Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

  It was the best kind of fun because you got to be someone else, just for a few minutes at a time. You got to have a break from being yourself. I didn’t have to be the smart one. I could be the airhead or the sports maniac or the mad one or whatever I wanted. It was like I folded my real self up and put myself in a drawer, just for a bit.

  Tig didn’t really get that, but he was from a normal family and wasn’t adopted and was actually pretty good-­looking and might have been good at sports if he wanted to do them, which he didn’t. I bet if he hadn’t had me, he would have had tons of friends. Normal friends. He was pretty OK in his own skin. I think that was my favorite thing about Tig. Now, of course, nothing is my favorite thing about Tig because he’s dead to me, so honestly, I have no idea why I’m thinking about him. Although I guess even after someone dies, you can still think about the good parts about them being alive. You can still miss them.

  When you know someone really well, you stop seeing what they actually look like. I think that’s why Tig was my friend. If he met me now, he probably wouldn’t be. Well, obviously he’s chosen to stop anyway. But still, that new kid is right: I look like a fish. A goldfish. Bright orangish-­red and nothing like all the other fish, all those rainbow trout glittering like silver-­pink prisms in the sunlight. The lake doesn’t have trout in it anymore, but it used to. I remember catching them with Elliott when we were little. I try to remember if that was fun or if she just shoved me into the water and ran away laughing, but I really can’t remember.

  Weird. It was definitely Before the Bad News, so she was probably normal then. She used to be. Hard to believe, I know.

  Being upright is making my headache worse, so I unstick myself from the tree and lie down on my back and close my eyes, my hair fanned out in the dust. I take the ponytail out altogether. It doesn’t help. I’ll swim in the lake later and rinse the dust away.

  I don’t really mean to fall asleep, but I guess that I do, because I’m dreaming that I’m on Mars. I’m on Mars and I’m working in a biome garden in a geodesic dome and the sunlight is filtering through a pink, dusty-­looking sky through the glass. I can practically feel the humidity, taste the dusty dirt-­flavored air. Through the window, instead of just red dirt, I see patches of green. Things are growing out there, which is impossible but must be true because I can see it. Tig’s dream has come true! Well, inside my dream.

  In the dream, I’m squishing seeds down into the earth. Everything is tinged red or more like rusty orange. (The reason why Mars looks red is because it is, effectively, covered with rust. All that dirt is oxidized, which is the same thing that happens to iron when it rusts. Look it up! It’s true.) I feel totally, weirdly peaceful and at home, like when we’ve been camping or on a trip and we come back to the house and I see my bed, and it kind of rings inside me like “Oh, finally! Home!” It’s like that, times a million. I sink my fingers into the ground, put in seed after seed. I’m super excited, but I’m trying to act natural because I’m dreaming that I know it’s a dream but it’s not a dream. None of that makes sense, but that’s OK. That’s what dreams are like.

  I sit back on my heels and look outside. I press my hand against a pane of the dome Plexiglas. It’s cold. Solid. I look up and a big butterfly flies by me, circles, lands on my arm and takes a few steps, plink, plink, plink with its sticky feet. It reminds me of something. I say, “Oh!”

  I lift it close to my face. On its wings, there is a perfect pattern. It looks like stained glass in a church window. I reach into a pocket on my shirt and take out a notebook and a pencil. The pencil is silver. I draw the butterfly. Of course, in the dream, I’m excellent at drawing. That’s how I’m reminded that it’s just a dream. At the top of the page, I write “Dream Butterfly.” Just as I finish, it takes off. It’s got iridescent wings, aqua blue and shimmering, like the moth this morning, which I’ve suddenly just remembered (but am trying not to, because it’s pulling me awake, dragging me out of this amazing dream).

  “It’s fine,” I say out loud, in the dream. “I’m on Mars. There’s a butterfly. I want to stay.”

  The butterfly comes back into focus. I exhale. He doesn’t hide his colors; they are all over him. He’s huge. When the sun glints off his wings, they look purple and pink. They look every color, like a rainbow trout in the sun’s beams. I get up and start to follow him. He flies crookedly, landing here and there.

