My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  “I’m bisexual,” Blake said.

  “Me too,” Kordell added.

  Roy stared at them like they’d announced they were from another planet for real. “Oh right, sure you are. Have either of you even kissed someone of the same sex?”

  Blake looked away.

  “I have,” Kordell said. He extended his arm along the back of the couch behind Roy, who immediately leaned forward, awkwardly bracing elbows on knees, oily pizza plate held in front of him.

  I reappraised Kordell. He’d kissed a guy? I liked him even more than I already had. Despite his pretty face and the bright clothes, he didn’t come across as feminine. He was built with some muscle but enough weight that there wasn’t definition to it.

  “Blake hasn’t had the chance,” Kordell said. “It’s not as if our school is crawling with opportunities.”

  Blake snorted. “Ha! No kidding.”

  “You’d let her kiss a girl?” Roy asked.

  “Let?” Blake glared at Roy.

  He held up a hand. “Hey, sorry.”

  “What about the rest of you?” I asked.

  I realized how that question sounded in context when Roy said, “I’m straight!”

  “No,” I added quickly. “I mean, your story or whatever. I know more about your characters than I do about you.”

  Sierra put her plate on the coffee table and crossed her legs. She was in faded blue jeans but the gesture reminded me of skirts anyway. And of her legs in skirts.

  She said, “I used to go to the same school as Blake and Kordell. I met Dustin through Bear, who I know from Cyd, but that’s kind of complicated. Roy came in from the story. Anyway, you know me. Dust, tell her your life story.”

  He cleared his throat and rested his pizza plate on his leg, one slice still on it. “I was sent away to be raised in anonymity so that I may someday be the rightful King of England. Oh, wait, that was someone else. I’m a programmer, I run the story site, I’m an Aquarius and I hate mushrooms.”

  “Taste or texture?” Blake asked.

  “Texture, for certain. Your turn.”

  Blake shrugged. “Okay. I like math. I write poetry. I haven’t figured out how to write poetry in mathematical formulas, but I’m working on it. Everything else you can figure out by hanging out with me; I’m open bookish.”

  She poked Kordell.

  “Kordell Graves,” he said. “Fifth kid of six. I like a lot of things: plays, games, more games, Blake, Shakespeare, African diaspora science fiction. You know, this is harder than I expected.”

  Roy took over. He leaned further toward me, elbows out at the edges of his thick, furry knees. “Okay, other than you I’m the newest person here so let me give you a heads-ups. I’ve been hanging out with these losers for the past few months and here’s the deal: Kordell looks gay, but he isn’t. Blake looks like she’s going to have sex with you, but she isn’t. Sierra looks like she’s all that and she kind of is. Dustin’s a lucky asshole. And I could beat all of them at Mystics if I tried but then they’d kick me out because they need a sucker.”

  “Not true,” Blake said.

  “Which part?” Roy shot back at her.

  “The cards. I am so never going to have sex with you—that’s gospel.”

  “Lucky Roy,” Dustin said. “We finally get another girl in the group and she’s a lesbian.”

  I had a pang of sympathy for Roy. “At least we can commiserate,” I offered.

  “With beer!” Roy suggested. “Did you guys stock the fridge?”

  “Bring me one,” Sierra said. Dustin also asked for a beer, but neither Kordell nor Blake did. They both had mugs of pop and I had my can of Pepsi.

  Roy got back with the beers and handed them around. He settled into his spot and said, “I’ve got an idea about the story but I don’t know if you guys are going to like it.”

  “Go on,” Sierra told him.

  I relaxed a little. This was a good topic, far away from my sexual orientation and who was or wasn’t going to have sex with Roy.

  “Well, I was hanging out with The Machine and Shaman Bill,” Roy paused and glanced at me. “They’re the guys who run the gaming side of the story. The Machine runs all the cyborgs and does the gamemastering and Shaman Bill is in charge of the cool magic. Bill’s his real name so that’s why…yeah, okay, that was kind of obvious.”

