Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

I think the truth is that he just likes how it feels to have the road spinning away under his tires, his legs pumping and carrying him faster and faster and faster. I like it, too. I get it. I’ll miss bike riding when I’m on Mars. I’ll miss Dad, too. Sometimes I get stuck thinking about all that I’ll miss and I feel like crying, but it won’t stop me from going. Nothing will. It’s too important.

  The lawn mower is parked in the middle of the mostly dead lawn like someone (Elliott) got bored halfway through and wandered off. Elliott is fourteen, almost fifteen. She is beautiful, which is the major thing you need to know about her. Her beauty is so shocking that people sometimes gasp when they see her, or at least do a double take. It’s like her edges were drawn more sharply than other people’s, and next to her, everyone else looks blurry. And she doesn’t even try, believe me. She also has ADD and a whole boatload of other issues, meaning that what Mom says next is pretty typical.

  “Oh, great!” Mom says, happily. “Ell started to mow the lawn!”

  I mean, a more normal response might be, “Why can’t that kid ever finish what she starts?” But ours is not a normal family. Iris—my oldest sister—is the only normal one and she’s at college in New York. She’s going to be a fashion designer. I don’t care about clothes, but even I can tell that hers are really really cool. Iris is kind and normal-­pretty and smart and popular and super nice and talented. She’s everything a parent could ever want. She’s a dream daughter. Why my parents didn’t stop after Iris is a real mystery. They ended up with a bully and a geek. How lucky! Being a trailblazing Mars settler is the least I can do to justify their choice of me, I suppose.

  The main difference between Iris and Elliott is that Iris is happy to be pretty and happy to be smart and happy to be kind and just generally happy, whereas Elliott is furious that she was born beautiful and does everything she can to fight it (she recently shaved off her eyebrows and dyed her hair gray), which (ironically!) only makes her prettier. I’d feel sorry for her if I didn’t hate her a lot, which I do most of the time. Living with Elliott is sort of like coexisting with a talking, breathing shard of broken glass. You never know when it’s going to poke you in the foot and leave you bleeding all over the clean floor.

  I help Mom with the shopping bags and then I take my usual spot at the kitchen counter with my laptop while Mom starts making dinner. In the corner of the kitchen, Buzz Aldrin says, “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.” A long time ago, I tried to teach him to ribbit like a frog, but he never quite got it right. We used to have a lot of frogs here. The frogs are all gone now. I don’t know what’s happened to them. I suppose they left when the lake went bad. Left or died. “Rabbit,” Buzz Aldrin says again.

  Buzz Aldrin is an albino, which means he has no pigment. He is white, with red eyes, which is every bit as creepy as it sounds. When I was little and my Grandpa Hoppy (he lost a leg in the war) gave him to me, I thought he was a ghost! I mean, he looked pretty dead. I was screaming-­and-­running-­away-­level scared. He’s grown on me now, though. It’s not his fault that he’s got terrifying eyes, any more than it’s my fault that I have red hair and freckles that look like I stood too close to a can of spray paint. It’s probably for the best that you can’t take your freaky albino parrot to Mars in your carry-­on bag. Nine months of having to listen to him saying “Rabbit” would do anyone in.

  “Ribbit,” I say to him. “It’s rib-­bit.”

  “Ten-­four, roger, duck,” Buzz Aldrin says.

  I don’t know how old Buzz was when Grandpa Hoppy bought him, but I’m guessing he was already retired from his job and starting to develop a serious relationship with his favorite TV game shows. Buzz Aldrin’s feathers are patchy and his eyes are cloudy with time and tiredness. He likes to hang upside down in the cage and flap his wings, little bits of feather puffing out of the cage in the storm, but he never flies. I don’t think he remembers how. When he blinks, the papery bird-­skin around his eyes wrinkles and shivers.

  “One small step,” Buzz Aldrin says sadly. “One small step.”

  “Shhh,” I tell him. “It’s OK.”

  “Rabbit,” he says, and climbs back onto his swing so he can stare out the window.

  I wonder if Buzz Aldrin wishes he could go outside. I wonder if he dreams of leaving, just like me. I wonder if he imagines escaping somehow and taking off, flying higher and higher until he’s gone. I would, if I were a bird.

  “Houston,” he says. “We have a problem.”

