Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  Drew slips his hand into mine. “Jesus, your hands are freezing.”

  I shrug. “We don’t need gloves in LA.”

  I can tell he knows I’m about to cry, and it’s nice that he doesn’t get weird about that.

  He tugs on my hand. “Come on, let’s warm you up.”

  I should take my hand out of his, but I don’t. It’s so warm. We hurry through the gardens across from the Common, but I stop as we reach a bronze angel statue tucked into a corner at the far end of the gardens. She’s in the middle of a fountain, on a pedestal, holding a basket. Her wings cut into the bright blue of the sky.

  “Oh,” I breathe.

  Something about her fills me up. Her face is so calm. Serene. For a minute, that peace washes over me, too, smoothing over the anger and sadness. The Judgment card in the tarot. Waking the dead.

  Drew’s hand tightens around mine, and when I look over, he’s watching me with the strangest expression.

  “What?” I say.

  He clears his throat. “Nothing.”

  His eyes are gray with little flecks of gold, which somehow the charcoal beanie he’s wearing brings out. I suddenly have an almost overwhelming urge to kiss him, to have his arms around me, to be held, and I know it’s only because I’m needy, but it freaks me out, how close I am to rushing through the space between us.

  I let go of his hand. “Coffee?”

  “Er. Right.” He puts that hand to the back of his neck and looks down for a minute. “Yeah. There’s a Dunkies on Newbury.”

  “What is the obsession with Dunkin’ Donuts in this place?”

  It seems like there’s one on every corner. Not that I’m complaining.

  He grins, and it looks good on him. “We Bostonians have very discerning taste.”

  I follow him down a street lined with brick town houses that have been turned into fancy boutiques and upscale stores that feature expensive winter coats in the windows. Halloween decorations abound. A few Christmas displays are already up. It’s the loneliest thing, maybe, knowing that this year will be the first one we don’t bake cookies with Mom or help Dad put lights around the tree.

  The Dunkies is in what once would have been a garden apartment, tucked beneath a toy store. We get our coffees “regular,” which is Bostonian for lots of cream and sugar. Then we head over to Copley Square and sit on the steps of the library, which looks like it should be in Paris or Berlin, maybe, with its statues and decorative iron lamps. I stretch my legs out and sigh as the warmth of the coffee burns my hands, as that pretty little Perc finally kicks in. More mellow. Takes the edge off. I have to remember how functional I can be on fives. Tens are like, Byyyyye, world.

  “Better?” he asks.

  I nod. “I feel warm and fuzzy again. Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “What do you do when you’re not selling drugs or ditching with me?” I ask.

  “I play guitar,” he says. “Read. Go out.”

  “A drug dealer who reads for fun?”

  “I’m not just a drug dealer,” he says.

  “What do you like to read?”

  “Fantasy. Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, that sort of thing.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “You love Harry Potter, don’t you?”

  “Hell yeah, I do. I have a Gryffindor scarf.”

  “Not Slytherin?”

  “The Pottermore quiz doesn’t lie: I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m one of the good guys.”

  I think I kind of believe him.

  “I’m a Hufflepuff,” I say.

  He laughs, soft. “I like Hufflepuffs. They’re sweet.”

  “You just don’t know me yet.”

  “Guess I’ll have to change that.” I can hear the smile in his voice, but I can’t look at him because I like looking at him too much, I think. “So, Hannah From LA, what does a Hufflepuff do when she’s not ditching school and popping pills?”

  “I used to hang out with my boyfriend. Go to the beach. Work at a coffeehouse near the boardwalk. Yoga. Tarot.”

  “So I read fantasy, but you live it,” he says.

  “I guess so.” I smile a little. “Maybe I have magical psychic powers.”

  “I’d love to see those in action.”

  “I’ll read your cards sometime.”

  “It’s a deal,” he says.

  The square between the library and Trinity Church is filled with people. Tourists, maybe, but lots of locals hurrying around with briefcases and backpacks.

