My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  Chapter Five

  Over the next few days, I finished reading through the existing story and, of course, cleaned the house. At the start of the week, my father showed up, checked the fridge for his oranges and coffee creamer, and asked me how school was. He listened for two minutes before reminding me that we were going to temple for Purim on Wednesday evening.

  By Wednesday, I’d forgotten. There were space elves, for goodness sake, and an elegant Queen of Rogues offering to take off my armor. I couldn’t be expected to remember that this boring human body of mine, marooned on the frozen ass-end of a nowhere planet, was expected to dress up for temple.

  A quick, sharp rap of knuckle on wood.

  “Lauren,” my father said. “Fifteen minutes.”

  He would want me to wear a dress. I put on loose gray pants, a favorite sweater, little gold earrings and a necklace. He was waiting at the top of the stairs in one of his innumerable suits.

  “It’s a holiday,” he said. “Don’t you want to look nice?”

  My father comes from centuries of warrior Jews. If Masada hadn’t been a total massacre, I’d say those guys were my ancestors. He’s six feet tall and broad-shouldered with thick, curly black hair and the eyelashes of a movie star. Women literally flock to him, like birds around a full feeder in the dead of winter.

  I’m pretty sure that in his copy of the Hebrew Bible—not that he’s observant at all—the commandment “honor thy father and thy mother” includes a footnote that reads “by making thyself look thy best all the time, as defined by thy father and thy mother and lo unto pain of death never by thine own sense of style, which is an abomination.”

  I went back into my room not wanting to look nice at all. Skirts aren’t nice. Dresses are not nice.

  Okay, truthfully, leggy sixteen-year-olds with giraffe knees don’t look good in a dress. Sierra in a dress and motorcycle boots: very nice.

  I wedged myself into pantyhose that felt like they were sagging and trying to crawl up my crotch at the same time. Add boring flats, because in heels I was taller than my father and I tended to fall over a lot. (He never tried to catch me. You might think that was penance for being taller than him in heels, but in truth it was his strongly held belief that I had to master gravity all on my own. He didn’t teach me to ride a bike either, that was Isaac.)

  Because I was tall and people often mistook me for being older, and because my father was handsome, and because in a plain black dress I resembled a matronly funeral guest, I had been at times mistaken for his girlfriend. I tried not to think about what that meant about the women he dated.

  I hadn’t seen the latest girlfriend. He’d been staying at her place and leaving me the house to myself, which was sort of neat except that I had to keep it spotless and there was never anyone I wanted to invite over to hang out in the big, empty great room with me.

  We only went to temple for the holidays, when it was packed. My father would circulate in his fashionable suit and shake hands and look important. He’s a partner in the local branch of a big law firm so he is sort of important, I guess. Lots of people know him and laugh at his jokes (which are not funny).

  As holidays go, Purim’s awesome. (Also a fan of Sukkot, because no holiday that gets joyful over lemons can be bad, and Yom Kippur, even though it’s the most serious business holiday. Not big on Hanukkah; all the Christians think it’s a much bigger deal than it is and it’s a pain in the butt to keep explaining that I do not get a gift for each day.)

  Purim is all about kids running around the temple in costumes and everyone eating. This year there was even a boy in a Queen Esther dress along with half the girls because everyone wants to be Esther (except me when I was little, the dress thing). Having all the kids there means that the rabbi keeps the service short and we get to the eating and partying more quickly than omg-will-this-Hagadah-ever-end Passover.

  I spent the service gazing in the direction of the rabbi but in my mind trying to work out how to draw the Queen of Rogues with Zeno. I wanted to get the shadows right so that you’d naturally focus on her fingers at the edge of Zeno’s armor, tips brushing Zeno’s bare skin. In my purse (hate having to carry that thing), my phone buzzed and I prayed it was Sierra texting me.

  After the service I snuck off to the restroom.

  You home? Come write, Sierra had texted.

