Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  Edie stood in the doorway and tucked her hands into her skirt pockets. She was scanning the hotel ballroom, at her leisure, watching Chris and his date—one of the cross-country girls, a short, sweet junior named Tonya—do the shopping cart, shoulder to shoulder. Evan was nowhere to be found, probably smoking under the boardwalk, if he had come at all.

  Arianna turned back, her arm still looped around Jacob’s elbow. “You coming?”

  Edie waved her on.

  Then she spotted them, standing at the edge of the dance floor, and she remembered the text she’d sent to Lynn and Kate a few days after the incident at Kate’s house.

  Edie: Protectors reunion at prom? <3 Vim

  She unzipped her leather jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. Underneath it she wore a garish purple T-shirt with an illustration of Vim on it. The superheroine was flying through the air, her cape rippling behind her and her fist outstretched, jagged energy lines radiating from her body.

  Across the room, Lynn spotted her and waved. She was wearing her Transforma horns and an acid-green dress that clashed horribly with them. She looked like a bottle of radioactive waste, and her lips were dark purple.

  Kate turned, and when Edie recognized the Vigor costume for what it was, she almost cried with relief, because it meant Kate had forgiven her. From the back, the costume just looked like a rippling black coatdress, but from the front, that bright red bustier was unmistakable. As was the sparkly red eye shadow on Kate’s eyelids.

  They looked insane. Ridiculous. And fantastic.

  She crossed the room just as a fast song started playing. When she was close to Kate and Lynn, she struck the classic Vim pose, and all three of them laughed.

  “Look, I brought something,” she shouted, over the music. And she took a tiny picture of Amy out of her pocket. It was attached to a Popsicle stick and decorated with the neon-yellow Haze headdress. And glitter.

  She knew it was weird. She hadn’t really brought it for them. She’d brought it because she thought it might feel good to remember Amy. Also terrible—she knew it would feel terrible to remember, but sometimes good and terrible could coexist, right? They had to.

  “That is . . . ,” Lynn started, eyebrows raised. “Dark,” she finished. “Very dark sense of humor you’ve got there, Edie.”

  But Kate was laughing. “Oh god, she would have loved it.”

  And Edie realized: Evan only liked her when she was lonely. Chris only liked her when she was happy. But Kate . . . Kate just liked Edie.

  Edie didn’t blame her for the accident, then, not even a little.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “I love this song.”

  And they danced.

  Work In Progress

  E. K. JOHNSTON

  1.0

  By the time the explosions stop, you feel like you have forgotten everything about your life before they began. There is only the dark, the muted breathing of your companions, and the desperate need to not be found. The mutineers have undoubtedly killed your parents—they were in the medical bay and would have tried to stop the captain from bleeding to death—and remembering anything would mean remembering them, so you don’t.

  Instead you pretend: it is a game. You only must stay quiet and stay together, stay clever and stay sharp, and you will win. This is what you whisper to the others. That there is a way out that doesn’t involve a bullet or a one-way trip through an airlock. It’s cold enough that you don’t want to think about the black void that surrounds the ship. You never much liked it before, even though you liked to look at the stars. You had a lot of faith in the ship’s hull, in its engine, in its crew, and all of that is gone now, bled out on the med-bay floor.

  The other two are quiet, and you wonder if they regret having brought you. You are good at distraction, but you don’t have a lot in the way of useful skills besides that. You do your best to keep them occupied anyway, telling stories the way you would if this was a sleepover. They never tell you to shut up, so you assume you are doing what they want. You certainly can’t imagine picking anyone besides them if you’d been the one doing the picking. The adults were all shooting at one another and the other children were all crying, and much too young. Maybe that is why they took you with them: you were handy and you weren’t screaming.

  You eat the smallest ration and you don’t complain, and when they ask you to keep watch while they risk trips out of the ducts for water or more food, you do it and you are grateful for what they bring back. And whenever you can, you remind them of what might be waiting when the ship lands, of the wide green fields and the wildflowers and enough room to run and spin and yell. You have only to make it that far, stay hidden that long, and then you might be safe. Will be safe.

  You remember more, now. That it will be a long time until the ship lands. That the planet will be gray and only partially terraformed. That the mutineers who killed your parents will still be waiting with guns. You don’t remind them of that when you speak, though. And they don’t ask you questions they don’t want to know the answers to. They only turn away, and say it’s time to rest.

  None of you has ever been really cold, even on the nights when CJ came to your bunk to avoid shouting parents, and Tab did the same to avoid crying siblings. There was always room for them in your bunk. There isn’t room now. The ventilation duct where you hide to sleep is only wide enough for two of you to lie abreast in it. The third must be alone, and cold.

  Space or company.

  Choose.

  You are in the schoolroom when it starts, of course, because it is the middle of the lighted shift, and you are still young enough that there are things you need to learn. The three of you sit in the hull-side corner of the room, passing the screen back and forth between you while you study. It makes Alex nervous, to be that close to space, but you ignore that, because your siblings sit near the door, and you have always done your best to avoid them. It saves your life that day, even though you don’t like to think about it.

