My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I wanted to go to dim sum, but Sierra wanted eggs benedict so we went to Wilde Roast down by the river. Afterward we strolled along the bank, watching all the dogs out walking their people. In the middle of the path, Sierra caught my hand, pulled me close and kissed me. I felt too conscious of the people and dogs looking at us, but also relieved. We were making up, it was going to be okay.

  “Bookstore?” I asked when I figured it’d been long enough for a make-up kiss.

  “Of course!” she said.

  We drove over to the Book House and I picked out a couple of manga for her to read next. She wanted the next novel in her epic fantasy series so I got that for her too. We sat in a nearby coffee shop and read while sipping fancy coffee drinks.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I’d turned off the sound in the restaurant. There was one text from my father, asking what time I planned to be home that evening, and a few from Blake.

  I held my breath and texted back that I wanted to stay another day, leave Monday morning. Then I peeked at the first text from Blake.

  She wrote: I decided on Calculus II.

  I bit down on my tongue and held my breath to freeze the laugh rising in my chest. It was so Blake to send me a text about calculus after everything. Was she making fun of herself? (Had to be.) My hands tingled with the memory of her.

  I put the phone away so I wouldn’t read the next text from her.

  “Everything okay?” Sierra asked.

  “I texted my father that I want to go back tomorrow,” I said. “Is that cool to stay another day?”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s out of town next weekend for a client thing, do you want to come up?”

  “I’d love to but I can’t,” she said with a long, dramatic sigh. “We’re doing inventory at work, I have to be there all weekend.”

  A flash of relief went through me. I shook my head and muscled myself over into disappointment.

  “That sucks,” I said. “I’m going to be all alone.”

  “Maybe Blake wants to visit.”

  “That’s not cool,” I told her.

  “I’m sorry, I guess I’m still hurt about it. I’ll be okay. Why don’t we go home.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We went back to her place and she pulled me into the bedroom. When she kissed me, I kissed back, but I didn’t feel like having sex. She seemed into it, though, and it would help the whole repairing-the-relationship phase. I got out of my clothes and slipped into bed with her.

  She ran her hands all over me, like she was claiming me. It was okay, ticklish in parts, and I squirmed in a way that I tried to make look sexy. After a few minutes, I pushed her down and started kissing her harder to take the focus off me. It worked. She lay back and let me play around with her until she came.

  I gestured for her to roll on her side and spooned up behind her. I didn’t want her to see my face. I was afraid the flat feeling inside me would show.

  She snuggled back into me and pulled my arm around her tighter. I needed a subject to think about that wasn’t her or Blake or me, so I thought about ways to draw Zeno that would make it clear she was nanites and not a person at all.

  * * *

  My father responded with a single word: Fine. I stayed over Sunday night. In the morning, Sierra went to work and I packed up my stuff. I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go. I wanted to leave this house, but I didn’t want to go home.

  I read the other texts from Blake.

  On Sunday in the early afternoon, she’d written: I got a thank-you card from the spider’s family. How are you?

  I grinned at my phone and read her text from a few hours later: Some of these Halestorm songs aren’t bad. Maybe I like metal more than I thought.

  An hour after that: Do you know why we’ll never run out of mathematicians? They multiply.

  Late last night: Working on the story, are you around?

  This morning: Luv ya, kid. Stay safe.

  My chest went tight and painful. I tried to breathe deeply but only managed a stuttering series of short breaths. Pain? Guilt? I couldn’t tell. How could there be so many ways to feel bad?

  No wonder I’d learned to stop breathing. Who needed all this shit? Emotions made you do dumb things and then feel awful about it.

  But whatever I felt, Blake shouldn’t have to worry about me.

  I texted back: I’m okay. Sierra and I are working on things. Thanks for checking on me. How are you?

  Her reply came a minute later: I’m good. You told her? How was she?

  Angry, hurt. She thinks you did it on purpose.

