Just tell her. Shut this conversation down. But I didn’t want to make a spectacle out of myself. Make this a topic of conversation. It wasn’t her business.
I stood upright again and glared at her. “Thanks, but I’m fine. They probably won’t pick two of us anyway, and all the rest of the crew are old. So it’s not even an issue.” I turned the focus around on her. “Why aren’t you worried about being locked together with Emilio, or any of the other guys you were flirting with at dinner? What about your husband?”
“Michael and I had a talk before I came.” She looked away for a minute, and then her gaze was steely. “He understands that if I make it to space, well . . . I do what I have to do.”
“What happens in orbit, stays in orbit?” I snorted and moved toward the door.
“More or less. Cass, wait.” She stood and caught my elbow. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I just thought . . . you’re so young. I just wanted to help.”
I softened somewhat. She really seemed sincere. “Thanks, I guess.”
She reached over and gave me a hug. When she pulled away there was a sly smile on her face. “You know there’s some Indian guys here.”
“Yeah, I did notice that,” I said. “Not interested. Excuse me, I have a competition to go train for.”
She cocked her head. Tapped her pursed bottom lip with one manicured finger, as if considering. “Cass, have you ever thought that you might be, like, asexual?”
I didn’t look at her. My hand froze on the doorknob; my entire body was a bated breath. “Yeah,” I said, having waited too long to respond, the words flying out of me in a rush that was half panic, half relief. “I think I am, actually.”
“Oh,” Suko said. My eyes darted to her. She’d gone still a moment, her lips still forming the circle of her response. Then her face brightened. “That’s cool! I’m bi.”
“Cool?” I sat down on the edge of the bed, my knees gone mysteriously weak.
“Yeah.” She was smiling, excited, like we’d just discovered we had the same favorite book. When I didn’t match her enthusiasm, she backed off. “Sorry, I—some people still don’t know that asexuality is even a thing. I just thought . . . I thought you might . . . For real, I wouldn’t have said anything if—”
“It’s fine,” I said. Mitsuko never got flustered like this. “I’ve just never really said it out loud before.”
“Oh, hon.” She sat down beside me on the bed. “You’re like a little kitten. I just want to adopt you.”
“So you’ll stop badgering me about guys now, right?”
She smiled. “I guess.” She paused, squinting at me. “Are you mad?”
I gave her a smile back, relief swimming amid the remnants of my fears. “Nope. I just . . . don’t talk about it. People hear something like that, for some reason they try to convince you that you’re not. And it’s not something I really . . .” Know for sure, I finished silently. “It’s just private.”
“Oh, believe me, I get it. But thanks for sharing that with me. Even though I did kind of drag it out of you. I won’t spread it around, I promise.” She bumped my shoulder with hers. “And I don’t care if people know about me—Emilio already does—it’s just that some guys think being bi is an excuse to be disgusting to me.”
“Yeah, of course.” I untangled my fingers, which had wrapped themselves into a bloodless knot. This conversation had changed course pretty dramatically. But it actually felt anticlimactic, to have this secret thing I’d thought about myself out in the open now. “So . . . you’re bi and married?”
Her voice went a little tight and she raised an eyebrow at me. “I can be both at the same time, you know.”
“Of course, yeah. I didn’t know. I don’t think I know anybody who’s bi.”
Her smile came back. “Now you do.”
“Pretty sure my uncle’s gay, though.”
She burst into surprised laughter. “Now are we gonna name all the people we know who aren’t straight?”
“He thinks he’s all sly about it. He’s really not. My grandma’s, like, eighty, and she totally knows. But he just keeps sneaking around for no reason. It’s not like we care.”
Her laughter calmed, eyes still sparkling but her expression becoming solemn. “You know it’s fine, right?”
We weren’t talking about my uncle anymore.
“Yeah.” It was more sigh than sound.
“Totally normal. Hell, it’s probably an advantage. Everyone here is ripped. It’s super distracting.”
“Anything to win,” I said, and she dissolved into laughter.
Now all I could see was Emilio standing in front of me, shirt off, teaching me the best way to do lateral pull-downs as I wondered what it might be like to kiss him. Thanks a lot, Suko.
Not that I wanted to kiss him. It was purely scientific curiosity. I didn’t feel anything when I looked at Emilio. I didn’t especially like the idea of kissing anyone at all. But should I? What if he was the last man on Earth—or, more accurately, in space. What if we managed to both get in? They said they’d pick two, after all. It wasn’t impossible. What if this was as close to someone as I’d ever feel? I was pretty sure other people weren’t lukewarm—at best—about kissing people they liked.
Could my feelings change over time? I mean, I liked Emilio well enough. I enjoyed his company more than most. But I’d never once, not till this moment, considered even the possibility of anything physical. The very thought made me uncomfortable.
I shut my eyes as if I could force the image from my retinas. She’d definitely done this to me on purpose. Was this what it was like for everyone else, all the time? Were other people thinking of me like this?
“Come on, three more reps,” Emilio said. He leaned his arms on his knees, his face near mine, sweat beading on his forehead.
