A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Clayton flared his nostrils but stepped aside. As I passed, he grabbed my arm, his fingers tight around my bicep. “All you have to do around here is go along to get along, okay? If you can’t do that, at least try not to take anyone down with you.”

  I yanked my arm free and walked out, ignoring the rest of the boys, each of whom stared at me like I was infected with a virulent disease. I had no idea what we had stumbled into, but I was ready to leave.

  FIVE HOURS EARLIER

  DJ, JENNY, AND I SAT in a circle under the expansive shade of an oak tree and ate our lunches. Jenny was the only one who was happy about it.

  “Nutreesh? Really?” I turned up my nose at the bar I’d been given along with a bottle of Hydrophoria, which was just water, and a banana. We hadn’t been offered a choice; it was the standard-issue lunch everyone had received. At least we’d been allowed to spend the hour outside.

  “This place is a prison,” I muttered.

  DJ leaned in and kissed my cheek. “High school always feels that way.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yeah, but this place is worse.”

  “I’m with Noa,” Jenny said. “There was a kid in my xenobiology class who wouldn’t stop talking, so they sent him to the office. I’ve never seen someone cry like that over being kicked out of class. This school is freaky.”

  DJ leaned against the tree and tried to scan the area in a way that looked casual. It wasn’t. There were other students outside, clustered together in groups, each of whom was watching us the way we were watching them. Teachers patrolled the perimeter of the grassy knoll, and herded students toward the center if they wandered too near to the edge.

  I had told DJ and Jenny about Thao and Clayton and my experience in gym class, but they hadn’t been able to make any more sense out of it than I had.

  “What do we do?” DJ asked.

  “Leave,” I said. “When the bell rings, we make a run for the shuttle and get the hell off this rock.”

  “Are you sure?” DJ asked. “We might be giving up the chance to find a way home.”

  I slipped my hand into DJ’s. Maybe my feelings were the result of chemicals, but the more time I spent with DJ, the more time I wanted to spend with him. “I’d rather live the rest of my life on Qriosity than here.”

  Jenny made barfing sounds into her napkin.

  “Besides,” I continued, “I feel like the longer we stay, the more at risk we are. For all we know, this could be a Nutreesh processing facility, and we’re about to learn that Nutreesh is made from rebellious high school students.”

  Jenny looked at her empty wrapper. “I thought you said Nutreesh was probably roaches.”

  “Well, now I’m saying it might be people.”

  “Nutreesh isn’t people.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you certain enough to keep putting it in you?”

  DJ wedged himself into the conversation before Jenny and I really got going. “We’ve only got two classes left after lunch. It’ll probably be easier to sneak away after that.”

  It was a good point, and I was about to say so when Jenny said, “Well, actually,” in a dramatic fashion, and then waited for us to give her our full attention. “There’s a dance this evening. The Equinox Formal.”

  “Okay?” I said.

  “I’ve been asked to go,” she said. “Officially.”

  I didn’t mean to snort. It just happened.

  Jenny slapped my arm. “What? I’m a catch.”

  “I would’ve thrown you back.” I winked at Jenny, and she hit me again.

  DJ said, “Staying for another class is one thing. But a dance? I don’t know.”

  Jenny shrugged. “And I don’t care. A living, breathing person who thinks I’m attractive has asked me to attend a social function as his date, and there is no way in hell I’m not going.”

  “It’s dangerous,” DJ said.

  As soon as DJ and Jenny began to argue, I tuned them out. Mostly because the sound made me want to stuff my ears full of Nutreesh. Over the past few months, Jenny had helped carry my emotional baggage, discovered an intruder, fought aliens, and been forced to endure unwanted isolation due to my and DJ’s burgeoning relationship. Jenny had had to smile and be happy for us even as we pulled away and left her alone. If she wanted to spend a couple of hours slow dancing to cloyingly sweet songs while her date worked up the nerve to try stick his tongue in her mouth, then I felt like I’d be a jerk to stand in her way.

  “We should stay for the dance.”

  I don’t know who looked more surprised by my decision, DJ or Jenny.

