A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  DJ stopped walking and turned to look at me. The reflective glass made it difficult to see his face. “Noa?”

  I couldn’t think of any reason we might need Jenny in the immediate future. “Enjoy second breakfast.”

  DJ and I continued walking. We had only covered half the distance to the navigational array, but I felt like we’d been out there for days. DJ might have been enjoying our spacewalk, but every second we were out there reminded me of dying. Talking seemed to help.

  “You said you had someone back home?” I said.

  DJ grunted. “We should stay focused on what we’re doing.”

  Clearly DJ didn’t want to discuss it, which made me even more curious. “Come on.”

  “It’s real complicated,” he said. “You don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Oh, I absolutely do. Besides, you owe me for making me come out here.” It was a dirty trick, and I owed DJ way more than he owed me, but I was hoping he wasn’t the type of person who kept score.

  The silence stretched on long enough that I feared DJ was going to let it go on forever. When he finally spoke, there was a hitch in his voice. “I… we were in love. The kind of love that I think only comes around once in a lifetime.”

  “Love’s not real,” I said.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I’m pretty sure I do.” I felt like a jerk as soon as the words left my mouth. I’d pushed DJ to talk about this, and then I’d ripped into him for it. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “You said you were in love. What happened?”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if DJ had decided to quit talking to me for the rest of the walk. But he didn’t. “One day he looked at me like he didn’t know me anymore—like our entire history together had been erased—and there was nothing I could do about it.”

  I wanted to hug DJ and tell him that it would be okay, but it wouldn’t. When you fall in love, pain isn’t just a risk, it’s a guarantee.

  “What about you?” DJ asked. “You said you had an ex.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Well, that’s not fair,” DJ said.

  “Life’s not fair,” I shot back.

  “Fine.” Judging by the harshness in DJ’s voice, it was not fine.

  Bringing up Billy, thinking about him, was almost as bad as thinking about drifting through space. They both made my heart race wildly like a car without brakes. They both made me want to vomit. They’d both embraced me and nearly killed me.

  “I met him on the bus.” I started talking before I thought about what I was doing. The words tumbled out. “I didn’t usually take the forty-four bus, but I did that day. I was reading some fantasy novel, I can’t remember which, and I noticed this boy watching me. For five stops, every time I looked up from my book, he was staring at me. Finally, he sat beside me and told me I should read better books. I told him he should mind his own business. And then he spent the next ten stops rattling off every book he thought was better than the one I was reading.”

  DJ said, “He sounds like a jerk.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We kept arguing, and I didn’t even notice I’d missed my stop, so I got off to catch the bus the other way, and he followed me. He said he was supposed to meet a friend, but that I was the most interesting person he’d talked to since moving to Seattle to attend UW, and he wasn’t going to leave me alone until I gave him my number. So I did. That was the start of everything.”

  Billy’s face floated in my mind. His brown eyes and his chipped front tooth and the three freckles beside his nose. The way he smiled and made me feel like I was the only person in the world.

  “It was also the beginning of the end.”

  DJ had slowed down to walk beside me. “He hurt you?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “But you still loved him.”

  “Yeah.”

  DJ touched my arm and pulled me to a stop so that he could face me. “Hearts break to remind us we have hearts to break.”

  “Like I told you,” I said, “I was born with mine broken, so whatever. Besides, I’m never falling in love again. It’s not worth it.” I turned away from DJ and continued walking.

  We didn’t talk again until we reached the navigational array. It was a box that looked like a power transformer. Near it, a cluster of antennae rose about fifteen meters into space.

  “Tell me what you need me to do,” I said.

  True to his word, DJ immediately clipped our tethers to the hull, and as soon as I was securely fastened, the tension riding in my neck and shoulders eased back. I still wanted to finish the job as quickly as possible so that we could return to the safety of the ship, but at least I knew I wasn’t going to fly off the hull while we fixed the array.

  My main job consisted of handing DJ tools when he needed them, preventing the tools he wasn’t using from floating away, and standing idly while DJ typed slowly on a keyboard that had slid out of the junction box.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked. I was awed by the confidence he exuded as he scrolled through the lines of code, changing bits here, deleting bits there.

  “The computer’s feeding me instructions through my hud,” DJ said.

  “But you still have to have some clue what to do. You really are a computer genius, aren’t you?”

  “You can bake.”

  “Anyone can learn to bake,” I said. “What you’re doing is on a whole other level.”

  DJ’s laugh filled the emptiness. It was quickly becoming my favorite sound. “I’ll teach you about computers and you can teach me to bake.”

  “How is that a fair trade?” I asked. “Baking is fun.”

  “And fixing computers isn’t?”

  “No.”

  “That’s only because you’ve never done it,” DJ said. “There’s a rush that comes from solving a problem that’s like nothing else.”

  “You are such a nerd.” DJ’s enthusiasm was endearing. I still had no desire to learn how to tinker with computers or write code, but I could’ve happily listened to DJ talk about it all day.

  “I’m serious!”

  “Oh, I know you are,” I said. “But you should stay focused on what you’re doing.” I pointed at the screen.

