My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  Which she would never do, I thought. No way was I leaving Blake’s character to team up with Roy. I said, “That could still be a trick. She has to lie to Zeno. There might be recording devices in the room so she has to convince Zeno that she’s becoming a traitor for real, even if that’s not her end plan.”

  “That’s brutal,” Roy said. “I like it.”

  Sierra shifted on the couch next to me and made a half-puff of air sigh, quiet enough that I was the only one to hear it.

  “The Queen won’t like being betrayed by Cypher. Even if it comes out later that she was lying,” Sierra said.

  “Good drama all around,” Dustin declared. “Lauren, can you start writing that this week?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If Blake’s okay with it.”

  Sierra’s tone was cool as she said, “She will be. She doesn’t care about the story that much. She’ll go along with it.”

  When she got up to refill her drink, I followed Sierra into the kitchen.

  “Are you mad at Blake?” I asked.

  “She’s not talking to me,” Sierra said. “It’s not me. Maybe she’s depressed or whatever. She’s supposed to be my best friend but we were at the same party weekend before last and every time I walked into a room she was leaving. She didn’t even say hi. And she was all bitchy to me when you guys were playing cards. I don’t know what her deal is.”

  “Maybe she does care about the story. Maybe she doesn’t like Cypher being kidnapped.”

  Sierra shook her head. “Who knows? Dustin seemed to like your ideas a lot.”

  She seemed sad and I wanted to make her smile, so I said, “Well I didn’t tell him the other ideas I have, about the Queen and Zeno.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah, but I think I’m going to need to do some research. I’ll need you to help me out.”

  That went over very well, but it left me wondering why it was so easy to talk about the story and about sex, but not about how I felt.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The beach near Bear’s parents’ house was open until ten p.m. Sunset was at nine, so everyone planned for a sunset swim and hanging out in the backyard. When we got there, Bear showed us around the house: the upstairs was off limits except for the bathroom. The basement held a pool table, two guest rooms, and a shower we could use after swimming because lakes are gross.

  A ton of food was set out along the kitchen counters next to a big, beautifully written sign that said, “No booze or pot in the house!” There were a bunch of people crammed into the kitchen eating and more in the backyard.

  “Did you make all this?” I asked Bear.

  “No, my mom did when she asked me to house-sit.” At my questioning look she added, “And some of it was leftovers. They have parties here every other weekend practically. She figures my friends are safer over here than anyplace else. My uncle lives down the street.”

  That almost made sense. We got plates of food. Sierra saw people she knew from the university in the yard so she went to talk to them and I wandered back through the house.

  I wasn’t inclined to go around sticking my nose into groups of strangers. I got out my iPod and sketchbook and curled into an armchair in the corner of the dining room. It was a long formal dining room and no one attending the party spent time in there, so I got to draw and listen to music alone for a while.

  A shadow fell over me and I glanced up. Blake was in black jeans and a black T-shirt. The shirt had a triangle on it with a moose walking up the long side. Written on the animal’s body was the word “hypotemoose.”

  “What’s the regular word for that?” I asked, pointing at her shirt.

  “Hypotenuse.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said, but I thought it was wonderful. Who else showed up to a party wearing a math pun and making it look cool?

  The shirt hung loosely past her waist and I wanted to slide my hand up under it, put my palm on the warm skin of her stomach or the rise of her hip. I mentally kicked myself.

  “Thanks,” Blake said with her midrange grin, her everything’s-good grin. Not her making-trouble grin or her wild-flight-of-thought grin.

  “What are you listening to?” she asked.

  I pulled out an earbud and offered it to her. She dragged a chair over from the dining room table and sat close enough to slip the round plastic into her ear. She listened for a while, face lit with a thoughtful enthusiasm.

  She had at least a dozen kinds of grins and more than that in smiles. I wanted to draw all of them. I wanted to draw this expression right now, eyes half-lidded and unfocused, her mouth barely open, upturned more on the left than the right. The squareness of her cheeks and the heavy, broad base of her nose.

  “I didn’t expect that,” she said as she handed the earbud back to me.

  “What did you think I listen to? Classical?”

  “Hey, I listen to classical. It’s elegant. I don’t know. Alternative, sure, but not that hard…or loud. Who is that?”

  “Halestorm,” I told her.

  “I did not picture you listening to metal. I like it. I mean, that you listen to it. I don’t know that I could all the time.”

  “I don’t all the time either,” I admitted. “Mainly when stuff’s going on and I’m trying to concentrate.”

  She peered around the empty room in the midst of the party, like the eye of a hurricane, and laughed.

  I said, “Sierra thinks you’re mad at her.”

  “I’m not in the mood for her,” Blake replied. “You going swimming?”

  The loose edge of her shirt. The memory of my fingers on her hips the night we kissed. My heart lurched and sputtered into a flurry of beating. It said: swimming with you? Heck yes.

  I told my heart to cut it the fuck out.

  I said, “In a bit. I’m working on an illustration of Zeno trying to rescue Cypher.”

  That got a broad, open grin. I wasn’t sure what to call that grin, maybe enthusiasm-for-your-art? She said, “Sweet. Can I sit here while you draw or does that bug you?”