  I go to the Mars Now website, but nothing has changed since the last time I looked. It still says “Accepting applications, all ages considered.”

  Liars. “You sit on a throne of lies!” I tell the screen. That’s from my favorite movie, which is Elf.

  “What?” Mom says.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I was talking to myself.”

  I click over and check my email. I try not to be hopeful, so I open it casually, like I’m not at all excited about what might be in there. (Everyone knows that if you sneak up on news, it’s more likely to be good than bad.)

  My email is empty except for a cartoon from Iris of a guy on Mars holding up his iPhone and shouting, “They said there would be 5G here!” (ha-­ha), a coupon from Old Navy, and a reminder that on the first day back at school we need to bring our supplies OR ELSE (it doesn’t say or else what, exactly), and then it lists the supplies. I have no idea how a seventh-­grader can need eighteen glue sticks, but there it is. I’m kind of assuming now that seventh grade isn’t going to be very challenging. I hope we’re allowed to have actual sharp scissors for all the cutting and gluing we’ll apparently need to be doing.

  There are no messages from Mars Now or from Tig. I close the computer and lay my head on it. The smooth, silver surface of the lid is hot under my cheek. The light on the side glows and subsides, glows and subsides, like the computer is breathing.

  “It’s alive!” I whisper. I pat it. “Good boy.”

  When Tig grows up, he is going to make a whole new kind of laptop computer. Instead of being a box that opens and closes and burns patterns onto your legs, it’s going to be soft, like an animal or one of those microwavable bags of beans, made to nestle into our laps, not to slide off when we reach up for a glass of water. Tig was always spilling water on his laptop. Don’t do that. It’s a terrible thing to do.

  “Not a person shape, though,” he said. “That would be creepy.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “No one wants a person on their lap.”

  “Exactly,” said Tig, who had steadfastly refused to sit on Santa’s lap every year. His parents had a whole row of photos of him with Santa on the wall in the front hallway of their house, Tig standing seriously beside Santa—never sitting on him—with his list of requests in his hand.

  Tig says having a soft laptop will make us feel less alone on Mars, although social media will eventually make it so that we’re actually more alone all the time, even if we never leave the Earth. He says internet relationships are easier than real ones, which may be true, but he doesn’t seem to want to have an internet relationship with me now that he’s gone, so I guess even an easy thing with me isn’t worth the trouble.

  You think you know a person and then bam! you don’t.

  I open the computer back up and drag my file labeled “photos of us” to the trash. Those pictures are all of Tig and me and the stuff we’ve done and built and climbed and explored and the places we’ve been. There are 1,008 photos. The background photo on my screen is a picture of us taken at tree-­climbing camp. We went so high up that redwood, we could see the lights of LA. It was windy up there and the trees bent and waved, but the one we were on held still, like it knew we were scared, like it knew we needed it to do that. We had ropes around our waists and spikes on our toes. It was so scary and so perfect at the same time. I can practically still feel how rough the bark was and smell the soft tang of the sap. I close my eyes for a second, then I open them and change it to a photo of Mars taken on the most recent mission. It looks like
there is a woman standing in the wind in a long dress. I love that photo. I put the tree-­climbing shot in the trash with the 1,008 others. It feels good to do that, but I don’t empty the trash bin. I can’t. Not yet.

  I wish I could go through my brain-­memory and scrub everything Tig-­related away, leaving clean spots, empty files that I can fill up with new, non-­Tig things, like maybe a whole new language or the song lyrics from every song that came out in the year I was born.

  Right now, I’m working on emptying my brain’s memory-­file of the raft we built last summer. It had a sail made from a white sheet. The raft part was made from pallets we got from the Home Depot parking lot and hammered together in the back yard. We called it the S. S. Rafty because neither of us is very good at coming up with names for things. We sailed the S. S. Rafty to Lunch Island almost every day until he left. Lunch Island is the rocky lump that rises out of the lake about two hundred feet from shore. It features some scrub brush and a glen of gnarled, dead trees that somehow are still standing. We ate peanut butter-­and-­cucumber sandwiches, and huge hunks of watermelon for dessert. We drank lemonade made with too many lemons and not enough sugar. Our mouths puckered and stung with every gulp, but we kept drinking. We swam races and then lay on the rocks to warm up. We read books and made plans. We agreed that the things we’d miss most when we live on Mars were lakes and rivers and the sea, not that either of us ever went to the coast.