  I’m right back in it again, deep in the dream. So of course, I make a dumb mistake. I guess if you didn’t make dumb mistakes in dreams, they’d be boring. What I do is that I forget that I’m on Mars and have to wear a suit to go outside and I follow the butterfly out an open door. (Of course, if the door were really open, I’d already have been dead! The atmosphere on Mars can’t support humans. It’s pretty much all carbon dioxide. Anyway, it’s a dream, so whatever happens happens and it’s too late, in the dream, to go back.) So I take about fifty steps outside, following the butterfly, when my eyes start to get blurry and I realize that I’ve died. I’m dead. In the dream, I die. You aren’t supposed to be able to die in dreams, you’re supposed to wake up right before you do, and this is the second time I have today!

  In the dream, I’m crying because I’m dead and I’m on Mars, I made it to Mars and I did something dumb and I died, once again before I was finished, before I had done what I meant to do.

  Chapter 9

  I wake up when the bell sounds to end lunch, and my eyes are wet from crying. I’m pretty much going to have to stop sleeping forever if every time I do, I die and cry.

  “Die-­and-­cry,” I say out loud. Tig would get that. I miss him so hard that my stomach clenches.

  I wipe my eyes with my hands. My hands are brown with dust, so that probably just makes matters worse. Great. Terrific. I stand up to head back into the building, but just as I do, there’s this incredible crackling sound.

  I can’t even describe how enormous it is, but no one else seems to notice.

  CRACKLE, CRACKLE.

  It’s crazy! It’s so loud! Like the whole world is made of thin glass and it’s breaking all at once.

  Then I realize that the sound isn’t a sound. Not one you can hear. It’s inside me. It’s a crackling inside me. It’s an inside sound that’s so loud and intense, it basically fills me up. It takes over.

  I open my mouth to call for help, but I can’t. My tongue is stuck. My word is stuck. I can’t remember how to push the word out of my throat. Is that where words come from? The word won’t come out of me. It won’t form properly in my mouth. My tongue is pinned down by something sharp. I’m standing now, under the tree, with my arms outstretched and my mouth open, waiting for the “Help!” to come.

  Then the crackle surges and wallops me in the back of the head and I feel my skull exploding and I’m on my knees and now I am dead, I’m dead, I’m dying! I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this is happening. And I’m buckling forward in slow motion and I’m thinking well, this is still the dream, the third time I’ve died in a dream today, wow, that’s weird, it’s really a lot of times to die in dreams and where is the butterfly? I’m falling forward and my hands won’t go up, so it’s my face that lands in the rust-­dust of Martian soil and then I’m gone. I’m gone.

  I’m dead.

  I guess I’m dead.

  Or I’m not dead.

  Because I can feel all my parts, I can’t be dead. My tongue is loose again. I feel normal.

  I feel normal, but nothing is normal. Time has done a skip and a hop.

  I can’t explain it, but suddenly I’m on Mars.

  Finally.

  Maybe Mom is right and the trip addles your brain and makes you forget and makes you confused, because this time, I open my eyes and look up and down and sideways and it’s true, because it’s real, and I’m on Mars. I see biomes through the glass of my helmet, a row of biomes, as well as long, low buildings with roofs that curve upward like sails. I see sky that’s greenish, not orange or red or blue.

  “Mars,”
I say, out loud, and my voice is trapped in a suit that I’m wearing, after all. I’m smiling, I’m so happy. I made it. I must have made it, because I’m here. I’m actually here. When did I come? I can’t remember anything after sitting under a tree and a crackle and it doesn’t matter because I’m here and I know which one is my biome, the one I was going toward when I tripped, so I start to walk. One foot, then the other. I’m strangely light, but stuck to the ground by my heavy feet.

  (“They have moments of lucidity,” Mom says about her patients. “Sometimes they know exactly who they are. It’s almost harder than when they don’t.”)

  Anyway, who cares? The thing is that I’m here. I’m home. I’ve never felt happy like this. I’ve never felt so strongly that I’m in the right place, exactly the right place.

  Then something makes another sound.

  What is it?

