What Happens Now(13)

My mother needed an episode every day. She especially needed Satina Galt, the sole human woman among men and aliens and androids in an interplanetary crew.

As for me? I was five years old. I could recite the alphabet, the Pledge of Allegiance, and this speech from the opening credits of the show (and I could do it in a slow, deep voice that sounded eerily like the one on TV):

Behold the Arrow One, a twenty-third-century hypership designed for long-range space travel! The shining beacon of an ever-unfolding future!

But an accident on its maiden voyage has torn a hole in the universal continuum. Now it hurtles randomly through time and space while its crew tries to get back home.

Where, and when, will the Arrow One hit next?

Wherever. Whenever. It was always Satina’s intelligence, her independence, her toughness, and her sense of humor that made all the difference. At least, that’s how Mom and I saw it.

She stopped watching around the time she met Richard. I didn’t.

The universe wanting you to have something, Camden had said about my thrift store find.

Some people were fans. Some people wove their fandom into the threadbare places in their lives, to make them stronger. I wondered if Camden Armstrong was one of these people, and where he wove, and why.

The next Monday afternoon, I stepped out of my AP French final and took a deep breath. It was almost worth it to get sick with stress about a test, to have this. One delicious moment of relief that it was over.

I found Kendall by her locker. She’d just come out of her chemistry exam and looked appropriately destroyed.

“A C at best,” she said, throwing a stack of study notes in a nearby garbage can. “I am so sick of this shit.”

“I’m sorry, Ken,” I said.

“Me, too.” She didn’t meet my glance. I knew from past experience that she was feeling a special combination of embarrassment and anger. Her parents, who were both college history professors, would have to put on their supportive-but-disappointed expressions that even I knew so well.

“What are you doing later?” I asked. “Wanna come over and cram for English?”

“I’m meeting up with Sasha, Caitlin, and those guys to do that,” she said, looking truly torn. Sasha, Caitlin, et al., were Kendall’s friends from the newspaper. I’d never clicked with them. Still, she asked, “Why don’t you join us?”

I hadn’t told her about the parking lot and Camden’s friends, and how a bona fide conversation had happened. I liked having the memory of it pressed against my palm, facedown, where it could only be felt and not examined to death.

“Sure,” I said.

Kendall smiled. I rarely said “Sure” to anything when it came to the newspaper masthead. Suddenly, my phone dinged with a text from my mother:

Coming to pick you up. Can you be at the loop in 5 min?

“My mom,” I said, worried.

“Everything okay?”

“I don’t know. She’s picking me up.”

“Call me later.” Kendall squeezed my shoulder before I rushed off to gather my stuff and head outside.

“What’s wrong?” I shouted when Mom drove up.

She had all the windows open, a news report blasting on the car radio. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and frowned.

“Nothing’s wrong. I figured I’d drive you home so you had extra time to study.”

“God, Mom. I thought something had happened.” I went around to the passenger side and climbed in.

“What would have happened?” Mom asked after I slammed the door.

“You’re the nurse. Accidents? Fires? Death and dismemberment?”

“Is it that unusual for me to surprise you at school with a ride home?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Mom looked hurt. Oops, she must have wanted me to lie. “I’m trying to help, Ari. I know how important it is that you finish the year with a bang.” She clutched the steering wheel tighter and eyed some other students outside, like maybe if she threw one of them in the car for a ride home, she’d get the gratitude she was hoping for.

“It is important. Thank you.”

As we waited to make the right turn out of the school’s main driveway, I studied Mom’s face in profile. From this angle, you couldn’t really see the dark circles under her eyes. She looked more like the Mom I remembered from when I was little, sitting next to me in the evening light, watching TV.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I woke up early and have tonight off, so I figured I’d go do stuff.” She paused. “Sometimes I forget what it’s like to be out in daylight.”

“You should be gardening, or taking a walk.”

“Shush. Will you please let me do this?” Her voice caught a little at the end. “I feel like I’m never around for you.”

Then just talk to me, I wanted to say. Ask me how my day was. Ask me if I had any good moments and I would tell you that, yes, I did. And I might even share them with you.

But I knew this simple car ride was all she had to give right now.

At home, Mom shooed me straight to my room to study. She said she’d bring me a snack, get Danielle off the school bus.

So I let her do that. It was all I really had to give back.

I heard Dani’s musical voice fill the house when she came home, Mom whispering for her to be quiet and that she couldn’t go see me right away. Dani protesting, then some kind of food being unwrapped and the TV turning on, and Dani not protesting anymore. I put on music and reintroduced myself to my history notebook.