“You have to get a donut, Sarah, they’re unbelievable!” Laila declared through a mouthful of food.
“She’s never had them before,” Riela commented. Sarah frowned in surprise.
“I can’t believe they still have donuts in the future, and I can’t believe, given the fact that they do exist, that Laila hasn’t tried one.”
“Ey gi’nt habb enny og Po’bo,” Laila said earnestly, having taken a huge bite of donut just before she spoke. The translator in Sarah’s ear beeped. It was unnerving to be reminded that it was there.
“They didn’t have any on Pombos,” Riela translated. “Or ‘A bint has a penny of par-balls.’”
“What’s a par-ball?” Sarah wondered.
“It’s something you put in the laundry machine to make the clothes smell nice,” Riela explained.
“Then she probably said the first thing you said.”
Riela nodded. “Pombos doesn’t even have electricity. I’m fairly sure you have to invent electricity to get donuts.”
Sarah thought about this then decided it was probably true. When she’d done about the Civil War at school, she was almost positive that nobody had eaten any donuts, and no one had electricity back then, either.
Whatever Laila tried to say next was so incomprehensible that the translator in Sarah’s ear merely beeped in confusion again. Riela shook her head; she couldn’t figure it out either.
Sarah put a hand on Laila’s shoulder. “Eat the donut. You can’t talk about it and eat it at the same time.”
Laila was still scarfing donuts when they went to class. By lunchtime, however, the donuts had run out, and all three girls ate a healthy salad. Sarah couldn’t quite get over the fact that most of the vegetables were dark purple, just like the weird red cabbage she’d hated in the past. At least the food here tasted okay. She’d never really been a fan of vegetables, but somewhere along the way, someone must have invented vegetables that were nice, or maybe it was because there were so many different planets with their own varieties of food that only the tastiest things got taken to other worlds to be grown.
Almost as soon as the vegetables were gone, the bell rang and they had to go to class again. Lunchtime had gotten shorter, or perhaps Sarah had eaten too slowly. She had literature next, and she was dreading seeing Mr. Tarik again. She hadn’t read all the books she had been assigned and she was sure he was going to single her out for questions. The dim hope that a substitute teacher would take today’s class was dashed when Mr. Tarik swept past the line of students and unlocked his door. There was much straightening of uniforms as everyone waited. He admitted the students one at a time, scrutinizing the length of skirts and the cleanliness of jackets. Sarah knew that teachers were allowed to cane pupils here because she’d signed a release form when she started. When she reached the front of the line, her legs turned to Jell-O.
“You have a ladder in your pantyhose, Miss Bryan. Perhaps in the future you should carry a spare pair, so that you can attend classes looking like a future member of Minos Keralan society instead of like a ragamuffin.” Mr. Tarik’s voice was dangerously soft. Sarah nodded and was about to pass him when he put his hand out and blocked her path.
“I hope you did my reading assignment,” he added quietly. Sarah was so focused on her pantyhose that she blanched when he mentioned the books she was supposed to read.
“I started the Udolpho, but at least I finished Bergensmith’s Voyages. I can’t read that fast, sir,” she pointed out. All of the books he’d assigned her were huge tomes, and it had taken her hours and hours to finish Voyages the day before.
“See me after class,” he responded, his face inscrutable. Sarah hurried to take a seat.
“Let us begin with a discussion of the unique value of mime-poetry. Miss Bryan, you can start with the post-terraformist point of view.”
Sarah’s eyes widened in horror. This class was the stuff of nightmares. She tried to remember what terraformism had been about. They changed uninhabitable worlds into places where people lived, so surely they were like colonialists. She sighed as she realized that gave her no useful information. Across the room, she saw Riela trying to mime something, but since Sarah didn’t even understand the mime poetry, she couldn’t figure it out.
Stabbing in the dark, Sarah said, “Post-terraformists were… after terraformists.” The class started to giggle. “And they wanted to… change people’s views on things.” She suddenly remembered something from the history homework she’d had to do recently. “The post-terraformists disliked the idea of categorizing people by their traditions, so that means they must have thought that mime-poetry didn’t have a unique value.” She hoped any of what she just said actually meant something. She hated things that couldn’t be measured or rationalized.
Mr. Tarik fixed her with his intense gaze and her heartrate quickened. He was going to cane her, she just knew it.
“And who can present the counter argument of the anti-deconstructuralists?” He picked someone closer to the front of the class, who duly parroted something about the right theory, and Sarah started breathing again. Her blood was rushing in her ears and her salad decided to spend the rest of the hour doing somersaults in her tummy, just in case she got called upon again to contribute. As the music played to signal the day’s end, she was about to leave when she remembered Mr. Tarik had wanted to see her after the lesson.
She stood before his desk, certain that she was in deep trouble.
“What did you think of Voyages?” he asked. She tried to explain, but reading the book was like being hit in the face with a door. It had been a cesspool of barely concealed rage interspersed with frequent substance-fueled antics that seemed to be meaningless and energetic. The writer shared none of her values and his actions were usually pointless, but for some reason, she’d really enjoyed reading his story anyway.