  What? I had sex with you because of her?

  Did you? I asked.

  No!!!

  She didn’t send another text and I couldn’t come up with what I wanted to say. The more time that went by, the more I couldn’t find the words.

  I dug the bucket of cleaning stuff out from under the sink. It didn’t have a lot of options for cleansers and there was no mop, but with the sponges I did my best cleaning the kitchen and bathroom. I vacuumed and straightened up the living room and dusted with one of my T-shirts.

  Then I had to get on the road, so I left Sierra a sweet note with a doodled mini Queen of Rogues on it and left.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Arriving home, I tossed my suitcase in my room, stripped and got in the shower. I put my fingers against the cold tile. Inside me was all pain: nauseous, guilty pain about Sierra; edged ice-pain that I was so far away; burning shame and desire.

  I remembered Blake in the shower with me. Closing my eyes, I tried to push the image away but that made it worse. I wanted to touch her again. I wanted her limber, deft mouth on mine and her tongue—I’d thought French kissing was kind of gross until she kissed me.

  I should have thought through this emotions business before I went around having relationships. Tears gridlocked my throat and I tried to cry but ended up coughing in the steam.

  When I was out and dressed, my father showed up from work. I went downstairs and watched 12 Angry Men with him so he’d feel like we were doing the right family stuff. In the middle, he paused it and asked how my visit was. I went on about seeing Macalester and St. Kate’s with Cyd. He made happy my-loser-daughter-visited-colleges sounds.

  Then he went into how we (meaning me) only had a month to get the garden in perfect shape for the Garden Tour. There would be journalists and maybe a photo in a magazine, so everything had to be right. He also reminded me that not long after the tour, I was due to fly out east to spend two weeks with Mom and Isaac.

  When we planned that trip, I didn’t know how I’d survive being so far away from Sierra for that long. Now it would be a relief to get farther away. I told him I was looking forward to it, forgetting that this would set him off on a rant about everything she’d done to us when she left her own family, her own children…and so on.

  I got away by suggesting I warm up dinner. One thing in favor of my father is that he could dig into a prepared dinner with the same gusto as a five-star restaurant entree. For all that he went nuts about the garden, he didn’t give a crap about whether or not I could cook.

  I could make basic stuff, but it was never better than what the Stouffers folks turned out. We ate on the couch in front of the movie. He gave his full attention to the meal and downed it in five minutes.

  “Want another one?” I asked. “There’s a ‘lite’ one, it goes very well with the steak dinners.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I brought him the next dinner. I wanted to ask him about dating, about how many girlfriends he had before Mom. Then I realized that he’d had many more after Mom and I didn’t want to hear about any of those.

  He was kind of a player.

  Gross. Was I?

  More gross.

  I got us slices of frozen chocolate cream pie and let the movie roll on.

  * * *

  Mornings I started the garden stuff early to get it
out of the way. Stoner Guy would roll in around eleven a.m. as I was finishing up and I’d tell him what I needed done and get myself lunch. After that, I’d check to see how badly he was fucking things up and send him off to the store. That usually took him about three hours.

  Since I was already disgusting, I’d go work out, wait for him, realize he wasn’t going to be back for another hour, give in and take a shower, and end up standing out in the yard again later trying not to get dirty.

  My father would get home eventually and walk through the garden pointing out a million screwed-up things I’d failed to notice.

  I’d be thinking: I don’t even like plants!

  But if I tried suggesting he hire an expert, I’d get a lecture about responsibility and blah blah bullshit. Things were kind of okay between us right now. I didn’t want to screw with that.

  I fell behind on my communications with Sierra. Her messages grew further apart too.

  Lauren: How’s work? The roses have scratched my arms up and I’m allergic to everything out here. My eyes are going to run right off my face one of these days. Am I missing any good parties?

  Sierra: I miss you!!! I didn’t go to the parties, no fun without you. Work sucks as usual. At least you get to be outside a bunch—I bet you have a killer tan. Can’t wait to see it. Send me a pic.

