My Year Zero Read online

  In the dim lamplight the greenish part of her blue eyes took on a golden hue. With the purple streaks in her hair, the color of her eyes seemed beyond real, like she was herself and the Queen at the same time.

  I forgot if she was talking about two characters in a story or the two of us. I forced myself to unclench my hands from around the Random Mutation mug and rubbed my damp palms on my jeans.

  “No,” I said. “I mean yes, I think they should, it’s, um, good character development. But…I don’t think I can draw that.”

  Her carmine lips opened in a soundless laugh. She reached across the table to touch the back of my hand, a light tap with her fingertips.

  She said, “I have faith in you. But you totally don’t have to. Can you draw something cool for the locus of the High God? Like circles and spheres and galaxies and stuff?”

  We talked about the story for almost an hour, until I was fading with exhaustion. She made a bed for me on the couch in her bedroom. It was ancient in a way that made it more comfortable once I found the right position across its sagging cushions.

  After Sierra turned out the lights, I listened to her soft breathing and imagined that I could feel Cyd across the hall in deep sleep. It had been years since I’d tried to sleep in a house with anyone other than my father, who never made a sound. Isaac used to mumble in his sleep sometimes and I’d hear him if I was awake. I followed Sierra’s breathing, like the gentle waves on a lake shore, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  In the morning I met Cyd and she offered to show me around the Cities. She was as tall as I am and impossibly statuesque. She had the kind of high, sharp cheekbones that I’d kill for and a hawkish, elegant nose. Her skin was a shade lighter than mine, reddish hair cut stylishly short and swept to one side. I wondered what people mistook her for, but I was too chicken to ask.

  Sierra and I got into Cyd’s beat-up Honda, me in the front with Sierra leaning in from the backseat, her hand on my seat’s backrest and the tips of her fingers tickling my shoulder. Cyd drove us over the bridge and through downtown, up past Loring Park where the Pride Festival is each year, past the Walker Art Center (that looks like the head of an angry robot ready to rise up and defend Minneapolis). We went through Uptown, around a bunch of lakes, along a pretty, winding creek to a park with a waterfall and a sandwich shop.

  I got a crawfish salad sandwich and, holding it up said to Sierra, “See, not kosher.”

  She gave me a puzzled look (that made her nose crinkle adorably), but Cyd said, “A girl in my class calls all the McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches ‘McTreif.’”

  I laughed and almost got part of a crawfish up my nose. “Treif” was the Yiddish word for not kosher and it was awesome to hear Cyd use it.

  After sandwiches, Cyd drove us to Dreamhaven Books and I browsed blissfully until Sierra started standing next to me. Cyd dropped us off at the house and went to a lecture by one of her acupuncture teachers.

  Sierra wanted to run out to pick up snacks for tonight when other folks from the story would come over. Plus she had to stop by the secondhand fashion and artsy gift shop where she worked to pick up her paycheck. She asked if she could borrow my car and I figured why not. She’d had an old car that died last fall, so she had to be a better driver than me.

  “You can stay here and get comfy,” she said. “You don’t need to come on my boring errands.”

  I’d happily have done all kinds of boring stuff with her, but she seemed to want to go on her own, so I stayed. I read and dozed off on the couch in her bedroom. When I got up, there were unfamiliar voices in the living room. I heard a woman and a man laughing: hers was a husky, open-throated sound and his a light chuckle.

  Was that Sierra’s boyfriend Dustin? If so, I was pre-intimidated by the evidence of his sense of humor. I went into the bathroom and contemplated my hair. Frizztastic. I wet my hands and ran them over the frizz. It lay down restlessly, like a dog who hasn’t been for a walk yet.

  The woman’s smoky voice carried through the bathroom door: “No. The Greeks didn’t believe in zero. That’s what fucked up their mathematics.”

  “You’re such a geek,” another guy’s voice said. Not the same as the guy who’d been chuckling, this voice fell in the bass range but with a grating overtone.

  “Ah the sound of envy,” the girl replied.

