Now she was doubling over, and the faculty director was walking into the wing to see what was wrong. Now he was taking her by the elbow and escorting her onto the stage. This was Pippi Lung-stocking all over again.
No.
AJ would not be known for this for the rest of high school. As the lights hit her eyes, her armor clinked back into place. “Sorry,” she said. “I think I just overdosed on Chekhov.”
The faculty director gave her a look of sheer surprise, then burst outlaughing. So did the students. AJ shrugged, the consummate joker, and let their laughter carry her offstage.
And as she left that theater, her defenses sealed shut, locking away that essential self for good.
It was too muchto absorb at once, this world without Noah, without Eudora, this world where people could turn on her without warning, where they could disappear.
AJ couldn’t sleep or eat. She flittered through her many commitments like a hologram. With Libby and Patrick back at UMass, there was no one to notice, and for once AJ took solace in her family’s noise.Astronauticals,her greatest source of comfort, was now an echo chamber for all she had lost. She couldn’t bring herself to think about her fic, let alone log on.
Noah’s absence was absolute, as if he had altered gravity itself. AJ could feel it in her bones, a brittle lightness where before there had been certainty and weight. Even as the weeks stacked up, she looked for him. Even as she told herself he wasn’t coming, she waited for him to reappear and explain. There had to be a way this made sense.
But all of the patterns had been broken; none of the pieces fit. There was no solution where the Drews cared about her and acted this way, or at least none AJ could see. Her only conclusion could be that she had been very wrong about them. The only person left to blame was herself.
Regret had its uses; AJ aimed hers at her college applications like a fire hose. She wrote a series of scalding op-eds for the school paper that had kids cackling in the halls. She took the SATs three times. She got A’s on all of her midyear exams and bagged glowing recommendations.
But the real coup had been her NYU alumni interview.
“Sister of Mike!” said Peter van der Hopper, inviting her into his surprisingly normal living room, where AJ then met his surprisingly normal wife. “What a small world.”
After sidestepping several comments about Eudora and ticking offthe perfunctory form questions, they started talkingAstronauticalsand wound up in an hour-long philosophical discussion about Gothic archetypes in space operas.
“I don’t want to say it’s in the bag, but…” Peter van der Hopper winked as he showed her out.
That night at Reel World, AJ pulled up the recommendation form for Eudora. For a moment, her mouse hovered over the print button. On a whim, she opened up her fic instead.
Holy shit.In her absence, NautiGurl421 had amassed 1,213 followers.
AJ stared at the number.
Then she reached for the keyboard. With a few choice sentences, she placed Glimmette in a new adventure and began again.
As the post went live, AJ reopened the recommendation form and hit delete.
She would go it alone. She would rather lose betting on herself than win with Eudora’s help.
When AJ’s acceptance to NYU arrived that March, she felt as kickass as Glimmette herself.
That summer, AJ did everything she hadn’t the summer before. She laughed at conversations entirely composed ofSouth Parkquotes and didn’t think of it as a game. She partied at night and did more than kiss boys—turned out, it wasn’t that hard. She removed the folding chair from behind the counter at Reel World and tried so very hard not to look whenever a red car drove by.
Because Noah was gone and he wasn’t coming back. And soon, so soon, it wouldn’t matter.
Because soon, AJ would be gone too.
Part II
Into the Blue
Callbacks are just other timelines peeping through. Oh, there I was. Here I am again.
—Laughter & Death,byEzell Farr
New York, New York
November 4, 2007
