Up to This Pointe

by Jennifer Longo

“Ohhhh…,” Willa breathes, the disappointment of the fancy scallops forgotten with the first bite of dense, heavy cake.

  “I will go to my grave trying to replicate this,” Dad murmurs, eyes closed.

  “Harp,” Mom says, leaning forward around Hannah and Willa. “Just try it. It won’t kill you. Seriously, this is the best thing in the world.”

  Smells so good. But I can’t screw it up this close to the end—no, the beginning—the start of our lives, the entire point of our existence so carefully crafted every day of every year for so long.

  It is nearly here.

  I see Owen watch this exchange with interest.

  “I’ll have it later,” I tell her. “I’ll take it home, I swear.”

  And I do. In the kitchen that night, I wrap it in foil with a note reading, HARPER’S! DO NOT EAT!

  Tonight’s snow is the best I’ve ever danced. I felt it. Fourteen years and I’m ready. We’re ready. No thinking about Owen or Owen with Kate or Owen at all until the safety of January, when, SF Ballet contract in hand, I’m going to eat this entire sand castle of chocolate, all of it, because it will be my reward.

  “See you after auditions, little chocolate minx!” I whisper.

  The sun is going down this afternoon, April 25. It will stay dark until late August, and tonight there is a party. A dance to celebrate or say farewell to the sun or something. This is not the Midwinter Formal, but Charlotte says it is nuts and mostly everyone drinks themselves into oblivion. The condom bowls are being refilled daily.

  “Be there for sunset. It’s gone at one-forty-three; do not be late. Both of you. Promise?”

  It’s only ten in the morning, but we’re taking the rest of the day off. Charlotte’s pinning her curls up off her face and pulling her shoes back on. “Stupid feet keep swelling,” she says. “The heaters are on too high. Sunset! I’ll see you out on The Ice, right? Viv?”

  Vivian shrugs but nods as she lugs a box of beakers to a cabinet.

  “Harper? Sunset?”

  “Yes,” I say, “of course.” I smile in the half daze I’ve been in the last few weeks. I think the heaters are on too high. “Charlotte.”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “When do planes start going to the pole? Can they go before Winter Over is…over?” I laugh quietly to myself. Vivian sighs.

  Charlotte strides to me, holds my face in her hands, and looks into my eyes. “You’re eating, yes?”

  I nod.

  “Staying warm? Taking vitamin D?”

  “Yep.” She studies me.

  “I don’t know.” She frowns. “If you’re not more with it on Monday, I’m sending you to the infirmary.”

  “What?” I whine. “Why?”

  She shakes her head. “I promised your mom. You’ve got to be careful. Never look a Winter Overer in the eye—you know why people say that?”

  I shrug.

  “She’s got it,” Vivian pipes up from across the lab.

  “Not necessarily,” Charlotte says.

  “Oh my God, what? I’ve got something?”

  “T3,” Vivian says flatly.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Charlotte says. “Just stay hydrated. Get some exercise…and you’ve got to socialize. I’m not kidding. You have to.”

  “I am!” I wail. “I go outside all the time with Aiden. What is T3?”

  It is true; I walk outside with him in the afternoon. Sometimes.

  “Take a class, get in the Ping-Pong tournament—there are a million ways to have fun here.” She turns to Vivian. “I know it’s hard when everyone’s drunk and stoned all the time, but the three of you—Vivian, have you even met Aiden? Why aren’t you all hanging out together?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Vivian says.

  Charlotte is not convinced. “I’ll see you both on The Ice, and then we’ll eat a few gallons of chocolate, okay?” She hugs the top of my head with her hand. “Okay?”

  I smile up at her. “Yes.”

  “Good! Viv, you’re done. Stop working, please…and make sure the lights are out, will you? I’m going to shower and change into clothes that make me look female. I’m sick of walking around here looking like an Antarctica five.”

  “Antarctica five?”

  “An Antarctica ten is a Mainland five. Men are pigs. See you at sunset. Do not be late. Do. Not.” And she’s out the door.

  Vivian sits on her lab stool for a moment, her hand absently on a microscope.

  “Hey, Vivian.”

