My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  “Give it time,” Isaac said. “You’ll get over it. Fish in the sea and all. You going to come out east for school?”

  I raised my head and stared out at the water. Blue and gray like Blake’s eyes. I wanted to throw myself into the waves. Drama queen much? the other part of my brain asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not staying in Duluth, I know that.”

  “No one does,” he said.

  “Do you like it out here?”

  “Yeah, I love it.”

  “You don’t talk about girlfriends,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Don’t date much. Too busy.”

  Busy or broken? Was it learned or genetic? Maybe our whole family sucked at relationships.

  “Our father…” I said and stopped. I forced myself through the question. “I don’t remember because I was a kid but, did he ever say things to you about, like, being overly emotional or trying to sabotage your life?”

  “No,” he said after a long pause. “When did Dad say that to you?”

  “Just sometimes.”

  “La, has he said that more than once?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s pretty weird,” he said.

  “I don’t like living with him,” I told Isaac. “I mean, he’s usually working or out with whoever he’s dating. And it’s nice sometimes to have the house to myself. But I kind of wish…do you think I’m old enough that Mom would let me stay with her?”

  “I don’t think she can. It’s illegal in most states to let sixteen-year-olds stay by themselves for weeks at a time,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Researched it back when Dad had that one girlfriend and barely came home, remember?”

  “Not so much. What’s illegal about it?”

  He said, “It’s neglect. But I don’t think Dad meant it that way. It was right after Mom left and I think he was, you know, working through things.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, not adding that I was still living that way.

  I felt bad that I’d brought up the whole “overly emotional” thing. If our father did say things like that to Isaac, I figured he’d know how to respond. Since he didn’t, maybe it was me. The feeling that I was wrong and monstrous crept back in to my gut.

  “You know there are rules to living with Dad,” Isaac said.

  “Yeah. Do whatever he says.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Do whatever you can to make him look good and he’ll let you do what you want.”

  That sounded horrible and phony. But I wasn’t going to say that to Isaac. And the more I thought about it, I got how practical it was. That was the reason for the garden show crap—getting photos in a magazine that he could show around to his colleagues. That’s why I had to dress up and go to the stupid parties and shake hands while saying all the right things and listening and batting my eyes.

  “I try,” I said. “It’s never quite right or it’s never enough, I’m not sure.”

  “One more year. Then you can come out here and party. You’ll like college.”

  One year. One year of shitty moments packed infinitely densely, like numbers on the number line. I laughed to myself. And I wanted to call Blake so much, but I couldn’t. All that slime from Sierra’s emails was burning through my skin from the inside. I was full of poison. I didn’t want to get that on Blake.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I flew back to the Cities. Walking from the baggage claim to the bus, I considered texting Blake just to see…but I didn’t. Even thinking about her hurt. It was all connected to Sierra and that email to Dustin, to the word “affair,” to the fear that I’d destroy whatever I touched, to the wrenching awfulness of being that person. How many people had Sierra told? How many people in this city thought of me as the horrible double-standard cheating girlfriend?

  I caught the bus to Duluth to get away and hide.

  School started and the weather was gray all the time, inside and out, in the sky and in my mind, gray and flat. I went to classes, I doodled in my notebook a sequence of evil flowers. My body moved around in space and time. I felt like an alien—a shape-shifting alien colony of nanites who’d taken on this girl’s body in a hopeless effort to blend in.

  * * *

  In the second week of school, I returned to the story. I didn’t want to. I kept telling myself it was insult to injury and all that, but I had to know what happened. Was Sierra enacting her bullshit plan to kill Cypher and Zeno?

  I scanned through the new posts for the ones from Sierra. There was a bunch of flowery crap introducing Veritie (who of course as Sierra’s new girl was a thousand times more amazing than Zeno). The story mentioned that Zeno had gone missing and they presumed she’d been blown up by Solar’s Sunslingers. There was even a scientifically awful paragraph about how by using the harnessed power of a sun, they could melt Zeno’s nanites.