  “Everyone here seems like they have somewhere to be,” I say. “Why do they try so hard?” I watch them go, go, go. “It clearly doesn’t make them happy.”

  “East Coast hustle,” he says. “Big dreams, big money. They’re trying to get to happy.” He shakes his head. “Like it’s a place. But they’re trying to get out of the cold, too. Not like in LA, huh?”

  “I lived five seconds from the beach. You don’t hurry in Venice, unless it’s to catch a wave.”

  “You surf?”

  “My boyfriend does.”

  Micah with his shaggy sun-bleached hair and tan skin. The thought of him makes me anxious.

  “Do you think your boyfriend would be mad that you’re hanging out with some dude who sold you pills?”

  “He trusts me,” I say.

  “What’s he like?”

  I smile a little. “Fun. Pretty chill—surfer, you know. I don’t know how I would have gotten through the past month without him. He and my dad were really close, but he kept it together, you know? For me. He’s loyal like that.” I take a long sip of my coffee. “Usually.”

  “Usually?”

  I shrug. “It’s a long story. What happened with you and your ex?”

  He grimaces a little, rubs his palm against the back of his neck. “Just too different. We broke up at the end of last year.”

  “Miss her?”

  He frowns. “Sometimes. But not really. We weren’t right for each other. She’s the captain of the soccer team, goes to church.”

  “Were you dealing at the time?”

  “Yeah. That’s part of why it was never gonna work out,” he says. “But I also felt like … I couldn’t be me with her. Like I had to be this version of me she wanted, but the real me—she didn’t want that.” He runs a finger around the rim of his cup. “I want to be all in with someone. You know?”

  And that’s the thing about Micah. He’s not all in. Not anymore. And I don’t think I am, either.

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  We get up and head back toward the car. We’re waiting to cross the street when I notice a woman with a tiny belly rest her palm against it, almost protectively. Something about that gesture stops me cold. Then it hits me, a sudden knowing, like the kind Mom used to get. My body floods with heat, and I’m so angry I can hardly breathe.

  I grab Drew’s arm because for a second, it feels like the earth opens up beneath my feet and if I don’t hold on to something, it’ll pull me down.

  “Hannah? What’s wrong?”

  There’s a reason we can’t wait.

  Rebecca Chen, when I met her at the funeral, before I read the emails: resting her hand on her belly and saying, I’m feeling a little under the weather.

  “She’s pregnant.” The crosswalk signal goes green, but I just stand there. “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Who?”

  “My dad’s…” I don’t know what to call her, but I look up at Drew, and he gets it.

  His eyes widen. “Shit.”

  And just like that, things get worse.

  16

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 18 October

  Earth Time (EST): 13:05

  The way to survive space is to keep asking yourself, again and again: What is the next thing that can kill me?

  It’s not paranoia. It’s good common sense. Chris Hadfield, ace astronaut, swears by this question. It’s what’s saved him countless times in space.


  By always thinking about what could potentially end you, you’re staying one step ahead of death. Sure, it will find you eventually—that’s just the law of nature. But it doesn’t have to be today.

  The problem is, of course, that there are a lot of things that can kill you.

  Faulty jets in flat spins going Mach 3.

  Waves.

  Your sister shutting you out of her life entirely.

  Nah hides in her room all day, and she purposefully avoids eye contact with me or wears dark glasses so I can’t check her pupils. I don’t need to. Every time I see my sister, she is on something. I wouldn’t have known the difference before because I don’t do stuff like that—however, this past year has been an excellent education in drug addiction. But I can’t talk to her about it. There’s a wall between us now.

  I don’t know how to tell her that she’s all I have without it sounding like a trick to get her sober. All that’s left. But we aren’t in the same orbit, anymore.

  My sister spends most of her time in bed, curled onto her side. She thinks I don’t know about the other pills, the new ones, but I do. Her purse was in the hallway after school yesterday, open, and I saw a mini Altoids tin and she hates those mints, so I knew there must be pills in there. I was right. Different pills from the ones I already took. Percocet. I was going to take them, but then Aunt Nora came up and I couldn’t. The next time I was in the hallway, the purse was gone.

