There is an app that shows you where the Appolina is, how fast it
is going, what the temperature is outside the pressurized doors, how many
days it’s been traveling, an estimate of the time remaining until the ship
touches down on Mars. My mother, who is a marine biologist, is one of the
eight people onboard. The app updates every five seconds, though as the
crew gets closer to landing it will takes longer and longer to load. I
check the app throughout the day: in the mornings right after I wake up, in
physics class from the back row, after I brush my teeth at night. While
Sara and I sit in her living room painting our nails, I stop and stare at
the little red dot that represents the Appolina, which shows that
it is 4,600,000 miles away—about twenty times the distance between the
Earth and the moon.

Sara peeks over my shoulder. “Jess, seriously. Again?”

I shrug, set my phone down, reach for my sketchbook. I draw wavy blue lines
across the page: a depthless open sea.

Maps show that over 20 percent of Mars’ surface may have been oceans. There
is evidence of shorelines carved into the surface by giant waves. One of
these maps hangs in my mother’s home office. We would sit together and she
would trace her fingers over the lowlands where there had once been rivers,
where oceans may have foamed. Sometimes we stepped outside and she would
point out where Mars sat in the sky, below a sickle of moon. It looks like
a star, but brighter, with a yellow-orange hue. The color reminds me of the
nightlight that I needed to sleep when I was small.

“What will we look like to you?” I asked her.

“From Mars,” she told me, “Earth will look like this too. Not as quite as
yellow.”

Nothing more than a speck in the sky.

*

I am sketching Sara’s foot, wishing I had the right colors for the seashell
pink of her toenail polish, when we hear car doors slam. I drop my pencil,
as if I’ve just been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Sara and I look
out the window from the couch where we sit in the living room. We can make
out four cars and five boys piling out of each. They heave cases of beer
out of the trunks. After being crunched in the back and middle car seats
they step under the streetlights and stretch their long legs. Jokes and
laughter carry across the yard to the open window, laughter that makes me
think these aren’t their first beers. They are loud. They swear. They don’t
care who hears. Sara’s yellow lab, Bailey, runs circles around us on the
sofa, barking so much I cover my ears. Even through my fingers, her pitch
is high, shrill. Nothing has happened yet but I already know: these are the
sounds of our night changing into something very different from what we had
planned.

The boys are friends of Sara’s older brother, Kyle, who is home from UT
Austin on spring break—he is in charge of the house while his and Sara’s
parents are in Sacramento for the weekend. Kyle is first through the door,
shouldering one of the cases of beer. He’s tall, like Sara, with eyes that
shift from gray to blue depending on the color of his shirt, and his dark
hair has grown long since he’s been away at school. He shakes it out of his
eyes.

“Sup, Mooch?” he says. Sara frowns at the nickname. I sit up and smile.
“Hey,” he says to me. I’ve spent many mornings barefoot at his kitchen
table while his mother offers me more cereal. He had given me rides to
school. But he’s never used my name. Jess, I want to shout after
him. You know it’s Jess.

Before the rest of the boys file in, Sara and I arrange ourselves on
opposite ends of the sectional and look at our phones so it doesn’t show
we’ve been watching, craning our necks toward the French doors. But we have
been watching these boys for years. Some of them pause outside the door to
stomp dirt from their shoes. I know most of their names: Ryan, Matt, Dan,
Luke, James, Jake, Dave, William, Bobby, Sean.

We have watched these boys score baskets in state championships, their
sneakers squeaking across the waxed floors. We’ve watched them row little
scull boats across the river with their long, muscled arms. We’ve watched
them make tackles, cradle lacrosse sticks, send soccer balls rocketing past
goalies’ hands. They never knew we were there, perched high in the wobbly
wooden bleachers that roll out from the walls, hooking our fingers into
chain-link fences during track meets until our hands smelled like metal and
rust. They wouldn’t have known it was us huddled together in our coats
along the river with the early morning cold making our eyes water so that
some mornings we weren’t sure whether we weren’t actually starting to cry.

Some of them nod their hellos as they pass on their way to the kitchen.

