A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “Maybe I don’t like being touched. Have you ever considered that?” My words had the bite of a frigid winter wind. “Anyway,” I added. “I don’t always pull away.”

  I could feel DJ wanting to argue with me, but he kept what he was going to say to himself and we sat in silence for a while. It was nice to just be there with him. I wasn’t completely oblivious. I knew DJ was into me, but he didn’t ask for more than I was willing to give, which, in my limited experience, was a rare quality.

  “She said I was supposed to die,” I said after a while. “That’s what she told me, DJ. That I should be dead.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I was.” I couldn’t see Kayla’s body. Even if the fold drive hadn’t already engaged and skipped us to some new section of the galaxy, it would have been too small. But I imagined I could still see it tumbling through the stars. “That could’ve been my body you spaced.”

  “But it wasn’t,” he said. “You’re alive, Noa.”

  “Then why does it feel like I’m not? Why does it feel like I’m still dead?”

  “Noa—”

  I turned to face DJ. “I died, and that was it. There was nothing waiting for me. Just like there’s nothing waiting for her. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. If there’s nothing after this, then nothing matters. And if nothing matters, then what the hell is the point of anything?”

  Tears welled in DJ’s eyes. “Everything matters, Noa.”

  “Not if there’s nothing waiting for us when we die.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “That makes our lives matter more.” DJ struggled to find the words, but he finally said, “I don’t know whether there’s anything after we die. I guess I won’t know until it happens to me, so I have to focus on what’s important. On what’s right in front of me.”

  “She said I should have died—”

  “She was wrong!”

  I turned to the viewport again. No matter how many times we skipped through space, I couldn’t tell one patch of stars from another. They were all the same to me. “How can something be filled with so much light and yet be so empty and dark?”

  “You’ll get through this, Noa. We’ll get through this together.” The anguish in DJ’s voice hurt, and I hated that I was the cause.

  “All that darkness, all that emptiness, all that space. It’s not just out there, DJ.” I took his hand and pressed his palm to my chest. “It’s in here, too.”

  “Then let me help you,” DJ whispered.

  I let go of DJ’s hand, the warmth of him quickly forgotten. There was some part of me that wondered what would happen if I accepted DJ’s offer. If I tried to fill that infinite, spacelike void in my chest with his laughter and Jenny’s intensity, and made an honest attempt to build a life on Qriosity. But that would’ve required forgetting the entirety of my life before I woke up on the ship. It would’ve required giving up on going home. And, to me, that felt like a kind of death too.

  “You can’t,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can.” I could feel DJ readying his argument, and I didn’t have the strength to fight him. “I’d like to be alone for a little while, okay?”

  DJ paused, probably considering whether he should leave me alone, and then nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He stood and headed for the door. But before he left, he said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think death is the end. Not for Kayla, and not for us.”

  I chuckled, thinking back to the first time I saw DJ’s face. “When you found me and Jenny outside the head that first day, I thought you seemed familiar.”

  “You did?” His eyebrows rose and he seemed surprised by the admission.

  “My mom went through a phase where she believed in reincarnation, and she said that recognizing a stranger is a sign you knew each other in a past life.” I shrugged, mostly because my mom had dipped her toe into a lot of different religions but had never committed fully to any.

  “Do you think it could be true?” I asked. “Do you think we might have been friends in another life?”

  DJ was looking at his feet. “I guess I think anything’s possible.”

  “I hope it’s true.” I liked the idea that maybe DJ and me ending up on Qriosity together wasn’t random. That there was an invisible hand guiding us.

  “But, Noa?” DJ said. “Whether we knew each other in the past or not doesn’t change how important your life is in the present. Jenny needs you… and so do I.”

  THE END OF A VERY LONG DAY

  ONE

  THE TIMER I’D SET BEGAN to blare as I opened the oven door. The moment the air hit it, the soufflé collapsed in the middle. It caved in more when I pulled it out of the oven. The whole disaster resembled a delicious chocolate sinkhole.

  “Damn it!”

  “Problems in the kitchen?” Jenny was sitting at the table, playing with a device the size of an apple that was composed of interlocking triangles. The metallic faces lit up different colors—red and blue and orange and green—as she twisted them into various positions.

  “I can’t get this soufflé right. I think something must be wrong with the ovens.” I dipped my finger into the creamy, spongy, molten-hot mixture. “Son of a—” I ran my burned finger under cold water. It hurt, but I didn’t think it would blister.

  “Or maybe you’re not good at making them.”

  “Maybe.” I took off my apron, tossed it on the counter, and sat at the table across from Jenny. “Mrs. Blum tried to teach me, but I couldn’t get it right then either. She said I was impatient.”

  Jenny snorted. “You are.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her. It’d been a few weeks since Kayla had stumbled out of her hidden room, died, briefly come back to life, and then died again, and I’d fallen into a routine. I spent my mornings running simulations with DJ and Jenny. The tutorials were intended to teach us how to operate Qriosity without destroying the ship. When we weren’t busy with those, I spent my free time working out with DJ in the gym, using Mind’s Eye to visit the virtual recreation of Bell’s Cove, the fictional town where most of Murder Your Darlings takes place, or hanging out in the galley, baking. My life was uneventful except for the part where I was living on a spaceship that randomly skipped around the universe every nineteen hours.