It was like Mitsuko had adjusted my focus, sharpening details that had always been background noise to me before.
“Concentrate,” he said.
Eyes still closed, I focused solely on the feel of my muscles working. After a few more reps, I was sweating and my mind was clear again.
We could just be friends; there didn’t need to be anything more.
“I need a break. Let me spot you for a while,” I said.
Emilio didn’t really need me to spot him on the bench press, so I leaned against the wall and kept an eye on him. We weren’t alone in the weight room tonight; there had been five other guys in here when we’d arrived, though now it was down to three.
What would it be like to be stuck in a spaceship with only one other person my age? I’d never thought about guys much before, except in an abstract way. They had been distractions at best, annoyances at worst. Like: Okay, yes, I knew that I wasn’t gay. But that’s about as specific as it ever got.
The thing was, I could look at Emilio, notice all these things about him that should be attractive, that were aesthetically pleasing, but it didn’t make me feel anything except slightly creeped out at myself for noticing.
I didn’t date—that had been my choice, even if I did make jokes about my grandmother arranging a marriage for me out of convenience. I’d just never been interested in anyone enough to take time away from studying. My goals were more important than anything. Still were.
Mitsuko was right. I was eighteen and I’d only been kissed once, kind of accidentally, by a guy from orchestra who was tipsy after our Christmas concert sophomore year. He had apologized all over himself and then fallen asleep in the storage room, and I had avoided him ever since.
I’d spent eighteen years doing nothing but trying to become an astronaut. Was I suddenly going to find myself attracted to someone to the point of distraction? This might be something I needed to get a handle on.
“Lola? Cas! Little help?!”
“Whoa, sorry!” I snapped out of it, leaned forward quickly, and snatched the bar from Emilio’s sweaty palms. Emilio lay on his back, gasping, with splotches of red in his cheeks. “What’s with you tonight? Y
ou’re totally spacey. Pun intended.”
“Sorry,” I said again. “It’s just . . .” It’s what? I blurted out the first thing I could think of. “I got a letter from my parents today. And they hardly wrote anything at all. It was, like, two sentences.”
Emilio rolled up, swung around so he was straddling the bench, and faced me. To my surprise, he looked genuinely upset. “Damn, I’m sorry. I forgot you still live with your parents. Of course you’d be homesick.”
Homesick? No. That didn’t seem right. “It’s not that,” I said.
But he kept on. “It sucks not being able to talk to your family. When I first moved out, my mom would call me just about every night after I got home from work. I got a letter from my sister the other day, and it was like a mile long.”
“That’s just it. They barely wrote at all. I feel like . . .” My eyes suddenly got hot and an alarm went off inside my head. Abort abort abort! “. . . Like they barely notice I’m gone.”
Emilio just looked at me with a mix of pity and empathy. “Hey, I’m sure they do. I’m sure they miss you.”
“Yeah? How? You don’t know them.”
“Because they’re your parents, and it’s the law.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.” This was just a tactic of theirs, I told myself. They were testing me. That’s all it was.
“You want to go beat up some punching bags?”
I smiled. “Can we, please?”
SEVEN
THE NEXT TIME I saw the shrink, he asked about my parents.
If I didn’t think NASA had bugged the whole installation before, I definitely did now.
He led off with the same old innocuous stuff. How did I like class, how were things going with my roommates, was I making friends? Then he went straight for the heart. “How do you think your parents feel now that you’re here?”
I’d been turning this question over in my head every night since the ridiculously short letter, so I was prepared. “I’m not sure. I’m not there with them right now, am I?”
“No, but I’m interested in hearing your estimation. You’ve had a letter from them, I believe?”
“Yes.” I exhaled through my teeth.
“Elaborate, if you don’t mind.”
“It was short. They wished me well.” I wasn’t about to share my fears with him.
Felix’s bespectacled eyes bore into me. “So they haven’t been in close contact with you.”
“How could they? With all the security around here, I’m glad I got a letter at all.”
“And you’re okay with that? With not speaking to your family for a long time? Are you not close with your parents?” He seemed to sense the truth beneath the lie.
I unfisted my hands. These rapid-fire questions were trying to stress me, throw me off. Had to keep up the volley. “Of course I am. We don’t have to talk every day to be close.”
“But this is your first time being so long away from home.”
“No, it isn’t, actually. I’ve been to camp before.” Though I was ready for it, he didn’t ask another question right away. He waited expectantly, and the longer it went on, the more the silence became unnerving. “They have their own lives. My parents are both scientists. They have their work to keep them busy.”
He held back a smile. I knew instantly that I’d slipped up and showed him the weakness he had been probing for.
“How does that make you feel?”
“About the same as I feel about being half Indian,” I shot back. I was still kind of mad at him for deliberately baiting me about Kalpana Chawla. “They’ve always been like that—it’s a fact of my life. It’s not something I think about. You wouldn’t ask a dolphin how he likes living in the ocean. He doesn’t know any different. He just does.”
Felix nodded slowly and scribbled on his notepad. Pen and paper—who still did that, anyway? “Do you miss being at home?”
The question caught me off guard. “No.”