  Where is she getting this Percocet? Dad had Vicodin. Did she steal the pills from my aunt and uncle? Because if she did, they are going to find out, and when they do, they will have to deal with this, and they already have enough to do, taking us in. I mean, that is a real violation, stealing someone’s medicine. Uncle Tony said the vodka is missing, in addition to his bottle of bourbon. Nate took the blame for that, but he said it’s the last time he’ll cover for Nah. And then I had to lie to Nate when he asked what was going on with her, the drinking. I made it sound like it’s a new thing.

  When I told her I knew about the new pills, the old Hannah—sober Hannah, who is sweet and likes to dance around the kitchen with Mom—was gone, and this Hannah told me to mind my own fucking business and leave her the hell alone.

  And I can’t do that, obviously. But the way I’m going about it is all wrong, I think. I don’t want to push her away even more. Then we’ll never get back to each other.

  Her grief, it’s an ocean. It’s a wave. Mine, I think, is a glacier, floating in that water. I can feel it in my chest, this ancient, cold mountain of grief. It’s all in one place, but you can only see the tip. It’s so much bigger than people realize.

  I spend most nights on the trampoline in the backyard, staring up at the stars, wrapped in a sleeping bag. It hurts too much to use the telescope Dad bought me for my birthday last year. It seems wrong to look through it without being able to tell him what I see. It’s strange, how instinctual it is to search for dead people in the sky. Perhaps it’s a biological imperative our psyche needs to make sense out of the sudden disappearance of the people we love. I always knew my parents were not going to live forever. But my brain never told my heart that.

  They’re not up there, gazing down on me. But I can’t stop looking.

  I don’t remember what it was like being in foster care—I was too young. But my bones know what it’s like to be abandoned, and I feel that deep inside, like you’d have to give me an MRI to see it. It’s an ache that won’t go away.

  Everyone I love leaves me. I don’t know why.

  I wish there were math for that. To figure it out. Or an abandonment supercollider, where you could take all the leaving particles and throw them in there and understand how they work, why they work. Maybe abandonment is necessary for certain species to thrive. Such as astronauts. Being alone is a big part of the job. You can’t relocate your whole family to the ISS just because you have a job there. And then, of course, that job site is four hundred kilometers away from most of the human species.

  Dad always said that our greatest hardships end up giving birth to our biggest strengths. Maybe everyone leaving me is a sim. Getting me ready for being alone in those fighter jets, alone outside the ISS in my space suit, fixing a broken part. Maybe it’s a good thing.

  But.

  If I don’t die on a mission, if I die when I’m old, then I don’t think there is any way to prepare for that. I will be all alone because everybody leaves, they all leave, and it will take ages for anyone to find me, to know I’m dead. And the paramedics will open the door of my house, my orphan house, and the smell will be horrific.

  This loneliness, a deep pit. A grave.

  It’s the thing that will kill me next.

  I have to work this problem. And this means keeping my sister alive. Because I want to be an old lady with her. I think that would be fun.

  By Friday of our second week at school, I decide it’s time to stop being afraid of her pushing me away. Better to have her mad at me than be dead from an overdose. I will confront her. If this doesn’t work, I will have no choice but to enlist the help of others.

  The bell rings at the end of the day, and I find her waiting for me in her usual spot, sitting on the low wall in front of the brick-and-ivy building. She’s talking to that vampire-looking boy, and when he sees me, he squeezes Nah’s shoulder, then walks off.

  “He’s the guy from your math class, right?” I say.

  “Yep.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Drew.”

  “Like, Andrew or—”

  “Just Drew, Mae.”

  She tilts her head up, looks at the sky. Blue, not a cloud. My favorite kind of day because it means great visibility for stargazing once it’s dark.

  “It’s good. To make a friend,” I say. “Maybe he can come over sometime and—”

  “Yeah, no. We’re not friends. Just friendly.”