  Can’t. I typed and paused. She hadn’t said anything obnoxious yet about me being Jewish so I figured I should go for it and see. I added, I’m at temple for Purim.

  What’s that? she asked.

  It’s a holiday. Kids dress up and there’s a big party.

  There was a long pause during which I washed my hands and then stood in the hall outside the bathroom holding the phone.

  Oh, there are costumes? What are you wearing? she asked and the question sent a tingling, lurching feeling down my legs.

  I’m not a kid, I don’t dress up, I typed back.

  So you’re in jeans and a flannel like when I met you?

  No…I’m in a dress. I couldn’t stop grinning; she remembered what I’d been wearing when we met!

  I bet you look great in a dress, she said.

  I have to go mingle, I typed and slid the phone into my purse. I went down the hall trying to not look like a leering horndog who wondered what it was like to rub your pantyhose-covered leg against someone else’s pantyhose-covered leg. By the time I’d walked back to the sanctuary, I had my smile contained to a reasonable level.

  “Ah there she is,” my father said as I approached.

  He was standing beside a man with sandy blond hair, a neatly trimmed beard and a small child perched on his hip. It was cute to see a guy holding a kid like he did it all the time, like if he had the chance to put the kid down or hand it off, he’d decline.

  They were talking with two dark-haired women. The one in the ruffled tawny blouse seemed more into my father than the one in the turquoise sweater.

  My father introduced me to them and I immediately forgot their names. He told tawny blouse, “Lauren goes to the same high school as your son. Is he here? How’s he doing this semester?”

  “Oh great,” she said and scanned the crowd. “He’s enjoying hockey. You two must know each other.”

  We didn’t, but I said, “I’m sure we’ve met. But I don’t follow much hockey.”

  “Lauren is an artist,” my father said with an inflection that made the word a boast and an insult at the same time.

  “Is that what you’ll go to college for?” the woman asked.

  Of course, I replied in my mind, but my mouth said, “I’m thinking about design, maybe architecture.”

  Or, you know, disgusting corporate law so I could protect polluters and shred class action suits like my father. So not. Isaac might be in law school but he was leaning toward International Human Rights. An evil part of me wanted him to go into Environmental and come up against our father someday and win. (Sad fact: Isaac probably wouldn’t win.)

  Springboarding off the fact that I’d be the one nonlawyer in the family, my father was going on about Isaac. Tawny blouse’s son came over to us after she gave him a wave so wildly enthusiastic that orbiting satellites must have noticed.

  “Travis, this is Lauren. She goes to your school,” she said.

  “Hey.” He nodded and held out his hand, not making eye contact. I was a good five inches taller than him. He had a long face with thick eyebrows that would look great sketched in charcoal.

  We stepped to the side and compared the classes we were in, though I already knew we had none together. My memory for names might suck, but I’m great at faces. The other adults had wandered off, leaving Travis’s mom and my father leaning in close and chatting. She was in high flirt mode.

  My phone hummed and I itched to pull it out and see if Sierra had more to say about my dress. I couldn’t do that in sight of my father. I’d never hear the end of it later if he saw me texting in a social setting. He already thought my social skills were exceedingly fai
l.

  “Do you want to get cake and find someplace to sit?” I asked Travis.

  He gazed longingly across the open middle of the synagogue to where a group of boys were shoving each other and laughing.

  “How about you cover for me?” I upgraded the offer. “Let’s walk across the room together and you can drop me off at those chairs so I can text my friends.”

  He chuckled. “It’s a deal. I’ll tell my mom.”

  We turned back to where our parents were talking.

  “…her teacher called us in for a meeting because she was concerned about Lauren’s reading level,” my father was saying.

  Sick dread and falling inside. Heat up the inside of my spine, in my cheeks. Blood hot in my skull. This story again; always this story, or one like it. He never told the stories I’d want him to tell. Nothing about art, about teachers praising my sense of perspective or visual narrative, about the local comic anthology I was in. He told stories that made him laugh, that matched with his ultra-narrow view of the world.