“Not at all?”
“I love my parents—and my grandma and Uncle Gauresh—but being here is the best experience of my life. Everybody leaves their parents at some point. This time next year I’d probably be leaving for college.”
“I’m glad you’re adapting so well, Cassandra. It shows a great amount of emotional maturity on your part. I just have one more question, and then you can get some sleep. Do you think your parents love you?”
I startled, then glared. “Of course they do.”
He looked at me, infuriatingly calm. “Let me rephrase it, then. Do you feel that your parents miss you?”
“Without a doubt.”
“And you miss them?”
I nodded, unwilling to say it aloud.
“If you were to go for months or even years without speaking to your loved ones, would you find that troublesome?”
I held my head up, my expression confident. “I can handle it. Don’t you worry about that.”
He smiled that serene smile of his, and jotted it down in his pad.
“How did—” Mitsuko started.
Walking through our dorm door, I breezed by her so fast her hair moved. I flopped straight onto my bed, face buried in the comforter. “He said I’m an object for my parents to see their own reflections,” I mumbled.
“What was that?”
I rolled over. By the look on her face, she’d heard me clearly enough. “I said, I’m not an object. And my parents aren’t vain.”
“Maybe not. And it doesn’t mean your parents don’t love you.”
“I know that!”
“But they did send you off on this dangerous, experimental mission where they can’t have any contact with you.”
I sat up. “Because it’s my dream. Because they think I’m old enough to make my own decisions. They let me come here because it’s what I wanted. He’s trying to mess with me, to throw me off. It’s rotten.”
She was silent, chewing her bottom lip.
I groaned into my pillow. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m just exhausted. I’ll be fine.”
Mitsuko came over and hugged me. It felt so good I had to tamp down the urge to cry.
The rest of the week went by without another incident. I went to class. Took tests. Ate meals with my group. It was strange how quickly I adapted to having a social circle. Expecting people to greet me when they saw me, save me a seat next to them, ask me about my day—even though we moved through all of our days as a whole.
But even my friends I had to keep at arm’s length. My brain churned constantly, calculating how to beat everyone else. What were their weaknesses? How could I show off my strengths?
I didn’t hear from my parents again. But after my session with Felix, I was fairly certain they were holding my mail on purpose, to test me. I put it in the back of my mind.
The names on the leaderboard shifted negligibly. Our names rose and fell like an irregular heartbeat. Hanna broke briefly into the top five. Mitsuko was ranked number two for an entire day. Emilio held steady in the middle of the pack, but our ranks seemed tied together: if I rose, so did he, so that I never surpassed him.
Even if the ranks didn’t seem to last, or matter, I was obsessed with every minute change.
I was beginning to think this was just another game they were playing.
I answered every question in class that I even thought I knew the answer to. I memorized diagrams from our tablets. I ran every morning, lifted weights in the afternoons, and slept like the dead every night.
I forgot an outside world existed.
My brain was fried. Even without tests, classes were exhausting. I didn’t have access to my usual methods of stress relief—no internet, no books that weren’t textbooks, and definitely no piano. I’d reread the one book I’d brought enough times to be sick of it. I hadn’t heard music in so long, aside from Emilio’s occasional off-key whistling.
I had no idea what day it was.
So after breakfast, when I headed down the hall toward class, Mitsuko tugg
ed on my arm. “Earth to Cass! Where are you going?”
I turned bleary eyes on her. “What?”
“It’s Saturday.”
Hanna and Mitsuko were both staring at me quizzically.
I shook myself out of my fog. Weekends were supposed to be downtime, but there was nothing to do except exercise or study. I followed my roommates out to the track, where a few other candidates had decided to spend their day in the sunshine.
Emilio met us in the hall, eyes alight with some juicy bit of gossip that burst out of him before even a hello. “A guy in my room dropped out today.”
Now I was fully awake. “What? Who? This morning?”
Emilio nodded. “You know Roman? Number seventeen?”
I knew his number better than his name, but nodded.
“He’d been moaning and groaning for days about being bored. He was missing out on college football or some shit. Can’t really sympathize, but whatever. We got up this morning and his bed was made and he was just gone. Apparently he went to the RA office last night and checked out, like a damn hotel, just like that. Without saying a word to anybody.”
I had an image of Luka, sitting alone at his table at every meal.
Mitsuko clucked her tongue. “Sad.”
“No, it isn’t,” Hanna said. “Anybody who doesn’t want to be here needs to go home. If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t disagree,” Mitsuko said. “But dropping out because you’re bored? I mean, come on.”
“After what we had to go through to stay here?” I asked, incredulous. “That marathon? He basically threw away the chance of a lifetime—of multiple lifetimes—in exchange for getting to watch TV. It’s disgusting. I’m with Hanna; I’m glad he dropped out.”
“No skin off my nose,” Emilio agreed. “To each their own. But listen. I overheard some of the profs talking when they didn’t think I could hear—I have excellent hearing, by the way—and apparently it’s not just Roman. Some kids are complaining to the shrinks about being burned out. I guess some of them—the profs, I mean—are getting concerned.”
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