Love is Hell Page 7

  “What are you doing here?” He pulled off his goggles and parka, stripping off his tempsuit right in front of me. “Are you crazy?”

  Half naked, he wrapped the silver tempsuit around me, its elements burning my skin like hot coals. I could only nod and stare. It felt like my eyes would shatter if I blinked.

  “Came see you,” I managed.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I never dreamed about Barefoot, never once! It was you from that very first night!”

  He swallowed. “But it was so weird and incredible, and everyone always said that dreams weren’t real. But they are sometimes. . . . Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yesh,” I assured him through cracked lips. There was more in heaven and earth and all that . . . so much more to say.

  But just then, my frantic bioframe realized that I’d reached somewhere warm and safe, and so dutifully knocked me out, not wanting to risk me freezing myself again. Stupid perfect world.

  .

  "So here we are at the end of our little adventure,”

  Mr. Solomon began.

  Barefoot Tillman sneezed in her quarantine corner.

  She’d been much better the last couple of days; the goo had stopped running from her nose. But everyone still kept their distance.

  “Gesundheit,” Maria said, having looked up a few old traditions on Barefoot’s behalf. We smirked at each other.

  “But before we all return to the modern world, perhaps we should share about our experiences.” He spread his hands. “Anyone?”

  Lao Wrigley raised her hand. “Well, I feel like I got much closer to my father.”

  “Hmm,” Mr. Solomon said. “Because you made him fly you to and from the Bahamas every day?”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Lao flicked her hair.

  “Check out these abs!” Sho cried, standing up in the front row, spinning around and lifting his shirt. “I may never eat again.”

  “I doubt that,” Mr. Solomon said. “And I believe those are ribs, Mr. Walters, not muscles. Anyone else with profundities to share? Yes, Mr. Stratovaria?”

  “Well,” Dan said, “I’ve discovered that there’s nothing funny about parasites.”

  “Ah, insight from the sightless. Someone, at least, appreciates the seriousness of scarcity. Perhaps this semester hasn’t been entirely wasted.”

  “No kidding,” Dan said, waving his cane in one white-veined hand. “My mom’s so freaked out, she’s shelling out big-time for the replacements. My new eyes are going to kick ass!”

  Mr. Solomon sighed. “Indeed. And is there any great wisdom from you two lovebirds holding hands in the back?”

  We pulled apart as everyone spun around, still quizzical at the two of us together. My friends blamed William Shakespeare for turning me into a meeker. They rolled their eyes at the old-speak that sometimes burbled out of my mouth.

  But the changes had come from a place more primeval than they thought. The Bard had nothing on my subconscious.

  “Well, Mr. Solomon,” Maria said, “I learned that those olden-day heroines weren’t nearly as wimpy as I thought.

  Turns out you really can die from running around outside in the cold. Especially if you’re wet.” With her free hand, she pointed to the dark patch of frostbite on her left cheek, which shone like a misplaced black eye. Her mother had made Maria promise to get a skin graft soon, but in the meantime she was seriously milking it.

  “Fascinating,” Solomon said. “Though perhaps not as relevant to your original project as one might hope.”

  “Oh, I assure you, Mr. Solomon,” Maria said. “Unbalanced hormones and Antarctic exposure go hand in hand.”

  “An interesting observation. And you, Mr. Black?

  What have you to tell us about the rigors of sleep?”

  What indeed? I took a deep breath, wondering what I was going to do after class ended today. Now that the final projects were over, I could reset my bioframe, switch on all those little nanos that would make my anabolic and catabolic processes simultaneous once more—no need to sleep ever again.

  Did I still want my dreams? They weren’t so different from real life, now that Maria and I had connected out here in the waking world. But I kept wondering what else they might show me, what magic would be lost if I never twitched and blinked my way through Stage 5 again.

  “I’m glad I tried it, Mr. Solomon.”

  “Did you make it all the way down to REM sleep?”