  Maybe this isn’t so bad. Spending time with DJ and Jenny, laughing and telling jokes. I was smiling before I realized it. And then the horror of what I’d been thinking hit me. The idea that this could be normal, that I could get used to living on a spaceship, was revolting. I’d toss myself out of the airlock before I let Qriosity become my new normal.

  “You done yet?” I asked, getting impatient.

  “Almost.”

  “Good,” I said. “The faster we flip on the GPS and go home, the better.”

  FOUR

  FIXING THE NAVIGATIONAL ARRAY TOOK two long hours. I had plenty of oxygen left, according to the readout in my hud, but I walked as quickly as I safely could back to the airlock, determined to get out of the suit.

  “What’s the hurry?” DJ asked.

  “I want to see if it worked.” I was winded, but I didn’t want DJ to know.

  “Do you hate it here so much?” DJ asked. “It’s not like you get the chance to explore space every day.”

  “Are you serious?” I stopped, and DJ stumbled into me from behind. Instinctively, I crouched down and grabbed hold of something to make sure I didn’t fly off, but my mag boots held tightly to the surface. When I was sure we were secure, I stood.

  “I was mostly serious,” DJ said when we were walking again.

  “I was kidnapped and brought aboard Qriosity, DJ. There’s nothing fun about it.” It was driving me mad that DJ couldn’t seem to get that through his head.

  “But what if this doesn’t work?” DJ asked. “What if we get stuck out here for a long time?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “What if it does?” DJ pressed.

  “Do you want to stay out here?” I asked. “Did you hate your life so
much that you’re willing to ignore how seriously disturbing it is that someone put three teens who don’t know anything about running a ship in charge of one?” I shook my head, not caring that DJ couldn’t see me do it. “I’m not playing their game, DJ.”

  DJ’s voice was calm despite my anger. “So if you don’t get your way, you’re going to give up? That seems like a real terrible way to live your life.”

  I rounded on DJ and yelled, “You don’t know the first goddamn thing about my life, okay?” I was vibrating with anger, but DJ didn’t respond, so I took off walking, not caring if he followed.

  DJ caught up to me as we neared the airlock. “I’m not trying to be a jerk, Noa. I’m just worried about losing you again.”

  “Losing me again?”

  “You know,” DJ said. “To the couch. To depression and Anastasia Darling.”

  I tried to throw up my hands in frustration, but it didn’t have the same effect in a gravity-free environment. “Why did we come out here if you’ve already decided it’s not going to work?”

  DJ sighed. “There are so many things that could go wrong. We might’ve fixed navigation, only to discover something else is broken. Or we might get back to Earth and find that nothing’s the way we left it.”

  “None of that is going to happen,” I said.

  “But it might.”

  “It won’t!”

  “You don’t know that, Noa!”

  DJ and I didn’t speak again until we were inside the airlock and the outer door was secured. We were stuck in the tiny space together for two minutes while it pressurized, making him difficult to avoid.

  “Sorry for yelling,” he said.

  I began to apologize too, but I wasn’t sorry. “I didn’t ask to be here. I’m not the kind of person who can shrug and accept that this is my life now. And I don’t know what will happen if fixing the nav array doesn’t work. I can’t even think about it because if I do, I might sit down in this airlock and never get up again. It just has to work. There’s no other option, okay?”

  DJ looked at me, and I could practically hear the speech he’d composed about how I was stronger than I thought I was and how we could face anything if we faced it together or some other nonsense. There were entire monologues written across his face that I never got to hear. Because when he finally spoke, just as the airlock chimed and the inner door opened, all he said was, “Okay, Noa.”

  Jenny was sitting at the starboard station with her feet propped on the console when DJ and I reached Ops. “Good, you’re back,” she said. “I tried calling you, but neither of you answered, so I assumed you were dead.”

  “And you look absolutely broken up over it,” I said.

  Jenny shrugged. “You, at least, have been dead before. I figured it might not stick.”

  DJ slid behind the nearest console and began to work. I stood over his shoulder, trying to follow along, but I was immediately lost. DJ navigated the system like he’d been working on it his entire life. The only difference I noticed was that the status lights that had been red before now shone green.

  “It worked,” I said under my breath. We’d fixed the array. The countdown clock on the screen said we had four hours and fifty-three minutes until our next jump, which meant we could be home in under five hours. My skin felt hot and itched. I was sure that if I’d been in the spacesuit, the hud would be warning me to practice deep breathing.

  DJ and Jenny, for whatever reason, didn’t seem to feel the way I did about Qriosity. DJ viewed it as an opportunity to explore the stars like a hero from a science fiction book, and I couldn’t get a read on what Jenny thought of our situation, but she didn’t seem terribly troubled by it so long as she had a steady supply of Nutreesh. For me, though, Qriosity was a prison. There might not have been jailers, and we might have been able to travel freely from one end of the universe to the other, but the ship was still a prison and we had been sentenced to life.

  “Here goes,” DJ said. “I’m asking Qriosity to scan for our current location.” He tapped a button on the console and then sat back, folding his arms across his chest.

  My entire body tensed while we waited. It seemed like forever, but a moment later a message appeared on the screen: Location scan in progress. Location scan will take approximately thirty-one hours and twelve minutes.