  “Really?” DJ said.

  I nodded. “You heard Jenny: she’s got a date. Besides, we have ten hours until Qriosity leaves.”

  Jenny laughed. “I love how I’m the only one of us who can fly the shuttle, but it’s your decision.”

  “There’s also that,” I said. DJ opened his mouth like he was going to raise another objection, but I stopped him. “It might be fun to live normal lives for a while.”

  DJ motioned at the nearest Teacher. “How’s that normal?”

  “Sure, there are robot teachers and this is a space school filled with Stepford students—”

  “Just agree to stay, DJ,” Jenny said. “You’ll feel much better when you do.”

  DJ threw up his hands in surrender. “Fine. I guess we’re staying.”

  Jenny’s scream of joy caused heads to turn, students’ as well as Teachers’, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable drawing so much attention to ourselves. But it had been a long time since I had seen Jenny so happy. She wasn’t the only one excited about the dance, though. I might have been slowly adapting to my role aboard Qriosity, but I was still sixteen, and I was looking forward to doing something where the stakes weren’t life and death.

  “The dance could be the perfect opportunity to break into the school’s computer system and see what we can learn,” DJ said.

  “That’s a good point too.” I was disappointed that DJ only saw the dance as an excuse to sneak around, but I tried to hide it. Not well enough, apparently.

  “What’s wrong?” DJ asked. Lunch had ended, and he was walking me to my next class. Jenny had abandoned us when the second the bell rang.

  “Nothing.”

  “Liar.”

  I shrugged, trying to play it off like it was no big deal. “I was looking forward to the dance a little. That’s all.”

  DJ held my hand, and we strolled across campus like we belonged there. “We’re going.”

  “But only as cover for breaking into their computers.”

  DJ pulled me to a stop, ignoring the dirty looks thrown our way from the people forced to walk around us. “To potentially find a way home. Don’t you want that?”

  I nodded. “I did. I do.” I sighed. “I guess I’d gotten used to the idea that we were never going home. That I’d never go to prom or graduate high school or worry about college. That I was never going to have the experiences I’d expected to have. Then we came here, and it’s weird, but it’s also a reminder of everything I lost.”

  I expected DJ to tell me I was being silly, because I was and I knew it. Instead, he wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me.

  “No exchanging bodily fluids!” the nearest Teacher yelled, but it was too far away for me to care.

  “If you want to dance all night, then we’ll dance all night.”

  It was so tempting to give in. To enjoy a few hours with DJ as a normal high school couple. Our relationship didn’t have to be complicated. We didn’t have to be DJ and Noa, strangers who were abducted and stranded aboard a spaceship. I could just be Noa, the devastatingly handsome popular kid, and DJ could be my hot but nerdy boyfriend.

  It would have been nice, and it would have been normal, but that wasn’t our story.

  THREE HOURS EARLIER

  FRESHMAN YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, second-period English, I was seated next to a new kid by the law of alphabetical order. Mrs. Forrester had us team up to w
ork on a project. The new kid’s name was Victor, and he was kind of cute. I wouldn’t say I had a crush on him, but I definitely wanted to impress him. He was telling me about his life—how his family traveled the world because his mom was a famous photographer—and I made up a story about my dad being an actor. It was a ridiculous lie, but it spilled out of me before I could stop it. Victor learned the truth—I should have known he would because I’d been going to school with most of the same kids since first grade—and he told everyone what I’d done.

  I thought my life had ended. I felt like the entire universe had imploded. How was I going to return to school? How was I going to face anyone now that they knew I was a liar? Every decision I made during high school felt monumental. Every mistake I made was the end of everything.

  As I sat through my last class, having lived on a spaceship where I’d been forced to make life-altering decisions, where the choices I’d made had led to my actual death, I realized how small and inconsequential high school was. There was a bigger world beyond high school, and an even larger universe beyond the world. That lie I had told and the other mistakes I had made, none of them mattered beyond my high school walls, and I was beginning to doubt that they had mattered much there, either.