“Hey ladies,” says Luke. Ladies. It’s the kind of thing they say
to other girls, older girls. Girls who know how to contour their makeup and
who click in high heels down the hall. Part of me is embarrassed at how
little it takes for us to feel thrilled, but we still are. Ladies.
This is a good sign.

After they’ve all filed into the kitchen, Sara grabs the top of my arm,
presses her fingers into my skin. “Come on, Jess,” she hisses, and I follow
her up the stairs.

*

My father and mother met when they were both in graduate school at Harvard.
He’s a heart surgeon. I think he always counted on being the more
accomplished one in the marriage. My mother was respectable enough to marry
but her field must have seemed safely obscure. He probably figured that she
was too specialized to ever be a threat. He didn’t count on her getting a
lot of attention, awards. He didn’t count on her diving under the ice in
Antarctica. He didn’t count on the call from NASA, the dinner invitation
from the president last spring, the press interviews in LA, her appearances
on the late night talk shows in New York. He didn’t count on her making
history, on her name being printed in books—on her being one of the first,
the thing that can never be taken back.

We had a party before she left for Mars, and after a few drinks some of
Dad’s friends gave him a present, something the size of a shirt box, tied
up with a red satin bow.

“
This doesn’t look like a nine iron,” he said, shaking it, looking
up to make sure everyone laughed at his joke. He tore through the wrapping.
In the box was an apron, which made everyone laugh harder. “Why don’t you
just trade your scalpel for a spatula, Bob?” said Ames, a vascular surgeon
he has known since their residency days. Dad’s face went red and I
saw him look to the corner where the CEO of the hospital stood, sipping a
beer, but he couldn’t do anything but chuckle it off, slap Ames on the
back. I watched him swallow the rest of his drink in one big gulp.

Later that night I heard a slamming noise in the kitchen, and the sound of
shattering glass. In the morning when I went for a drink of water the
cabinet door was hanging from a single hinge and the countertop glistened
with shards. This was unusual for him. My father’s anger is a surgeon’s
anger, as precise as the laser he uses to cut into the delicate veins that
lead to someone’s heart.

*

My mother used to measure my height every year on my birthday and mark it
on the wall in the kitchen, next to the sliding glass door. Before she left
she insisted we do it again, to cover the two years she would be gone.

“I’m done growing,” I told her. “You saw the reads from my physical this
year. My growth plates are fused.”

“Just in case,” she says. “Doctors don’t know it all.” She winked. This was
our joke. She pulled a stool across the floor so that she could stand over
me.

Before she left she was eating as much fruit as possible, knowing she would
have to go years without fresh produce, and during those last few weeks
before her mission she always smelled like apple, cherry, watermelon. Her
fingers and lips were stained purple from blackberries. She tells me that
fruit used to have seasons, before it was grown in the labs. I like to
picture the raspberry bushes out in the wild, the fruit ripening in the
sun.

Using her hand as a level, she dragged a pencil in a line a few inches
above my head, traced it again and again until it became a thick gray line.
When she stepped down from the stool a tear leaked from her eye.

We are only able to talk while she’s on her way to Mars and then on her way
back to Earth in two years. Each time we talk on our video conference calls
during her journey, the lag will grow greater, until there are entire
minutes between what is said and what is heard. By the time the Appolina lands, we will only be able to use email. I will watch
her interviews on the news, the speech she made at the summit for Women in
STEM last year. I’m stockpiling the links now so that by the time she lands
I will have ways to see her in motion and to hear the sound of her voice. I
think of the end of her speech, the clip that was played again and again on
the news:

Serve your passion. Find your mission. Let your hunger and your drive
and your knowledge shape the adventure that will be your life. Let it
take you as far as you can possibly go

. I’ll never forget it: the auditorium boomed with applause, and when she
looked down at me from the stage, and as everyone clapped and whistled for
her I felt her leaving. I felt the world cheering for her, cheering for her
and willing her away.

