My Year Zero Read online

  Heart-fluttery what? She’d already kissed a girl?

  So you’re bi? I asked.

  I’m whatever, you know, love is love.

  And you’re dating Dustin?

  Sierra said: Something like that.

  Did she think I was hitting on her? Had she been trying to figure out what my orientation was? Was she flirting with me? What was “like” dating?

  Sierra wrote: Dinner’s here. Got to go.

  Okay, I’ll check out the story.

  Bye!

  I couldn’t focus on anything except the line where Sierra said she’d kissed girls, and dinner sounded like a good idea, so I went down to the kitchen. When my father got home in a few hours, he’d have eaten at his law office or gone out to dinner with a client. He wouldn’t bring food home for me. I had a credit card and an allowance and he expected me to get what I wanted as long as it was reasonably nutritious and as long as I also got whatever he put on the grocery list.

  The grocery list was a small whiteboard hung in the upstairs hallway. It read: oranges. It belonged on the fridge, but nothing was permitted on the fridge. That would detract from the handcrafted cabinetry.

  When Jenny’s parents divorced, her father bought a Porsche. I get that. You’re trying to get away from someone, you want a fast car even if it is metaphorical. When my mom left my father, he bought a house. Not any old house but a cabin-mansion overlooking the lake through two-stories of enormous windows (as if you want to see more frozen lake views during Duluth’s fourteen months of winter).

  Did I say cabin-mansion? I meant METICULOUSLY BUILT cabin-mansion. That’s what it said in the real estate brochure, full caps. Back when I was ten, I had to look up “meticulous.” It meant careful and precise, which was my father’s perspective on everything that year. After that he reeled it back to suspicious and exacting.

  My mom got a job working for the President. I’m not even kidding. She’s the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for South Asia so she goes around to all those countries and makes it easier to do business with the U.S. She loves to quote Roosevelt’s famous line, “If goods don’t cross borders, troops cross borders.” I don’t blame her for leaving; when you get a chance to work for the President and represent the whole country, how could you say no? But because of all the travel, she couldn’t take us with her. And if kids don’t cross states, bullshit crosses states.

  For a year before the divorce my parents were extremely shitty to each other. They stopped talking except for short, ugly-sounding sentences and there was a lot of door slamming and one of them driving off around dinnertime and coming back after I was in bed. Isaac is five years older than me so he was more in tune with it. I’d ask him, “Why aren’t Mom and Dad talking?” and he’d say, “Because they hate each other,” which made sense to him but curdled my kid-brain.

  After the divorce, Isaac got a new TV and an Xbox, I got every art supply I could ask for and a drawing table, and my father got his cabin-mansion. You might think I’m mad at the house because I’m mad at my parents, but I assure you, I am not mad at the house and its PRICELESS VIEWS. (It was an intensely shouty real estate brochure.)

  The house has huge cedar beams throughout the two-story living room with its wall of windows. There’s slate tile floor full of golds and grays, browns and silvers. I used to sit in the entryway and run my fingertips over the tile to figure out if the different colors had different textures. The gray was finer than the browns and golds, and the silver was like silk.

  After she left, Mom sounded happier right away and my father stopped talking to us except to say, “Isaac, take care of your sister.” I figured any day we’d be moving out east with Mom. But her job kept her too busy going to places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. (She got points for sending me a postcard from Middlefart, Denmark, but still). We spent the whole summer with her every year from when I was ten through thirteen. Then Mom’s job got busier, and Isaac went out east to college.

  Me and Isaac did okay together. We actually like each other and I didn’t mind hanging out by myself, so he’d make sure we had dinner on the nights our father worked late and he’d get me up for school in the morning. He’d send me off with a little pep talk that I think he got from his coach. (There was an age-inappropriate “slaughter them” in the middle plus a lot of swearing.)