  She looks up.

  “What’s T3?”

  Vivian shakes her head, puts her earbuds back in, locks the microscope away, and hefts her backpack onto her shoulder.

  “What are you listening to?”

  She pushes the door open. “Lock up, will you?”

  “Hey!” I call. “Are you going? The sunset?”

  But she’s gone.

  I would never have gone to the rookery if I’d known it was going to cause this ridiculous Sharks and Jets rumble—no, not a rumble; it’s just cold indifference. I wish Charlotte would tell her to knock it off.

  I wish I still had Kate.

  I turn out the lights and run to a take a shower, pull on my warmest layers, and lie down on top of the blankets to take a mini power nap before the sun does its thing. I’m drifting in the kitten bed…until a knock wakes me.

  “Hellew…,” the Irish cadence sings. “Harper Scott?”

  I heave myself up. “It’s open!”

  His smile peers around the door. “Perfect! You’re dressed. Let’s go!”

  “It’s not for hours. I’m sleeping!”

  “Oh, but the show beforehand is not to be missed. Come along.” Aiden sits on my chair and waits while I pull my socks and boots over my shower-warm feet. He looks around my empty room.

  “Nice holiday lights.”

  “Thanks. Someone left them.”

  “Radio working well?”

  “I’m your biggest fan.”

  He picks up the books on my desk. “Using the library? Good!”

  I nod. The library is awesome. Worn-out ski-lodge carpeting, shabby sofa. Lots of coffee table books about the explorers and, of course, a million science texts. Dog-eared fiction paperbacks people bring from the mainland and leave behind.

  “Kübler-Ross. Tao Te Ching. Light reading for the darkest, coldest, most isolated place on the planet.”

  I shrug.

  “Don’t you like lady books? I always see they’ve got plenty of those.”

  “Lady books?”

  “The ones about ladies going shopping and eating sweets when their fella drops them.”

  “Uh…am I the first female human you’ve met? Where are you getting your lady info?”

  “Hey, nothing wrong with lady books! They’re better than the…What is this?” He picks up the top of the stack. “On Grief and Grieving.” What in the world are you grieving?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “You’ve got everything on? It’s nearly twenty below.”

  “Got it.”

  He sits and looks me over. “How’re you feeling?”

  “You know what? I’m feeling T-three-licious. Let’s go!”

  At the door, he hesitates. Looks real cagey. “If I show you something, will you not say anything to anyone about it?”

  “Not if you’re committing a felony.”

  He opens his red parka, not an easy feat once it’s on and zipped.

  “Ohhh!” I squeal.

  “Shhhh! See, that’s what I’m talking about! Shut up or I’ll get in trouble!”

  “Whose is it?”

  “My guy,” he whispers. “The ‘supervisor’ who doesn’t even know my name. I’ll put it right back, but today’s supposed to be perfect. We’re not missing this chance. This is the smallest telescope with any power I could fit under here. Let’s go.”

  At the stairs, I stop us once more. “Hey,” I say. “Come with me.” We troop up to the third floor, a
nd I knock on a door I’m pretty sure is the correct one.

  “Vivian,” I call.

  “Do we have to?” Aiden whispers.

  “She would love this,” I hiss back. “She’s still so mad for the Great Penguin Betrayal, I need to make her not hate me!” I knock again. “Vivian!”

  Maybe this is the wrong room. I press my ear to the door. A man’s deep voice is speaking. Modulated, conversational. Maybe she’s got a TV in there. “Vivian?”

  The voice stops. “What?”

  “It’s Harper. And Aiden!”

  Pause.

  “What do you want?”

  “Well,” I call, “we’re going to watch the sunset. Come with us?”

  “It’s not for another two hours.”

  “Yeah,” I say, hopeful. “But Aiden’s got”—he nudges me hard with his shoulder—“a thing for later, a surprise that’s going to be amazing. Please?”

  The man’s voice starts back up.

  “All righty!” Aiden chirps. “We’re off, then!” And he’s halfway down the hall.

  I knock once more. “Vivian?”

  Nothing.

  Aiden stands at the stairs. “Scott,” he calls. “She’s fine.”