  The first male voice (the chuckling one), said, “The Greeks were dicks. Are you going to play?” His voice was silvery without being too light.

  I flushed the toilet, so I missed what came next, and went into the kitchen for a can of Pepsi. There wasn’t anything else to do; time to check out the living room.

  The wide room had two ancient beige couches and a heavy, ebony-stained oak coffee table that had been shoved against the couch to the far right. Three people sat on the floor in front of the nearer couch with cards spread out between them. Not regular playing cards. Against the backdrop of the smokestack-colored carpet, bright illustrations of monsters, swirling magic, mutated forms, and armored warriors stared up at me.

  A guy with a barrel-shaped body in a navy hoodie sat cross-legged, his back to me. His dense brown hair, made a stark contrast to his eggshell skin at the back of his neck and all down the heavy, furred calves showing below his gray cargo shorts.

  Across the room, sat a taller guy with chestnut skin and a broad, flat nose. Close-cropped midnight hair, a diamond-shaped face with defined cheekbones and arched brows gave him a careful, pretty look. He wore black-framed hipster glasses, the only noncolorful part of an ensemble that included powder-blue sneakers, jade jeans, and a periwinkle shirt covered by a vibrant indigo vest, fully buttoned.

  By comparison, the girl sitting perpendicular to him, leaning back against the couch, was a shocking absence of color: jet-black hair and olive skin, obsidian jeans, coal button down shirt, onyx suit jacket with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her bare feet rested on the outstretched legs of the colorful guy.

  I remembered texting at Purim, “What are you wearing?” She’d said, “Black…like always” and I felt the off-kilter disorientation of knowing her without knowing her.

  She looked up me with slate-blue eyes. Her gaze flicked away and back, away and back, then held mine. Her eyes reminded me of a busted smartphone: screen cracked with a spiderweb of lines, shattered, indecipherable text shining brightly through. I thought she was like a torch: the kind angry villagers use to set windmills on fire.

  The barrel guy saw her staring at me. He lumbered to his feet and held out a hand. “I’m Roy.”

  It wasn’t like we were meeting at a lawn party. What was the protocol for meeting people in a strange house where you’d already been napping? I shook his hand, to my regret, because his palm was damp and he held mine for way too long.

  “Lauren,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, from the story? Then you already know Blake and Kordell.”

  Blake was shorter than I expected. I could almost see her making a good master of secrets, except that her nose was broad and kind of cute, not the least bit sinister. Maybe that was a tactic to set people off guard.

  “Join us,” Kordell said with a gesture to the wide open center of the room between their game and the coffee table. I folded myself down to sitting, equidistant between Kordell and Roy.

  “How do you like Zeno?” Blake asked.

  I pushed a drop of condensation down the side of my Pepsi can and said, “She’s…uh, I think she should have more of a power than she does.”

  “More than being a werewolf?”

  The werewolf thing didn’t match at all with the science fictiony nature of the story. It was hard for me to picture Zeno turning into a wolf inside of a giant spaceship—like that would be an asset. Maybe that was Blake’s point. Maybe she wanted to make a character with a fairly useless power.

  “Why did you pick a werewolf?” I asked.

  “Irony,” Blake said.

  She looked away again, and back, her compact, rose lips forming a half smile.
Was the expression meant for me or was she smiling to herself?

  Blake said, “The original Zeno developed a paradox to prove that motion was impossible so that he could argue for a changeless universe. I thought it would be funny if this Zeno, the thief, could change shape. Maybe I should have called her anti-Zeno, but that doesn’t make for a very good name and I was getting obscure enough already.”

  The words came out of her mouth clear and rapid. There were so many of them that it took me a minute to process. My Zeno was named after who? What now?

  Blake held her cards in one square-fingered hand, facedown against her thigh. The fingers of her free hand tapped her leg as she spoke, but not in rhythm with the words. It made her seem more nervous than me. I wasn’t going to turn out to be the weakest member of this pack after all. Next to the crazy girl, the sort-of-crazy girl seems sane. I felt like a dick, both for thinking that and for how relaxed it made me feel.