  “Kind of,” Sierra said sarcastically.

  Roy ignored her. “They’re in the middle of a campaign where their strike team, the roleplaying guys, found a way into another universe.”

  “How?” Sierra asked.

  “Um, something about a black hole.”

  Blake turned sideways and sat against the arm of the couch. She bent her knees and put the soles of her feet on Kordell’s thigh so as not to overlap him and touch Roy. Kordell rested one hand on her shin.

  Blake said, “They’re using the bubble multiverse theory. It’s this idea that we’re in a universe that’s one of many in a multiverse, like soap bubbles floating on water. Our universe is one soap bubble. Because black holes are thought to create new universes, you can theoretically go through one to get into another universe.”

  She glanced around the room and added, “It’s a thing. I’m serious. It’s a real theory. Of course we don’t have the technology to test it, but still, wouldn’t that be wild? All those universes?”

  I was getting chilled again. Multiverses were on the list of space things that creeped me out and made me think about being nothing. Not multiverses specifically, but anything that enormous. How could you get your head around that? The one universe was big enough, but an infinite number of them? I could not deal.

  Did a multiverse mean there were other versions of me? What were they doing? How many of them had gotten laid already? How many of them were sitting in a living room with strangers and new friends obsessing about multiverses and sex?

  “The soap bubble model is my favorite kind of multiverse,” Kordell said and beamed at Blake.

  She grinned back at him. Envy speared my heart. I had no idea why his comment made her grin, but watching them it was super obvious that I had no one to grin at like that.

  “Yeah,” Roy said, waving a hand in Blake’s direction. “The Machine said that thing about bubbles. So the strike team goes through the black hole and in this other universe, the laws of physics are the same, but the laws of magic are different. They have to figure out if their magic works and how. But Shaman Bill said: what if in this universe the High God’s power doesn’t work? What if there are universes where the High God has no power? He was wondering if the strike team can get into one of those universes and find a weapon that could nullify the High God.”

  “Maybe,” Dustin mused. “I see the power of that. What happens if we get the High God’s locus from the future and then the strike team finds that kind of weapon? Or vice versa? If they kill the High God and we get the locus, are we the new High God?”

  “Sounds like a great idea,” Sierra said. “Is the Machine okay with us writing about that? And Shaman Bill?”

  She was leaning into Dustin and smiling, like she was trying to mirror Kordell’s gesture but couldn’t do it right because they were sitting side by side. The more she leaned into Dustin, the farther away she was from me.

  “I can ask them,” Dustin offered.

  Roy said, “I was thinking there could be a second strike team put together by Lord Solar.”

  Lord Solar was his character and now this all made sense. He’d figured out a way to make his character a lot more important.

  When no one protested, Roy kept talking. “And I thought it would be interesting if…I mean, there has to be a faster way to figure out which universes are the right ones, so you’d need someone who could do that. Like someone who’s good with information.” He turned toward Blake.

  “Like an infomancer, a master of secrets,” she said. “I get it. But can information travel through the multiverse? I don’t know. I’ll have to look that up. It depends
on what the water is. You know, in the soap bubble metaphor. What are all the bubble universes resting in? What’s the medium? Is it information? Oh wait, what if it’s the zero point energy field? Oh oh yeah, because the empty set is in every set, so zero is the one thing that’s in everything. It totally works!”

  “Huh?” Roy said.

  Blake shook her head at him in annoyance. “It works,” she insisted.

  “So Cypher can see into black holes?” Dustin asked.

  “It’s because of how Cypher teleports,” Kordell said. “She becomes zero and moves through the zero point energy field to anywhere.”

  “Right, yes,” Blake went on. “So the universes all have to have zero in them. They can’t not. Because of the empty set. So Cypher can be tapped into another universe. She could know where the black holes go, because she feels the zero point energy.”

  I mostly followed what she was saying. The water in the bathtub that held all the bubbles, all the universes, had to include zero in it. Cypher could use that zero-ness to know what was in each bubble. But she’d missed a step.