*

In the bathroom Sara searches through her makeup bag, a pink zippered pouch
crammed full of crumbling blushes and lipsticks she’s periodically stolen
from her mom. She rustles through the bag, then lays out an eyelash curler,
a tube of lipgloss. Compacts of eye shadow and bronzer clack together, and
she pulls out a stub of eyeliner, then a purple plastic lighter. She flicks
the lighter and runs the tip of the eyeliner through the flame.

“It makes you look sexier when it is smudged,” she says. “Like you’ve just
gotten out of bed with someone.” She blows on it once, then runs the pencil
along her eyelashes, draws it out past her eyes like wings. After, one side
is much longer than the other. She turns to me, pinches my chin between her
hands, and I feel the warm tip at the corner of my eye.

Sara traces a line around my eyes until they started watering.

“Hold still, Jess.” She slaps me hard enough on the thigh so it leaves a
tingle in the shape of her hand. When she’s finished we study ourselves in
the mirror. She pouts at herself approvingly. I look squinty. Something
about all that black makes my irises shrink to little dark beads. I
realize, too late, that this has probably been her plan all along—to make
me look bad. We are both virgins, though Sara says she has reached into the
pants of her ex-boyfriend Phillip, from her old school, though I’m not sure
I believe her. I have only kissed three boys, and one of them was someone I
met at a science fair in D.C., which Sara tells me means I shouldn’t talk
about him at all. We have been friends since the fifth grade, but Sara is
always making sure to suck up to the cool girls in our grade—Jennifer
O’Neil, Julie Wagner, Lorrie Montgomery. She lets Lorrie copy her homework,
lends Jennifer Chapsticks knowing she’ll never get them back, laughs too
loudly at Julie’s jokes in class. I know that she’s frustrated with me and
the way that I’m always too nervous to do things like skip school and
message boys. I know I should change, but I can’t. I don’t know how to act
like those girls: loud, laughing, brave.

Bailey is barking in the hall, and I can hear her long tail swishing
against the walls. Sara goes out to get her, hooks a finger around her
collar, leads her downstairs to the basement, where she puts her into her
metal crate heaped with old flannel sheets. While she’s gone I take a
tissue and wipe some of the makeup off. Before I leave the bathroom I check
the app to see where the Appolina is and hold my finger over the
dot that represents the craft. It is Day 61 of the journey. I like the
feeling that I can trace them. Sometimes I imagine that my mother will
sense my attention, my touch. On Day 68 she will open one of the surprises
I packed for her—an envelope packed with sketches I made of her when she
tried on the first prototype of her suit. A study of her hands, one in her
glove, one out. Her body in profile as she first learned how to walk in
those giant boots. How delicate her face looked in the perfect circle of
her helmet before she lowered the shield, the wisp of blonde hair that fell
across her forehead. The softness of her cheek stood out in all that gear,
something you want to reach up and touch.

“Tell me again,” I asked her after each of her tests, “what it’s like to
feel weightless?”

“It feels like your body is a secret,” she said. Another time she told me
it was “like being invisible.” Another: “like being underwater and never
having to come up.”

*

In the kitchen, Sara and I find a box of beer cans, the cardboard torn on
the side so that it gapes darkly, like a mouth. She cracks her beer open
quickly, tips her head back for her first sip, tosses her hair. My beer
sends up a spurt of foam that wets my hands and leaves a dark mark on my
shirt. I have to brace myself for each sip. Kissing, beer—none of it is
what I imagined it would be. I hate the taste of beer, and kissing only
makes me feel concern. I worry about bumping teeth, too much spit, where to
put my hands.

One of the boys, James, who we’d watched row in the men’s varsity eight,
crosses the kitchen toward us. I think he notices the way we tolerate only
the smallest sips of our beers by the way he smiles. He can tell we hate
it. He is wearing a tie dyed shirt, the kind of ugly thing these sorts of
boys wear to show off how much it doesn’t matter—even the most stupid
clothes can’t cover up the aura around them, that they are always having
fun, the sense that they are in on every joke.