  “You can sit here,” I said, pleased that she’d asked first. “You want to keep sharing the iPod or is it too metal?”

  She held out her hand and I put the earbud back in it, fingers brushing palm. She moved her chair closer.

  “Is Kordell not here?” I asked.

  “No, he had to go do another family thing. They left this morning.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Of course,” she said. She settled next to me and put the earbud in her delicate ear. “Bring on the metal.”

  Sierra came in while we were listening together and I was drawing. She looked at me strangely. I couldn’t understand her face. It wasn’t anger, it was cold.

  After Blake hopped up and gave her a hug, she softened.

  “Are we swimming?” she asked.

  “Yeah, let me get into my suit,” I said. “How far’s this beach?”

  “Half a block.”

  Running down the street in my suit with a towel wrapped around me was weird, but there were about ten other people with us and more already at the beach. The setting sun smeared the horizon with melting orange popsicle. It was a close, warm night, perfect since in June lakes can be chilly. I swam around (by which I mean dog-paddled lamely). Sierra pulled me into an alcove made by a tree hanging over the water and we made out, chest deep in the lake, hands roaming over each other.

  She seemed not as much there as usual, not as responsive to me, but maybe that was the effect of the cool water. Or maybe it was me. I didn’t feel right. Mostly numb and not from the chill lake.

  Was it numb? Or tired? Or some kind of angry? I didn’t like how she’d been about the character of Cypher. I didn’t like how she reacted to Dustin showing up with Gabby. I didn’t like how she’d pushed Blake and Kordell out the other day when we were playing cards. The way she’d called Blake “bitchy.” The most Blake ever said against Sierra was that she wasn’t in the mood for her.

  But I liked ho
w Sierra’s body felt under my hands. I liked how my body reacted to hers, at least on the surface, but under my skin ran waves of heat cut through with queasiness. Numb was easier, especially with her tongue in my mouth and her breast filling my hand.

  We fumbled around for a while and she said, “Let’s go to the bonfire. I’m getting cold.”

  “Me too,” I agreed.

  We hurried to the house and slipped through the open gate to the backyard where a fire burned in the ornate fire pit. Bear came through telling people to keep the volume down. There were about a dozen people in the backyard, most of them stoners. They cut the volume by half after her warning.

  “Do you care if I go smoke with them?” Sierra asked.

  “No, go for it.”

  She went over to the far corner of the yard and I sat watching the fire burn down. I didn’t know how to bridge the distance between us. I wanted to go over with the utterly cool right words and get her to come away with me, maybe go home and get into bed. But I also didn’t.

  Maybe I didn’t want to work that hard. A month ago, two months ago, I’d been wild for her, wanted to drive to the Cities and spend every waking moment with her. Now all we did was have sex and eat dinners out and sit around her house talking about sex and eating.

  Maybe I was a lot worse at relationships than I’d ever expected.

  Blake came back from the lake while I was staring at the embers of the fire and trying to figure out what to do. She’d wrapped a huge beach towel around her shoulders like a cloak, and in the darkness the color of it had turned from dark blue to nearly black. I almost laughed—of course Blake would find a way to make even her swim towel black.

  “I’ve got smoke in my hair,” she said, gazing into the glowing coals. “I’m going to shower.”

  She went toward the house but stopped, turned around and looked at me.

  I said, “Yeah, good idea, me too.”

  I followed her inside.

  The basement had this big rec room space and two little guest rooms. Blake was spending the night in one of those rooms. Too bad she had a guest room to herself and no Kordell to share it with.

  “There’s a shower in the basement,” she said.

  “Are you saying I should…” I trailed off.

  I remembered her leaning forward from the couch at Sierra’s during my first visit, when I’d said the thing about black holes. She’d said, “I kind of love you right now.” I felt like that too. All random and happy around her, but I thought that was more like a sister thing. Not that I’d know.

  And I loved Sierra, right? When I was in town, we had sex almost every night and she cuddled me and she was always emailing and calling me “baby” and stuff. I wanted to spend the whole summer with her. Or at least I had until I actually got to the Cities this time.

  Halfway down the stairs, Blake turned to look at me again. Like she was checking to make sure I was coming with her.

  “I’ve got to get my clothes,” I told her. I’d left them behind the chair in the dining room after I put my swimsuit on, so I gathered them up and went down the stairs.

  The main room in the basement was dim, two people making out in one corner on the far side of a Ping-Pong table. Everyone else was in the yard or in the big, bright living room on the first floor. I went down the short hall to the open door with light spilling out. The larger of the two guest rooms had an attached bathroom, big enough for a shower, toilet and sink. I dropped my clothes on the foot of the bed.

  Blake stood in the open sliding door to the shower, her hand under the spray. She got in with her swimsuit on. Her suit was a light tangerine with teal piping that made her skin warm and luminous.

  She’d left the shower door open, like an invitation, so I got in. We washed our hair and chatted about school like we weren’t standing in a shower together.

  “I’m thinking about taking a math class at the university next year,” she was saying while she rubbed shampoo into her hair. “I can take calculus II at my high school, or there’s Intro to Advanced Mathematics at the U. I’d have to bus over there a bunch, but it sounds really cool.”

