pricing plane tickets, drafting my itinerary, sketching my plan into existence one line, one sale, one day at a time.

  Because, yeah. Five months. Less, depending. Maybe Nari’ll get an internship. Maybe San’ll get a coach down at Stanford for the summer. Keagan’ll follow Nari. Bells’ll take summer classes or get into some genius program. As for me, maybe I’ll leave early and skip the death throes of my parents’ union. The embalming. The preparing of the corpse. Corpse, divorce. Divorce, corpse. How appropriate that that rhymes, right?

  I leaned my head back and watched the sky lighten. It was full of puffy outcroppings of clouds, the cotton-ball kind, the perfect-daydream kind, the kind I used to build whole imaginary worlds in when I was little and stuck in the car on some trip or sitting out in the backyard staring at the sky. They were houses. Not house, singular. But houses like Dr. Seuss drawings. The ones with all the stairs and doors and windows to rooms inhabited by furry, body-sock-wearing creatures. Except my cloud colonies were home to beings of a darker sort. Ethereal. Beautiful. But also with, like, pointy teeth. For biting.

  I wondered what the dresser looked like. The one my mom’d bought for “my room” at her new apartment that was apparently “purple” and also “very colorful” and she thought I’d “like.”

  It probably had daisies or some shit painted on it. The seller probably called it “country chic.”

  The sound of the tent unzipping made me turn. Santiago crawled out, blinking. Inside, Nari sat up in her bag, running her fingers through her long hair. Keag was already stuffing his sleeping bag into its sack. Bellamy crawled out after Santiago, hood of her sweatshirt up over her head and eyes puffy behind her glasses.

  “Good morning, beautiful people,” I said.

  Yawns, a groan, San’s tired smile.

  He unfolded the rest of the chairs while Bellamy grabbed the keys from Keagan and headed to the car to retrieve the box of donuts we’d bought to eat this morning. Keag, Nari, and San joined me around the fireless fire pit, staring glassy-eyed out at the ocean or down at the dirt, as one does the morning after sleeping on the ground outside.

  Bells came back and passed the box of donuts around. I let everyone eat for a minute before asking Nari, “What’s on the itinerary for today? More 1994?”

  From her seat across the circle, she gave me a narrow-eyed look, then licked the chocolate from the corners of her mouth. “Nope. At T-minus eighty-odd hours and dwindling till we do the thing, today is solidly a present-moment day.”

  SANTIAGO

  A Perfect Point in Space and Time

  The mood changed.

  The closer we got to the city, the harder it was to pretend. The realness of what we were planning to do here grew like a balloon inflating in my chest, making my breath tighter, my thoughts thicker, my tongue heavy in my mouth. By the time we reached the hotel, the only voice we’d heard for the past hour was that of the lady giving directions on Keag’s maps app.

  When we finally found a parking spot outside the hotel, Nari climbed out before Keagan cut the engine and shut the passenger door behind her without a word. Reese jumped out and hurried after her toward the office’s doors. Keagan, Bells, and I continued the silence, watching the traffic on the road and sidewalk outside. Sitting in the rear middle seat beside me, with Keag staring blankly out the windshield, Bellamy slipped her hand into mine and I felt the balloon deflate.

  “This changes things,” she’d said the night before, pulling back from our kiss, her lips stretched in a wide, infectious smile.

  With the coals burned low and the air cold, our breath had fogged between us. “Good changes,” I’d said, and leaned in for another kiss. It was the momentum of chance-taking. Doing this epic, risky thing made the barrier between us evaporate, made me wonder why I’d been so sure of its existence at all. I’d known I was done negotiating that nervousness, that uncertainty, before Reese even went to bed. I’d known that tonight I’d kiss Bellamy. She’d simply beaten me to it.

  When we’d parted again, Bells had rested her head on my shoulder. I’d still gripped her hand against my chest within the warmth of my coat. She’d reached over and tucked her other hand between my right arm and side. “And complicated changes,” she’d said.

  “Like?”

  “Time.”

  I’d taken a slow breath through my nose. The cold made it sting. “Yeah.” I hadn’t said more because I hadn’t wanted to. We were seniors in high school, March of our last semester, and we both knew it was only months before everything began to change. But it hadn’t felt like a moment for pragmatism. It had felt like one for possibility.

  “You know how Einstein developed his theories based on Minkowski’s hypothesis th
at time is the fourth dimension?” she’d asked.

  I’d breathed a laugh. “No, I don’t.” Only Bellamy would know that, right there on the tip of her tongue. Like how she could watch me practice a dive, calculate my angles and force and trajectory in her head, then tell me how far to shift forward or back, how much harder or softer to push off the board, to perfect an imperfect dive; or like how one afternoon when my Harry Potter–loving sisters had come with Keag, Bells, and me to the beach, she’d described the possible quantum physics behind Apparition. “Explain it to me.”

  “Okay.” She’d snuggled even closer. “Minkowski space combines space and time into a single manifold, meaning, basically, that events occupy unique positions in spacetime, or spacetime points, that exist continuously and concurrently, rather than vanishing into nonexistence once they’re past. Past and present and future, therefore, coexist in the spacetime manifold, regardless our sequential experience of the ‘passing’ of time. Meaning that if time travel were possible, you could visit the spacetime points, the coordinates of ‘past’ events as they exist in the manifold. But because time is both continual and punctuated, even if you could go back and retry the different options, make different decisions, each time you would irrevocably change who you’d been when you traveled in the first place. Which could negate the reason you went back at all.

  “But that isn’t my point. My point is that we can’t go back and try out different decisions, so.” She’d shrugged.

  “So…unlike working out a math problem or practicing a dive, you don’t get to try again and again until you get it right.”