“You ladies want something special?” There’s that word again: ladies. It starts to feel like some kind of code. He opens the
freezer drawer and pulls out a bottle of vodka. The glass is cloudy with
cold, a Russian name branded across it in bright red writing. The astronaut
on the label has the shield of his helmet flipped up so that you can see
his eyes as he floats through space. I want to laugh, to point out that
he’d be dead in a half second if he did something like that. Sara must have
known, because before I can say it she elbows me in the ribs.

“Thanks, James,” Sara says. She touches his arm. I can’t believe the
boldness. Probably those few sips of beer have already made her brave. I
can tell that he likes the touch, too. The little sister a bit more brazen
than she was last year. It’s the kind of thing that the magazines always
tell you to do: Be Bold and Leave Him Begging for More. The kind
of thing I can’t remember whenever a boy is within twenty feet. I make a
note to myself—it will be my mission for the night, to touch one of these
boys on the arm. But even looking around and wondering which one makes me
blush.

Sara spins a lazy Susan underneath the counter, finds a can of pineapple
juice. We use it to cut the vodka, and the sweetness is a relief from the
dull sourness of the beer. I follow Sara out into the living room, where
the boys have set up triangles of red plastic cups, and we listen to the
constant pock of a ping-pong ball bouncing against the rims. We
share an arm of the couch, but it’s hard to balance. I can’t seem to sit
right. We do what we always do. Watch. The boys toss the ball back and
forth, back and forth. We watch them yell and laugh. Droplets of beer
splash over us, into our hair. We tally the points they score. I know it
should be different than this. Women have been president, women are on
their way to Mars. And still, I don’t know how to rise from the couch, to
take from this moment, this night, any part of it that seems like it could
be mine.

*

Sara and I finish our drinks. The liquor has made my face feel hot, but
other than that, I don’t feel different just yet.

“You want to do our refills?” Sara asks. As I stand up, she adjusts
herself, using the extra room to sit with her back arched, her chest pushed
out. She flips her hair. I think how some girls already know what to do.
Girls like my mother, who grow up knowing they want to seek signs of water
on other planets, oceans that are billions of years old. Girls like Sara,
who seem to know exactly how long to leave their fingertips on the inside
of a man’s wrist.

When I make my way back into the kitchen, Dan is sitting on the counter,
his feet resting on the island, presiding over it all. He wears shorts and
has long legs full of golden blond hair. He was the captain of the soccer
team last year. I remember him making the first goal in the state
championship against Sacred Heart. He has the most perfect teeth I’ve ever
seen, and a smile that seems to say he already knows this about himself.

“Excuse me,” I say. I stare at the cracks in the floor, which are lined
with crumbs and bits of dog hair.

“You have to pay the toll.” He holds out his hand for a high five. I slap
my hand, a little too hard, against his.

“Okay, tiger!” he laughs. I am surprised by the way he presses back, lets
his palm linger in mine, the thick fingers. I think of the three boys I
have kissed, the ones I have slow danced with in the gymnasium on
homecoming, how their hands felt as small and soft as girls’. I have never
touched such a big hand before, other than my father’s. This is something,
I think, a start. That someone with a man’s hands has reached for mine.

I measure out two shots of vodka for me and Sara, cover it with juice. I
feel the soccer player watching, so I spill a little more vodka into each
of our cups until the color of our drinks pales into a watery yellow. I
hope this makes me look like Sara: brave. He is still watching, even as I
walk away. There are ways of walking, I think, for moments like this. You
see it in the movies. Even some of the older girls at school. But I don’t
know it. I look at the floor, trying not to trip.

Sara sips her drink. “Jesus,” she says. “We’re going to be plastered.”
Plastered, I think. I take a few sips, glancing into the kitchen. The
soccer player stares back at me. He gives me a thumbs up. I gulp down two
big sips. Plastered. All of the sudden it sounds like something to aspire
to. I feel like I’ve done something right.

*

If there were an app for my mother to follow me through the night, the
little red dot of me moving across the screen, it would speed up after I
get to the bottom of that second cup. That’s when I feel it. That’s when I
become brave. The little dot would get a little bigger, brighter. There
would be some sort of glow.

