by JB Dutton
Chapter 9
Memory #7: I’m on Dad’s shoulders. We’re walking down Main Street and I’m queen of the world. We see a street vendor selling cotton candy to some kids half a block away and I plead with Dad to buy me some. He says yes, but then ducks into a store and plops me down on a chair while he chats to the woman behind the counter. I tug at his pants and he ignores me. They talk and laugh for what seems like hours. When we leave the store, the cotton candy vendor has disappeared and I cry all the way home.
I streamed a few shows and ate junk for the rest of the day. I felt like I’d become an adult in the space of a week. And not a very upstanding adult at that. But the reality was that I had zero way of dealing with the stuff that was happening to me. No emotional toolkit, I guess a shrink would say. My choices weren’t right or wrong, just lacking experience.
One of those choices was to post on Facebook that I was really missing someone. Of course within minutes my friends were all, “Sounds like Kari’s in love!” and “Ooooh... tell us more!” like they’d read a celebrity scoop in a gossip mag. I tried to smiley it all away, but finally had to log off to extricate myself from the conversation.
Night came and went with me stuck to the couch, laptop still open on my stomach. When the doorbell rang I was wearing the same PJ’s I’d had on since about 4 o’clock the day before. I blinked away the haze from my eyes, wiped the drool from my cheek and staggered to the door, expecting to see Noon.
I opened it, looking like a newborn warthog, and there stood Elle, as immaculate and stunning as ever.
“Oh...” was all I could manage.
“Kari. May I come in please?” Even her voice was beautiful.
“Um, sure,” I answered, resisting the urge to sniff my armpit to confirm the worst. “Could you, um, hold tight for a sec while I, like, make myself more human?”
Way to go. Just the thing to say to an alien.
“Absolutely.”
She walked into the living room, her stylish heels making a confident, decisive clunk with every step. I grabbed a long-sleeved tee and jeans, dabbed on deodorant, splashed cold water on my face and retied my hair. Then I slapped myself a couple of times for good measure.
When I entered the living room, she was perusing the CD collection that Mom and I had pointlessly hauled from Wisconsin along with our iPods.
“Music is interesting,” she announced.
It was hard to know what to answer.
“Yeah... I, um, like it too.”
She stared at me and a bright smile spread across her face. If it was possible for the sun to become even more radiant, this is what it would look like.
“Kari Marriner,” she said as she approached me, still beaming. “Kari Marriner, you are perfection personified.”
I knew I looked better than when I opened the door, but this was pushing it.
“Um, thanks?” I ventured, starting to wonder where all this was heading. “Can I get you anything?”
She ignored my ridiculous question. “I’ve come to take you to the airport.”
My face must have fallen.
“Noon did tell you that he was forbidden to see you now,” she added, her smile barely fading.
Suddenly I had a lump in my throat. I’d been studiously ignoring reality for almost twenty-four hours and here it was again, standing in front of me, shining like a movie star. But it was a feel-bad movie.
“He told me all about your conversation yesterday. The email you received. We want to help you find your mom, but Noon cannot be a part of it. He has returned to the Dark Universe. Voluntarily, I should add.”
I felt the tears well up in my eyes. Elle observed me like a laboratory specimen for a moment, then she opened her arms and I fell into them.
“I’m just so scared for Mom and I don’t know what to do!” I sobbed.
“We understand, Kari. But, like I said, we’re going to help you. Now that we occupy both pyramid rooms, we, the Temple of Truth, are in control.”
“You mean the one here and the one in the roller derby arena?”
“I do. And eventually Aranara and Bob will have to use one or other of the portals to return to the Dark Universe, otherwise their embodied forms will cease to be viable. Besides, they know that harming your mother won’t achieve anything.”
Her embrace was so unnatural (yes, so alien) that it made me feel worse. I pulled away.
“You don’t know that!” I wailed. “They’ve already done... something to her. Some sort of brainwashing. Or drugs, I don’t know...”
“Kari, like Noon told you, the Mom you saw on your phone probably wasn’t your mother at all. We are the Embodied, remember? And we can choose to embody ourselves in any advanced life-form. We simply need to access its genome. Then, when we pass through the portal, we can organically re-sequence our Dark Matter form into a Light Matter being.”
I shook my head. “But where would they get her genetic information from?”
Now her smile really faded. “This is partly our fault.”
“Why?”
“Because she works for the Temple of Truth. You’ve been to her office – it’s a genetics project.”
“So?”
“So we ask every employee to donate DNA to our global database.”
I sat down slowly on the arm of the couch, my mind racing.
“Shit. How will I know if it’s her when I see her at the airport then?”
“Talk to her. It’s a purely physical embodiment. You will know very quickly if it really is your mother.”
This would explain how weirdly “Mom” had acted in Paris. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach.
“I don’t know if I can go through with that! What if I freak out?”
“I’ll be there to help you,” she said in the same calming tone that Noon used on me.
But it was one thing to have Noon’s calming words right there in my head, and quite another to hear them from this stranger, no matter how hard she was trying to help. Could I really face meeting a Fake Mom and the consequence of what that might mean? Did I even have a choice in the matter? Come to think of it, did I even have a choice in anything in my life anymore?
I picked up my phone from the cluttered coffee table. Oh man – it was already almost one o’clock!
Elle headed for the door.
“We must leave. Do you have everything you need?”
Need for what? I thought. Every day felt like another step into the unknown.