“That man, Bergensmith, took a lot of illicit substances, he tricked out his brain with, like, a million implants, then he wrote down everything that came into his head. I wouldn’t like to meet him. Especially the time when he was sliding down ten flights of apartment stairs in an overturned fridge.” She remembered some drunk guys doing something similar in her freshman year of college. They’d gotten the fridge down a few steps, then its wire had tangled in the handrail and they couldn’t get it back to where they found it. But in Bergensmith’s version, the fridge was almost a sleigh sliding down a mount staircase. That pretty much summed him up, she decided.
“What did it tell you about life in the twenty-second century?” Mr. Tarik asked. Sarah thought on it for a moment. It hadn’t seemed that different to her own time, except that everyone did really stupid things, and they believed anything they were told unless it came from an official channel.
“It was… not a very nice place to live. So… a dystopia? And everyone exclusively ate fast food. Also, there were a lot more weird substances floating around back then, and people seemed to take them a lot. The more things were outlawed, the more everyone seemed to want to take them.”
“Everyone?” Mr. Tarik raised an eyebrow. Sarah tried to explain further, still hoping that she would be in slightly less trouble for finishing one third of the set reading.
“Probably just the people Bergensmith met. The government of his planet should have outlawed carrots and broccoli, then everyone would have become really healthy and stopped being so stupid. He seemed to have a skill for finding strange people to talk to. Those weird triangle cultists from chapter six come to mind.”
“Develop this further. What does this show you about his character?”
“He’s an unreliable narrator. Every single person he meets is special and different, and people aren’t really like that. And he’s flamboyant. He always tries to make everything he does larger than life. If he goes to a bar, he meets someone famous. When he meets a girl, she tells him he’s the best she ever had, even though when you read his sex scenes, you have to wonder if she’d never had sex before or if she was trying
to spare his feelings. If he ties his shoelaces, he wins a prize for it. He’s a bit of a James Bond character without the deeply scarred flaws that make Bond human.”
“Was Bergensmith human?” Mr. Tarik’s question caught Sarah off-guard, and she remembered that the book had been set on Nidia, which was now one of the most important Prime planets. She cursed her stupid brain for not thinking that through.
“No. I guess not. So, maybe his species were all like that. Or maybe he was just a delusional narcissist. How could we possibly know? We’ve only got his word for it.”
Mr. Tarik smiled. It was more terrifying than when he’d been frowning. Sarah wondered if he were about to eat her.
“Finish Udolpho before our next class. And Grandil’s The Passage of Time. Soon, you’ll be on the same level as everyone else.”
Before he changed his mind and decided to give her more work to do, Sarah left the classroom and headed straight to Dagon’s Drinks. Riela and Laila were already halfway down their hot chocolates.
“I thought Mr. Tarik was going to kill you! Are you okay?” Riela asked.
Sarah nodded, in a slight daze.
“Me too. But he didn’t. He just asked me a bunch of questions about one of the books I was meant to read, then told me to read the others. Is it me, or are all the men on Minos Kerala really confusing and hard to figure out? One minute, they’re yelling at you and then, when you expect them to? They don’t. What even is that?”
“In my experience, men only yell at me when I did something wrong. And I usually expect them to, so I’m generally pleasantly surprised when they don’t,” Laila pointed out. “Be right back.” She left the table for a moment.
Baffled, Sarah turned to Riela to ask her something she’d been curious about for a while. “You’re from Minos Kerala, right?” Riela nodded. “So why are you here? In school? I know why Laila and I are here. I mean, she can’t even read a book without pictures in it, and I don’t know what anything is. But you don’t seem to need to be here at all.”
“I was sick. I couldn’t finish school.” Riela looked uncomfortable and her hand instinctively went to rearrange her hair. Laila chose that moment to reappear with another bag of donuts.
“Can you believe this? They sell these things everywhere! They’re the bestest thing ever!” Laila tried to move her voluminous hair out of the way but it bounced back to where it preferred to be.
“This is where you bought them this morning. I swear, no one eats as many sugary snacks as you do! How are you not five feet wide yet?” Sarah asked in disbelief.
Laila stared at her donuts and looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I didn’t really get much food growing up. I was hungry all the time, and when I did get to eat, it was horrible ready-made stuff out of a packet. Basil said I was so thin I could fall down a grid. He thinks I didn’t get enough vitamins and minerals. I’ve only been away for a few months, though, so I guess food hasn’t really had time to make me grow yet.”
Laila looked truly sad for the first time since Sarah met her, and Sarah felt slightly awkward for bringing up the subject of weight.
“You should be careful, it’ll creep up on you,” Sarah warned her, feeling petty. She was developing a theory with no scientific basis that every time Laila ate a cake (or now, a donut), it went straight to her hair. It was the only possible explanation. Sarah’s own locks were very tame by comparison, and she hardly ever let herself eat cakes or donuts. She’d always liked her hair, now that she thought about it. It was pretty much the only part of her that didn’t conspire to piss her off on a regular basis. It was nothing special compared to Riela’s tresses, however. Riela had the most stunning hair that Sarah had ever seen. She wasn’t sure if it was extensions or real, or if purple was Riela’s natural color, but the whole effect was delightful. Sarah wondered why Riela had never been a model. Everything about her, from her curvy hourglass figure to her on-point makeup, was so polished and perfect. Sarah had wished more than once that she had the makeup skills to look like that. She’d always wanted to be sexy and glamorous. There was nothing glamorous about debugging lines of code late into the night and stuffing her face with pizza day after day to get the job done.