  Lauren (after giving up and sending her a pic of me in front of the awful rosebushes—after my shower that day, of course): Stoner Guy is useless. He got loads of mulch and put it all in the wrong places so we’ve been carting mulch for the last two days. It makes my face itch. Not just on the outside but on the inside too. I itch inside my eyeballs.

  Sierra: Get Stoner Guy to share with you. If there’s extra, bring it down next time you visit. When are you coming down again? That pic is beautiful! You should take one of you in that blue-green dress, it would look amazing with your tan.

  Lauren: Stoner Guy carried a dripping hose of weed killer the full length of the lawn and back again so there’s a crisscross series of dead grass patterns like alien crop circles. I expected a dedicated stoner like him to know how not to kill grass.

  Asked my father if I could come down for a week before my trip to see Mom. He says I’m spending too much time running around wild with you all.

  She replied: Hah! I bet your dad would freak out if he knew we were having sex. Maybe I should come up there sometime and make out with you on that big couch just to freak him out. I miss you!!!

  That was never going to happen. I’d told her over and over that it wasn’t okay with my father for people to be emotional in any way. Making out on the couch “to freak him out” was so far over that line, I didn’t know how she’d even gotten there.

  I went for distraction and wrote back: I like your couch a lot better.

  Then I put my phone away. I was tired all the time. Allergies probably. Every day for the last two weeks my head and sinuses ached like I had a cold. I wasn’t drawing.

  * * *

  Two weeks into the month of pre-Garden Show torture, I found a thick envelope on the edge of the countertop in my bathroom. I hadn’t gotten the mail today, so my father must have brought it up for me. It was weird enough that he hadn’t left it on the kitchen counter, but on top of that, it was from Blake.

  I slid my finger under the edge of the flap and opened it gently. There was no letter, only a small book: Springs of Persian Wisdom. So quirky and perplexing. What was it supposed to mean if you had sex with someone and followed it up by sending them a book about wisdom?

  Inside the front cover, she’d written in her skinny, elongated printing: “For Lauren, I think of you every day. Love, Blake.”

  She’d written, “love,” but as the signature line, so what kind of love was that? Was it casual, like on cards from distant relatives? Or was it what you meant when you told someone, “I love you?”

  What kind of love was that anyway? I’d said it to Sierra so many times and now everything with her had this glossy, plastic feel to it.

  What was Blake thinking when she thought of me every day? “Oh that Lauren, she’s all right,” or “God, I want to jump Lauren again,” or “Lauren’s story ideas aren’t half bad,” or “I can’t stop thinking about you. I need you. As crazy as you are, my life makes so much more sense with you in it?”

  Probably not that last part. That was me. Though she should have been thinking it. At least the crazy part. Super assholey of me to have thought of her as crazy when I was way more so.

  I turned to the first page of the book:

  “Such are the ways of fate in this harsh world: Today you are lifted gently into the saddle, and tomorrow the saddle is placed on your shoulders.—Firdausi.”

  What

  The hell

  Did that mean?

  Irrelevant? Not the reason she sent the book?

  Next page: “If a word burns on your tongue, let it burn.”

  No help.

  But then: “Through Love all things become lighter which understanding thought too heavy.”

  I turned to another page.

  “It was a night like no other…You came, oh my beloved! You made the night into blessed day…”

  Blushing hard, I closed the little book. I held it against my chest and remembered how her body felt on mine.

  I wanted to hold her (and kiss her!). Do everything again and more. I wanted to slide my fingers inside her and see what that did to her eyes and her brightly dark face. I wanted her to keep looking at me, the way she had when she was between my legs, all keen attention and wonder.

  Could I trust this desire? And if I acted on it, what would I have to deal with from Sierra?

  Everything jumbled together in my head like broken glass. I wanted to sweep it away, not have to pick through the fragments with bleeding fingers to find out what was real.