  “In second grade, the teacher thought she couldn’t read because she wasn’t picking up any of the books,” he said. “When they had quiet reading time, Lauren sat by herself and the teacher thought she was slow. We had to take her in to see a specialist. Turned out because she was reading those cartoon books, she didn’t think the books in the classroom were real books. After all, they didn’t have cartoons in them. She thought only books with pictures were real books.”

  They were both laughing, my father genuinely because he thought this was one of the funniest things he’d ever heard. The woman because she was going to laugh at everything he said.

  “Wasn’t that funny?” he asked me. “Do you remember that?”

  “Yep,” I told him. I didn’t remember it. Why would I? As if a story about people thinking I was stupid and how he got me checked out for learning disabilities was funny. I remembered how he’d locked up my comics for months and asked me if I wanted people to think I was stupid.

  The weirdest part of this whole business was that he thought I’d want to laugh about this with him. The hot, sick feeling was inverting itself in my chest, sucking away into a nothing place of numbness. I forced a smile.

  He put his hand on my shoulder; he only ever touched me in public. When people could see, he was the loving father raising a successful if physically awkward daughter.

  I said, “Travis and I are going to get cake and go hang out with his friends over there, okay?”

  The cake sat at the far end of a long, blue-and-white decorated table loaded with food, way more than the usual oneg shabbat on Fridays. Plate in hand, I walked Travis to his friends and dropped down into one of the empty blond-wood chairs that made up the body of the sanctuary. I set my phone on the chair next to my leg.

  No text from Sierra. I had a note from Mom wishing me a happy Purim. I sent her a quick message: Thanks, you too!

  I texted Sierra: So what are you wearing?

  The reply said: Black, like always…but I’m not Sierra.

  It was Sierra’s number. Was this a riddle? A flirt? Or someone else with Sierra’s phone?

  I wrote: I don’t like puzzles.

  Nor dresses, I gather. No prob, this is Blake. Sierra’s in the shower. I’ll tell her to text you when she’s out.

  What are you doing with Sierra’s phone? I asked.

  What I wanted to ask was what she was doing hanging out at Sierra’s house with her phone while Sierra was in the shower. Was that a regular thing friends did? Jenny never handed me her phone and went to take a shower, but then I was her lesbian friend and we just did homework together.

  She said to say hi if you texted, that you’re bored, Blake replied. She says to tell you she’s wearing nothing but a smile, which isn’t true, she’s got a towel and is about to put on sweatpants that make her look like my grandmother.

  I have to go, I wrote. I’ll see her online later.

  I wandered around the cavernous room, got a plate of cookies to pick at, stood by my father until he started another embarrassing story, went to the bathroom again. I ended up watching kids acting out the Purim story with far more martial arts moves than the original. (Queen Esther, Persian Jewish Ninja, owned all her scenes!)

  When we’d been there long enough to seem socially awesome, my father waved to me and we left. He dropped me off at home: pulled into the garage, saw me safely through the inner door, put the car in reverse and left. It was midweek so he could have been going back to the firm to work, or to go see whatever girlfriend he had going.

  I checked my computer but Sierra wasn’t online. Hanging out with Blake? Had they gone somewhere together? I made bad microwave popcorn that tasted like burnt packing peanuts and tried to watch a movie.

  “I wasn’t reading cartoons,” I said to the empty living room. “I was reading comics.”

  My words trailed off into nothingness.

  When I got into bed later, the nothingness was still there. In the dark, the ceiling seemed to stretch away from me forever. I stared into the vastness of space, as if I could see to the edge of the galaxy and beyond it, to all the galaxies.

  I didn’t know how to tell people—on the rare times I participated in conversations like “stuff that scares me” or “what’s worse? Zombies or demons?”—that pictures of outer space scared me worse than anything else. Monsters, zombies, demons, death, destruction, serial killers, I didn’t care. But one image of a spiral galaxy on a black background spotted with space dust and other galaxies and I stopped breathing.

