They take effort, social graces, but the moms will kill me if I abandon them completely in favor of a person they think is a ghost. So I say, “Hi.”
“You have to go to school, kiddo.”
“I am going to school,” I say.
It’s not a lie. Periodically I show up and pass tests. I’m still part of a grief exemption. And I saved my sick days in case. So I have a couple of weeks’ worth for the year, before anything too truant happens. People are probably relieved not to have to see me anyway.
“You have to actually go to school.”
“Independent study.”
She rolls her eyes.
“The history of human innovation is independent study,” I tell her. “We can fly because of people who didn’t go to high school.”
“Those people weren’t my kid,” she says.
Eve joins her, stepping into the room. Without making a big thing of it I put a few papers on top of something on my desk.
Carol takes her usual unhappy gaze around at my stuff. She doesn’t know about the storage units, and she doesn’t need to. Some things have to be bought in bulk.
I don’t know where Aza is. I don’t know what she’s doing. All I know is where she was three weeks ago, when she died holding my hand. And then a few days later, when I heard her voice coming out of the sky.
She’s alive. Aza’s alive.
I know it like I know my own name.
I just need to figure out where.I checked wind currents and mapped the possibilities, at first in a pretty primitive way, and then in a more functional one.
Unusual storm patterns moving east across the country. Reports from weather balloons and satellites.
As far as I can tell, those patterns are moving in an unusually coherent clump, and they’re still over land. I have a master chart at this point, and a program that runs it on a variety of axes. This isn’t just my own obsessive doing. I wish I was a full-on programmer, wish I was a full-on anything other than this, but I know people.
And this is one of the uses for the money earned by my hotel bed-making devices and instant dry-cleaning sprays.
There’s not anything really concrete to go on and I don’t even exactly know what I’ll be going on to do. But there are plenty of scraps out there, things about ships in the sky, things about weather and weirdness. Then there are other things, dug up out of places I’m really not supposed to be looking.
Official places. Government places.
“You need to say good-bye to Aza,” Carol says, and takes Eve’s hand.
“It’s important, baby,” Eve says.
Their front is worryingly unified.
“I DON’T have to,” I tell them, though we’ve been through this already, too many times to count. I was prepared for dead, as prepared as you can be. I wasn’t prepared for this.
Ship. In. The. Sky.
I am not a fool. I haven’t told my moms anything about the ship. They would look at me for about three seconds, and then put me into the car, and take me directly to the children’s hospital (an insult, but it’s where you go until you’re eighteen) where we’d have a speedy meeting with the psychiatric unit. So, no, I don’t tell Carol and Eve about the ship.
In fact, I tell them nothing, beyond: I’m working on a project. My moms have the look of people who might be getting ready to take me offline. The Great Unplug has happened only once before, when I was nine and in the obsessed throes of memorizing a chunk of the OED. The moms did not approve.
Memorizing took up the extra places in my brain that were otherwise occupied with counting down the seconds of Aza’s life until age ten, when the doctors had, at that point, decided she was going to die. It was about this time my moms discerned that meds were required.
“So,” Eve says. “Do we need to take you offline?”
“I’m not even on right now,” I say, lying.
She looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
Yeah, Eve has a bandwidth monitor. I find this hilarious. They got the monitor to keep me from looking at porn, I assume. They were definitely convinced that’s what I was doing when I was working on the OED project. Carol burst into the room, all, AHA! And found me midway through H.
Maybe I’ve looked at some things on the internet in the category of naked. Who hasn’t, I ask you? But there are a million categories I care to look at, and most of them are not porn.
Categories like historic UFOs. Categories like history of flight. Categories like peculiar weather patterns since the eighth century. I’m compiling said categories into one larger thing in my computer. Because, reasons.
“I’d actually not be that unhappy if you were looking at porn,” Eve says, reading my mind, and sighs. “At least you’d be human.”
I look up.
“You wouldn’t be happy,” I tell her.
“I would be reassured that you were normal,” she says.
“Yeah, but I’m not,” I say.
“Go outside,” says Carol.
“It’s cold outside.”
“See a friend?”
“In case you missed it,” I say, playing the illegal card, “my only friend died.”
“She wasn’t your only friend,” Eve says, impervious to my attempt.
“Name another,” I say.
She can’t.
I do have other friends. Those Who Live Online, in Other Time Zones. Mind you, I’m not nine anymore. If I ended up unplugged again, I’d get around it.