  “No body, no proof,” I snarled at the screen.

  I saw with a shiver that she’d already gone after Cypher too.

  Sierra:

  Many had forgotten, but before the Queen of Rogues rose to her current station, she was the best assassin in the galaxy. Her powers allowed her to weaken others and blind their sight so she could pass unnoticed.

  Using her smallest, fastest stealth ship, she closed on the fleet of Lord Solar as it hopped from black hole to black hole on its fruitless quest for a weapon they would find too late. After she disposed of her enemies, the Queen and her allies would travel to the future to get the locus of the High God that they’d recently found and needed to possess to rule the Universe.

  The Queen tucked her ship to the belly of Lord Solar’s battlecruiser and cut through the bulkhead to slip unnoticed onto the ship. Veritie brought her the key information she needed. Veritie’s powers as an infomancer were stronger even than Cypher’s.

  Veritie had seen the docking bay on the cruiser where Cypher’s ship was. She’d given the Queen the code to the microchip Cypher carried so she could confirm that Cypher was on board the ship and staying in her smaller starship, the one she used to approach the black holes.

  The Queen waited until the security shift change and made her silent way down to the docking bay. Veritie was even able to get her the security code for Cypher’s private ship and she opened the door without trouble.

  Cypher was sleeping. The queen slipped a grounding collar around her throat so she couldn’t teleport away. Of course that woke Cypher but that was part of the plan. The Queen jerked on the collar, sending Cypher to her hands and knees next to the bed.

  “No one betrays me and lives,” the Queen said as she leveled her blaster at Cypher’s head.

  “I wasn’t going to,” Cypher said. “Please don’t kill me. I’m loyal to you. I was going to bring you the weapon, really.”

  “I don’t care,” the Queen told her. “I know you’ve been working against me and these are lies upon lies. You and Zeno were going to try to take my throne once you had the weapon, but now Zeno is destroyed and you’re next.”

  “Please, I’ll do anything!” Cypher said.

  The Queen fired her blaster once into the side of Cypher’s head and her body slumped to the floor. She walked out of the ship without looking back.

  “Cold,” I said to my laptop screen. “And bullshit.”

  I cupped my body around my anger like hands around a spark, praying for a fire to ignite. Sierra could come after me. I was the one who’d had the “affair.” I was the monster. But not Blake. No way did she deserve that.

  “There’s no fucking way I’m letting you end Cypher,” I said out loud. It felt good to hear the words.

  But I didn’t know how to fix it. She’d used a blaster so Cypher’s head was ruined. It wasn’t like I could write a scene where Zeno showed up and healed Cypher from that. She was clearly dead.

  There had to be a way.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I paced the house, trying to figure out what to do. Anger burned through the
layers of numb and shame and fear. Who could help me? I wasn’t going to email Dustin. I had no idea where he stood. Not Blake, not yet. She shouldn’t have to brainstorm her own rescue. I didn’t know Bear well enough.

  I texted Cyd: Hey, sorry if I’m bugging you, but have you kept up on what’s going on in the story?

  She responded: Hi, it’s kind of crazy down here. I haven’t.

  What’s going on? I asked.

  Sierra has Tracy over all the time and I’m so sick of both of them. I’m moving out end of Oct. How are you?

  I smiled at the words. I hadn’t thought about what Cyd would be doing the last few weeks. So cool that she wasn’t going to be Sierra’s roommate anymore.

  I’m…I typed and erased it. How was I? That should have been an easy enough question, but it wasn’t.

  I was afraid and sick inside to show her the emails from Sierra, but I had to tell someone.

  I wrote: Did you see the emails Sierra sent Dustin?

  Nooo? What?

  What’s your email? I’ll forward them.

  She gave me her address and I sent her the one from Dustin with the whole, long, evil conversation from Sierra.

  A while later my phone pinged again. Cyd wrote: I’m sorry, Lauren. I should have talked to you sooner. I thought she wasn’t going after you. That’s seriously wrong.

