The Thousandth Floor
“Oh. Sure.” Avery waited as their contacts connected, enabling them to flicker and ping each other. “See you around,” she added, and pulled her headset on. The doors slid open, giving Watt a glimpse of the arena as it truly was, a series of gray walls covered in misters and motion sensors.
“Good luck in there,” he called out, but Avery was already a world away.
ERIS
“YOU’RE HERE!” AVERY exclaimed, moving down the hallway toward Eris. The crowds instinctively parted to let her pass. “I thought maybe you were skipping. I haven’t seen you in ages.” Avery’s voice pitched upward at the end, turning that last sentence into a question.
“Even I wouldn’t skip the first day,” Eris said lightly, though it had been the absolute worst first day of school ever. She’d actually come upTower early, wearing a plain black windbreaker over her uniform to hide from the lower-floor stares, and showered in the school locker room. Anything to avoid getting ready in that cramped bathroom she shared with her mom.
Normally on the first day of school, Eris’s parents made her take an awkwardly posed picture by the front door, to add to the collection they’d started way back when she was in preschool. “Good luck!” they would both exclaim, hugging her until she finally escaped to the lift, laughing at their silly picture tradition but secretly loving it.
There hadn’t been any pics this morning, of course. Eris wondered if her dad even knew it was the first day of school. At that thought, she felt a sudden, sharp pain gathering behind her eyes. She closed them for a moment, trying to calm the storm of hurt and bewilderment that tore through her. She couldn’t let Avery see.
“Okay, but, Eris—is something going on?” Avery asked as the two started toward the exit. The afternoon bell had just rung. Students clustered in the hallways like flocks of monochromatic birds, all of them wearing pleated skirts or pressed khakis and button-down shirts. For the first time in her life, Eris was grateful for their stupid school uniform. She wasn’t sure how many outfit combinations she could make with the clothes she’d brought down to 103, but she knew they wouldn’t be enough.
“What do you mean?” she asked, pleased at how normal her voice sounded.
“I haven’t seen you at all since Cord’s, you missed the AR game yesterday, and when I went by your apartment to check on you, no one was there.” Avery shot her a look. “Is everything okay?”
Eris didn’t want to talk about any of this. It was too raw and tender; and besides, as soon as anyone knew the truth, it would all be irrevocably real. But she’d already thought of the perfect excuse. “My parents decided to renovate our apartment. Again. You know how they are.” She gave an exaggerated eye roll. “We’re at the Nuage for a while. I’m sorry about yesterday,” she added.
“I’m just glad everything is okay. I mean, not that I was too worried; I figured you were off doing something fabulous. Like that time you came back a week late from summer break, because you and your mom took ‘the long way home’ from Myanmar,” Avery teased. Eris felt a pang at the memory. She and her mom had so much fun on that vacation, traipsing around Asia wearing brightly printed dresses without a care in the world.
“Anyway, I’m jealous you’re at the Nuage,” Avery was saying. “We should start sleeping over at your place so we can wear those fluffy robes and order ricotta-blackberry pancakes in the morning!”
“Absolutely,” Eris agreed, with false brightness.
They stepped out of the doors and onto the lawn in front of school, where manicured green grass sloped down toward Madison Avenue. A chorus of voices instantly surrounded them, Ming and Risha and Leda all debating how to spend the afternoon, exchanging gossip and stories from the day. Eris just stood there and let it wash over her. When the group decided on yoga and smoothies at Altitude Club, she let herself be swept along, nodding and smiling with the rest of them. She needed this time with Avery and her friends, doing what they always did. She needed to pretend that everything was normal, that her life wasn’t crashing down around her. That she was still Eris Dodd-Radson.
As they walked past the tech-net—the boundary surrounding campus that caused all contacts, tablets, and other nonacademic hardware to go dark—Eris immediately pulled up her inbox. It was delusional, she knew, but she kept hoping for something from her dad. She got that he needed space, but still … was this really how it would be from now on? What if they never spoke again?
The top message in her inbox made her cringe. It was from the Altitude Club’s member services desk: a courtesy notification that her membership had been discontinued.
Eris was overwhelmed by a sudden flush of anger. Her mom had done this—she’d been the one to insist they join Altitude in the first place, the one who managed all their memberships and social appointments and everything else that was fun or luxurious in their lives. Of course, Eris knew her mom didn’t want to spend any of Everett’s money anymore; that was the whole point of moving. But what harm would it really do if Eris stayed on his Altitude membership?
Then she thought of what her mom had said, about letting her dad set the tone of their relationship moving forward, and she realized that might be the reason Caroline didn’t want Eris at Altitude. So that she wouldn’t risk running into Everett there.