  Since I regularly freaked myself out obsessing about the universe, I’d read about black holes. In addition to keeping me up late and making me panic, they were pretty fascinating.

  I asked, “Wouldn’t Cypher at least have to go to each black hole individually to find out where it went?”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “Um, I mean, I don’t know what zero point energy is, but can it carry information out of the black hole’s event horizon?”

  Roy looked like I’d started speaking Russian, Kordell had an eyebrow raised, and Blake’s eyes were wide and curling up at the corners from the force of her grin. When she grinned like that, her face went from broad-nosed and plain to…I don’t know what but it made me want to keep looking at her.

  On my side of the room, Dustin was leaning forward around Sierra, watching me, and Sierra had a curious, amused expression on her face.

  I tried to ignore everyone’s eyes on me and clarify, “I’m just saying, even if Cypher could tell what kind of universe it is, she can’t pull that information out of the black hole from far away, all at once. See, because the gravity is so strong, nothing can escape it. Not even information. So she can use the zero thing to teleport through it and know what that universe is like, but she’s going to have to go to each one and go through it to find out which universe is the right one.”

  Blake turned toward me, leaning, almost to the point of falling off the couch. She was shining in a dark way, like an eclipse.

  “I kind of love you right now,” she said.

  My brain went through a black hole.

  On the other side was a universe exactly the same as the one I’d been in, but way more complicated.

  That wasn’t something you said. Nobody in my life threw around the word “love” as a casual compliment. It reverberated in my chest like a bell ringing. I wanted to press my palm to my breastbone and make it stop.

  I was saved from sitting there with my mouth open for an awkwardly long time by Dustin.

  “That’s a great idea, lots of story applications,” he said. “But Cypher is supposed to be figuring out the future…”

  “That’s where I come in,” Roy announced. “What if Lord Solar kidnaps Cypher to make her go to the other universes to find the weapon?”

  Sierra said, “That would infuriate the Queen of Rogues. And probably piss off The Machine because you’d be competing with his team.”

  “Great conflict,” Dustin pointed.

  I remembered how to operate my lips and tongue and suggested, “The Queen could send Zeno to steal Cypher back.” I stared at the raggedy smokestack-blue carpet, worried that this made me sound too interested in Blake.

  “We could all go,” Dustin suggested.

  “Are you okay being kidnapped?” Sierra asked Blake.

  “If I get to teleport through black holes into other universes, yeah, I’m okay with that.”

  “All right, that’s our storyline for spring and summer,” Dustin said. “Good job, Roy.”

  “Thanks!”

  Everyone got up to get more pizza and pop or whatever they were drinking and then they talked about the story while I focused on eating. When I got through my two slices I went into the kitchen and got a third.

  It hadn’t meant anything, what Blake said. That was just how she was, all wild exuberance one moment and silent the next, a crazy blend of fidgeting and stillness.

  I should read up on multiverses and figure out more smart things to say. Considering how everyone’s attention kept drifting back to Blake, maybe if she said enough nice things to me Sierra would stop leaning into Dustin and lean my way.

  Chapter Ten

  Sierra worked at a secondhand fashion boutique and gift shop most days. Plus she was taking a writing class at the University of Minnesota so she had schoolwork. We fell into a pattern where we’d get up and have breakfast, chatting about the story, or what she was reading. She’d head out and I’d work on the story or read.

  Monday and Tuesday when Sierra got home, Dustin also stopped by and we all sat on the couch watching movies on his laptop. The house didn’t have a television, and seeing the high def on his 17-inch screen, I got why they didn’t need one. He put his arm around Sierra and she snuggled into him and I felt like a fifth wheel—until late Tuesday when she threw an arm around me and tugged me next to her.

  Three of us on the couch: his arm around her, her arm around me. I didn’t know how to feel. The weird overshadowed everything else.

