Pete always held her hand on the way to the parking lot, and even though the drive was only fifteen minutes, it often took them nearly an hour because he was always pulling over to kiss her. Whenever Gemma’s mom was home, she invited him in for sweet tea made by their housekeeper, Bernice, who came in the morning. The whole thing was so normal it hurt.
Except that it wasn’t, because she wasn’t, and they weren’t, and the more she tried to pretend, the more obvious it was that something had cracked. Meeting Lyra and Caelum, knowing they were out there, knowing Haven and the people in charge of it were still out there somewhere—it had knocked her life off its axis. And Pete and April thought they could make things right just by acting as if they were all right. Gemma felt all the time as if they were circling a black hole, bound by the gravity of their denial. They would fall: they had to.
“What is it?” Pete brought a hand to her cheek. She loved the way he did this, touched her face or her lips with his thumb. They were parked at the very end of her driveway, the final quarter-mile stretch through graceful birches and plane trees whose branches interlocked their fingers overhead. “What’s wrong?”
She wondered how many times he’d had to ask in the past weeks. “Nothing,” she said automatically. “Why?”
“Your eyes were open,” he said. “Like, staring. It was like kissing a Chucky doll.”
That made her laugh. That was the amazing thing about Pete, his special talent: he could make anyone laugh. “Thanks a lot.”
“Let’s try again, okay?” He leaned into her. She closed her eyes. But she couldn’t relax. Something was digging into her butt. She must be sitting on a pen. This time, she was the one to pull away.
“Sorry,” she said.
For a split second, Pete looked irritated. Or maybe she only imagined it. The next moment, he shrugged. “That’s all right. We should probably keep it clean for Ms. Leyla over here.” He reached out and flicked the hula girl on the dashboard, who promptly began to shimmy. Then he put the car in drive again. Gemma was relieved, and then guilty for feeling relieved. What kind of monster didn’t want to make out with her adorable, floppy-haired, freckle-faced, absolutely-scrumptious-kisser boyfriend?
A monster who couldn’t move on. A monster who felt like moving on was giving up, even though there was nothing, anymore, to fight for.
“Where’d you get this thing, anyway?” She leaned forward and gave the hula girl another flick. Her face was chipped away and the only thing left was a small, unsmiling mouth.
Pete shrugged. “Came with the car. Your dad thinks she must have good engine juju.”
Gemma got a weird prickly feeling, like a spider was walking on her spine. “When did my dad see your hula girl?”
“When he dropped the car off.” He shoved the gearstick into park as they pulled up to the house, which never failed to emerge suddenly, enormous and unexpected, from behind the long column of trees. If a house could pounce, Gemma’s would have.
Pete caught her staring at him. “What? He didn’t tell you? His friend was selling the car and he knew we were looking to cash in the Eggplant. He offered to make the trade. It was nice,” he said, frowning, and Gemma knew she must have been making a face.
“Sure,” she echoed. “Nice.”
This time, he was definitely annoyed. He rolled his eyes and got out of the car without waiting for her to unbuckle her seat belt. Already the front door was open; Rufus bounded outside, as quickly as he could given his age, and began licking Pete’s kneecaps. Gemma’s mom, Kristina, appeared in the doorway, waving overhead with a big, beaming smile, as if she were heralding him from across a crowded dock and not from twenty feet away.
It was a stupid thing. Tiny. Minuscule. So what if her dad had a friend selling some shitty old turd-colored Volvo? Her dad had friends everywhere. Friends in the police department. Friends at the Formacine Plastics Facility, where Rick Harliss was now employed, a short ten-minute bus ride from the Winston-Able Mobile Home Community and Park, where he, Lyra, and Caelum were living.
Still, she didn’t like it. She’d told her father weeks ago she would come home only if things changed. It would be her rules. Her life now. And yet weeks later she was as trapped as she’d ever been. They were trying to soothe her, appease her, distract her, make her forget. Even Pete wanted to forget.
It’s too big for us, he’d said to her, shortly after they returned home. It’s too heavy for us to carry.
Gemma knew exactly what he meant. She felt the weight too, the constant pull of something deep and black and huge. Except she wasn’t carrying it, not even a little.
It was carrying her. What would happen, she wondered, when she fell?
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 1 of Lyra’s story.
TWO
“NO WAY WILL WE PUT troops on the ground.” Gemma’s father talked through a mouth full of half-chewed tenderloin. Geoffrey Ives believed strongly in table manners—for other people. “No way will the American public stand for it.” He leveled a fork at Ned Engleton, an old friend of his from high school, now a detective with the Chapel Hill Police Department. “Patriotic outrage is all well and good, but once you start shipping out these poor kids from Omaha, Des Moines, wherever, it’s a different story. I’ve seen robotics stocks go up tenfold the past month. Everyone’s gambling on drones. . . .”
“May I be excused?” For the past few weeks, Gemma had seen her father for dinner more than she had in the previous ten years. Usually, Gemma and Kristina ate takeout sushi in front of the TV in their pajamas, or Gemma was left to scour the refrigerator for whatever Bernice had left her while Kristina floated between various benefits and social obligations.
But after Gemma had come back from Florida, and Lyra, Caelum, and Mr. Harliss had been packed off (protected, Kristina said; given new life, her father said, although Gemma thought it was more like out of sight, out of mind), Gemma’s parents had determined they needed more together time. As if everything Gemma had learned, everything she’d seen, was just a nutritional deficit and could be resolved by more home-cooked meals.
It turned out Geoffrey Ives’s idea of family time was simply to bring his business home. In the past week alone they’d had dinner with a professor of robotics at MIT; a General Something-or-other who’d helped Ives land a lucrative consulting contract with a biotech firm that did work for the US government; and a state senator on recess whom Gemma had surprised later on that night in her kitchen, standing in his underwear in the blue light of the refrigerator, staggering drunk.