  I stared at the words, reading them over and over. And then I began to laugh. I fell into the nearest chair and held my belly as laughter ripped out of me. As tears welled in my eyes. Because of course scanning for our current location would take thirty-one hours. I had been a fool to believe there could be any other outcome.

  DJ touched my arm. “Noa…”

  I jerked away from him. “Nope, I get it. This is my life now. I live on Qriosity. I’m going to die on this ship. We’re all going to die here. Are you happy? Of course you are! This is your dream.” Another laugh escaped, deformed and grotesque. “Your dream and my nightmare.”

  “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?” Jenny asked.

  In a tired, defeated voice, DJ said, “The computer needs thirty-one hours to calculate our current coordinates, but the fold drive initiates every nineteen hours.”

  “So we’re not going home?” Jenny asked.

  DJ tried to answer, but I beat him to it. “Nope. Sorry, Jenny, we’re stuck out here. Get used to breathing stale air, drinking recycled piss, and eating Nutreesh bars, because we’re never getting off this ship.” I stood and headed for the door.

  “Where’re you going?” DJ asked.

  I paused, looked him in the eye, and shrugged. “To pick up where I left off. Season four, episode thirteen. The one where Anastasia Darling finds a boy who’s gone missing. Someone on this damn ship deserves a happy ending.”

  FIVE

  JENNY FLOPPED DOWN ON THE couch beside me, opened a Nutreesh bar, and proceeded to devour it. Crumbs tumbled onto her shirt, and she smacked her lips as she ate, which made me want to scream.

  “I expected DJ.”

  “Expected?” Jenny asked. “Or hoped for?”

  I rolled my eyes, ignoring what she was implying. “Seeing as he can’t stop sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong and you don’t seem to care about anything but food…” I shrugged.

  Jenny scooted around to face me. “I’m betting you didn’t have any friends back on Earth.”

  “I had friends.”

  “You couldn’t have,” she went on like I hadn’t spoken. “Because I can’t imagine anyone putting up with your selfish ass for long without sticking a knife in you.”

  I gave her the finger. “I’m not selfish.”

  Jenny snorted. “And I’m not full of Nutreesh right now.”

  “What do you want?” I asked, my patience frayed.

  Jenny folded her arms across her chest and stared at me. Her eyes were narrow and she flared her nostrils. “I get it; you’re sad. You want to go home. The universe is a cruel, desolate place, no one loves you, and nothing matters because existence is meaningless.” She paused. “Get over it.”

  “I didn’t ask for this!”

  “And you think I did?” Jenny asked. “You think I wanted to be trapped on a ship with one boy who’s got his head up his ass and another who hardly knows I exist because he’s so worried about you?”

  “DJ’s not worried about me.”

  Jenny slapped my arm. Hard. “Are you really that dense? That boy has it so bad for you. And I don’t know why. You’re okay-looking, I suppose, but your personality is somewhere between raw broccoli and a rabid raccoon having an existential crisis.”

  I didn’t know what Jenny was going on about. DJ had no interest in me, and even if he had, I had no interest in him or anyone. “Sorry I’m not living up to your expectations.”

  “You’re hardly living at all,” she said.

  “Do you want me to cook? Is that what this is about?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, yes, that would be nice. But I also want you to find a reason to get your br
oody ass off this couch. I want you to find a reason to get out of bed every day and keep going.”

  “I…” I had planned to recite my list of reasons to get up in the morning, but my list was blank. I eyed Jenny thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, “What keeps you going?”

  “Revenge.”

  “On whom?”

  Jenny shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I’ve been scouring Qriosity for clues. I think there’s more happening here than we realize, and I’m going to uncover the truth. When I do, I hope it will lead me to the people who kidnapped us.”

  “And when you find them?”

  “I’m going to cut off their balls,” she said. “If they have them. If not, I’ll devise a suitably painful alternative.”

  “You’ve been investigating our kidnapping this whole time?”

  Jenny nodded. “And I don’t need a sidekick.”

  “I wasn’t offering.”

  “Good,” she said. “You’ve got to find your own thing. DJ’s found his.”

  “What?” I asked. “Being perfect?”

  “You.” Jenny looked at me like it should have been obvious. “Taking care of you, trying to get you home. If you asked him to capture you a comet, he’d try to find a way to do it.” She shrugged. “We all need a hobby, and you, inexplicably, are his.”

  What was I supposed to do with the knowledge that the only thing that kept DJ from joining me on the Couch of Misery was his desire to help me? Maybe that’s just the kind of person he was. He saw someone in pain and needed to fix them. It was sweet, but also unsettling.

  “You know it doesn’t work that way, right? You can’t tell me to stop being sad. I can’t flip a switch and shut off my emotions.”

  Jenny took my hand and offered me a sympathetic smile. “You don’t have to stop being sad, Noa. I have cried myself to sleep every single night since you found me.”

  “You have?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised, but Jenny didn’t strike me as the type who would readily admit to crying.

  “Yes,” she said. “And I overheard DJ having a full-out argument with himself in the Freshie. He blames himself for everything that’s happened to us. We’re all hurting, Noa.”