  “You bet,” I said. “Dreams, rapid-eye movement, drool, the whole deal.”

  Maria shot me a sly look. We’d decided not to mention that she’d dreamed once, too, courtesy of acute hypothermia, combined with a little knock-out juice from her bioframe. Or to tell Solomon that my hormones had followed hers out of balance, since modernday widgets weren’t calibrated for someone sleeping six hours a night. I’d gone mad enough to have teleported to a deluge in Denmark the night before, just to hold Maria’s hand in the freezing rain.

  Our projects had overlapped in all kinds of interesting ways.

  “And what exactly did you dream of, Mr. Black?” Solomon asked. Maria reached over to squeeze my hand again, fingernails biting flesh.

  “Scarcity, Mr. Solomon,” I said. “War, pestilence, famine.

  All the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that this world does not allow.”

  “Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “Nightmares is the old term, I believe. So you must be relieved to be here at the end.”

  “Most definitely,” I said, hearing the sound of Maria scribbling in her notebook, tangling more words and images inspired by my lies. And I decided: no adjustments to my bioframe this afternoon, not yet.

  At least one more night of dreams.

  .

  .

  .

  Thinner than Water

  justine larbalestier

  .

  I was going to run away, but then I saw Robbie bathing in the river. It was a few hours shy of midnight. The village was asleep. I’d snuck out and gone walking, trying to plot how to run away. Where to go.

  I took the path down to the river, ducking cobwebs glowing in the full moon, wondering how long it would take me to walk to the city. How much food I’d need. How many pairs of shoes. An owl hooted and took off just over my head. I was startled, I stumbled, and, when I righted myself, I was gazing at Robbie splashing water over his head and shoulders.

  His skin shone. It was only the drops of water reflected in the moonlight and the contrast with his dark skin, but I think I forgot to breathe.

  For the first time I looked at someone and wanted to touch them. My hand half lifted toward him.

  “Jean!” he called, turning to me and smiling. “Jeannie.”

  My hand dropped to my side and the skin across my face tightened and grew hot. I wasn’t dizzy, but I still wondered if I might faint. I don’t think I’d ever heard him say my name before.

  “Robbie,” I said, stepping closer to the riverbank.

  “Will you be on the hill tomorrow?”

  I nodded, though I couldn’t believe he was asking me.

  He was so . . . not beautiful or handsome, but there was something, something that made me want to touch him.

  I’d heard other girls talking about him.

  Robbie was asking me to handfast with him. Me, who he’d never spoken to before. I shivered. I know it sounds like fancy, but I could feel my left and right ventricles squeezing blood out from my heart and into my tissues, my lungs. Robbie’s words made them pump faster.

  Handfast? Me with him?

  Tomorrow was Lammas Day. First day for bread from the new harvest. You take two fresh loaves to church as an offering—one for inside, for Jesus; and one to place outside for the fairy folk—and if you’re young and not married, you can handfast. A trial wedding. If it sticks, come next Lammas Day, you make it proper. If it doesn’t, you don’t.

  The girls sit on the hill and wait for the boys to come ask them. I’d just agreed to s
it there and wait for Robbie.

  They don’t handfast anywhere but the villages around here. The tourists come to watch and take photos of the couples with handkerchiefs tying them hand to hand. They think it’s quaint and adorable. They think we are quaint and adorable. I didn’t think Robbie was quaint or adorable. I thought he was dangerous and wild, and not just because my parents didn’t like him, but because there was something in the air around him, something that made me shiver. A shiver that was both warm and cold.

  Lammas was the day I’d chosen to run. Because my parents had decided it was well past time for me to be ’fasted. They’d given me the whole day off. Plenty of time to get away.

  “I’ll see you there?” Robbie asked.

  I watched the way his mouth moved, his lips, his tongue.

  “Yes,” I said. “On the hill.”

  I’d decided to stay.