  “What is that thing?” I motioned at the object Jenny was playing with.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I found it in one of the science labs. I think it’s a game. That I’m meant to twist the pieces around until the faces light up the same color.”

  I watched Jenny play with the device. The way the faces shifted made my head feel tight, like I’d spent too much time in the sun and was dehydrated. “Do you think you should be messing with it?”

  Jenny shrugged. “It hasn’t killed me.”

  “Yet,” I muttered.

  Jenny ignored me. “What’s with all the baking, Noa?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been spending more time in the kitchen than usual,” she said. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I noticed the chocolate croissants I made yesterday are already gone.”

  “I only had one!”

  “They didn’t eat themselves.”

  “Maybe they did,” Jenny said.

  It wasn’t worth arguing about because I honestly didn’t care who’d eaten them. Besides, Jenny wasn’t wrong about how much time I’d been spending in the kitchen, and my devotion to baking had little to do with her voracious appetite.

  “Waking up and getting out of bed every day is hard, Jenny,” I said. “Making it through the day is a choice I have to make over and over and over. And you’d think it’d get easier, but it never does because everywhere I look is a reminder that I didn’t choose this.” I shrugged. “The truth is, baking is the one thing on Qriosity that makes me feel normal.”

  Jenny nodded solemnly, her hands idly twisting the puzzle. “When you first let me out of the toilet, I thought this was a nightmare
. Nothing seemed real to me. I was a girl trapped on a spaceship with a couple of guys, which sounds like the start of a weird story or a low-budget porn.”

  I snorted.

  “Eventually, you and DJ and Qriosity began to feel more real to me than my life on Earth.”

  “Doesn’t that scare you, though?” I asked. “Doesn’t it piss you off?”

  “Yes.” She paused. “I used to hate my parents every time they dragged me to a new school in a new state where I had to start over again. But hating them didn’t change anything.” Jenny’s face softened. Not pity, but not quite sympathy, either. “This is our life now, Noa. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to live it.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “And I’m doing my best. I really am—”

  “But some days are harder than others?”

  I nodded. “Days like today.”

  “Why don’t you go find DJ, then? He usually puts a smile on your face.” She winked suggestively.

  I rolled my eyes. “There’s nothing happening between me and DJ. Nothing is ever going to happen between me and DJ.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jenny said.

  “I’m serious. We’re friends. That’s all.”

  Jenny’s devious grin did not waver. “You keep saying that.”

  “Because it’s true,” I said. “Anyway, it’s complicated. There was a guy on Earth—”

  “Billy,” Jenny said. “You’ve mentioned him. Please tell me you’re not still hung up on a boy you’re never going to see again.”

  “No!” I said it so loud that I startled Jenny, causing her to drop the game. It hit the floor and broke into a dozen pieces. Jenny gathered them together and laid them on the table. “Sorry about that.”

  “Whatever. Now it’s a different kind of puzzle.” She set about trying to fit the segments back together. “So you were shouting about how you’re absolutely, positively not hung up on your ex?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But, at the same time—”

  “You can still love someone who hurt you.”

  “Can you love someone you hate?”

  Jenny nodded emphatically. “Definitely yes. Is that why you won’t give DJ a chance?”

  “Jenny—”

  “If we never get off this ship, DJ may literally be the only available human male you see for the rest of your life.”

  “DJ’s nice and all, Jenny. Really nice. And sweet and cute and brave. But I don’t want to wind up hating him.” I didn’t want to peel back his layers and find something awful I couldn’t unsee. I wanted to always smile when I thought about him, and I wanted to look at him and believe he was a good person. Mostly, though, I didn’t want him to wind up hating me.

  Jenny tapped her fingernails on the table as she leveled a serious stare at me. “That Billy really hurt you, didn’t he?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Tell me.”

  I considered it. Part of me wanted to. I’d never told anyone, and I knew that the longer I held on to it, the more it would fester inside me. “Maybe another time.” I pushed my chair back and stood. “Speaking of DJ, he asked me to meet him in the garden.”

  Jenny raised her eyebrow.

  “To help him clean the recyclers,” I said. “It’s a two-person job, and he said you already refused.”

  “Sure.” She dragged out the word, and was still grinning obnoxiously when I left.

  I made my way through the ship to the oxygen garden. I thought back to that first day. Waking up in medical and getting lost while trying to find the source of the noise that had turned out to be Jenny. Now I could navigate the ship with my eyes closed. I could barely remember what sunlight smelled like, but I knew the smell of the air recyclers when they needed to be cleaned. I couldn’t remember the sound of the city, but I was familiar with the almost imperceptible hum that ran through Qriosity in the minutes before the fold drive engaged. I still thought of Earth as home, but Qriosity was my home now, and I hated how easily the change had occurred.

  Jenny was right. I didn’t have to like this life, but I did have to live it.