With the third drink, the little dot would zoom across the screen, dip and
loop. It would show me moving from the couch into the middle of the room,
the soccer player next to me. There is music blasting from the speakers. We
are dancing. I’ve said something funny but I forget what it is the second
it leaves my mouth. The soccer player smirks, and I wish he would laugh.
Then we are outside, under the stars, and through the glass I can still
hear the others whistle when we start to kiss. His tongue is hot and salty.
Then I am in a lawn chair, in his lap. He moves my hand over a hard place
in his shorts. At no point do I look up, toward the stars, toward the rest
of the galaxy, toward the moon my mother hurtled past nearly two months
ago.

*

Then, after the third drink, my app might be having connectivity problems.
A loss of contact, a server that cannot be reached.

The rest of the night: we go back inside, and I can still feel the cold on
my fingertips. There is a hiss of more beer cans being opened. Sara steps
behind me, whispers in my ear. “Talk to him.” Someone pours beer into the
dog bowl, and someone else lowers himself to the ground to drink it. There
are red plastic cups on every counter, on every table. There is the
constant thop of ping-pong balls landing in cups. I do a shot with
the soccer player and it is warm in the back of my throat. Afterwards he
places his hand on the small of my back.

“My mother is going to Mars,” I tell him.

“You’ve said that four times.”

“Well, she is.” I worry because he sounds mad. No more mother, I
tell myself. No more Mars. One of the boys leans in to the soccer
player, says something I can’t hear. When he steps away, the soccer player
asks how old am I. When I tell him—the truth, I can’t even think to lie—he
puts his lips to my ear.

“Well, you sure don’t kiss like you’re fifteen.”

Then we are in the basement. After the flush of the drinking, the cool
dark, the cinderblock walls, are a relief. The old couch smells musty, and
the afghan draped over the back scratches my skin. Bailey cries from her
crate. I look down at my pale body and wonder, how strange it felt to be
naked in front of someone else. I am watching myself, my body, his hands on
it, quick and sure. When he puts his fingers inside me I bite my lip. I
don’t tell him that it hurts.

He tells me what he wants, what I should do. I tell him I’m not sure.

“Yes you are,” he says. “You wanted to all night.” I listen to how he wants
me to use my hands, my mouth. I close my eyes and try not to listen to the
noises he makes, the grunts and moans that don’t seem to be in his voice. I
concentrate on the way the carpet feels rough on my knees, the way the air
feels cool on my back. Then comes the moment that must have been the flash,
blooming in the dark, a flower of light. The afterimage of it on my
eyelids.

“What was that?”

“
Just keep going.” His hands, those big hands, on the back of my
head. The dog, sensing us there, our movements, still crying through the
dark.

*

I wake up to my phone dinging. My father is out front to pick me up. I am
asleep on the basement floor, and the smell of dust is close and choking. I
see the soccer player nearby, curled on the futon. I stand over him. I’m
not sure what to do, what happens now. In the movies there is usually
breakfast, coffee. There is usually some kind of goodbye. I see blood has
dried on the rim of his nail, a crescent of red. I look around for water,
something to wipe it away. I lick my finger. It seems important, to get rid
of the blood on him. I don’t even care if he wakes up, if my father has to
wait.

My phone dings again. Hurry up, my father says. I have to be at
the hospital by noon. I take one last look at the finger and pray no one
else sees. At the foot of the steps Bailey looks up at me from her cage. I
touch my hand to the cold of her nose through the bars then I creak, quiet
as a secret, up the basement stairs. I hurry out the door, past the shapes
of sleeping boys on the sofas, on the floor. The room is strewn with last
night’s wreckage: pizza boxes and chip bags on the coffee table, red cups
and empty cans on every surface: the kitchen counter, the fireplace mantel,
the window sills. I wince as a can crunches under my feet just before I
slip out the door.

If my father notices anything: the reek of liquor, the circles under my
eyes, some kind of change, he doesn’t say. He has just eaten an apple and
the core sits in the cup holder between our seats. The smell of it fills
the car. My stomach churns as we drive home. I count backwards from one
hundred, start over again. I close my eyes as we pass under the shade of
the maples on our street. I never want the shade to end. I want to see
where my mother is, but I don’t want to move. It hurts to blink. As I walk
to the front door I realize I’ve left my bag at Sara’s. Sketchbook.
Pencils. Clothes.