  Did my father know he was going to have to keep me and Isaac when he bought the cabin-mansion? It does have four bedrooms and a ton of space. Isaac thought it was badass because he and his friends could hang out in the woods behind the house’s ornate gardens. I wasn’t as excited to have friends over. I had friends then, Jenny and two other girls, before I got tall and weird and awkward and queer.

  Speaking of awkward and queer, along with buying the cabin-mansion, my father started dating not long after Mom left (or maybe a little before she left, based on some of their fights). Around fourteen I’d started to wonder if he’d had this whole plan in his head for how the divorce would go: that it would be okay because she’d take the kids and he could work as much as he wanted and spend his spare time asking out Duluth’s small population of hot, eligible women. The house is perfect for bringing dates home. The whole first floor is this giant great room situation with a handcrafted dining table and huge couches.

  He didn’t bring women back to the house until after Isaac went to college. The first time I walked into the kitchen and saw him on the couch laughing with a prettied-up woman, I think we were all shocked. Maybe he’d forgotten that he had a daughter. I said, “Hi,” nuked dinner and went back to my room like it was all normal, but after that I started keeping candy bars in my room, just in case.

  It’s mortifying to walk in on your father’s date. Profoundly worse were the rare times I thought his date was hot. There was this one woman, tall as me, mane of brown-blond hair, not too much makeup, freckled and sunshiny face. Looking at her, I forgot how to make words. I spent the rest of that weekend at the library even though in the pre-car era it was a two-mile walk in the snow. This was another reason I needed a girlfriend of my own.

  * * *

  I wanted to tell someone about Sierra, to have an excuse to talk about her and to debate what she might have meant by telling me she’d kissed girls, but who?

  Not Jenny and her clone army. Maybe Mom would be a little happy for me, in a perplexed way. We mostly talked about world politics and shopping when we talked every week or two.

  Isaac? Was it weird that I liked my brother more than just about anyone in my life?

  I wrote out a text to him: I met this girl. At my school. She had purple hair and wears dresses and kisses girls and I don’t know what that all means. And she’s dating this guy, but…how do you ask a girl out?

  I deleted that because it was stupid.

  But I couldn’t say nothing.

  I sent him: How do you ask a girl out?

  He texted back a few hours later: Is she into you?

  Maybe, I wrote.

  Get that to a “probably” and ask me again, he said.

  I wanted to ask him how to do that. How do you go from maybe to probably to yes without being a creeper? I guess that was up to me to figure out.

  Chapter Four

  I stayed up until after midnight finding my way around the story, reading until my eyelids were heavy and hot. In the morning, my father rapped on my door because my alarm was going off and I hadn’t hauled myself out of bed yet. By the time I was up and dressed, he’d left.

  The only evidence that he’d been home was the whiteboard in the hall that now read: oranges, coffee creamer.

  I dragged through the school day, but when I got home I was fully awake. Calling up the story site on my laptop, I picked up where I’d left off. The main characters were from a human-like race called the Illudani, a cross between elves and vampires. They had metal-hued skin, from inky, graphite tones to shimmering silver.

  Sierra came back online while I was reading.

  Whatcha doing? she asked.


  Reading, I told her. And looking at this art.

  That’s Bear, she’s fantastic.

  What kind of girl called herself “Bear?” Or was that what her parents really named her?

  There’s Kings and Queens and Gods, right? I asked.

  Yep. And the Kings and Queens can appoint their court. Do you want me to give you a rank and a character to be?

  That’d be cool, I replied.

  I’ve got a Knight who’s in a few of the stories who doesn’t have a real person behind her. Or we can make you a new character. But you’d have to start at the outside and work your way in if we do that.

  What does the Knight do in the stories? Is she awesome?

  She’s the best thief in the galaxy, Sierra replied.

  Should I ask if Sierra’s character was also bi in this fictional world too—before I agreed to a female role? That seemed too forward. Like, why would I be asking unless I wanted her to like me?

  Starting as a Knight in the Rogues’ Court put me as close to Sierra as I could get.