  Why is this making me so sad? I give up and join Aiden in the stairwell.

  “Are we going to get arrested for this?”

  “Probably,” he says brightly.

  At the main door Ben’s rearing to go with preloaded snark. “Little early, aren’t we, children?”

  “Have a good one!” Aiden smiles and holds the door wide for me. “Kill him with kindness,” he murmurs as we step out into the icy wind. “Or just kill him, eventually. I hate that guy.”

  Even through the now familiar cold-induced head pain, I laugh. It’s so nice to hear my inner thoughts spoken out loud—and with an Irish accent. “I kind of hate him, too,” I admit. “But I feel bad for him.”

  “What for?”

  “He wants to go to the pole. Charlotte says he never will.”

  Aiden sends his green eyes skyward. “If he truly wanted it, he’d have gone by now. I hate people wailing and lolling about, ‘I can’t do this, that’s too hard.’ My gran always says, ‘Just shut your yap and do it, for God’s sake!’ Get a better attitude, make some friends, and get on a damn helicopter. He got himself here, didn’t he? That’s the hardest part, and the rest, pardon my saying so, is not too effing tough. This way.”

  He takes my mittened hand and pulls me toward the fire station.

  “Where to?”

  “Trust me?”

  I let my hand stay in his. But not without thinking of Owen.

  “Yes,” I say. “So far.”

  We sign out, pick up radios, and follow the flags along the familiar path to the Ob Hill hike, past everyone else gathering on the flat expanse of ice near the main buildings, the sun very nearly set.

  “Should we be doing this?”

  “Trust me.” He smiles inside his hood.

  At the start of the trail, he moves in front of me. We stay on the flat road, and now I know where we’re going. Charlotte is right. The early-evening sky couldn’t be more perfect, just about twenty below zero, only a few pale clouds around the lowering sun. It will be beautiful. I’ve not been out in such dark yet—too cold—but I understand this is special. And the hike—uphill walking—keeps us warm.

  Happily, I see that other people are also heading up the hill, red parkas dotting the path to the top, but we take a detour, back to the base of the mountain, where there’s only snow, and quiet, and us.

  A ten-minute walk, and we’re standing in Scott’s Hut, shelter for his first trip here, sailing his ship, Discovery—not to get to the pole, but to explore The Ice. This was the trip Shackleton was on and got scurvy, and all the dogs died—but Scott gathered a ton of information about the penguins and seals and the ice. They stayed in this hut for a while, before losing Discovery to the crushing ice, and they all had to be rescued.

  Not unlike Shackleton’s Hut at the rookery, it is made of wood and perfectly preserved, though not so full of personal objects. There are tables, mostly, and crates and boxes labeled DISCOVERY EXPEDITION. Hundred-year-old dog biscuits.

  “You’re a Scott,” Aiden says in the quiet of the hut. “That is so amazing.”

  “Yeah,” I sigh. “We’ll see.”

  I close my eyes and breathe, try to feel my lineage, feel Scott’s courage, his refusal to give in, moving through my veins.

  Rose-colored beams of the sun’s sinking rays come straight through the windows and spill in rows on the wood floors.

  “What is it you’re grieving?” he asks again.

  I touch the thick glass window with my mitten. Outside, the reflected light off the snow is blinding even in these very last moments.

  What the hell.

  “You know what?” I admit. “I am mourning the loss of the love of my life.”

  “You’re seventeen! That is insane.”

  “It’s true.”

  “That’s why you’re here?”

  I shrug.

  “Scott. Honestly.”

  “I am completely lost.”

  He shakes his head.

  In the last sunlight, we climb Observation Hill once more, with about fifty other McMurdo people. Citizens of The Ice. Our red parkas are moving dots winding around the face of the mountain until we stand together at the windy summit, near the cross for Scott and his crew.

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  Everyone stands in groups, and we face the sun. No one speaks and I understand why Aiden insisted we climb.

  Our goggles briefly off, we watch the last burning sliver of light sink into the sea, and at once the sky is a million swirling waves of iridescent pink and orange, purple and blue, clouds lit from inside, glowing. My eyes sting because I’m not blinking.