  It’s like a bee in my suit at first. A zapping sound and a crawling feeling on my skin. It gets louder and louder. And then that crackling again in reverse. I swat at it, but you can’t swat at something that is inside a suit. Are there insects on Mars? No. Think. What is it? My body is shaking, or it’s being shaken. Is it an earthquake? I wish I didn’t have such a bad headache.

  And then, Bam! the scene jumps, like when you’re watching a scratched DVD, and there I am on the ground under the tree and Mr. Wall—whose moustache does join under his chin like a giant O—is above me shouting something and someone (Bea?) is crying, and all around me is my whole class staring at me and then Fish-­boy loudly and clearly says, “She’s wet her pants!” Then there is the hushed sound of people trying not to giggle and then a laugh leaks out and then another and my mouth isn’t working because of the pins in it. Why are there pins in my mouth again? Where is my tongue? Why have I wet my pants? I don’t remember needing to pee.

  A siren splits the air. It is so loud that it feels like it drills right through my eyes and ears like a sharp spike. I am all needles and pins, pins and needles. There are people asking me questions and taking my pulse and shining lights in my eyes. Time is jittering. Everything is too fast and too slow at the same time. I’m lifted and moved. The sheets on the stretcher are cool and smooth and I’m so so so tired, so I just smile at the people gently, kindly, like Iris, and close my eyes and think about how later, when I wake up, I’ll tell them about Mars, and about how it smelled like metal and dust and something sweet like maple sugar and how the butterfly was different and so beautiful, and worth chasing out the door, and worth following into the too bright sunlight, into the unbreathable air out there, the green sky all heavy with dust all around me.

  Chapter 10

  I haven’t been in the hospital before, but I know that I’m in a hospital because it is exactly like it looks on every hospital TV show ever. There is an IV in my arm and machines beeping around my head and, on the other side of a glass wall, my mom and dad, looking like people normally look at the top of the Tower of Terror (except without their arms in the air). I feel like a fish in a tank. A goldfish. Bubble, bubble. Ish, Fish. Fish-­Ish. There should be a tipped-­over treasure chest beside me or a plant to swim into or hide behind, but there isn’t, and anyway, I can’t move. I blink. Tick, tick, tick.

  There is a really terrible painting of a flower hanging on an angle, like someone just remembered decorations were nice and threw it up there at the last minute. The flower is orange and droopy. Someone painted that and thought it was good. Someone looked at it and agreed and bought it.

  The whole world is so dumb and sad, I can hardly stand it, honestly. I feel like crying. Not just because of the flower, but because I’m in a hospital and the dumbness and sadness of everything is totally amplified by this room. Maybe it’s the smell? There is a smell in here that’s worse than school, worse than anything. Antiseptic and vomit and below that, something awful and more ominous. One time, Tig and I found a dead raccoon in the woods. “I’ve never smelled anything dead before,” he said, and we stood and breathed it in and stared. It smells like that in here. Is it me? Am I a dead raccoon? The raccoon had flies on his eyes. I try not to panic. I try to breathe slowly, in and out, in and out. My heart beat speeds up and a machine beeps faster.

  The IV is dripping something purple into my arm.

  Why is it purple?

  Why am I here?

  I try to remember, but I can’t quite figure it out. My head feels funny. I blink at Mom and Dad. Why aren’t they coming in here? They are looking at me but not seeing me. Blink, blink, tick, tick, tick. Come on Mom, why can’t you hear it? I blink an SOS.

  Trying to figure this out is like pedaling with a bike chain that’s slipped off the pedal wheel. The pedal is still going around but not catching on anything at all. My chain did that a lot until we got it tightened. We had to go to a special bike shop. It was a two-­hour drive.

  “Tighten your chain,” I tell myself. But I can’t! I try to squeeze my brain down so my thoughts stop slipping. It’s hard. It doesn’t work. “Think.”

  I close my eyes because keeping them open is too hard and I try to go back to how it was hot and the first day of school and a boy called me Fish and laughed and I wet my pants and the tarmac was hot under my new Converse and the tree threw a long, skinny shadow on the ground and then I was on Mars. Well, dumb. Obviously that was a dream. No one just goes to Mars. It takes nine months! But only if the orbits are lined up. I have an orbit tracker and I know that if you left for Mars today—if today is still today, that is—it would take seventeen months and six days, give or take a few.

