I sit across from Priya in the living room, watching her eat pizza in my Phillies T-shirt and a pair of Mom’s shorts. I gave her something to wear while I wash her tutu and top after our long afternoon at the amusement park. The clothes swim on her but it doesn’t matter: she could have a parka and jeans on and I wouldn’t care. She dazzles me like the lights on the Kennywood grand carousel no matter what she’s wearing.
After she polishes off the last slice—splitting it with Ginger, her new best friend—she settles back on the couch just half a cushion away.
“I will definitely miss this food of yours,” she says, patting her belly.
“Maybe you can teach them how to make pizza,” I say, tapping my temple like she often does. “Your data collection must have something in there.”
She laughs and leans into me, her hair falling across my chin. I want to grab her shoulders and pull her to me, to not let her sit back on her side of the couch, but somehow I manage to keep my hands still.
She regards me, her lips upturned in a smile. “Matthew, I have only the taste to share with them. The sensation of eating the pizza.”
“And what is the sensation of eating a pizza?”
“It’s . . . not unlike sliding through a wormhole.”
That cracks me up and my laugh fills the room. “What does that mean?”
Priya’s grin is steady. “When your ship passes through a wormhole, you feel the change in time and space in your whole body.”
“And that’s like eating a pizza?”
“The pizza is the wormhole. When I eat it, my whole body shifts. I taste the saltiness of the cheese combined with the tang of the tomatoes at the very moment my teeth crunch into the crust. This is sensed instantaneously. There is no separation of flavors. They are there all at once, an explosion not unlike the sudden shift in the time-space continuum in a wormhole.” She smiles serenely and spreads open her palms. “Do you see?”
I shake my head. “No. And now I wish we had more pizza.”
Priya takes my hand in both of hers, startling me. On the cushion between us, her fingers play with mine, tangle and untangle as if they were thick strands of hair, or the willow branches down by the creek. “Matthew, I will have to leave. Probably tonight.”
“Tonight?” Sudden panic grips my throat. My brain just does not want to assimilate this bit of information, no matter how many times she tells me.
We both look out the window, our eyes finding the setting sun. How did it get so late?
“It is late,” she says, reading my mind again. She bends down to my hand and brushes her cheek and lips against it. “Mmmm . . . you smell like pizza.”
“My favorite cologne,” I say. As she starts to rise from the couch, I pull her back. “We can order another one. Another pie for your trip back.”
She shakes her head. “That was enough. We will be in suspended animation for the return home,” she says matter-of-factly. “We will not be able to eat pizza.” She gently disengages her hand from mine. “Would you get my clothes for me? I can’t travel in this outfit.”
“Not your usual uniform?” I tease her.
She scowls at me. “We don’t have uniforms.”
I head for the basement, calling back to her. “No? Space travel isn’t like Star Trek? No one-piece-unitard things?”
Priya laughs. “That show is very unrealistic. Space is not like that.”
“Well, it is the future,” I say.
Of all the space worlds, I like the Trekverse best. Peace and community and a holodeck for all your fantasies. I’d ride into the final frontier if I had a replicator and a transporter.
When I come back from the laundry room with Priya’s fresh-smelling clothes, I find her collapsed on the floor of the living room. Her legs are twisted under her and her head lolls to one side. Ginger paces back and forth, whining.
“Priya!” I drop everything and run. I pick her up and carry her to the couch. Her long arms and legs are like the tentacles of an octopus, all rubbery and out of control.
Her eyes open, lashes blinking against the light and me. Confusion furrows her brow and her lips part as if she were about to say something.
“Priya? Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Finally, she nods, forehead relaxing as she recognizes me. “I’m . . .” Her voice trails to a mumble.
“What did you say?”
“I . . . I will . . .” And then, more confidently: “I will be fine.” She pushes herself to a sitting position and slowly swings her legs over the side of the couch, trying to get up.
“Whoa, hang on.”
She shrugs off my help, irritated. “I’m fine, Matthew! Leave me alone!” She launches her body off the couch, as if defying me to stop her.
I don’t and she stumbles forward, catching her hand on the arm of the sofa and sort of lurching back and forth, drunkenly, before settling in an upright position. She winces and her hand goes to her head, massaging her temple in a circle.
Are you okay? I want to ask, but bite my tongue. She doesn’t want my help. It’s weird, this sudden change in her. She even walks differently. Her gait is awkward—more awkward than usual—and her head twitches as she cringes inwardly, at something going on internally.
I follow her at a distance out to the kitchen, picking up her clothes along the way. She pauses at the door, looking out at the field. Her hands grip the doorframe and her back shudders. She breathes heavily, her shoulders rising and falling. I don’t think she’s crying. Is she crying?
“Priya—”
“Matthew . . . I have a headache again. May I have an aspirin?”
“Just one?”
She clears her throat but doesn’t turn to me. “Maybe more.”
I leave her clothes on the kitchen table. “Yeah, sure.” I hurry to the first-floor bathroom and grab at the bottles of painkillers. “You know, maybe you need to see a doctor if you keep having headaches,” I call to her. “I know you don’t want to talk to my mom, but she knows stuff about stuff. I mean, it’s probably just the heat or something, but all those meds aren’t that good for you.” I run the water in the sink until it’s cold and fill a glass. “I read once that you can do some serious damage to your liver if you take too much—”
From the hallway, I see she’s gone. Back door wide open. Tutu and dog missing.