In my room I hear the jangle of my father’s keys, and front door pulled
shut. In an hour my father will be performing his surgery: the patient is a
three-year-old girl. He will look into her heart with a scope the size of a
pencil tip and repair a defect in her aortic valve. I get in bed, pull my
comforter over my head, enjoying the soft weight of it, and I sleep.

*

In chemistry class we learned that the first camera flashes were miniature
explosions. Photographers produced flashes using a combination of magnesium
powder and potassium chlorate, placed on the end of a stick and ignited.
There are many stories about photographers being disfigured or even killed
in pursuit of a portrait. They suffered festering burns and their arms were
tattered with scars. Serves them right. There are days when I’ve thought
that.

*

When I wake up three hours later, I am certain there must have been some
kind of catastrophe. My screen is filled with text messages. Asking if I’ve
seen, if I’ve heard. I am too panicked to read the rest. I am sure that it
must be my mother—there was a crack in the plug door, they lost oxygen, the
pressure onboard suddenly dropped. Or there’s been an explosion, a
collision, an asteroid, but I can’t tell. I picture a flash of light,
debris hurtling through the galaxy, pieces of the Appolina
drifting in every direction. Toward Pluto, toward the sun. When I open the
tracking app my hands are shaking, but the dot is there, but I can’t tell
if it’s still moving. They’ve got over 100 days until they will reach Mars.
I check NewsFlash. Nothing. I call the hospital, where they tell me my
father is still in surgery. My voice cracks with fear when I speak the
commands into my phone.

I call NASA—there is someone we can talk to, kids like me, the ones left
behind on earth. A counselor was assigned to each family, and we are
supposed to talk to them when we need help.

“Jess,” the woman says. “It’s nice to speak with you.”

“What happened to the ship?” I say.

She pauses. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“The Appolina. Is everything okay?”

Another pause. “Again, I’m not sure what you mean, Jess. You know you can
follow the ship’s progress on the app, right? It will show you exactly
where your mother is.”

I end the call after that.

I read the messages, all 54 of them. Three of them contain the picture of
me. They are of my face, my mouth, my fingers. Doing what he taught me to.
Some of the messages come from numbers I don’t even know.Blast off, one of the messages says. Another:Houston, we have a problem. Another: Mommy will be so proud.

*

The inventor of the synchronized camera flash, Artur Fischer, came up with
a system which triggered the flash at the same time the camera’s shutter
was released. Fischer was photographing his newborn daughter when he came
up with the idea. I’ve been tempted to tell myself that this is all her
fault.

*

Later I’ll see the time stamp on the emails and the ZipPic posts. Four
minutes. That’s how long it took for the picture to go from the email chain
to ZipPic to who knows how many people in school. The soccer captain sent
it to Sara’s brother. Sara’s brother sent it first to Sara. From there, it
traveled like a comet through the atmosphere, uncontrolled. It was posted
on the Slut Pages for the suburbs of Houston. Last year Jenny Nelson’s
boyfriend posted a nude selfie she sent him after they got into a fight at
our homecoming dance. Jenny and I went to middle school together. I liked
her, and she always smiled at me in the halls. I was sorry when she
transferred to another school.

I call Sara three times before she picks up. She doesn’t say hello.

“I was grounded,” she says. “For a month. And it’s because of you, you
stupid whore.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. My voice shakes.

“The barf in the pool table,” she says. “You’re disgusting in more ways
than one.” I don’t know what she means, for a minute. Then I remember:
staggering over the pool table and throwing up in the pocket. I remember
seeing the dark stains splatter the felt.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “We drank too much.”

“You drank too much. I was fine. And I can’t believe you did that with Dan.
You never even met him before.”

“But…”

She hangs up before I can say anything more. I think of Sara leaning over
me with the melted tip of her eyeliner, covering my eyes in black.