  At the end of last period, DJ and I waited in the quad for Jenny so that we could plan our next move. Jenny arrived a few minutes later, dragging behind her a tall, handsome, freckle-faced boy in a letterman jacket and very tight jeans.

  “Meet Ty,” she said. “He plays football.”

  Ty was nearly a head taller than Jenny. He waved at us and flashed a charming, easy smile. “What’s up? You must be Noa and DJ.” He spoke with a lazy, lackadaisical style in a voice that sounded like an ocean wave.

  I pointed at myself. “Noa.”

  “DJ.”

  “Cool,” Ty said. He was too pretty to be real. His eyes shone like smoky quartz, his skin was ivory and smooth, and he had the broad shoulders and narrow waist of a doll. Next to him, I felt like a troll. Like my face was covered in pustules on the verge of bursting and my mouth was filled with foul, green, crooked teeth.

  I wondered if DJ was feeling as suddenly inadequate as I was. If so, he didn’t show it. “What now?” DJ asked. “We’ve got some time to kill before the dance, right?”

  Jenny said, “Ty’s going to show us where we can get clothes. We can’t show up looking like this. Apparently, it’s where everyone goes shopping.”

  “Yeah,” Ty said. “The Underground.”

  The Underground, as it turned out, was both the name of the place and a literal description. As in the mall was literally underneath the school. I stood at the top of a long escalator and looked down.

  “It’s a mall,” I said.

  Ty was grinning and, of course, he had a perfect smile full of straight white teeth. “Awesome, huh?”

  I rolled my eyes but kept my face turned so that only DJ could see. “Yeah. Totally.”

  Jenny and Ty got onto the escalator, and DJ took my hand and pulled me on behind them. From the top, I could see everything. We were in a pastel-and-neon underground mall with a huge fountain in the center and fake palm trees lining the promenade. The stores had names like “Dankworth & Fernsby,” “Eternally Eighteen,” “Munch,” and “Illicit Syzygy.” The most surprising part was that it was crowded with teenagers. The entire school must have been there.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a mall. And I certainly never went there to hang out. That was something my mom had done when she’d been sixteen, which I knew because I’d seen the pictures. Her permed hair held back from her face with something she called a scrunchie. She and her friends trying to look disaffected and cool, crowded at a table in the food court. The Underground was a paradox. A futuristic anachronism. But I was willing to overlook that if I could find something decent to wear that also fit well.

  DJ was characteristically quiet as he took the scene in, but I wondered what was going through his mind.

  When we reached the bottom, Jenny pulled Ty off the escalator and said, “I don’t know what F and G is, but those dresses in the window are gorgeous. I’m going in.”

  Before Jenny could drag Ty away, DJ said, “Why don’t I go with you? That way Ty won’t see your dress until the dance.”

  Jenny’s eyes lit up. “Perfect! I love that idea!”

  “I don’t know…” I wasn’t keen on being left alone with Ty, but DJ was wearing a determined look that made me suspect he was actually suggesting that I spend time with Ty to pump him for information.

  Ty motioned toward the other end of the mall. “We can check out Chainsaw. They have killer suits.”

  DJ kissed my cheek and whispered, “Be careful.” And I wanted to shout at him that sending me off with a stranger had been his idea, but he and Jenny took off, and I was lured away by the promise of shopping for suits.

  Insert montage of me trying on every article of clothing in the entire store. With a name like Chainsaw, I had expected generic, bland clothes for men who still thought colors were gendered, but I was quickly proven wrong. The store presented me with such a vast array of choices, any of which could be quickly tailored by a Sales Associate to fit, that I nearly broke into tears. Sales Associates were exactly like Teachers, but their job seemed to be making sure I found the perfect outfit for the dance.

  “What do you think of this?” I walked out of the fitting room wearing an iridescent tux, with a banded collar, that made actual whooshing sounds when I spun around.

  “Dope,” Ty said. He wasn’t my ideal shopping partner. He responded to everything with one-word replies that were either “dope,” “rad,” or “meh.” Ty’s lack of verbal skills was probably the main reason Jenny liked him. If I hadn’t been occupied trying to find a suit that would melt DJ’s knees, I would have been bored. He certainly didn’t seem to know anything about the space school.