  “What is happening?” I whisper, reaching, without thought, to hold on to his arm. We are so tiny, even the mountain is dwarfed beneath this unreal color and light.

  “Nacreous clouds,” Aiden says close beside my hood. “Polar stratospheric clouds. They’re so high and the air is so cold that they follow the curve of Earth. They’re lit from the sun below. It’s set for us but still reflecting light into the clouds.”

  Paint spilled into a glass bowl sky, lit from beneath.

  The colors are the underside of an abalone shell, deepening, shifting above our upturned faces, not the green and blue of the aurora australis—that comes later, Charlotte says—but shimmering.

  And then it is dark.

  The cold is a whip-crack pain in my head.

  “Can you hold out just a while longer?” he asks.

  In my giant parka, I nod.

  Most of the other people are gathering to hike back down the mountain, and Aiden reaches surreptitiously into his parka. The glorious clouds are moving swiftly on the ocean wind, sweeping the black sky clear, revealing…oh my God…

  Stars suspended in its depth, infinite points of light—this is stardust. There is not a bit of sky untouched, not pricked with diamond light.

  Aiden sets up the very small tripod and telescope he has borrowed without permission. “Okay,” he says. “Here you are.”

  I pull my goggles aside once more and aim my gaze through the lens, straight into the burning light of a billion stars, so close my eyes can barely focus.

  “My astronomy professor is always on about how stars are rebirth in the form of light,” he says. “Molecular clouds of dust collapse—they die beneath the burden of their own gravity—and from this death, stars are born. It’s how the universe began, carbon and nitrogen and oxygen—we’re made of the stuff of stars.”

  In an instant, for the first time in months, my heart unclenches.

  I wish Owen were here. I wish he could see this sky.

  At the end of our streets the stars.

  I will find my way beneath these stars; the stars my Scott, all the explorers, used as guides to navigate
the unforgiving, endless ice and sea. The stars will steer me.

  “Aiden,” I whisper. “What is T3?”

  I hear him smile. “It’s a thyroid thing. The brain sort of…reassigns chemicals it normally uses for itself to your muscles.”

  “Because of the dark?”

  “Because you’re cold. Your brain’s trying to keep your body warm and alive. Sacrificing itself for the good of warmth.

  “And then what happens?”

  “Uh…well, your brain loses some of its…what is the…cognitive sharpness? You’re dull. Forgetful. You’ll have the Antarctic stare.”

  “How do you know all this?” My voice feels too loud for the perfect frozen stillness.

  “Because,” he says, “I read the manual.”

  I cannot afford to exist in a fugue state. I’ve only got a few months to unravel the ruins of my life.

  - - -

  The party is raging. Charlotte was right—is right. Aiden and I get separated in the crowd hurrying back from the ice and snow to the warmth of Building 155, and she pulls me into a tight parka-full embrace. “Harp, I looked everywhere for you! Did you see it? Wasn’t it the most unbearably beautiful sky you’ve ever stood under?” She holds on to my elbow, and we practically fall into the entry hall. The wind is whipping up icy bits of snow, and the darkness is nearly black. But inside the lights are blazing, music is blasting from speakers in the rafters, and everyone is apparently totally hammered already. Except Charlotte, who doesn’t drink, and Aiden, who claims Irish babies drink whiskey from sippy cups, but he hasn’t had the opportunity yet to sneak any tonight.

  “Charlotte,” Aiden calls above the music, moving through the crowd, clutching cups above his head. “Are you drunk?”

  “Oh my God, no,” she says. “I love sundown. I’m under the spell of winter! Have you seen Vivian?”

  We shake our heads.

  “She made it to sunset, but I haven’t seen her since. Keep a lookout, okay?” She turns to Aiden. “Does your supervisor know where you are?”

  Aiden nods.

  “Okay. Walk Harp to her room, will you? And, I’m not kidding, look for Vivian. Buddy system. Especially on party nights. Got it?” And she is gone, into the darkened dining hall, where a spinning disco ball has been installed in the ceiling. There’s a long table with a ton of food, hors d’oeuvres, and yes, a chocolate fountain.