  On Lammas Day, the cattle tails are bound in red and blue ribbons to keep the fairy folk from stealing them. To keep them out of our houses, there are crosses above all the doors and windows. Lammas Day is when the green folk like to come calling. Our bakery was no different, crosses nailed to all the lintels. I lived there with my ma and pa, my two brothers, Angus and Fergus, and their wives, Sheila and Maggie. All of us lived redfaced, sweaty and floured, making and baking from midnight till dawn, then over again. Before Lammas Day, the work is longer and harder as we baked enough loaves to fill every corner of hell.

  It was a horrible life.

  The tourists loved it. They loved us, leaving coins and notes in a tin on the front counter, large chunks of it foreign. It was my job to gather it up, sort it, and take it to the bank to turn into real money. Not to put it in the bank. Oh no.

  My parents didn’t believe in banks. Or in foreign countries. Or in anything but our little tourist-trap village, though they called it “traditional” and our ways “fitting.” Our money was kept under my parents’ mattress.

  That mattress was filled with straw. Like mine. The straw scratched. The bakery was at the front of our house, and the living quarters in back, and up the rickety stairs, the bedrooms.

  There was no television, no radio, no electricity.

  The ovens ran on coal and wood. In the dark, we used candles and the fire of the ovens to see. In summer, we went to bed long before the sun set and in winter not long after. Summer or winter, we were always up before it rose.

  My parents were obsessed with maintaining the old ways, but I read in a book that in the old days everyone made their own food. They didn’t have bakeries. There weren’t any tourists to feed. You only provided food for your neighbours when they came visiting. My parents’ version of the past rarely matched what my teachers told me or what I read in books. They believed in the fairy folk, the green men, and that the old ballads were history, not story. They believed in a world that stayed the same from day to day, year to year, century to century.

  That tourists came to watch them be the same—day after day, week after week—didn’t strike them as odd.

  “Were there tourists a century ago? Two centuries?”

  I asked.

  My ma told me I was insolent; my pa ignored me.

  Angus said he’d hit me if I ever said such a thing again, and Maggie giggled. We do not get on, my brothers and their wives and me.

  For as long as I could remember, I’ve wanted to run away. I did not love my family. I didn’t even like them.

  I wanted to live with a real family. One that would have let me stay at school past the age of fifteen. A family that would let me go to university, study to become a doctor. A family that would allow me a real life in the real world. A family that would let me leave. My brothers didn’t mind the life. Especially Angus. He liked it, couldn’t wait to take over the bakery for Pa. He and Fergus saw nothing wrong with being barely educated, marrying at sixteen, having children at eighteen, staying at home where there’s nothing but family and baking and church on Sunday, and, very rarely, a visit to the Green Man Tavern to yell and sing with their mates.

  They liked making the deliveries in a cart drawn by two old farting drays. I don’t suppose it will shock you to hear that my parents didn’t hold with combustion engines.

  They didn’t hold with strangers, either.

  Especially not Robbie.

  Robbie’s family hadn’t lived in our village for countless generations. Because Robbie had no family.

  He was found when he was wee in a cradle boat down by the shore. A fairy cradle boat, sent by the green men, everyone said, but the miller took him in anyway. He had no son of his own. But within five years, he had three and Robbie was demoted. Not a son anymore, more like a distant cousin.

  He lived with the miller, his wife, his sons, and his daughters. And at harvest time, he’d bend his back in the fields along with everyone else. But he didn’t work in the mill. Robbie turned to fiddling and odd jobs around the village.

  Not what my parents considered marriage material.

  My parents wouldn’t let me leave. They wouldn’t let me study. They hardly let me read. My Goldstein’s Anatomy & Physiology had gone missing, and when I’d complained, my mother had wanted to know what I needed with it now that I was almost sixteen and out of school (they made me) and getting too old not to be married. I had the book almost memorised, but that wasn’t the point. Just having it, being able to pore over the charts and diagrams of all the systems: cardiovascular, digestive, endochrine, excretory, immune, integumentary, muscular, nervous, reproductive, respiratory, skeletal; to murmur their names . . . That book was the future I wanted so desperately. The future my parents had taken away.