  Alex is reading out loud about some city back on Earth-of-Old—because Alex is a storyteller’s voice in the black—when the explosions start. The younger kids scream immediately, and you feel CJ tense. CJ knows the inner workings of the ship the best of the three of you, and that’s how you know to worry. The void of space seems very, very close, and you put an arm around Alex to remind you both that the hull is strong.

  You can hear the sound of gunfire, and the heavy tromp of grav boots. Whatever is happening, there is a worry that the ship’s gravity will fail. That is when you know that it is not a drill.

  CJ is moving, prying a panel off the back wall. Alex is frozen. The kids are still screaming, and you are standing somewhere in the middle. You feel like you’ve been in the middle a lot lately, drawing away from the other two even though you don’t know what direction it is you’re heading. There are things you want to do alone, but at the same time, there are things you want to share. You have to figure out who it is you want to share them with, and that turns out to be harder than you thought.

  You don’t want to share them with your own family, really, except that your older sibs are almost interesting now, and you wonder if you should stop ignoring them. This is probably why people build robots. It’s much easier to talk to robots.

  Alex is pulling you toward the gap that CJ has made in the paneling. Neither of them is yelling, but it isn’t because they’re calm. Quiet people don’t attract attention, and attention right now will get all three of you killed. Behind the schoolroom, in the bones of the ship, you will be safe from gunfire. There is not enough time to take everyone. You don’t hesitate for a moment, following them and then helping CJ to attach the panel and cover your tracks. It’s only afterward that you realize the full weight of what you’ve done.

  You want to be alone then, more than ever before. Alone with your grief and your guilt. But you are afraid that your loneliness would kill you, as surely as the bullets mowed down the kids you left behind, your brothers and sisters am
ong them. Children are a drain of resources on a spaceship, and it’s easy enough to make more of them if you decide later on that their numbers can be supported.

  Privacy or security.

  Choose.

  You really, really would prefer it if Alex would shut up, but you can’t bear the thought of what you’d all do in the silence. Alex’s parents had been in the medical bay, and Tab’s were goddamned bridge officers. They were dead for sure. Your parents, engine grease so far under their fingernails that their hands were never clean even after their allotted time in the sonic shower, might have held the guns that did it. You don’t want the other two to figure that out.

  They’d been shouting at each other for weeks, your parents had been, about the state of the engine and their prospects for promotion. They’d argued about the food and the water ration. They’d griped about their options during the dark shift, when they weren’t working but weren’t yet tired enough to sleep. You’d ignored them, slid out of your bed, and gone to sleep with Alex, where it was quieter.

  You have always had Alex and Tab. Your parents have different jobs, but the children are all raised together, until aptitude splits them off. You three are the first batch of children born onboard, once the captain determined that there were enough resources to support you, and you have always loved her for it. Your parents didn’t much care for the captain’s favor—or for your friends—but there was nothing they could do. They had their jobs away from their quarters, and the alternative was endless loneliness.

  You do what you can. You learn the ship inside and out, to make them know that you are proud of what they do. You study the star charts and you absorb everything about Earth-of-Old that Tab will tell you, and everything about the destination colony that Alex can make up. You are determined to be a child of the ship, and to make sure your friends are too, but that isn’t enough to quiet the grumblings on the lower decks.

  When the shouting is no longer something you can ignore, it is too late. There is gunfire, and the heavy step of those doing the shooting coming toward you. Alex is frozen and Tab is torn, but you are already moving. The panel shifts under your hands as you pry it free, just enough for three bodies to squeeze into the wall. You’re not sure what will happen after that. Whoever wins the fight will know you’re missing. It’s not like there’s anywhere that you can go. But for the moment, you and yours will be safe.

  You drag them behind you, and refasten the panel. Somehow, you manage to stay quiet as the schoolroom fills with shooting and the screams are cut off. You are in the middle, holding Alex still and keeping Tab from crying out—or vomiting—as the sound of dying is replaced with the sounds of nothing, which is somehow worse.

  The silence stretches on, broken only by Alex’s whispers about the haven you might find when you reach the destination colony. You know the stories aren’t real, but you can’t bring yourself to voice corrections. You’re afraid that if you do, they’ll remember that you could leave the walls and ducts whenever you wanted to, and be safe there. You think. There had been other children of engineers in that schoolroom, and when the guns stopped, it had been very, very quiet. The three of you cling to one another and to Alex’s stories, and you cannot make yourself let go.

  Chance or reality.

  Choose.

  2.0

  The thing you remember most clearly about summer is how quickly the heat of it can turn to cold when the sun goes down. There are hot summer nights, of course, when the three of you lie on the bed, covers thrown far away and none of you touching. But by the time the sun comes back, the cool breeze off the lake has mixed with the stuffiness held down by the trees, and Tab has reached for the sheet to keep the rest of CJ from shivering and waking you up too early.