  I knew something was off the moment I walked into the garden. The first clue was the sky. No matter what time of day the ship said it was, the fake sun of the garden’s dome always hung overhead in a blue sky with gentle clouds that occasionally drifted by. It was always mid-afternoon and summer in the garden. Yet, as I pulled the heavy door shut, I noticed the long shadows cast by the innumerable plants and trees surrounding me. The dome was no longer pale blue. Orange fire blended into the red of an ember that faded into a soft, gentle pink.

  The second clue was that the air was cooler than normal. Not cold—Qriosity’s computer kept the temperature within the optimal range for the plants in the garden to thrive—but not the tropical heat I was accustomed to.

  “DJ?” I followed the path that wound through the garden, reaching out instinctively to touch the flowers as I passed, ignoring the tiny bee-shaped pollinating drones that buzzed near my fingers, attracted by the pollen that had attached to my skin. “DJ?”

  “I’m over here, Noa!”

  Sound traveled strangely under the dome. “Over here” could have been anywhere, but the recyclers were submerged in the pond, so I made my way there, expecting I would also find DJ.

  “Did you change the sky?” I called.

  “Yeah. To sunset.”

  “It’s beautiful. I haven’t seen a sunset in…” I hadn’t seen a sunset since being abducted from Earth. And though I tried, I couldn’t remember exactly how many days I had been gone. “DJ?”

  “Hurry up,” he said. “I got something to show you.”

  “How many days have we been on Qriosity?”

  Before DJ answered, I reached the pond and found him standing at the edge, wearing a tan suit that didn’t quite fit properly. The jacket was tight across the shoulders, his chest looked like it was straining the buttons, and he’d had to roll up the cuffs of his pants. But he was smiling, and his hair was combed off his forehead, and he was holding a delicate yellow flower in one hand.

  “What… uh… what’s going on, DJ?”

  DJ flashed his dimples like he didn’t know how utterly dangerous and disarming they could be. “I thought, maybe, since you always do the cooking around here, you might like it if someone cooked for you.”

  I hadn’t noticed before, but there was a blanket spread out on the grass, set with plates and glasses. “That was nice of you,” I said. “Should I get Jenny?”

  DJ coughed. His smile slipped, and the hand holding the flower trembled. “You see, Noa, I was kind of hoping it could just be you and me.”

  “Like a date?”

  “Not like a date,” he said, sounding unsure of himself.

  I didn’t know what to say. DJ had rendered me speechless even as a couple of things clicked into place. I would’ve bet money, if money had mattered aboard the ship, that Jenny had known about DJ’s plan. She’d probably helped him organize it.

  “I practiced cooking after you went to bed, and I’m not as good as you, but I made some spaghetti and garlic bread and a salad. It’s not much, and I didn’t mean to spring it on you, but I thought you’d like the surprise. This doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just dinner. We spend a lot of time together, but we don’t hang out much.” As DJ kept talking, sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. It rolled down his temples and was probably soaking his back.

  “Will you just say something, Noa? Yell at me for tricking you or smile or something.”

  I held up my hands and backed away. “No thank you.” I turned and ran out of the garden. DJ’s voice calling my name followed me as I threw open the door and headed to my quarters. I reached them and locked myself in. I crawled into bed, shut off the lights, pulled my pillow over my head, and closed my eyes.

  TWO

  THE TIMER I’D SET BEGAN to blare as I opened the oven door. The moment the air hit it, the soufflé collapsed in the middle. It caved in more when I pulle
d it out of the oven. The whole disaster resembled a delicious chocolate sinkhole.

  “Damn it!”

  “Problems in the kitchen?” Jenny was sitting at the table, playing with a device the size of an apple that was composed of interlocking triangles. The metallic faces lit up different colors—red and blue and orange and green—as she twisted them into various positions.

  “I can’t get this soufflé right. I think something must be wrong with the ovens.” I went to dip my finger into the creamy, spongy mixture, but before I touched it, I had a memory of being burned. I stood staring at the mess in the dish, feeling like I’d done all of this before.

  “Jenny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t the hologram say something about the fold drive causing déjà vu?”

  Jenny said, “Jamais vu.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Jamais vu is not remembering something you know you’ve experienced. Déjà vu is remembering something you know you haven’t. Why?”

  I pulled my apron over my head, tossed it onto the counter, and joined Jenny at the table. “After I took the soufflé out of the oven, I was about to stick my finger into it to taste it when I was overcome with this memory like I’d done it before and had gotten burned.”

  Jenny had set aside the game she’d been playing with, but I kept stealing glances at it because there was something familiar about the device. Everything about this day was familiar. “How long did you work in Mrs. Blum’s bakery?”

  “A few years.”

  “I imagine you burned yourself a couple of times there.”

  I held out my hand to show her the faded scars on my fingers and wrists. “More than a couple.”

  Jenny nodded like that was the answer she had expected. “See? So you’re probably confusing a time you got burned in the bakery with today.” She picked up the device and began twisting it around. The triangle’s faces changed colors as she shifted the pieces.

  “I remember that, too.” I pointed at the puzzle. “What is it?”

  “I think it’s a game; like a Rubik’s cube,” she said. “I found it in one of the science labs this morning.”