On Monday I see Sara in the hall before homeroom, standing at Julie
Wagner’s locker. I wonder if she’s still angry, and I take a step toward
them but they lean their heads together, giggling. As I pass, Sara sticks
her foot out, and I stagger, trip, my books slipping out of my arms.

“A slut,” Julie says as she passes. “And a klutz too. Jesus Christ.” And,
as with all of Julie’s jokes, it is Sara’s laugh that is the loudest, and
the sound of it follows me down the hall.

*

The first digital photograph was taken in 1957. It was 176 x 176 pixels.
The pictures would have been so blurry that even behind the lens, there was
still somewhere to hide. You were safe from the horrible precision that
could reveal every eyelash and freckle, every smudge of makeup on pale
skin.

*

At school, people torment me. The girls, mostly. Julie, Lorrie, Jennifer,
Sara. They treat it like game. The point is to run up behind me in the
hall, pull my hair, repeat names—bitch, slut, whore, cunt—right in my ear
while gripping my ponytail, a hank of my hair. Then they move away, quick
as whispers, so I can never turn around and see their faces. I try to tell
myself they are angry because I got what they wanted. The soccer player,
his movie star smile. But I know that’s not true. I know that I’m not
proud. I know that when I think of what happened, I don’t feel what the
magazines say you should feel: bold and sexy and brave. I feel tricked. I
feel stupid. I feel so ashamed.

The same boys who mime blowjobs with pens and pencils in the middle of
algebra now send me texts late at night, asking me to come over. All kinds
of messages come from every angle: Emails. Strangers on ZipPic, Sara and
Lorrie and Julie, ghosting under different profiles. The soccer player’s
ex-girlfriend, Amy, is still at my school, a senior now. Kill yourself, she texts me, every morning and every night. Her
messages come at the same time every day, like an alarm. Once when she
passed by in the cafeteria, she leaned in close as I ate my sandwich.

“Stupid bitch,” she said. “I hope you choke.“

What I now realize: that everyone I know has the capacity to turn on their
heels, to hate me, even if they never spoke to me before. They’ll hate you,
even if you think there isn’t enough about you to hate. It turns out to be
the easiest thing in the world.

You liked that, didn’t you?
the texts say. You want more.

Who are you?
I say. They’ve screened their numbers, but I can guess. Jennifer uses all
capital letters. Julie swears the most. And Sara knows how to scare me.

What if your mother sees this picture? What would she say if she sees

? I would drop my phone into a gutter if it weren’t for my mother.

For the first week after the photo spread, I hardly have time to refresh
the app, to see where she is, before another message comes in. Slut slut
slut. I block each number. Still, the messages come.

My father hopes to be promoted to chief of surgery at his hospital before
my mother comes home. He leaves for work before I wake up, comes home after
I’ve rinsed my dinner plate clean. He sits at the kitchen table, looks at
charts and files, rubs his chin. He does not notice anything. I have
stopped doing my homework. I have stopped going out. I sleep from eight at
night until eight in the morning. I don’t wash my hair. He doesn’t know how
I want to be weightless. That I want to go underwater and never come up.

*

The soccer player. His winter break must be over. He must be back at
school. I imagine him throwing a football across a quad, cramming for a
test in a library behind a fortress of books. I picture him ordering a
coffee in a café with big windows and overstuffed chairs. Laughing. Leaning
in to kiss a girl in a dark bar. A girl who knows the rules, who knows how
this goes. Not a girl like me. It feels as if everyone has managed to stand
on this ice-covered lake, but when I took my first steps, it cracked apart
beneath my feet.

*

My mother and I have our Day 68 video chat. She opens the envelope full of
the sketches I made. It’s like a time capsule of my life has been sent
through space. I wonder if she still smells the same. I’d like to think she
smells of cherries, even though it is impossible, that the sweetness has
clung underneath her nails, to her skin, her hair.

“These are so wonderful, Jess. I miss you so much.”

“I miss you too,” I say. I wonder if she feels what I feel when I say it.
The same hard lump in her throat, the same ache.