  What was out there? Where did it end? What happened at the end? My mind zoomed out beyond the Milky Way, beyond the other galaxies that were all expanding on spacetime like an unbelievably huge balloon. I’d read a book on the universe trying to get over this fear but that had made it worse.

  What were black holes? What would happen if I fell into one? The gravity was so strong that even light couldn’t escape the event horizon—so what did that mean for consciousness? If I fell into one, would I be wiped out forever?

  What was it like to cease to exist? Now that I thought about it, I had to try to imagine it. My whole body got freezing cold and started shaking. I sat up and turned the light on again, wrapping my blanket around me. I got out of bed and distracted myself by reading at my desk until my face was falling onto the page.

  Chapter Six

  On Sunday afternoon with the chores done, I went back to the story to take up Sierra’s prompt and fill in more about Zeno. I’d been thinking about her—about Zeno, and also about Sierra. I couldn’t stop thinking about Sierra. She was so different from everyone around me. Not like colored hair was that rare, but the way she put herself out there, the way she’d introduced herself as the Queen of Rogues that day we met. She and the story swirled together in my mind.

  Who did I want to be in that world? What should I make Zeno into? I didn’t want to be a Mary Sue, a character with disproportionate power who could get out of every conflict without effort. Zeno had to have weaknesses, insecurities, fears. But not the same as mine.

  I should start by answering the questions posted by the first part of the scene, like, what was in the bag?

  Lauren:

  Zeno lifted her bag. She accompanied the Queen up to her throne and sat in the cushioned seat at her right side. Servants brought an ewer of wine and poured it into chilled cups.

  “Tell me where you’ve been,” the Queen said.

  “I went in search of an ancient artifact that Cypher said has the power to reduce matter to its true form, but I only found half of it. When I touched it, this armor came over me. I don’t know what it means. I have always been proud of my past, being one of the race of wolf-shifters, but I fear I’m something else.”

  “Cypher will know,” the Queen said and closed her eyes in concentration as she telepathically called to the Master of Secrets.

  Cypher teleported into the center of the throne room. For the race of immortal ones, the Illudani, she was small
in stature, the height of a human, with tousled pink hair and eyes like chips of lapis rolled in gray dust.

  In the other stories, Cypher tended to appear out of nowhere and say whatever was needed. As Master of Secrets, she was a perfect plot device. What did I want her to say?

  I got a pop out of the fridge and made myself cinnamon toast. When I got back to my room, my chat window was flashing. I’d put my screen name on the account I created to post as Zeno so anyone else in the story could contact me. But I was surprised to see the line:

  Hey this is Blake, did you survive your thing the other night?

  I remembered sitting up in bed the night of Purim shaking because I felt like I was sliding off the edge of the universe. Did that count as surviving? Either way, I wasn’t going to tell Blake.

  Yeah, I wrote back. What did you end up doing?

  Dustin and Kordi came over, she wrote, but didn’t elaborate. Instead she added, Do you want me to write a few lines for Cypher?

  Sure, I told her because now I wasn’t thinking about the story. I was thinking about Dustin and Sierra and wondering if I had no chance or less than no chance.

  Blake:

  Walking up the length of the throne room, Cypher bent to the worn leather bag at Zeno’s feet and unlaced the top. She peered inside.

  “This is only half,” she said. “But it was enough to begin unlocking the secrets of your past. We must find the other half. Also I don’t recommend anyone touch this.”

  “What secrets?” Zeno asked. “I’m a noble wolf-shifter, that’s all there is to it.”

  Cypher laughed. It was clear that Zeno had been memory wiped at some point. Although Cypher didn’t know everything Zeno had lost, she wanted to help figure it out.

  “You were given to that family to raise, but wolf-shifter isn’t all that you are,” Cypher told Zeno. “That’s not your true family. Didn’t you ever wonder why you left that life so readily? Why you took to thieving as the most natural pursuit in the galaxy? Why you’re so good at it?”