I glance over at Jason Kerwin, who is ensconced in his own book. I eye the title. Kepler’s Dream: With the Full Text and Notes of Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris. It looks old and semi-nasty, recycled hardcover library copy. Big picture of the surface of the moon on the front.
No clue: me.
I slink my hand over to his desk and snatch it to read the flaps. The first science-fiction novel, it says, written in the 1620s. An astronomer tells a story of a journey to the moon, but also he attempts to encode in the novel a defense of Copernican theory, because he’s looking for a way to talk about it without getting executed for heresy. Only later did people realize all the fantasy bits are pretty much Kepler’s code for astronomy and equations.
I thumb. There’s a flying alien witch.
Awesome. Kind of my kind of book. Except that I’d prefer it if I could write one of my own. This is always the problem with things containing imaginary languages and mysteries. I want to be the cryptographer. I’m not even close to being a cryptographer, though. I’m just what used to be called “an enthusiast.” Or maybe a hobbyist. I learn as much as I can learn in like fifteen minutes of internet search, and then I fake, fast and furious.
People therefore think I’m smarter than they are. It gives me room to do whatever I want, without people surrounding me and asking questions about things. It keeps people from inquiring about the whole dying situation. I invoke factoid privilege.
“Give,” Jason whispers. Mr. Grimm shoots us a shut-up look.
I consider how to pacify my parents about the birthday party. I think they have visions of roller-skating and clown and cake and balloons—like the party they had for me when I was five.
That time, no one showed up beyond two girls forced by their mothers, and Jason, who crashed the party. Not only did he walk a mile uninvited to my birthday party, he did it in formal dress: a full alligator costume leftover from Halloween. Jason didn’t bother to tell his moms where he was going, and so they called the police, convinced he’d been kidnapped.
When the squad cars showed up outside the roller rink, and the cops came in, it became immediately clear that Jason and I were destined to be friends. He was roller-skating in the alligator suit, spinning elegantly, long green tail dragging behind when they demanded that he show himself.
That party was not all bad.
For birthday sixteen, though, I’m drawing a better vision in my notebook: a dead clown, a gigantic layer cake from which I burst, a hot air balloon that arrives in the sky above me. From the hot air balloon’s basket dangles a rope. I climb. I fly away. Forever.
How much pain would this solve? So much. Except for the pain of the dead clown, who died not according to his own plan, but mine.
Apparently, Mr. Grimm hears me snort.
“Care to enlighten us, Miss Ray?”
Why do they always use this phrase? Rest of the class is taking a quiz. They look up, relieved to be legitimately distracted. Jason smirks. There’s nothing like trouble to make a day pass faster.
“Do you really want enlightening?” I ask, because I’m working it today. “I was thinking about dying.”
He gives me an exasperated look. I’ve used this line before in Mr. Grimm’s classroom. It’s a beautiful dealbreaker. Teachers melt like wet witches when I bring it up. I kind of enjoy Mr. Grimm, though, because he sees through me. Which means he’s actually looking. Which is, in itself, weird. No one looks at me too closely. They’re afraid my unsustainability is going to mess them up. That plastic bubble I lived in when I was little? It’s still there, but invisible now. And made out of something harder than plastic.
“Dying, in the context of which literary work, Aza?” he asks. No mercy.
“How about The Tempest?” I say, because there it is, on the syllabus, looming. Everything is ocean this semester. “Drowned twins.”
“The drowned twins who don’t really drown are in Twelfth Night, not The Tempest,” he says. “Try it again, Ray.”
Embarrassing. I’m at a loss, unfortunately.
“Play it again, Sam?” I say, illegally using Mr. Grimm’s first name. Then I embark on my traditional method: one-fact-that-makes-them-think-you-have-all-the-facts. You can learn the oddest little items from a wiki page.
“Except that that’s a misquote. ‘Play it, Sam,’ it should be, but people want it more romantic and less order-givey.”
Grimm sighs. “Have you even seen Casablanca? Ten more minutes till pencils up. I’d do the quiz if I were you, Aza. And don’t call me Sam. It’s Samuel. Only people who don’t know me call me Sam.”
He’s won, because he’s right. I so haven’t seen Casablanca. That fact was all I had. I cede the field and pick up my pencil to navigate old man and marlin.
Samuel. Who names their kid Samuel these days? I consider making a remark about pen names: Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, and Life on the Mississippi, recently read, but I don’t. Last time we did this it became a duel, and there’s something about my chest right now that makes me uncertain whether I can properly duel without coughing.
There’s a storm kicking up outside, and trees are whacking against the windows. The blinds are rattling like crazy, because this building is a leaky, ancient thing.
Jason flips a note onto my desk. Mr. Grimm is vigilant about phones buzzing, so we go low-tech. Giant squid, it says. Tomorrow, five o’clock. Your house.
We were supposed to watch the footage a couple of nights ago, but I was coughing so hard I had to go to the hospital. Which sucked.