  It’s okay.

  She wrote: It’s not. She has no right. You deserve much better.

  I felt like I was going to cry but the pressure in my head was a relief compared to all the gray.

  I typed, Sierra’s trying to kill Cypher in the story. I have to fix it but I don’t know how.

  What does Blake think? Cyd asked.

  I haven’t talked to her, I wrote back.

  What? Since when?

  Since I broke up with Sierra, I said.

  That had been over a month ago. It was strange that so much time had passed. Trying to not feel anything made it seem like I’d slept through entire days, maybe weeks.

  Cyd wrote: LAUREN!

  Why are you yelling? I never know what’s going on with her. I don’t even know why she hooked up with me. What if she doesn’t like me like that?

  She likes you, Cyd wrote. LIKE likes you.

  How do you know? I mean about her?

  The way she talks to you, the way she LOOKS at you. The way she talks about you. And the times she doesn’t talk about you but she’s thinking about you, it’s obvious.

  What if I fuck that up like I fucked up things with Sierra? It was easier to ask by text, disconnected words out in space.

  OMG Lauren! That wasn’t YOU! Sierra is an epic *^* * *!&@%. Don’t buy into that shit from her.

  If Cyd was right about all of this, I wanted to know what Blake’s face looked like when she was thinking about me and not saying anything. Was it one of her smiles? Was it a grin?

  Blake hasn’t emailed me or texted or anything, I wrote.

  She’s dealing with things, Cyd said.

  I was an idiot. Anger could not be my favorite emotion if it made me blind to stupid-obvious things like the fact that Blake might have problems of her own to handle. She was the one at ground zero for Sierra’s bullshit. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I should have texted her or emailed or made a comment on the scene she’d posted—or something.

  Is she okay? I asked.

  She’d love to hear from you. Especially now.

  I assumed that last was a reference to Sierra trying to kill Cypher in the story. But it could be anything. How much did I know about Blake’s day-to-day? I hadn’t even asked her what she was doing the rest of the summer.

  The last time we’d talked was lying on the golf course together staring at the sky. I hadn’t even considered what she might think it meant that I hadn’t texted her. What if she thought I blew her off?

  Does she know I broke up with Sierra? I asked.

  The whole Twin Cities knows and most of the first ring of suburbs. Blake didn’t tell you about any of this?

  Blake hadn’t told me anything, only posted that scene telling Zeno to run. Maybe she said that to protect me. Not because she wanted me to go away but because she knew what was coming. And I’d kept running because of what Sierra said, because of her words: affair and immature and self-absorbed. I’d been afraid I’d mess up anything I touched.

  Had I been a bigger jerk to Blake by trying not to screw things up? If I was going to mess up no matter what I did, I wanted to be talking to Blake.

  I typed to Cyd, What happened???!!!

  There was a long pause. I walked up the stairs and into my room and stood by the dresser staring at the things Blake had given me.

  Cyd’s message came through: All that shit Sierra said in the emails to Dustin, she’s been saying to anyone who will listen. She still has friends at Blake’s school. She’s been saying that you and Blake hooked up a bunch, that you used Sierra for a place to stay and a lot of other crap about Blake lying and stuff. Do you really want to know all this?

  YES!

  Cyd went on: She’s been spreading lies that Blake can’t be trusted and will have sex with anyone. That she used you to get back at Sierra for some made-up shit.

  She outed Blake at school?

  Yep. Blake says she doesn’t care if those jackass kids call her dyke or whatever. She made a joke about it the other day: being bipolar and bisexual is being bi-squared. But she can’t stand that kids are harassing Kordell.

  How does that figure? I asked.

  They assume that if she’s gay then he is too. Like nobody can be bi or anything. Though they’d probably harass him for that too.

  What are they going to do?

  Weather it out, last I heard. Most of the school doesn’t care, only a small group. She won’t say it, but she’s scared and pretty down. Talk to her. Right now. Stop texting me and text her. And let me know how it goes.