  “But after the terraforming, we’ll have lakes and trees and all that,” Tig had insisted. Tig was a big believer in terraforming, like we could seed the whole planet with trees and eventually they’d exhale enough oxygen that we could breathe.

  But I didn’t think that would happen. I know we’ll live on Mars, but it will be inside biomes. Perchlorate is a real problem! Tig and I used to have big arguments about perchlorate. He was sure that perchlorate-­eating bacteria would take care of it and then Mars would be as green and blue as the Earth, flourishing and safe. A small part of me doesn’t want that to be true. It doesn’t feel as brave. It doesn’t feel as new. I could never explain that to Tig. I should have known we wouldn’t stay friends forever. We had that perchlorate-­issue niggling between us like a future disaster.

  Anyway, hardly anyone swam in the lake anymore except for me and Tig, back then. We were braver than everyone. We wouldn’t be scared off by toxic sludge! No way. Not us. We’d dive right into possible-­perchlorate stew.

  One day, we carved our initials into the one tree on Lunch Island with a sharpened rock. We wrote “TD & ML, Planet Earth, July 2015, forever friends.” We wrote “We were here” and made an X out of pebbles to show the exact spot. We planted a signpost that said MARS: 140 MILLION MILES. (That’s an average, as I’m sure you know. The distance shrinks and grows all the time because Mars’s orbit is an oval. It comes closer and then moves farther away depending where it is on its path. Earth’s is pretty much a circle. I wanted to write “average” beside the number, but Tig said that would be too confusing to regular people.)

  I try and I try and try to erase these memories but the more I try, the more details I think of, like the bee sting I got just after we planted the sign and how I screamed. Tig made me a compress out of lake reeds to use until we could get back home. When he pressed it on my skin, he leaned his face really close to mine. I would never tell anyone this, but I think he almost kissed me and then he changed his mind. His breath was lemon-­sour, but I bet mine was, too. He was so close that I could see the tiny flakes of dry skin around his nostrils. I didn’t want him to do it. I held my breath. But then he didn’t do it and right away, I felt sad that he didn’t. Stupid, huh.

  I squeeze my eyes shut tight, trying to block it all out. I wish you could stop memories. I wish you could wipe your own brain’s hard drive clean.

  When I open my eyes again, Mom is staring at me. “Are you OK? Do you have another headache?”

  “No,” I lie. “I’m fine. Well, a bit of one. Maybe.”

  She nods. “You’ve been getting lots of headaches,” she says. “I have to remember to schedule you an appointment with the doctor. Note to self! Make that appointment.” She taps her nose, like she’s sealing that information in.

  “Mom,” I say. “It’s just the seasons changing. You know that air pressure changes when the seasons change. Tons of people get headaches when it happens! It’s normal. Also, I don’t want to go to a doctor.” I don’t want to explain to her that the headaches are also from the work of emptying out all the Tig-­memories, leaving glittering achy holes behind. No doctor would be able to figure that out. Doctors don’t understand that stuff.

  “Nothing from Mars Now yet?” she asks.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “Tig?”

  “Double-­nope.”

  Then she goes, “He’s probably just—”

  “Mom, don’t make excuses for him. DTM. Remember? Dead. To. Me. Iris says hi,” I add, even though she didn’t.

  Mom smiles. Thinking about Iris makes everyone happy. I wonder what it would be like to be a person who has that effect on people, a person who makes everyone smile. I’ll ask Iris, one day. Maybe. I just know that if I asked, she’d laugh, showing her perfect, square teeth. She’d say, “I don’t do anything special, Ish.” But she does. Even her voice is special.

  It’s not just how she looks, it’s how she is: thoughtful, gentle, kind. I don’t think I’m thoughtful, gentle, and kind. I want to be, but I’m not. It’s too hard. Besides, sometimes I get mad. Sometimes I forget that other people, like all those girls in my class, are real people, too. They seem pretend, like extras in a movie scene, and I’m the only real one, the only one who is taking the planet seriously while they run around and throw their candy wrappers into the wind and assume someone else is going to clean up their mess. Honestly, it’s crazy-­making. I don’t know why Iris isn’t bugged by anything. She just isn’t.

