Light Years Read online

  “Thank you, Dad,” Ben says.

  “Love you both.” My dad smiles at us. Wind rushing through trees. A deep breath.

  We say our good-byes and Ben and I get in a cab. We’re going to an old warehouse in Queens. The one the seniors rent every year for graduation night. The television in the backseat is blaring news about forty-one people dying of some kind of mystery flu.

  I mute the volume as a text comes through: my dad. It’s the photo of the four of us. We look happy. I wish I could climb inside the picture and stay there forever. I glance back through the rear window, catching one last glimpse of my parents together on the street before they disappear.

  “Dad’s such a softy,” Ben says, looking at the photo on his phone.

  “Yeah.” I flash to the time I found him passed out on the kitchen floor at six in the morning. I knelt down and put my hands on his chest. I wanted to check that he was breathing. He snapped awake and yelled, “Get the fuck away from me.” So, there’s also that.

  “And Mom,” he continues. “I literally haven’t heard from her in like three weeks and she shows up and is all crying and ‘Let’s go out to dinner’?”

  “Yeah,” I mumble, but I’m focused on the TV. Camera flashes fire in the background as a basketball player’s massive body glides through the air in slow motion like gravity doesn’t exist. My heart flies into my throat as I watch the ball leave his hands, then slip gently through the hoop. Two points. Deep satisfaction in that moment, even though I couldn’t care less about the sport itself.

  This is what my mother studies. How the chemistry of our brains makes watching other people do something as exciting as if we were doing it ourselves. It’s why we like sports and movies and social media. It’s why we are interested in other people at all. It baffles me that she studies the part of us that cares about others when she barely seems to care about anyone besides herself, but hey.

  “Hello?” Ben snaps. I look at him. “Have you talked to her lately?”

  “I got a text from her three days ago asking for Bell’s address. Otherwise, no. And she was twenty minutes late, by the way.”

  “Of course she was. She’s worse than Dad ever was and at least he had an excuse.”

  “She also told me if I get the Fellowship, she won’t let me accept it.”

  “Um, sorry. What?”

  “Yeah.” I press my hand against the window. The cool glass, an antidote to the anger bubbling purple in my field of view. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to get it. Bell told me my work was a waste of energy.”

  “Is that a quote or are you doing that thing where you act like someone hates you but actually they think you’re amazing?”

  “Direct quote.” I press the glass harder. “And I don’t do that.”

  Ben looks at me in a way only my older brother can. “Yes you do. But anyway, listen. Fuck that guy. Fuck him. You don’t need that guy.” The question of Bell’s value is now settled in Ben’s mind. He goes back to his phone.

  Yeah. Fuck Bell, I think to myself. But I don’t mean it.

  We pull up to the party and get out of the cab. Missy Allegheny is puking behind a Dumpster. She is one of the most popular girls in my class, but this is not the first time I’ve seen her slumped over in some corner trying not to get vomit in her hair.

  “Are you okay?” I offer. She nods and then doubles over. She gives me a thumbs-up as she wretches onto the concrete.

  Inside, it’s dark and loud. Music, warm bodies, the smell of liquor, weed, and beer. If it weren’t for the chance to see Kamal, I would never have come.

  “I’m gonna go find Des and George. You cool?” Ben asks. I nod and he disappears toward the bar. I weave through the dimly lit crowds. I pass Clara Adams and Cicely Dormer, wasted and dancing their faces off. I pass Matt Kenner and Dan Fryman ripping bong hits. Nathalie Spencer, Dave Rothman, and Zoe Kalember are in a corner decked out in VR goggles and gloves.

  These people are not my friends. Ben likes their world even though he isn’t from it. He’s popular because he doesn’t care what they think. But I do. Dr. Steph says I should try getting to know them, and let them get to know me. She doesn’t see that they only like people like them. Rich, normal. They do not like weird. And a girl on a scholarship who can taste colors and hear smells would definitely be considered weird. Mostly, I just keep to myself.