  So why not handfast with Robbie? They wanted me tied down to someone from the village, didn’t they? What did it matter if he wasn’t a McPherson or a Cavendish or a Macilduy?

  I hoped they wouldn’t be too angry. And if they were, well, a handfast is not a proper marriage. It’s just practice.

  Either one of us could walk away if we chose.

  And maybe, just maybe, I could convince Robbie to run away to the city with me. He’d study music and play in the taverns. And I’d work in a shop or a pub or even a bakery, and study whenever I could. Work hard and long until they let me into a university to learn everything I could about medicine, about the ins and outs of the human body. All the secrets that weren’t in Goldstein’s Anatomy & Physiology. I made it home before midnight and crept into bed. I thought I wouldn’t sleep, thinking about Robbie and me handfasting, but I was out as soon as I closed my eyes, not even stirring when the others were up and baking.

  The sun woke me. I lay there on the scratchy straw a moment, savouring the warmth being absorbed by my epidermis.

  Lammas Day.

  I pulled on my best dress: homespun and homemade with crooked stitching, and cloth not as scratchy as straw, but not anywhere near as soft as shop-bought cotton. One day, I told myself, I would wear a dress someone else had made.

  “Are you awake, Jeannie?” my ma called.

  I ran downstairs to her.

  “You look nice,” she said, handing me a sack and straightening my apron. “That’s bread and cheese and a garland for you.”

  “Thank you, Ma,” I said.

  “Do us proud.”

  “I will.”

  I took the sack and set out for the hill to meet Fiona and wait for Robbie. The day was bright, without a hint of rain.

  Fiona laughed when she saw me and waved. She was at the top of the hill. I made my way up, weaving past the other girls, nodding and smiling and exchanging hellos, avoiding eye contact with the few tourists pushy enough to take photos. I sat down next to Fi at the the crest, under the biggest ash tree, hot and a little out of breath.

  “Trust you to pick the very top!” I complained.

  “But look,” Fi said, “you can see clear out to the ocean.

  And those hazy bits—I think those are the islands.”

  I squinted where she pointed. Everything dazzled, especially the
endless blue sea blurring into endless blue sky. I grunted. “It could be.” I’d prefer a view of the highway that led to the city. Or of Robbie.

  “We can also see who asks who. Gossip’s-eye view.”

  “True enough.” That was why we’d come every other year. I broke the bread in half.

  “Did you bring a knife?”

  She nodded and handed it to me. “Also pickles. Storebought.”

  “Yum!” I sliced the cheese and laid it evenly on the two halves, then Fi added the pickles. As we ate, a few boys stopped by and swapped garlands with their sweethearts. I wondered how long it would be before Robbie came to ask me, and what Fiona would say.

  “Looks like Dougie and Susan are back together again.”

  “Who can tell with those two?” I said wisely, though I hadn’t hardly seen either since my parents pulled me out of school. I hadn’t known they’d been together in the first place. Fi always promised to keep me up to date, but we barely saw each other outside of church.

  “Dougie just bought a car. It’s only four or five years old. I bet that’s why Susan’s decided she likes him again.”

  I felt a hot pulse of jealousy. If I had a car, I could be out of here faster than a loaf proves in summer, hopefuly with Robbie by my side. Or at least I could if someone would teach me how to drive. “Where does he keep it?” I asked. Cars and trucks and the like aren’t allowed in the village. The tourists’ buses park on the edge of town and they walk in, grumbling every step of the way.

  “Out in the paddock with all the other cars and buses.

  Where else?”

  I nodded, feeling foolish. He wouldn’t have to hide it, would he? Dougie didn’t have to hide. His parents didn’t want him to be trapped in the village forever.