I really need to stop turning my back on this girl. Something always seems to happen when I’m not looking.
The sun is at the edge of the horizon when I get up to the field. Priya stands directly in the center of it, a stick figure against the glorious orange glow that fills the sky. Her head is angled to one side, and she cradles her cheek in her palm, her elbow crooked into her waist.
I hold the water out to her and pour some pills into my hand. She cups my hand in hers and tilts it toward her mouth; her lips brush my skin as her tongue flicks the pills from my palm. I feel a shiver roll up my spine and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.
She finishes the water with an ahh. “I feel better.”
“That was fast.”
“I felt better as soon as I came out here.”
“Must be the fresh air.”
“Oh, Matthew . . . ,” she says with a shake of her head. You’re so naive, I hear in her voice, and that kind of pisses me off.
“What?”
“It’s the field. You know that.”
“It’s not. And I don’t.” I sound like a belligerent child. “The fucking field is just a field,” I add, profanity being proof I’m not a kid. So there.
“You’re not as skeptical as you think you are,” she tells me confidently.
“Like you know me?”
“I do. You love that telescope,” she says. “You loved it when you were a child. You looked at the stars, side by side with your dad, and imagined what was out there, what was beyond the Earth and the moon.”
I shrug. I have a telescope. Seems logical I’d like looking at things through it.
“And you wished you could go out there. You and your dad.”
“You know, you can stop talking about him.”
She stares at me blankly.
“Yeah, the stars were cool. They are cool. And I like looking. And I like imagining.” I look up at the moon that is beginning to appear in the sky. It’s that hazy time between sunset and night, that twilight moment when the world around us starts to shift. Which are we, I wonder, day or night?
“What did you imagine when you looked up at those stars?” she asks me.
“Me?”
“Yes, when you and your father watched the skies. What did you imagine was out there?” Her voice reaches to me, drawing me out like little Boo from under the Aokis’ porch.
I glance over at the telescope as if I could see my dad and me, years ago, when Ginger was just a pup frolicking in the dry grass.
Billions and billions of stars.
“I guess . . . I guess I imagined what it would be like to be out there, to sail from one planet to another. Not like Star Trek,” I add. “But real astronauts, real explorers.”
“And what did you think it would be like?”
“Magical,” I say. “Exciting. Transformative.”
Priya murmurs, “It is all those things.”
Before my dad ever had a blog, I was his biggest fan. I was his first follower. I believed the field we were in was a wonderful, magical place. I believed the fact that the aliens had landed there meant anything was possible, even for someone as small as me.
He told me to look to the skies. We were like the stars that glittered and glowed. We could find ourselves among them if we just looked hard enough. We could do great things. We could make a difference. We could be special.
But I grew up and things changed.
“I’m not stupid,” I tell Priya. “I know what’s real and what’s . . . not.”
“Real, unreal, Matthew—”
“The stars are real, the planets are real.” I point up at the sky. “We are real.”
“I know these things about you,” Priya says. “Because we are connected. Like my people at home.”
“Priya, I don’t think that’s it,” I say with a laugh and a shrug.
And then she kisses me. A full-on, mouth-to-mouth, resuscitate-the-dead kiss. Her tongue explores mine in a tangle of tastes—pizza and soda and the bitter aspirin dust. My arms wrap around her back and hers around my waist and we fold into each other like a pair of origami cranes. The last thing I see when I close my eyes is the fading sun over the field.
When I open them again, we are on the ground, my shirts—both the one I was wearing and the one Priya had on—are under us, the thinnest barrier between our skin and the dry earth. I run my hands along Priya’s side, from her thigh to the slope of her hip and waist, trailing my fingers up her arm and across her collarbone. My hand leads my lips and I kiss that same curving path from thigh to neck.
Priya’s fingers and then her mouth caress a trail up my leg and waist but her lips don’t stop at my neck; I feel her tongue gently lick my earlobe and her teeth nibble behind my ear.
I do the same and she giggles.
“Ticklish?”
“Keep going.”
Don’t have to tell me twice.
I roll onto my back and pull Priya on top of me. Her hair falls across my bare chest and that should tickle, but no, it doesn’t. It feels weird and amazing and a little awkward, but mostly amazing and kind of scary and definitely absolutely fucking amazing.
I hold her by the hips as she rocks against me and I press her chest to mine. Our hearts thunder together, blocking out voices, cars, dogs, logic, anything that is not here, is not now, is not between us at this moment. I don’t care about anything else.
I gaze into her eyes, afraid to look, afraid to see what’s in there.
Fragments of thoughts echo in my head.
She barely knows me, she can’t love me.
She’s crazy, she’s beautiful.
She’s leaving.
She’s leaving.
She’s leaving.
My hand pulls her head to mine, and I inhale her, and my tongue goes deep inside her mouth. As we kiss, I see the birth of a new star far off in the universe, an explosion of color in the empty black expanse of space.
We created it.
We are the center of the universe.