  That’s cool, I can be the thief, I wrote.

  My other Knight in the story is Blake, I mean in real life—in the story she’s Cypher. She’s like my best friend, the bipolar one, and super smart. You should meet her sometime, you’d like her.

  I considered the words, ran back over them, thought about her mentioning Blake that day at school with the crazy kid. Did she say “bipolar” every time she brought up this best friend? Or was she saying it because of the conversation after the bomb scare, because that’s the way she’d first talked about Blake? Would Sierra start introducing me as her “lesbian friend Lauren?”

  Did it have to alliterate…lesbian/Lauren, bipolar/Blake? What title did Dustin get? (I wanted it to be “douche.”)

  In a side window on the computer, I did a quick search. Bipolar disorder: dramatic mood episodes, intense emotional states, depressive lows, manic highs. Maybe this girl Blake didn’t give a shit what people knew about her. Super-outgoing, confident, emotional people scared me. Should I be picking a character who was paired with someone like that?

  Of course if I changed my mind now, I’d be the dick who didn’t want to run with the bipolar girl.

  “Dick” also alliterated with Dustin…nah, that was too easy.

  Okay, I typed to Sierra. Do we run around thieving together?

  In one story you do, but most of the time the thief is on her own because she’s a thief and all. Blake’s character Cypher is the Master of Secrets.

  Oh, right.

  The thief’s name is Zeno. I let Blake name her. It’s some math thing. I’ll tell the group you’re coming in as Zeno the First Among Thieves and link you the doc with her backstory, it’s only a paragraph right now. You’ll want to add to it.

  Minutes later she sent me the link and I clicked it:

  Zeno was born to a noble family but she didn’t like it so she ran away and joined the Rogues. She’s loyal and an okay fighter but really good at breaking into places and stealing things. She serves the Queen of Rogues directly.

  I had work to do. Had the mysterious Blake written that? If so, I wasn’t impressed.

  I messaged Sierra: How much room do I have with this character? Can I change stuff and kind of reintroduce her?

  She wrote back: That’s a great idea! Do it! I can’t wait to see it!

  There was a black and white drawing of a slender but chesty woman with hair pulled back in a short ponytail. If I put my hair up like that, would it come out that neatly? I didn’t put my hair up. (If you have to wear your hair long because your father would freak if you cut it, why not keep it to hide behind, right?)

  Zeno was about six feet tall with pewter skin and narrow eyes. There were notes about her being a werewolf and the artist had drawn her with a wolfish face: mouth and nose protruding a bit like a muzzle and light-colored eyes.

  Sierra’s character, the Queen of Rogues, stood at six and a half feet, which put her a foot taller than Sierra herself. She had silver-platinum skin and sapphire-blue eyes, plus a mane of black hair that sparkled like the night sky.

  Blake’s description of Cypher made me laugh:

  Cypher is short, way shorter than you’d think she should be, so she’s always eye level with people’s chests. Not that she minds. She’s got short pink hair and it’s not the least bit stylish. It looks like a paintbrush that got jammed down into a jar for too long. And her eyes are indigo, no wait, dark gray, or a combination of those two colors that we’ll call “grindigo.” Did you know “greige” is a real color? Anyway, her eyes are grindigo. Except when she’s peering into the zero point energy and then they’re black.

  I wanted to rewrite Zeno’s description immediately and say something clever or cute, but I had to think about it. I had to let her permeate into my head so I could feel how her character wanted to expand. I read the three stories where she was a side character. Zeno walked on scene, said a thing or two to move the plot, and wandered off to steal things.

  * * *

  I dug into the story more, even though some of it was pretty bad. I mean I’m no J. K. Rowling, but I can write in complete sentences. At least one of the writers was given to having every character gasping and exclaiming and once even ejaculating, but not in the way that would have made the scene interesting.

  I was working on ways to reintroduce Zeno as a machine-based life form when I saw Sierra back online.