“What’s new at school?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I tell her. “Everything is the same.” The delay in the video
chat has increased to half a minute since the last time we spoke. I picture
my words bouncing off of satellites, ringing through thousands of miles of
dark, cold space, and how many inventions it has taken for us to be able to
speak, for me to be able to see her face. But I have nothing to offer,
nothing to say.

She narrows her eyes at the camera. “Jess, is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m just tired.” Out of the corner of my eye I see my phone
light up with another message. A screenshot from a porn video, something
with black leather and chains. Slut. It says. You like this, don’t you? Freak. Slut. I would do anything to feel
my mother’s cool, soft hands on my face.

“What are you working on? Show me more of your sketches,” she says. In the
past two weeks I have not made anything new, not since I left my sketchbook
at Sara’s. I picture her with her purple plastic lighter, all of the pages
curling in the flame, crumbling into dark ash.

“My sketchbooks are at school, “I say.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, next time.” I swear I see something sad in her eyes,
her smile, and I know it is my fault. I remember that look from her
fifteenth anniversary, when my father called and said he would miss their
dinner reservation. She picked up a slice of the pizza she had ordered for
me, smiled at it, and I remember the little clicks of her pearls as she
took them off and lay them on the kitchen table.

When we hang up I stare at the blank window on my screen, wishing it would
fill up once again with her face. I know that all she wants is for me to be
happy, and I can’t even give her that.

*

In the 1840s, a woman named Anna Atkins photographed plants—mostly algae
and seaweed. Her images look like x-rays. One of her first photos, on
cyanotype: “Dictyota dichotoma, in the young state; and in fruit.” Roots
and tendrils reach for the edge of the page, as if they are trying to
escape. In class, I spend entire periods drawing plants like these on the
margins of my assignments and tests, and when I run out of space, I use the
backs of my hands, my arms, tracing the engorged pods of seeds, the long
wavy grasses that she plucked from the sea.

*

After dinner—Day 71—I bring a pair of scissors into the bathroom. I listen
to the slice of the metal against the silk of my hair and the long strands
bend along the curve of the porcelain, like strands of Anna Atkins’ sea
grass. I think of the way my mother would twist my hair into a rope and
wrap it around her wrist. When I am done, there is very little left.
Nothing for anyone to touch, to love. And nothing for anyone to pull.

*

The next nine days I spend making sketches to show my mother. I draw more
grass, more seeds, but I want to show her something other than Anna Atkins’
plants. Then, in art class I find myself drawing the soccer player’s face.
I make sure to hunch close over my work, so that no one else will see. I
already know what they would say. Stalker, obsessed. Slut slut slut. Each picture takes up its own
page. I draw the kitchen counter cluttered with cans of Keystone Light, the
bottle of Russian vodka with its cartoon astronaut, the red plastic cups,
the can of pineapple juice. I draw a single fingertip, shading the place
where it was darkened by blood. I draw Sara, her eyes rimmed with makeup,
flashing, excited, and a little bit mean, and on the next page, Bailey
curled in her crate, her tail touching her nose, warm in her sheets. I draw
a girl, slim and pale, with long dark hair down her back. She is naked,
revealed. A phone, the flash large like a firework across the pages. Then a
whole page full of little phones and faces, no white space. Talk bubbles
that all say it: slut. The girl’s face, her tired eyes. Her hair
shorn close to her skull, ugly and uneven. More like a boy.

*

During our next video chat, I take a breath before the camera brings my
face into focus.

My mother covers her mouth when she sees my hair.

“Jess,” she says. “What…”

I am shaking when I hold up the book. I show the drawings in reverse,
starting with the one of myself, the short hair, the eyes fixed and tired
and dull. I flip my way back in time, so that the last drawing is the one
of the soccer player’s face, his movie star smile, as though it were that
easy to bury it all, to take it all back.

When I rest my sketchbook in my lap I’m thankful for the lag, for the
millions of miles, the countless satellites, the extra thirty seconds that
now comes between each sentence we finish and when the other one hears. I
am so thankful for the time that stretches, silent, peaceful, between my
mother’s nod of understanding and the sounds that I hear when she drops her
head to her hands and starts to cry.