THE NEXT TIME I saw the shrink, he asked about my parents.
If I didn’t think NASA had bugged the whole installation before, I definitely did now.
He led off with the same old innocuous stuff. How did I like class, how were things going with my roommates, was I making friends? Then he went straight for the heart. “How do you think your parents feel now that you’re here?”
I’d been turning this question over in my head every night since the ridiculously short letter, so I was prepared. “I’m not sure. I’m not there with them right now, am I?”
“No, but I’m interested in hearing your estimation. You’ve had a letter from them, I believe?”
“Yes.” I exhaled through my teeth.
“Elaborate, if you don’t mind.”
“It was short. They wished me well.” I wasn’t about to share my fears with him.
Felix’s bespectacled eyes bore into me. “So they haven’t been in close contact with you.”
“How could they? With all the security around here, I’m glad I got a letter at all.”
“And you’re okay with that? With not speaking to your family for a long time? Are you not close with your parents?” He seemed to sense the truth beneath the lie.
I unfisted my hands. These rapid-fire questions were trying to stress me, throw me off. Had to keep up the volley. “Of course I am. We don’t have to talk every day to be close.”
“But this is your first time being so long away from home.”
“No, it isn’t, actually. I’ve been to camp before.” Though I was ready for it, he didn’t ask another question right away. He waited expectantly, and the longer it went on, the more the silence became unnerving. “They have their own lives. My parents are both scientists. They have their work to keep them busy.”
He held back a smile. I knew instantly that I’d slipped up and showed him the weakness he had been probing for.
“How does that make you feel?”
“About the same as I feel about being half Indian,” I shot back. I was still kind of mad at him for deliberately baiting me about Kalpana Chawla. “They’ve always been like that—it’s a fact of my life. It’s not something I think about. You wouldn’t ask a dolphin how he likes living in the ocean. He doesn’t know any different. He just does.”
Felix nodded slowly and scribbled on his notepad. Pen and paper—who still did that, anyway? “Do you miss being at home?”
The question caught me off guard. “No.”
“Not at all?”
“I love my parents—and my grandma and Uncle Gauresh—but being here is the best experience of my life. Everybody leaves their parents at some point. This time next year I’d probably be leaving for college.”
“I’m glad you’re adapting so well, Cassandra. It shows a great amount of emotional maturity on your part. I just have one more question, and then you can get some sleep. Do you think your parents love you?”
I startled, then glared. “Of course they do.”
He looked at me, infuriatingly calm. “Let me rephrase it, then. Do you feel that your parents miss you?”
“Without a doubt.”
“And you miss them?”
I nodded, unwilling to say it aloud.
“If you were to go for months or even years without speaking to your loved ones, would you find that troublesome?”
I held my head up, my expression confident. “I can handle it. Don’t you worry about that.”
He smiled that serene smile of his, and jotted it down in his pad.
“How did—” Mitsuko started.
Walking through our dorm door, I breezed by her so fast her hair moved. I flopped straight onto my bed, face buried in the comforter. “He said I’m an object for my parents to see their own reflections,” I mumbled.
“What was that?”
I rolled over. By the look on her face, she’d heard me clearly enough. “I said, I’m not an object. And my parents aren’t vain.”
“Maybe not. And it doesn’t mean your parents don’t love you.”
“I know that!”
“But they did send you off on this dangerous, experimental mission where they can’t have any contact with you.”
I sat up. “Because it’s my dream. Because they think I’m old enough to make my own decisions. They let me come here because it’s what I wanted. He’s trying to mess with me, to throw me off. It’s rotten.”
She was silent, chewing her bottom lip.
I groaned into my pillow. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m just exhausted. I’ll be fine.”
Mitsuko came over and hugged me. It felt so good I had to tamp down the urge to cry.
The rest of the week went by without another incident. I went to class. Took tests. Ate meals with my group. It was strange how quickly I adapted to having a social circle. Expecting people to greet me when they saw me, save me a seat next to them, ask me about my day—even though we moved through all of our days as a whole.
But even my friends I had to keep at arm’s length. My brain churned constantly, calculating how to beat everyone else. What were their weaknesses? How could I show off my strengths?
I didn’t hear from my parents again. But after my session with Felix, I was fairly certain they were holding my mail on purpose, to test me. I put it in the back of my mind.
The names on the leaderboard shifted negligibly. Our names rose and fell like an irregular heartbeat. Hanna broke briefly into the top five. Mitsuko was ranked number two for an entire day. Emilio held steady in the middle of the pack, but our ranks seemed tied together: if I rose, so did he, so that I never surpassed him.
Even if the ranks didn’t seem to last, or matter, I was obsessed with every minute change.
I was beginning to think this was just another game they were playing.
I answered every question in class that I even thought I knew the answer to. I memorized diagrams from our tablets. I ran every morning, lifted weights in the afternoons, and slept like the dead every night.
I forgot an outside world existed.
My brain was fried. Even without tests, classes were exhausting. I didn’t have access to my usual methods of stress relief—no internet, no books that weren’t textbooks, and definitely no piano. I’d reread the one book I’d brought enough times to be sick of it. I hadn’t heard music in so long, aside from Emilio’s occasional off-key whistling.
I had no idea what day it was.
So after breakfast, when I headed down the hall toward class, Mitsuko tugged on my arm. “Earth to Cass! Where are you going?”
I turned bleary eyes on her. “What?”
“It’s Saturday.”
Hanna and Mitsuko were both staring at me quizzically.
I shook myself out of my fog. Weekends were supposed to be downtime, but there was nothing to do except exercise or study. I followed my roommates out to the track, where a few other candidates had decided to spend their day in the sunshine.
Emilio met us in the hall, eyes alight with some juicy bit of gossip that burst out of him before even a hello. “A guy in my room dropped out today.”
Now I was fully awake. “What? Who? This morning?”
Emilio nodded. “You know Roman? Number seventeen?”
I knew his number better than his name, but nodded.
“He’d been moaning and groaning for days about being bored. He was missing out on college football or some shit. Can’t really sympathize, but whatever. We got up this morning and his bed was made and he was just gone. Apparently he went to the RA office last night and checked out, like a damn hotel, just like that. Without saying a word to anybody.”
I had an image of Luka, sitting alone at his table at every meal.
Mitsuko clucked her tongue. “Sad.”
“No, it isn’t,” Hanna said. “Anybody who doesn’t want to be here needs to go home. If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t disagree,” Mitsuko said. “But dropping out because you’re bored? I mean, come on.”
“After what we had to go through to stay here?” I asked, incredulous. “That marathon? He basically threw away the chance of a lifetime—of multiple lifetimes—in exchange for getting to watch TV. It’s disgusting. I’m with Hanna; I’m glad he dropped out.”
“No skin off my nose,” Emilio agreed. “To each their own. But listen. I overheard some of the profs talking when they didn’t think I could hear—I have excellent hearing, by the way—and apparently it’s not just Roman. Some kids are complaining to the shrinks about being burned out. I guess some of them—the profs, I mean—are getting concerned.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said with a snort. “What did they expect? This isn’t Disney World. There’s no television in space.”
“Stress can make people batty,” Mitsuko said. “But there’s a fine line between training for stressful conditions and running off your potential candidates—most of whom have never had to deal with being deprived of entertainment for longer than it takes for them to sleep.”
“So kids these days are just too spoiled for something as rigorous as astronaut training, is that what you’re saying?” Hanna made a disgusted face. “I beg to differ.”
“Maybe some are. And that’s what they get for picking young people for a mission like this.” Mitsuko shrugged and leaned in close. “So that’s just one more thing we have that makes us better than them.”