Why had Ral slept with her? The question seemed to come from nowhere, but then it flooded every brain cell. She wasn’t pretty, she was so dependent on him it was pathetic, and she didn’t think she even had a particularly stellar personality. She definitely wasn’t interesting enough to be one of Bergensmith’s characters. What could she offer Ral that he couldn’t get elsewhere? It dawned on her that he’d probably only done it because she was nearby. She was convenient. That made more sense than anything else, although it stabbed her heart.
“You okay, Sarah?” Laila’s voice broke into her thoughts.
“Yeah, just thinking.”
“‘Bout?” Laila proffered the bag of donuts. Sarah summoned all her self-control and shook her head.
“Ral. I mean, why does he even bother?” Sarah looked down at herself, noticing her chubby legs in the laddered pantyhose. “I’m the literal opposite of a good catch.”
“Do you think he likes you?” Riela asked.
Sarah flushed red. “I don’t know. I can’t understand why he would.”
“Didn’t we just say that men are weird and confusing?” Laila reminded her.
Sarah had to smile at that. She nodded. “Men are from Mars, right?”
“Uh… where?” Riela asked.
“Never mind. It’s just a saying. It means that men are all from a different planet to women.”
“Makes sense.” Riela looked across the room wistfully, and Sarah wondered what Riela was thinking about. “Do you like him?”
Sarah nodded again, feeling her face flush even redder.
“You have to talk to him,” Laila said. “Men are not so good at telling you things when they think it’s something obvious that you should already know. Like when we look pretty, or learn something new, and they don’t tell us they’re proud or that our hair is nice. Because we just did the thing, so they think we should know. They don’t get that sometimes we just need them to tell us anyway.”
“How do you have this all figured out?” Sarah asked. Laila usually seemed to go through life without actually thinking about anything at all.
“Duh. I have two of them to keep track of.” She bit into another donut. “I can’t wait to tell them about donuts!”
“What do I even say? ‘Hey, person who I’m staying with in the future, who has only been nice to me, I want to repay your kindness by putting you in an awkward situation.’ Because then he has to reciprocate or push me away. And I don’t want to spend even a day away from him.”
“If he says he doesn’t like you back, why can’t you both just get on with your lives like normal?” Laila asked, once she’d swallowed her donut.
Riela giggled, and Sarah tried not to.
“That’s not how things work,” Riela said with more certainty than Sarah had ever seen from her.
“Well, it should be. Everyone could save a lot of hurt feelings,” Laila said. Ral chose that moment to arrive, and Sarah said her goodbyes. Suddenly he was the only person who existed in the entire universe. She took his hand and let him lead her out of the café.
“We’re going to walk home today, since it’s such a nice afternoon. Did you have a good day?” he asked.
Sarah wondered how to answer. “Laila discovered donuts.”
“I’m not interested in her. What about you?” Ral’s voice sent her heart fluttering. He only wanted to know about her. With a sharp pang, she realized that made it so much harder to tell him how she felt.
“I didn’t have any donuts,” she said carefully.
“Sarah.”
“My day was okay. I missed you.” She looked up at her tall man earnestly. Was he really hers? Probably not.
“I missed you too. My day was complicated. With all the things we found on a recent dig, someone’s gone and mixed up a lot o
f the context numbers that we use to organize finds. We literally have no idea where about half of the finds came from on that site, and it was a very big site.”
“Don’t you, I don’t know, track them with laser devices or GPS or something?”
“We do, but that doesn’t tell us how far down they were found, because depth changes depending on the thickness of the planet’s crust, as well as changing from one planet to the next. Those context numbers were an important part of the bigger picture, and it looks like one of the excavators rewrote them. On top of that, some helpful soul washed all the soil off those finds so we can’t even check which sediment layer they came from. I’ve got to write this site up and send it to the Minos Kerala Council for Archaeology by next week, so I’m going to have a lot of work to do over the coming days.”
Sarah nodded. She appreciated that he had his own problems, but it was typical that they would have to surface at the very moment she wanted to tell him something important. She took a deep breath and prepared to tell him again.
Sarah opened her mouth to speak, and her eyes fell on the adorable chaos happening across the street. A kindergarten was emptying, and tiny children—the first chronological children Sarah had seen since she got here—were being reunited with their parents after a day of finger painting and naptimes. Sarah looked at the row of children lined up with their book bags. Her heart clenched as she remembered the detail her brain had been hiding from her. The reason she couldn’t fall in love.
She had a son.
Chapter Twelve
Ral was staring at her. Sarah felt like the world was melting away around her, and there was only one thing that mattered in the entire universe. It wasn’t Ral.
Turning to Ral, she shook her head and when he tried to take her hand, she pushed him away. He reeled back on the matte black pavement, and she was glad when she saw the surprise and sadness in his eyes.
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