  I turn back the way I came and stop at the dance floor. I scan the crowd of bodies frozen midmotion in the pulsing light. I’m looking for the particular shape of Kamal’s shoulders that is permanently lodged in my brain. And then, like an anchor to the ocean floor, my focus falls on her—straight red hair, a poppy-colored pout, and smoky eyes. She’s walking right toward me like she owns everything on earth.

  Who is she? Why can’t I stop looking at her?

  Then, as her path veers, I see him. Kamal. Right behind her, his hand on her back. He guides her forward and they melt into slow motion. My mouth is suddenly dry with the taste of salt as a hot flash of realization travels up from my stomach and out the sides of my face. They are together. This stunning girl is Kamal’s girlfriend and I want to die.

  I turn away before he can see me. I practically run to the bar, where I find Ben. Breath is barely escaping my lungs. Waves of purple light mix with brown. I get the attention of the freshman behind the bar and order a vodka and orange juice. I drink it down in about seven seconds. I feel better. I order a second.

  “What’s wrong?” Ben asks. I just shake my head as the drink arrives. I lean against the bar and wrap my hands around the icy cup. The cold helps a little. Then I feel that tingle run up my legs. I practically gag on a torrent of pine. I don’t have to move to know he’s standing right behind me.

  “Hey stranger.” His voice and all its proper Englishness. I clutch the cup tighter. I take a sip and turn around. “Lu,” he says. I stare at him, wordless. Thoughtless. Blank.

  The girl extends her hand.

  “Hey, I’m Phoebe,” she says. She is like the teacake that makes Alice shrink to the floor. I let go of my drink just long enough to shake.

  “Phoebe just graduated,” Kamal says.

  “High school?” I blurt out.

  “Harvard.” Her white teeth twinkle like Christmas tinsel. I shrink another two inches at least.

  “So the world is pretty much your oyster,” remarks Ben. He’s using the deep voice he reserves for beautiful girls and their parents.

  “The world is everyone’s oyster, if they step up to crack it open,” she replies, hopping to the bar. The taste of salt again, so strong my mouth feels like it’s withering into dust.

  “Phoebe’s working for Front Line,” Kamal adds.

  “Oh. So you’re a hippie, or a communist? Excellent,” Ben says playfully.

  Phoebe laughs. “I guess we are like hippies. If hippies were, like, the most tech-savvy, organized, and democratic power structure in the world, doing shit that the so-called government never could with all its bullshit bureaucracy and antiquated aversion to anything grassroots and actually effective.”

  Ben smiles. She’s right. Five years after Blackout, Front Line is practically like a second government. Plus they have their own news network and all those Peacekeepers.

  She orders a vodka soda with a lime and her arm grazes mine. I grab a piece of ice from my cup and squeeze it. Cold water drips down my hand as her lips surround her straw with a heart-shaped pucker.

  I want to kill her and be her all at once.

  She turns to Kamal and puts her hands on his chest. “Let’s dance!” she exclaims and sails off. I shake the water from my hand and attempt to slink away unnoticed.

  “Hey,” Kamal calls. I stop and turn back. I feel so invisible I wonder if he can actually see through me. He walks up and pulls me toward him. His leather jacket dulls it, but his scent wraps itself around me like a cloak. My legs buzz.

  “Hey,” he whispers. He tucks my hair behind my ear and lets his face linger close, the theory of rel
ativity proving itself true in this moment that seems to last a thousand years.

  “Welcome home,” I manage to say.

  “Thanks.” He steps back. “I’ll see you around.” He turns and walks off toward Phoebe. A second later, he turns back: “I like the hair!”

  I gulp the rest of my drink and text Janine: U here? Need u. She writes back instantly: Upstairs, couches.

  Janine is basically my only real friend and the only one at school besides Ben who knows about my condition. She comes from money, but you’d never know it. She makes beautiful photographs of what’s left on the table after people eat. She says they are portraits of time—its passage, but also how it creates memories that become part of us, like how our food becomes part of our bodies. She reads books. She sees movies in movie theaters. She talks about philosophy and religion. And sex. And she makes me feel like it’s normal to be not normal.