  I close my eyes and try to imagine that I’m more like her, calm and happy. I try to picture her apartment, which is tiny, but painted all pretty colors and perfectly arranged, everything tucked away in a little space for itself. We visited her last summer. It was hot and crowded and crazy, but I loved it. I love her. I guess that’s what love is, really, just wanting to be with someone. Just wanting to breathe the same air.

  I do not have those same feelings about Elliott.

  “Ugh,” I say, out loud.

  “What, hon?” says Mom.

  “Nothing.”

  “Love, love, rabbit,” squawks Buzz Aldrin from his cage, like he’s reading my mind.

  “Shut up,” I tell him. “What do you know about it?”

  “Dinner in five minutes,” says Mom.

  I get up to set the table before she asks. That’s what Iris would do. I decide that from now on, I’ll try to be more like Iris. What would Iris do (WWID)? I’ll ask myself, and maybe my inner Irisness will sneak up on me, maybe I’ll be more like her and less like Elliott. Mom says that Elliott and I are more alike than I think, that we’re both a bit “fierce.”

  “Fierce?” I’d repeated, when she first said it. “I’m not fierce!”

  “You are the fiercest,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that! Well, maybe a little. But at least when you’re older, you won’t let yourself be pushed around. It will be a good thing.”

  “I’m not fierce,” I protested.

  “And prickly,” she’d added. “Fierce and prickly. Just like Elliott.”

  I started to cry. “I’m not fierce and prickly! You make me sound terrible! Like some kind of psychotic . . . hedgehog! Or something!”

  She’d laughed. “Hedgehogs are cute,” she’d said, coming over and giving me a hug.

  I’d pushed her away, though. No one wants to be fierce and prickly!

  Except maybe Elliott, and I’m not Elliott. I’m just not.

  I’m going to be Iris. I’m going to be a scientist on a Mars mission, but I’m still going to be Iris. You’ll see. I’ll be the nicest.

>   If I really put my mind to it, I can do anything. I know I can. I can even be kind and happy. I think I can do that.

  I stick a smile onto my face and open the laptop back up so I can see it in the camera. It looks too toothy. I dial it back a bit. I shrink my smile until it’s barely there, so just a tiny sliver of my teeth show. Perfect.

  “Kind and happy,” I murmur to myself. “Kind and happy.”

  “Rabbit,” says Buzz Aldrin.

  “Rabbit,” I agree, with the gentlest possible smile on my face. Just like Iris.

  I feel nicer already.

  Chapter 5

  Mom starts cutting thick slices of whole-­wheat bread and laying it out on colorful plates. She adds a leaf of something on the side of each plate, a curlicue of cucumber. I love the smell of cucumber. (More TIWM: the smell of cucumber; the clatter of plates on the kitchen island; the way Mom makes everything prettier than it has to be, strictly speaking.)

  “Honey, I heard on a talk show today that it actually takes years to get to Mars. Even if they do accept you, you’d just be on the spaceship for your entire life. Think of all the things you’d miss!”

  “Mom,” I say. “It doesn’t. That’s an old lie, that it would take that long. Or maybe you’re thinking of Pluto? It takes forever to get to Pluto and Pluto’s not even a real planet anymore, so it’s not like NASA will be sending anyone there. Anyway, it only takes nine months to get to Mars. Because of orbits. I’ve told you this! Mars gets super close to us.” I smile my nice, new, gentle smile but she doesn’t notice, so I keep talking. I could talk about Mars forever. “I actually think all the time about the stuff I’ll miss. I just wouldn’t miss any of it enough. Besides, I store it all in here.” I tap my head with my finger. “If I don’t go, who will? Someone has to be the first. Think about it. It’s basically the most important thing ever.”

  “Well, Ish,” she says. “I guess the thing is that I’d miss you.” She stirs some tuna salad in a bowl, the fork tink-­tinking against the metal like a tiny silver hammer against my tin skull. “I’d have you up here,” she taps her own head. “But it’s not the same. It’s not this.” She gestures around our kitchen, which looks like a page out of an Ikea catalogue, all pale blue and shiny and clean, like the inside of a Swedish kid’s perfect dollhouse.