  If I could figure it out, would it matter? I lived hours away. If I wanted to see Blake, I couldn’t stay at Sierra’s place. Was I going to drive down and stay at a hotel in hopes that Blake meant “love” in somewhat of the same universe as the one I understood? If it turned out that I understood love at all.

  I put the book on the dresser in my bedroom. There was space for it next to the pen and the infinity pin. I touched the pen.

  Blake had given it to me at the end of my first visit there. She’d handed it to me casually, saying she’d won it in a math competition but her penmanship was awful and it should go to a good home. It was beyond nice: a Retro 51 Tornado rollerball with a black barrel covered in tiny white math equations. (Blake had said they were Einstein’s.) Heavy with great ink flow, it was solid in my hand and moved easily across a page.

  The infinity pin she’d sent me for Zeno. She said she’d get herself a zero symbol and we could hang out together being incomprehensibly cool. (Literally, because nobody would get the symbolism but us.)

  On the other side of my dresser was a dried rose that Sierra picked up for me at a gas station on her way here that time she visited. And that was it: the one flower, long dead.

  But I loved her.

  Because?

  Because I had sex with her?

  That could not be it.

  I wasn’t that shallow. I had sex with Blake and that didn’t make me love her.

  I remembered Blake looking up at me. The image was frozen in time because I’d felt so exposed and self-conscious. Her eyes, the darkly burning kingfisher’s wings, studied my face with complete attention.

  Sierra never looked at me like that. Mostly during sex she never looked at me. She didn’t send gifts. She wasn’t curious about me. She would walk off in the middle of conversations that weren’t about her.

  Blake was the one I wanted to talk to. She was the one who offered help, who understood me, who listened.

  I closed my hand around the dried bloom of the rose and ground it to powder. Brown ash filtered down to the burnished mahogany of my dresser top. I carried over the trash can from my desk and swept it away.

  * * *<
br />
  For two days I did routine stuff. I worked out, wandered through the garden, watched movies, drew a little, cleaned. Randomly, I’d find myself standing at the dresser holding the book of Persian wisdom and staring at it as if it was going to get less cryptic over time.

  “But while the eternal one created me, he word by word spelt out my lesson, love, and seized my heart and from a fragment cut keys to the storehouse of reality.—Omar Kayyam.”

  There were keys? Where?

  I gave up.

  I had no clue what Blake meant me to get from this book.

  I went to my computer to see if she was online and ask. She wasn’t. For all I knew, at that very moment she could have been having sex with Kordell.

  If I couldn’t ask Blake what the book meant, maybe I could write a scene about Zeno and Cypher that would convey my confusion. Maybe she’d understand and answer.

  Cypher was with Lord Solar’s people, doing the black hole thing, so I had to write it as a flashback…

  Zeno sat alone in her little spaceship that was set to autopilot alongside the Queen of Rogues’ fleet. She had the first half of the Sigil of True Form. She needed the second half in order to know all of her true self, to steal back the parts of her identity she’d lost.

  She also had a gem Cypher had given her that she said would lead Zeno to finding the second half of the Sigil. But Zeno had no idea how to understand the secrets held in the gem’s fiery heart. She turned it in the light and watched it shimmer and burn inside. Nanites too small to be visible, but felt as part of herself, lifted off from the top layer of her fingers and buzzed around the gem. Its crystalline structure was too dense and they couldn’t get into it to find out more.

  Zeno remembered the last time she’d sent out part of herself to explore. It was when she had copied Cypher into her library of forms. Zeno and Cypher had been sitting on the high crates again, up near the ceiling of the largest loading dock. She went up there to think sometimes. She could turn into a cloud and fly up where the dockworkers couldn’t see.

  Cypher had seen her flying up one day and teleported to join her. They were the only two on the Queen’s battlecruiser who could get up there, so it became their spot to talk about anything and everything.