  She went on talking, “But I also picked Zeno because he discovered infinity for the Greeks. Even if they couldn’t deal with it. I figured my character, Cypher, is about the number zero, about dividing by zero, teleporting through the zero point energy of the universe—and Zeno is about infinities.”

  A pause. Fingers tapping without a pattern. She said, “Maybe Zeno can turn into an infinite number of forms? Then it’s super ironic but also makes a point.”

  The basis for my character was infinity? And Cypher was zero? I liked these ideas. I saw them overlapping in the space of my mind, like the shapes of a sketch coming together to make the first draft of an illustration.

  “You’d have to put a lot of limitations on that or it wouldn’t make good conflict,” I said. Caught up, thinking out loud. “Changing shape has to cost her physically or emotionally. Maybe it messes with Zeno’s head, not ever knowing what her real shape is. Maybe she can take any form, but she doesn’t want to, she simply wants to be herself but she doesn’t know how.”

  I sketched a shape in the air with my hands: indistinct boundaries.

  “I like that,” Blake said, burning darkly. Staring at me over the smashed rainbow of the cards. “Zeno is everything but she’s afraid she’s nothing.”

  The words “she’s afraid she’s nothing” fell into me like stones dropped in a well, sending ripples through my body. I was afraid of nothing, afraid of becoming nothing.

  “Zeno the infinite,” I said, trying to laugh. The words came out flat. I was cold from the inside.

  Blake gazed over my shoulder, across the room, then down at her cards.

  Kordell said, “You bring together limits, zero and infinity and you’ve basically got calculus.”

  Blake grinned sidelong at him. “You’re making it sound less cool.”

  He rolled his eyes at her theatrically. She leaned toward him and shoved her palm against his shoulder.

  “Play your stupid card,” Roy said, frowning at his cards in an effort to not watch them.

  Blake threw a card down on top of the three in front of him. He groaned and swept his three cards to one side.

  “How’s that for a stupid card?” she asked.

  I went into Sierra’s room to get a heavier flannel because I was freezing. I wanted to get into the tub and warm up, but I’d never taken a bath in a house with strangers. Usually when I was in the tub at home I was alone, and I mean alone in the whole house.

  Blake couldn’t have seen me like that, couldn’t have known how close to the truth she was. She was all about the ideas. No one saw me. That was the trouble with being so much nothing. They didn’t look at me. They hadn’t for so long that I was used to it. Being looked at felt like too much fire under a skin wrapped around ice.

  I left my Pepsi on the dresser and went into the kitchen to find a hot cocoa packet and stall until Sierra got back.

  Chapter Nine

  Sierra returned while they were trying to teach me the card game, “Mystics & Mutants.” Each deck included a hero with magic spells and an army. You fought each other until the last person standing won. I lost miserably in the first game because every card had so many different ways it could be played, especially with the mutations. I kept getting distracted by the art and missing possible attacks.

  Sierra came into the living room through the front door, accompanied by a copper-haired guy with a skinny, curved body like a longbow. I recognized him from the Halloween photos as the one in the Obi-Wan robe, so he had to be Dustin. They were carrying pizza boxes and paused halfway between the door and the dining room, giving off the smell of onions, dough, spicy sauce and pepperoni.

  “I got you veggie,” Sierra told me. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “That’s great.”

  I thought I should get up but nobody else was, so I stayed in the middle of the living room, twisted around to see Sierra. She had on her cool black overcoat with the metal. Her eyes were outlined darkly and swept up with caramel eyeshadow.

  “Lauren doesn’t eat pork,” she announced to the room, with a trace of pride that I found weird but charming.

  Kordell asked, “Halal, kosher, or vegetarian?”

  “Kosher-lite,” I said.

  He chuckled and started picking up his cards. “I like that. Can I steal it?”

  “Be my guest,” I said and pushed my cards into a pile. I didn’t mind that the second game was over before it had gotten going. I was glad to see Sierra.

  “Where are you ever going to use it?” Blake asked him.

  “There are black Jews,” he replied.