  I count my steps as I stumble to the stairs in a haze of internal sensory chaos. I find Janine sipping tequila and telling one of her epic stories to a freshman named Francis.

  “And then I took the knife and slit its throat from one end to the other.” Francis watches her mouth form each word. “The blood drained into the earth and I realized: I’ve never seen an animal die. I could actually feel the energy shift, like when a cloud covers up the sun and everything feels totally different for a second? And then, it was all normal again. Just like that.”

  “Whoa,” Francis murmurs, mesmerized. And stoned.

  “We ate the pig that night.”

  He gasps.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say. I pull Janine toward me, signaling that Francis’s time with this beguiling older woman is up.

  Janine hands Francis her cup. “Would you?” she says. He trips over the couch and leaves. Janine turns back to me. “Okay, what’s up?”

  “Kamal is here.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s with some girl. Like a superhot, smart Harvard girl who just graduated and is practically model-pretty only real-looking and she also seems really nice and it’s making me—” I don’t need to explain.

  “Ugh,” she replies. “Let’s go.” She grabs my hand and I follow her. My woozy mind struggles to touch down amid a kaleidoscope of thumping music and flashing lights. Her long black hair becomes my runway.

  We make it outside and walk to the nearest intersection. The streetlights buzz above us as Janine lights up a half-smoked joint and takes a hit. Smoke swirls around her like dancing phantom serpents. We are comfortable in silence.

  “Henry and Bay,” she tells the driver as we get into a cab.

  “Dude,” I say. “We can’t.”

  “Oh c’mon. We’ve done it like a hundred times.”

  “Yeah and last time we almost got busted.”

  “But we didn’t. Look, you want to feel better. This will make you feel better.”

  I roll my eyes. But she’s right. She lowers the window and spits onto the street. I gaze through soft focus at the passing lights, the storefronts, the people busy in their lives. This silent movie lulls me as the vodka and adrenaline wear off and sleepiness sets in.

  “Hey,” she says after a while. “You didn’t even tell me. How’d it go today?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Hello?”

  “Sorry.” I sit up straighter. “It didn’t go well.” She doesn’t press me, thank God. “My mom loved my hair, though.” She shoots me a look. “Kidding.”

  “Your hair is amazing,” she says.

  “I know. And thank you.”

  We arrive at the Red Hook Pool. In summers during middle school, my dad would take me and Ben here every Sunday morning and drill us on our strokes. Half the time he was still drunk from the night before, but I loved it. I loved his voice booming from the side of the pool, and his attention, which was rare then.

  I quit the swim team after freshman year when I started building LightYears, but Janine and I still sneak in on warm nights to swim laps back and forth across the dark, cool lanes.

  There’s a break in one side of the fence and there’s never anyone around, except for the one time when a cop saw us coming out. He decided not to chase us when we ran.

  We climb through the fence and come out onto the concrete deck. With no lights on, the pool looks black and bottomless. We strip down to our bras and underwear.

  “You have the best boobs,” Janine says, staring at my chest.

  “Your skin is like white lilies in the summer sun,” I tell her, stifling laughter as I dive in.

  The moment my skin breaks the surface, I am home. The weightlessness, the quiet, the smooth pull of the water along my body. This is where challenges, disappointments, and uncertainties slip away. All I have to do is exhale and move forward. If I were to have a church, this would be it.

  I take the whole length underwater, my eyes open, and come back up as the murky wall of the far end comes into view. Janine arrives next to me a moment later.

  “I’m so bummed about this girl,” I say, catching my breath. “I mean, it’s obviously not like we were together at all; we never actually even kissed. And of course I couldn’t expect him to go to college and not meet someone amazing. But I somehow still thought there was something there and that he’d come back and—I don’t know.”

  “Who is she?” Janine asks.

  “Her name is Phoebe. She has, like, insane red hair. And she has bangs, really good bangs.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. Perfect bangs. And she’s smart.”