  Dustin didn’t seem to care. He half patted my shoulder with his hand. I wanted to pull away but that would have moved me further from Sierra so I stayed put.

  The next morning after Sierra went to work, I sat down with my cup of tea and breakfast burrito at the dining room table, where Cyd had her acupuncture books spread out. She rubbed her hand across her forehead like she already had a headache and got up to get herself a fresh cup of coffee. Her long sweater was deep terracotta over black tights.

  When she got back to the table, she slid into her chair like grace was something tall people had naturally. She’d probably never tripped over her left foot and then tripped again over her right while trying to catch her balance.

  She blew on her coffee, fingers curled around her mug. “How’s your visit going?” she asked.

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks for letting me stay here all week.”

  “You said thanks plenty when you did the dishes last night. It’s great to have you, and I’m not saying that because of the dishes.”

  Her hazel eyes had a natural downward turn to their outer edges, like she was always on the brink of smiling. When she did smile, her cheekbones went from enviable to amazing. (Why don’t cheekbones like that come standard on all tall girls? Serious design flaw.)

  “What’s the deal with Sierra and Dustin?” I asked.

  Cyd sipped her coffee and pressed her lips together. She rolled the mug between her palms.

  She said, “They hung out a few times last fall and about three months ago she decided she was madly in love with him. She does that at least twice a year.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t figure him out,” Cyd told me. “But, you know, they’re going to be soulmates until they’re not anymore.”

  I studied the few black beans that had fallen out of the end of the burrito and seemed ready to make a run for freedom. If Sierra had fallen that fast, and that often, did that mean she’d get over him that quickly too? Would it be the same with me? Would our flirting turn into something and end as abruptly?

  “You know, Sierra’s not the only girl in town,” Cyd said.

  “Are you offering to fix me up?” I asked, my voice light so she’d know I was kidding.

  She smiled back at me but answered seriously, “I would if I could, but I don’t know any single queer girls. My sister has a girlfriend.”

  “Oh cool.”

  This cinched
my growing suspicion that everyone in the Cities was amazing and that I absolutely wanted to go to college here. Ideally at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, but my father would never go for that. It wasn’t on the corporate track.

  I pulled my sketchpad over and scribbled around for a bit while Cyd studied.

  * * *

  Thursday everyone came over again. One moment Sierra was sweeping through the door from work, pulling off her mouth-wateringly fashionable knee-high boots, and the next moment the house filled with people. Blake and Kordell brought a mountain of chicken wings, breadsticks and sauces from the aptly named Wings-n-Things.

  We sat in the same spots we had days before and aside from Sierra wearing a skirt instead of jeans, we were dressed about identical: me in a flannel shirt and jeans, Roy in cargo shorts, Blake all in black, Dustin a collection of noncolors and Kordell in four complimentary shades of blue from sneakers to sweater: royal, pacific, and alternating stripes of aqua and dark slate.

  After the plates were cleared away and we got through trashing and praising the current shows, Kordell asked me, “You’ve only got a few more days with us, do you feel like you’ve gotten to know everyone?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “I mean, I already know I’ll never beat you at Mystics.”

  That got a general laugh.

  “It’s too bad we don’t have an initiation,” Dustin said. He snapped his fingers. “Got it! We should all play Truth or Dare Spin the Bottle. It’s the one guaranteed way to get everyone’s secrets out. I played it in college. It’s like Truth or Dare but upgraded with an element of randomness. You spin the bottle and whoever it points at gets to pick truth or dare from you.”

  Sierra looked around the circle. When her gaze came to me, I nodded. I assumed the rules of relationships were suspended during the game. Maybe I’d get to kiss her.

  Kordell shrugged and said, “Sure.”

  Roy was nodding enthusiastically, and Blake smirked, so that was it.

  Sierra drained the last of the beer from her bottle and set it on the coffee table. Dustin and Kordell rose from their spots on the couches to sit at the short ends of the coffee table, creating an even circle of people around the bottle.