  Those nights aren’t your favorite anyway. You like the ones where it gets cold enough that you all huddle together as soon as it gets dark. Sitting on the end of the dock after swimming, in spite of the mosquitoes, or lawn chairs pulled as close together as they can be around the bonfire. Those are nights for whispers and games that you have shared with no one else, for secrets and for plans.

  You outgrew CJ’s bed last summer, and Tab’s bunkie is shared with too many siblings. This bed creaks whenever one of you rolls over, and whoever sleeps in the center has to climb out the foot to go to the bathroom, but it’s in the attic, so no one complains when you talk and laugh too late. You all drift toward the middle when you sleep, and wake in a pile of arms and legs. Warm skin and soft breathing give way to giggles as you climb out and head down the rickety old stairs for breakfast, and whatever excitement waits you in the newness of the day.

  The rare nights you sleep alone, you don’t stretch out in the bed. You sleep where you always do: on the edge, facing inward. The whisper of the wind in the trees outside your window is a poor substitute for secrets, but if you close your eyes you can pretend. You have always been the best of the three at pretending: the dreamer who makes the games and keeps the tally of the worlds you have already conquered. It’s harder to pretend when you are alone, but you do your best. When you wake up in the morning in the middle of the bed, you scramble back to the edge, and try to forget how comfortable it was to sprawl.

  You can fit one person into places that three people can’t ever go, but you don’t like to do it unless you have to. You can fit two people, a traitorous part of your heart whispers. You can fit two people where three people can’t go. You only ever do it when one of them is sick or stuck in traffic. You don’t like it when they go somewhere without you, after all.

  Two people in the front of the car. Two people to balance the canoe. Two people to split a Popsicle. You’re not much of a driver yet, and if there’s three in the canoe then someone’s always resting, and freezies are better than Popsicles anyway and . . .

  So many things are built for two.

  Space or company.

  Choose.

  The best thing about summer is that you can spend it with your family without spending it with your family. There are a lot of them, and they are noisy, and you like that you can play with them sometimes and ignore them when it suits you. When you were very small, before the lake had internet access and before you had more than one younger kid to worry about, you only came up for weekends. But progress is kind, and now your parents can work away from the city, so you are here for all three glorious months of summer.

  (It’s really two and a half, CJ tells you, because CJ measures everything precisely. You are more given to rounding up. It makes you feel better.)

  With five more kids after you, the bunkie shouldn’t be a refuge, and yet it is. The sibs have bikes and pocket money for candy, and they’re gone from sunrise to sundown, unless one of the twins scrapes off enough skin to merit a trip to find Alex for some first aid. You’re not sure why you stay so clear of the pack, why you don’t lead it. You had two years as an only child, but apparently it stuck.

  You read a lot, inside because there aren’t any horseflies there. When you go to the main house for snacks, your parents say things like, “Why do you read in the bunkie when you have all that nature?” and you look calmly at the ledgers and file folders spread out across the dining room table until they appreciate the irony and leave you alone. If they can understand the difference between working in the city and at the lake, they can understand the difference of reading too.

  You disappear after dinner, and a lot of the time you don’t come back. They know where you are, so they don’t worry. They could shout for you and you’d hear them. They never do.

  The mosquitoes are bad at dusk, but not if you’re swimming or standing around a fire pit. CJ and Alex talk nonstop, but not in the way your siblings do. They talk about the future, things that could never happen and things that might, and if they notice that you don’t say much, they don’t make a big deal of it like your parents would. You keep your secrets, but you keep theirs too, and somehow that balances the scales. Sometimes you wish that you could just tell them something, anythi
ng, that would make the exchange more fair, but your tongue always sticks.

  You can’t even say something when you’ve all gone to bed and you hover on the edge of the mattress, too scared to get close and too scared to leave them. You imagine that they’d forget you immediately if you did. You’re surprised, every summer, when you come back to the lake and they take you in like you’ve never left. You’re not sure what you’ve done to deserve it, because it’s certainly not that you’ve opened your heart up the way they do.

  Privacy or security.

  Choose.

  Someday the world is going to come down very hard on Alex, and you kind of hope it’s in the winter so that you don’t have to see the ruination. In the summer, life at the lake is very different. There are a lot more people, for starters, but not in the obnoxious way. The people who come up from the city come for the quiet, so they are respectful. They buy their food at the local store (your uncle), if something goes wrong with the toilet they call a local plumber (your cousin), and they pay their taxes to the local council (headed by your mother), because property ownership is property ownership, regardless of how much time you spend in residence. Hipsters, it turns out, are good for something after all.

  “We’re not hipsters,” Tab says, every time you mention it. “I don’t think hipsters have six kids.”

  They probably don’t, but it’s one of your small pleasures to get a rise out of the city kids at every opportunity.

  “I’m not from a city!” says Alex. Same deal.

  They let you get away with it because you are a local, and because they miss you when they have to go back to their real houses, hours and hours away. Your real house is here: insulated walls against the cold and snow, a practical number of bathrooms, a television that doesn’t rely on the weather for good reception, and all of your belongings in the same place, all the time.