  I stood over my desk, holding my phone, staring at the glowing screen of my laptop and Sierra’s last, ridiculous email to Dustin. She’d said those things to people at Blake’s school?

  I could picture it. Sierra had a way of talking about people. Like when she’d said Blake had bipolar disorder so casually while telling me about her. It would have been like that, at a party with her standing in the group of kids smoking or maybe sitting in a chair like a queen.

  She’d have looked around at the curious and eager faces, knowing they went to Blake’s school. She would start it as a story about something else, probably the online story. She’d quickly, off-handedly, mention that she and I split up. She’d say that we had to because of Blake. She’d say just enough to get someone to ask. And then of course she’d have to tell them more of the story.

  Cyd was right. I had to text Blake. But I couldn’t figure out what to say. I bounced around the house but there wasn’t anything else I remotely wanted to do. Finally with supreme articulacy, I texted: Hey. I just talked to Cyd. I’m sorry I haven’t texted. I wanted to talk to you. How are you?

  She wrote back minutes later, Hey monkey, how was the journey to the east?

  Seeing the words on my screen next to her name made me smile in a ridiculous Cheshire hyena way. I wrote: Beautiful, weird, the usual. Are you okay?

  Her hasty reply said: Somewhat okay, avoiding Sierra. Social scene is pretty bad. Story group imploding.

  I considered the glowing screen and the dark words. I took a deep breath, into my gut, and another. I tried to be some kind of honest with myself.

  I told her: I’m so sorry I didn’t text weeks ago. I wanted to. I misunderstood. I wouldn’t have gone away like that. I got all messed up.

  Yeah, she wrote.

  After a too-long pause of minutes, a series of messages from her rose brightly to the surface of my phone:

  I’m sorry.

  That I didn’t send more.

  Or write.

  Or call.

  I meant to.

  My brain is plastic-wrapped.

  I paced across my bedroom,
staring at my phone, hating that I was so far away from her. I said: That sounds uncomfortable.

  I’m a dusty jar, she said.

  Unbroken?

  I can’t remember if that’s good or bad, she said. I’m sorry.

  I don’t know if it’s either. Anyway, you can’t put a jar around infinity.

  She wrote: I feel lost in a fog. Like no one cares about me.

  I hit the phone icon and held my breath through one and a half rings.

  “Hey kid,” Blake said.

  Hearing her voice, I started grinning too hard to talk. Something flew open inside me, like a plant sped up in time, throwing wide all its tightly curled parts and lunging up toward the sun.

  “Blake,” I managed to say around the grin. “Hey. Cyd told me. About your school and stuff and Sierra. Can I do anything?”

  “Just talk,” she said. “Tell me what you’re looking at.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see what you’re seeing.”

  I told Blake, “I’m in my room. The walls are a pale cyan with a gray undertone, white trim. There’s a pretty unremarkable bed, my drawing table and my desk, which is this dark oak situation, kind of out of place here. There’s a photo I took at the beach of the sky and the sea. It’s pretty. I could send you a copy.”

  “I don’t want a photo. I want to hear you talk. Keep going.”

  “Oh. Um, well, there’s a strip of sand at the bottom of the photo and it’s yellow tan pale speckled with bits of brown and gray. There are a ton of shells and stones that got polished by the waves. I brought a few of them home and put them around the base of the photo so it’s three-dimensional sort of. I could bring you one. A stone from the ocean.”

  I was babbling with relief. The confusion wasn’t gone, but alongside it was the rightness of talking to Blake, hearing her voice. I didn’t understand her, but I didn’t have to. Inside I was easing out from under the weight of all the numbness I’d been holding onto.

  “I’ll trade you for a lake stone,” she said.

  “What color do you want?”

  “Your choice. Bring me one that you like. Pocket-sized, though.”

  I told her, “The sky in the photo is super blue and the ocean is too. I love looking at the ocean. Part of the time I was out east it got stormy and rained. I took photos of that too. It’s beautiful like that. It makes the ocean look serious.”