  “There are a lot of things. But you’ve been going on about being a proud atheist all year.”

  He sighed in defeat as he put decks back into the box.

  Sierra and Dustin the longbow carried the pizzas through the house to the kitchen. Everyone but me followed. There wasn’t that much room in the kitchen. I’d wait until everyone else had theirs.

  I picked up Roy’s cards, put them in their box, and pulled the coffee table into the middle of the room again. It was too narrow for playing cards, but it would fit plates fine.

  Dustin came back with Sierra right behind. He was an inch shorter than me with a long, gaunt-cheeked face, high-crowned head, and skin like freckle-infested cornsilk. His few boyish curls were the only round element to him. He wore ash-colored jeans tucked into earthy workboots and a fawn mock turtleneck sweater that even I could tell was the wrong shade for his skin tone.

  “This is Lauren,” Sierra told him. “Lauren, Dustin.”

  “It’s good to put a face to a name,” he said.

  “Thanks, same,” I responded, though I remained annoyed that he existed, that Sierra was dating him.

  Sierra dropped into the middle of one couch and Dustin lowered himself next to her. She patted the empty space on her other side.

  “I need to get some pizza,” I told her.

  The others were coming out of the kitchen. Roy took the far side of the other couch facing Dustin. Kordell planted himself in the middle, right next to Roy, who gave him an irritated glare.

  Blake carried two plates across the dining room and offered me one. It held two slices of veggie pizza with a napkin tucked under the plate. When I took it, she went to sit next to Kordell before I could say thanks.

  Sierra watched as I settled beside her with my plate. I couldn’t read the expression on her face but it wasn’t happy. I hoped she was getting a sting of jealousy—and that it was for me and not that she was secretly into Blake.

  That would be my luck. Someday she and Dustin would split up and it would turn out she was into Blake the whole time. We were both dark-haired, slender, not-ghostly-pale white girls. Blake’s hair was more true black than mine and completely straight, cut in a messy shag to her shoulders, framing her face. My hair went past my shoulders in coffee-brown curls when I was lucky and a pyramidal mass of frizzy Jewfro when I wasn’t. I was also a hand taller than Blake, but sitting you didn’t see that. Maybe Sierra picked me out to be friends because I was a more accessible version of Blak
e. That would be so great.

  Roy made it through a slice of pizza while everyone else was halfway into theirs. Dustin leaned around Sierra and asked, “What’s your story, Lauren?”

  “Apparently I’m an infinitely shape-shifting werewolf,” I said.

  “That’s redundant,” Roy protested, holding his second slice barely away from his face between bites. He had orange pizza grease on his chin. “And he means in real life.”

  “So does she,” Sierra told him.

  Roy opened and closed his mouth with no snappy retort forthcoming.

  “Not much of a story,” I said. “I go to school, I draw, sometimes I write stuff.”

  “Family?” Kordell asked.

  He had one bright jade leg crossed over the other at the knee, like a girl. Roy was jammed into the corner of the couch, as far away as he could be. Was Roy kind of homophobic? Not that Kordell had to be queer for that to be the case—in my experience homophobia didn’t care if you were really queer or not—if you did anything that even looked queer, you were in trouble.

  Blake rested an elbow on the back of the couch, her arm behind Kordell, the tip of one finger visible over the rise of his shoulder. She was rubbing lightly on his shoulder but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I live with my father,” I said. “My mom works in DC and my brother’s in college.”

  “Dating?” Sierra asked. She sounded offhand about it, but my heart jumped like a fish and wriggled in the air before dropping back into my chest.

  “Uh, not so much.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me.

  “It’s hard to find a girl to date in Duluth. There’s like three other lesbians my age.”

  “You should date a bi girl,” Kordell said.

  “Haven’t found any of those.”

  I stopped trying to eat my pizza until they were done asking me questions so I wouldn’t have to worry about having stuff caught in my teeth.

  “Do bisexuals actually exist? Or do people just say that?” Roy asked. He was done with his second slice and wiping his fingers on a tattered paper towel.