  I held out my arms and turned to get a better view of the back. The shiny suit definitely made a statement, but I wasn’t sure if I liked what it was saying. “I should try the blue one on again.”

  I was in the fitting room, hanging the shirt I’d just taken off on its hanger, when Ty opened the door and ducked inside. The tiny space was barely large enough for me, and Ty had to press against me to fit.

  “Whoa,” I said. “You’re cute, but I’m with DJ.” I paused. “I think.” It wasn’t a conversation we’d had. We’d made out, and we’d gone on dates, but we hadn’t exactly defined our relationship.

  Ty clamped his hand over my mouth. “Jenny told me you arrived here in a shuttle.” His voice was barely loud enough for me to hear, but his tone was razor-sharp. Gone was the dopey, goofy jock Jenny had introduced us to, and I didn’t know how to react. A familiar dread seized me, and I froze. “You have to take me with you when you leave.”

  I refused to be intimidated by him. Sure, Ty could have folded me into a neat square and tucked me into his back pocket, but that didn’t mean I had to give up. I pried his hand off my mouth. “Why would we do that?”

  “There’s no time to explain,” he said. “Just promise you’ll take me.”

  “I’m not promising anything until you tell me why.”

  Ty clenched his jaw. “Because you need me. You’ll never escape without my help.”

  A Sales Associate knocked three times on the door. “Fitting rooms are designed for single occupancy.”

  I reached past Ty to open the door, but he grabbed my arm. He mouthed, Please. His palms were damp, and there was genuine fear in his eyes.

  This wasn’t a decision I wanted to make alone. DJ would have known what to do, but I didn’t. What would be the repercussions of allowing Ty to come with us? What would happen if I said no? Would Jenny want Ty living on Qriosity? This was a decision that the three of us should have made together, as a crew. But there was no time.

  “If one of you does not vacate the fitting room immediately, I’ll be compelled to call Manager.”

  Ty squeeze
d my arm harder. I gave him a terse nod, hoping I wouldn’t regret it. Ty sighed with relief, let me go, and opened the door. “No need,” he said to Sales Associate. “We’re good.”

  But I wasn’t so sure we were.

  I tried to find other ways to talk to Ty, but a Sales Associate always seemed to be lurking nearby. Later, when we met up with DJ and Jenny, I tried to get DJ alone, but couldn’t manage that, either. If I hadn’t seen Ty’s transformation for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it.

  Eventually, the mall began to clear out as the time of the dance neared. We made our way back to the surface and then to the quad in front of the gym. Ty had chosen a white tuxedo with tails while DJ had picked up a traditional black tux. After much debating, I’d settled on the most amazing blue suit. It was dramatic and modern. I’m not saying I wanted to die, but it was definitely an outfit worthy of dying in.

  Jenny was the star of the show, however. She arrived wearing an elegant strapless aubergine sheath dress. Her hair was piled on her head in a cascade of ringlets, and it glittered like a million stars. If Jenny didn’t steal Ty’s heart, then he was probably a robot.

  Despite knowing that DJ and I weren’t really there for the dance, I did my best to pretend we were. To live in the moment and enjoy the evening. Jenny and Ty went inside first. DJ and I followed after the Teacher at the door scanned our passes and stood aside to let us in.

  “Wait,” I said. “So we’re seriously not going to talk about the fact that your full name is DJ Storm?”

  NOW

  THE GYMNASIUM HADN’T BEEN TRANSFORMED so much as shoddily disguised in the hopes that none of the students would notice. Fairy lights hung from the walls, paper streamers dangled from the ceiling, and a mirror ball spun over the section of the floor designated for dancing, but the stink of shame, rubber, and BO remained.

  It was perfect.

  “What were your parents thinking? Does DJ stand for something? Let me guess: Django Johannsen?” DJ and I were making our way around the room. He was scoping out the exits while I tormented him.