  I know that it would take seventeen months and six days to get to Mars, but I don’t know why I am here or why Mom and Dad can’t see my blinking or why my body doesn’t want to move. I try to lift my arms. They are as heavy as fallen trees.

  I crunch my brain into a fist and make it flex. I try to make my brain pedal smoothly from one thought to the next.

  A fish. Me. A butterfly. My biome. Home. Wetting my pants. Tarmac. Mr. Wall’s O.

  I remember eating my sandwich and lying down on the ground. I remember the tree left sticky sap in my hair. I remember Mr. Wall’s beard. Something was in between the tree and the beard.

  “She’s wet her pants!”

  It keeps playing in my head, on a loop, over and over again. I hate that boy. That Fish-­boy. Who is he, anyway?

  Lightning.

  The tree was hit by lightning.

  It crackled.

  But I went to Mars, I really did. It was so different. How it smelled. How the air tasted in my mouth. That butterfly.

  I love Mars.

  I’m still on Mars.

  Am I?

  No, no hospitals there. No Mom and Dad.

  But, I mean, look. Look around! Don’t you see?

  The air is still green and dusty and I’m breathing. Only I can’t be breathing because 99 percent of the atmosphere on Mars is made up of carbon dioxide. But wait, I’m in a suit, which is good, although I didn’t put one on, so this is the dream again. I tell myself firmly, “Dream.”

  Wait, I’m sleeping.

  Am I?

  But I’m not. I can’t be. I mean, I can sit up. I can sit up, so I do. Then, because I can, I stand. I walk on my heavy-­light feet all the way to the dome, each footstep feeling like it takes forever. I enter the airlock. I lift my arm and punch in a code (1430), which I somehow know and the airlock fills with pressure, like being inside a balloon that’s being blown up. How could this be a dream? My skin hurts while the suit decompresses. It’s a tight-­loose feeling that’s hard to explain.

  I don’t understand any of this, I just know what’s real and what isn’t. I lean against the airlock wall, which is cold and solid behind me until an alarm beeps, which means I can go back into the dome. I look at my hands, which is something that Dad taught me a long time ago about dreaming, but my hands are just my hands. I scratch my cheek, which is super itchy, and it’s like normal, like I’m scratching my cheek. There are bumps on it. Mosquito bites. There are n
o mosquitoes on Mars. What? Wait. They must have changed their mind about sending twelve-year-olds to Mars because these are my regular hands. My regular nose. My three mosquito bites. My hair swings over my shoulder in a ponytail and I pull it forward and inspect it and it’s my regular hair, too red, too long.

  I take a deep breath and it smells green and damp and humid, like it does in my greenhouse. Crops are growing everywhere and a path of flat red rocks threads between them. At the end of the path is another door, and I make my way down the path, plants brushing my legs, and I open it. I go inside the room. Two boys are in there, playing a game of chess.

  “Hey,” says Tig. “Where were you?”

  “I went outside,” I say. My voice sounds thin and high. I clear my throat. Can you clear your throat in a dream? “I went outside,” I say again. “Without a suit. I passed out. I had a dream. But then I was wearing a suit. I don’t know. Just a hiccup. Brain hiccup. I guess. Mars brain?”

  Tig nods. Tig is Tig, but he looks older. Is it ten years later? There’s a faint beard on his chin. His eyes look like my dad’s, crinkling at the corners. Is it even later than that?

  “Then you’d be dead, Fish,” says the other boy, who is also a man.

  I squint, trying to place him. Oh. It’s Fish-­boy. I don’t hate him now. Why don’t I? I check my hands again. Maybe they are more grown-­up hands. Maybe I am more grown up than I thought. But they look like my hands. Maybe bigger. Yes, I guess a bit bigger. Maybe I didn’t grow so much between twelve and twenty-­two. Maybe I’m really the same.

  The mosquito bites bug me. Those can’t be real if this is the future and I’m in it.