  She switched places with me so I could dip my hair under the water.

  “I thought all math was advanced,” I said, trying to sound casual and, if possible, nonstupid.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we were a foot apart and it’s not like bathing suits are the most covering garments. Blake favored loose tops or layers. In her swimsuit, she was stocky and slender, with smaller breasts than mine. Because she was shorter than me, I couldn’t help but be staring down into her cleavage.

  She went on talking blithely. “It’s got probability theory, which would be amazing. Matrices, multivariable differentiation and integration. But I could take honors calculus II.”

  “It’s like you stopped speaking English,” I told her.

  “Hey, do you know why they don’t serve beer at math parties?” she asked, voice light.

  “Why?”

  “So people won’t drink and derive.”

  I laughed, even though I didn’t know why that was funny. Her laughter made me want to join in.

  I ran the soap over my arms and glared at my bathing suit. My skin was wrinkling under the wet fabric. A lake plant had wedged itself into my suit and was sliming my back. It wasn’t like anything was going to happen between me and Blake.

  “This is stupid,” I said. I set the soap on its ledge and pulled the straps down on my suit. “I have lake grossness on me. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s cool,” she replied. She turned half away and took her suit off too.

  I squeezed the water out of mine and threw it over the top of the shower door and she did the same. For a moment I managed not to look. But my gaze wouldn’t stop wandering over to her body.

  She had that same beautiful olive color all over and it gave her skin a smooth and flawless quality. Her breasts hung lower than mine, making her seem more than a few days older than me, and I thought about resting the weight of them in my hands. I couldn’t help it. Her nipples were dark brown and there was the softness of her belly and below that I saw, with a shock, that she was shaved.

  Was that from having sex with guys? Did Kordell like that? Or did she like it herself? Did I like it?

  I turned away, picked up the soap again. We rinsed off, carefully not touching. Switching places was even trickier with nothing covering our breasts as we moved by each other. I felt like the steam from the shower was collecting in my lungs, heavy and dense, making it hard to breathe.

  She got out first and went into the guest room, giving me enough space in the bathroom to towel off. I wrapped the towel around my body and stepped into the room.

  Blake was sitting in a chair by the mirrored dresser, brushing out her hair, still naked.

  I had not a single clue about what we were doing here. Was she mostly straight and this was one of those surreal moments when a straightish girl doesn’t realize you don’t sit around naked with your lesbian friends? Or was she very bi, like she said, completely and totally bi and interested in me?

  Did it matter? I was with Sierra.

  I figured the safe bet was to do what Blake was doing. Pulling off my towel, I rubbed it across my arms and legs, then draped it over the foot of the bed. My clothes were there, folded in a neat pile, but Blake wasn’t getting dressed. She’d started rubbing lotion on her arms and held the bottle out to me.

  I took it and sat on the edge of the bed a few feet from her. She was talking about her math class and I listened enough to say “uh-huh” in the right places. I kept lotioning my legs and trying not to look at her too much while so much wanting to look at her.

  She had her legs crossed but her arms open, like she wasn’t trying to hide how naked she was. One hand rested on her thigh, fingers spread. I remembered those fingers on the back of my neck when we kissed, surprisingly strong. Her body was compact, hips broader than you’d notice in her everyday clothes, but broad shoulders too, sle
nder but not skinny.

  What do you say to a girl who’s sitting naked in a chair talking about mathematics like this is all completely reasonable? Searching for something safe to comment about, I looked around. A massive daddy long legs spider was crawling up the edge of the mirror behind her.

  I yelped (okay, screamed) and scrambled backward. Slipping off the foot of the bed, I fell onto the floor and kept moving back until I hit the wall.

  The side of my arm pressed hard against the foot of the bed. The bed was level with my shoulder, so I could see Blake staring at me while the horrible creature blithely crawled along a few feet from her.

  “Spider!” I managed to say. “On the mirror.”

  Blake’s wide-eyed expression of alarm transformed into a grin. (I guess the naked-girl-freaked-out-by-spider-is-cracking-me-up grin.) She examined the edge of the mirror until she saw the spider making his creepy way up the wooden border.

  “Hey, little guy,” she said. “Let’s get you out of here before Lauren has a heart attack.”

  She put one hand in front of the creature and tapped him. He scooted into her palm and she closed her fingers around him. Or her. Could’ve been a girl spider. Blake wasn’t screaming in pain from being bitten, so maybe it was a girl spider and they had some sisterhood thing going.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed back into my safe corner bordered by wall and bed. I heard Blake get up and the creak of a window opening. Another creak and click as it closed, followed by the sound of her crossing the room. Water burbled from the bathroom as she washed her hands.

  I needed to get up and put clothes on. Being naked and freaking out was so much worse than freaking out while dressed. If it hadn’t been disgusting, Blake picking up the spider would have been amazingly cool. But right now I wanted clothes and to get out of this room and away from this spidery house. I needed to draw and think and listen to metal and figure all this out.

  When I opened my eyes, Blake was standing in the bathroom doorway staring down at me. Still naked.

  Still.