  It’s not fair, her being angry at me. It wouldn’t even be fair to be angry at the wave—even though I am—because the ocean can’t help what it does when there’s an earthquake under it, but if she’s going to be irrational, I’d prefer her to channel her anger in that direction.

  “Good day?”

  Nah’s wearing sunglasses, but I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “Sure, Mae. Fantastic.”

  I sit next to her on the low wall, but I’m quite short, so my feet dangle, whereas her long legs stretch onto the sidewalk. We are quiet. She doesn’t move, and so I don’t either, which is just as well because what I have to say to her isn’t really a conversation for home. It doesn’t take long for the students to clear out, and soon it’s just us.

  “Nah, are you…” I never have the right words for her. I know I can’t be too exact. That will make her angry. If she’s using, she could get mean and call me professor, which really annoys me. “What I mean is, right now, are you currently—”

  She knows what I’m asking, but makes me say it. “Am I what?”

  My sister shoots me a truly ferocious look, as though we’re not on the same team, the same side, anymore. If she’d take off her sunglasses, I bet her pupils are tiny specks, like extremely distant stars across the galaxy. She’s taken a pill today—I don’t know what, but it contains opiates. At lunch, all she did the whole time was stare at a spot on the floor. She wouldn’t eat—of course, the pills make you nauseous. But people were around, and I couldn’t say anything. A high school cafeteria really isn’t an appropriate location for an intervention.

  “Are you on something?”

  There are other ways to express this—the vernacular particular to drug use is quite varied, and you really could write a linguistics paper on it—but I choose this general, less loaded term (loaded, of course, being a colloquialism favored by many). The whole situation is crass enough.

  “No, I’m not, actually.” She stands, towers over me. Her jeans and sweatshirt—one of Micah’s old surfer ones—hang too loose on her tall frame. “Are you trying to make me feel like a piece of shit?”
/>   “Excuse me?”

  “I was just sitting here, waiting to walk to the train with you, and you come up and make all these accusations—”

  I throw up my hands. “It’s a fair question, Nah!”

  “No, it’s not. When you don’t trust me, it makes me feel like shit. And when I feel like shit, I use. So I need you to trust me, Mae.”

  This manipulation technique worked on me last year, and it took a family therapist to explain what was happening. My own sister is gaslighting me. Just because I don’t get vibes like her and Mom doesn’t mean I don’t know when someone’s lying to me.

  “Your logic’s faulty,” I say. “It sounds like you’re reasoning that if you use, it’s my fault.”

  I stand up and I try to take her hand, but she backs away, this tide of her always receding.

  “You’re lying to me.” I say this very nicely, but her reaction is immediate, as if she’s cesium—one of the most reactive alkali metals—and I’m water.

  There is an explosion.

  “Wow. Wow, Mae. Well, you know fucking everything about everything and I’m just your dumb sidekick, so, yeah, sure, you’re probably right. I’m lying to you. That’s all I do, right, because I’m an addict and I’m opening my mouth, so I must be lying.” She throws her backpack on. “I wish I could get tested right now just to see the look on your face when you find out I’m not fucking high right now and you’re actually, for once, wrong about something.”

  She’s shaking, and her voice carries on the breeze so that her anger surrounds us completely, a whirlpool. I could stop right now, stay on Hannah’s good side, apologize. But Mom and Dad would never forgive me if I let her do this to herself. I would never forgive me.

  “Maybe you’re not currently high, as you say, at this moment. But you were at lunch.” I step closer to her. “You’re lying to me. Every day. I know you are. I know you have more pills.”

  “And why is that, Mae? Hmmmm. Could you have reached that conclusion because you stole the ones I did have from under my goddamn pillow after pretending to have a sister moment with me?”

  “No. I reached that conclusion because you didn’t say a WORD to me after I threw those pills away. Which was very suspicious.” I cross my arms. “You would have been a lot more mad at me if you couldn’t have gotten more.”