  Pounce! She messaged. What’re you doing?

  Working on reintroducing Zeno.

  Want to write it together?

  Yeah, cool, I wrote, but how does that work?

  Get in the shared doc and write a paragraph or two, or a few lines of dialogue, and then I do the same, in turns. And we stay on chat so we can talk about where the scene is going if we need to, so it all makes sense. Go ahead and start it, write a little with Zeno reintroducing herself to the Queen.

  Staring at the blank document, I told her: I don’t know where to start.

  Okay, what’s your new Zeno like? What’s different?

  I thought she should be a little taller and, I don’t know, stuff about being part machine maybe.

  Got it, she said. Can I run with it?

  Please do.

  Sierra:

  The Queen was in her throne room polishing her barbed daggers when a tall stranger came through the doors and bowed low. She was familiar. But not in a way the Queen could place.

  She walked up to the stranger. A tall, beautiful woman with long, dark hair, and complicated metal armor over her legs, body and arms. The Queen appreciated the armor. It looked deadly and effective.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “I feel that we’ve met.”

  On chat Sierra said: Okay, you go.

  Lauren:

  “I’m not surprised you don’t recognize me, but it’s me, Zeno, your thief. I stole an artifact that changed me. It’s in my bag if you’d like to see it.”

  Zeno set down a leather pack at the feet of the Queen with a heavy thunk. The servos in her armor whined and hissed as she moved.

  I told Sierra: I don’t know what the Queen would do.

  She wrote back: Hang on, I’ve got it.

  Sierra:

  The Queen walked slowly around Zeno, her fingers tracing the hard curves of the armor.

  “My thief,” she said. “I like how you say that. Who sent you so far away to get this thing? It wasn’t me. Was it Cypher? She’s too curious, that girl.”

  She stopped in front of Zeno, radiating an aura of danger and power. Zeno trembled a little but then stilled because she knew the Queen would never hurt her.

  The Queen put her hand on Zeno’s arm, or rather on the metal over her arm.

  “Is this part of you?” she asked.

  Lauren:

  “Yes, now it is. It happened when I grabbed the artifact. The metal came out of nowhere and protected me, but I don’t know how to make it go away again,” Zeno said. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m afraid I’
m no longer certain that I know what I am.”

  Sierra:

  The Queen moved her hand along the metal armor covering Zeno’s arm. Her fingers reached its edge and brushed the skin at the base of Zeno’s throat, making her shiver.

  “We’ll have to find a way to get this off you,” she said.

  Lauren:

  Zeno found her mouth suddenly dry. She licked her lips, not knowing what to say. The Queen was so many ranks above her, it would be improper to take her statement as more than a practical suggestion.

  Sierra:

  The Queen of Rogues grinned at her thief’s discomfort. She’d always liked teasing Zeno but now in this new form of hers, there was something else about her. What did she look like under all that armor?

  “We should ask Cypher how to deal with this, she’ll know,” the Queen said. “But not yet. Come and sit by me. Rest. I’ll have the servants bring wine and you must tell me all about your travels. You’ve been away too long.”

  Okay, Sierra messaged while I was reading her last part. I have to run but there’s an opening for you to keep writing. If you need, you can have Cypher come in with new info. Blake won’t mind as long as she sounds decently smart. I’ll read it later. Isn’t this cool?

  Yeah, it’s awesome. See you soon.

  She signed off and I read back through what we’d written. Writing together made me feel more in the scene than when I was writing on my own. Going over it again was like reading over a memory. I could feel Sierra standing in front of me, touching my armor, touching me. I wanted that to be real.

  Sierra had a confident way of moving. Even if she was a foot shorter in real life, it was easy to picture her as the Queen, stalking around the throne room. Her dramatic and compelling and me…she’d described Zeno as “beautiful.” Did she actually think that about me or was it merely storytelling?

  Were we flirting? I didn’t even know how to find out. I hated how far away she was.