  “But not as smart as you,” Janine says. I smile. This is most probably true. “Why do you like him so much anyway?” She floats on her back. I consider the question.

  “He has every reason to be just like all the others, to just be rich and into himself and boring. But he knows that, and he doesn’t want to be that. That night in the garden, my senses were all over the place, but it wasn’t entirely terrible. It was kind of the opposite of terrible.” I push off the wall and float next to her.

  “I’ve never been in love,” she says.

  I am quick to clarify. “I am definitely not in love with Kamal.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think of love as something mutual,” I say.

  “Mutual? Um? Unrequited love? That’s, like, a thing. That millions of songs and poems and books and movies have been written about. Most love is the opposite of mutual.”

  “Well, I still wouldn’t say I love him. I don’t even know what love is.”

  “We are born of love, love is our mother. I read that on a teabag,” she says.

  “Not my mother,” I reply, laughing as Janine disappears underwater. I look up at the muddy gray-black sky. All the ambient city light makes the stars invisible. They are there though. Blocked by the light, but they are there. And I can feel them.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bell is the first thing on my mind when I wake up the next morning. I check my e-mail hoping for a message from him or Joe or anyone involved. Nothing.

  I go downstairs. My dad’s making banana bread and watching CNN. I can’t speak or even think until I have coffee. I pour myself a giant mug. The words BREAKING NEWS scream across the screen like they always do. It’s the mystery flu. The same one from that headline in the cab.

  “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued a statement confirming that the number of fatalities attributed to this emergent illness is escalating rapidly and they have yet to determine the cause.” The reporter sounds overcaffeinated.

  My dad stops mixing the batter and turns to watch.

  “Also unknown to them, according to the statement, is how this flu is being transmitted, as there is no apparent connection between the victims.”

  I wrap my hands tightly around my warm mug. “That’s creepy,” I mumble.

  The newscaster is replaced on-screen by a press conference setup and a polished-looking older woman at a podium. A CDC placard and an American flag stand behind her. Her name
, Dr. Rosemarie Timmons, comes up at the bottom of the picture.

  “We are calling it ARNS, or Accelerated Respiratory and Neurodegenerative Syndrome,” she says. “The first cases emerged across the U.S. approximately three weeks ago, and the CDC has been monitoring the trajectory of the infections thus far. We have seen forty-one fatalities and the pattern is consistent.”

  “Let me stir,” I offer. I grab the spoon—the nearest distraction.

  “Patients complain of flu-like symptoms, which worsen over a period of hours or days. The nervous system ultimately fails, leading to paralysis and death.”

  Her voice softens as she says “death,” like she’s run out of air, like she’s hoping that one word will be too faint to reach us. I see a burst of yellow. I continue to mix.

  “We’ve seen complete deterioration occur in as little as one to two days, but it can take a week or even longer. We have not yet seen evidence of the symptoms reversing.” I am stirring vigorously. “Our current theory is that ARNS is transferred by a new type of flu-like virus, by the exchange of bodily fluids, but we cannot confirm that at this time.”

  My father starts chopping onions for a frittata. The smell bombards me like a beating drum.

  “Can we turn this off?” I ask, motioning to the television.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” my dad replies. “Of course. I should’ve realized.” He fumbles for the remote as the doctor from the CDC tells us not to panic. She tells us that the ordinary flu kills over twenty thousand people a year, so this is not that big a deal. Yet.

  We turn it off. Relief. My dad stares at me with a concerned look.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “The onions were a little … loud. But it’s really fine.”

  “Sit down over there, lamb. Take your coffee. I’ll put on some music. Yes?”

  I nod and go over to the chaise by the garden door.

  “Jazz?” he asks.

  “That’s fine.” I curl up on the chair. The bright, relaxed notes of a Bill Evans track fill the room. I close my eyes and listen. I wish I were musical like Bill Evans, like my dad. I’m sure I could master the playing part if I worked hard enough. But the expression, the feeling behind the music, that requires a language I don’t speak.