The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (15 page)

Because at first they only see an Asian girl carrying a violin case, and if they think about you at all, it’s to wonder at what a dweeby little princess you must be. But then they realize that the violin is borrowed from the scanty school music equipment
room, deep scratches next to the f-holes as if Wolverine himself had given classical music a brief try before roaring in frustration, that you can only ever understand about half of what your parents are saying (if that), that your father is a nutcase, that your mother – who, let it be known, is amazing at her job – periodically has clients who want to speak to her manager because does her
manager know that
this woman totally cannot speak English?
, that your brother likes to spit on the floor inside the house, that you are trashy and weird and something is deeply wrong with you and
it will never be right unless you do something drastic, like go away to an Ivy League college and return transmuted, if at all.

You like to think that the Ivy League is mystical, miraculous – that, in
a biography, it erases everything that comes before it, or else imbues an ignoble childhood with a magical sense of purpose. And it goes without saying that it charms the life that comes after it.

Grace, you moron!

But I understand. Things were rough; you got single-minded.

Your high school is named after a Native American chief and is said to be one of the most ethnically diverse high schools
in the state, which unfortunately gives ethnic diversity a terrible name because the high school is truly rubbish. They don’t offer AP classes, which is a big part of what drove you to cheat on the SAT, because the SAT is then the only objective measure by which admissions officials will be able to determine if your waving and withered cold hand is the one they want to catch and yank out of the
sea.

(You’ve thought this through. You chew your nails, a lot, and spit out keratin explosively like so many bitten-off ends of cigars. You like to think you fret in style.)

The school day is a long gray expanse. At lunch, you sit in the hallway with some friends. Tama is your best friend here. Tama’s half-black, half-white, her skin paler than yours. She’s stupid-pretty. Not as in ridiculously
pretty, but as in pretty in a way that initially makes people think she’s not smart, with her jutting upper lip and her lashes so thick they pass for eyeliner. You and Tama have an unequal friendship of the type where she is your best friend and you are probably not hers.

You break Fritos in your mouth and listen to Tama talk about her mother’s new painting. It is something sexually explicit
involving satyrs and plums. Tama’s parents are both artists.

You pull out
Science Fiction Terror Tales
, an act that might be rude if you were there, but you are not there. They, your friends, like you when you’re there, but they don’t miss you when you’re not there. I don’t read science fiction anymore, but I like to watch you do it. You get so lost, Grace. You’re split in two: you’re immersed
in a story about a man who is confused about if he’s
really a man or a robot (truth: he’s a bomb), but you’re also dreamy for the better days to come.

Right now, you’re a weirdo in a hooded sweatshirt, a skinny girl shapeless but for a gigantic ass. Think of a boa constrictor that’s just eaten a goat. Stand the boa constrictor on its pointy end. The goat, sliding deeper into its body in one thick
lump, is your ass. The rest of you, in this example, is the boa constrictor, which was chosen because obviously boa constrictors do not have tits.

But someday, far into the future, you will look fine. You will have money to spend on your clothes instead of going to the thrift store and pretending that the stuff there is cool but really everything’s been picked over by tattooed twenty-somethings
and all that’s left are racks of sad tank tops with droopy armpits and flared stretch denim. Your hair will be washed with shampoo like the snot of unicorns and cruel hairstylists who are rude to everyone else but kind and complimentary to you will shear you into acceptability. Someday you’ll learn on your own the things that no one bothered to teach you. You’ll be a lovely young woman.

Yes you
will
.

Riding the bus home after school, you think about those letters that might be in the mailbox right now. Why not? You’ve got a perfect 4.0 (albeit the easiest 4.0 ever), crazy extracurriculars, a brilliant essay all about, like, making realizations about things and stuff at important moments, and an SAT score of 2,400. A perfect score.

Around this time last year, you received a strange
invitation to join a group on a social networking website. The group was called The Other Graces, and when you saw its members, you looked around the library in a panic and scooted your chair closer to the computer. Because the other members of The Other Graces looked just like you, but older, all different ages and hairstyles and clothing.

Well, you joined. The next day, you received a message
from Grace Prime, as she called herself. Grace Prime got right to it:

you have been chosen for a mentorship by the other graces the other graces are grace chos from alternate timelines of a high fidelity to yours
we have decided to help you with your dream of acing the sat in order to do so i will have to open a subspace corridor into your brain
please respond with your answer within two business
days
all best
grace prime

You wrote back and asked her what a subspace corridor was and what it would do inside your brain. You told her that you needed more information before proceeding, duh. Grace Prime called you at home later that night. How she got your number you still don’t know.

“It’s a way of traveling between universes,” said Grace Prime. “You won’t feel anything. Well, you may experience
a side effect of odd dreams, just here and there, but that’s the nature of the beast. It’s an invasion, dear. A kindly invasion. You don’t need to be afraid.”

The cordless handset rested on your face. You tapped your feet on the wall. “You’ll all be inside my brain? For how long?”

Grace Prime’s voice was old. Quavering-old, creaky-screen door old, gargling-with-Listerine-for-a-thousand-years
old. But strong and scary. “Once created, the subspace corridor remains open for a time before fading away. It has to close on its own. It’ll take time, but eventually your mind will be all yours again.”

“I don’t want a bunch of strangers running through my brain,” you said. You laid back on your bed, stuck your big toe into a dent on the wall from that time you threw a desk drawer at it. (See,
you’ve caused trouble too.)

Grace Prime sighed. “Grace, privacy is overrated. Especially among those who’ve already thought your thoughts, or near enough. You think about that. We’re no strangers. Think about what that means. Do you want a perfect score on the SAT or not? And those subject tests are killer. You’ve not exactly had a classical education. You need the help. But it’s your decision
to make.”

You listened to the TV for a while. The way it sounded from the other room, the walls muffling its noise, made you think of someone being kidnapped. Oh, Grace: you composed an ecstatic letter in your head, like a
Penthouse
Forum letter except not to
Penthouse
:
Dear Amazing Stories – you’ll never believe what happened to me …

Then, slowly, you agreed to everything.

“Good,” Grace Prime
said. “You won’t regret it. We get results. We change lives.”

“Now what?”

“Now I tell you the truth,” she said. “The subspace connection was already opened. It was the only way we could talk.” She coughed, but not in an embarrassed way. “I’m sorry. I do hate to trick a Grace.”

Your head jerked up, just a little. The phone stayed stuck to your cheek. “We’re talking on the phone. You called me
on the phone.”

“Unfortunately not,” she said. “Sorry.”

The dial tone became louder, turned up and up, until it was all you could hear. And then you realized that it was all you had ever been hearing.

You never spoke to Grace Prime again. Grace Prime, ancient, weird, brilliant – you wonder how she’s been. Moved on to another young Grace, you imagine. She may have lied to you, but the subspace
corridor worked.

On the morning of the SAT, you got to the testing site and tied your hair back as solemnly as a kamikaze pilot, sitting monolith-straight in a room full of slouchers. The answers came to you unbidden, if not of you then from you. The room was silent but your mind was stuffed migraine-full. You wondered, as you do now, if the feeling of the panoply of Graces in your head, their
voices as familiar as your own thoughts, is what it is like to be your father, who gets transmissions from a place he calls the Information Center. Sometimes you imagine how nice a place called the Information Center would be, so straightforward and honest, but then you remember that the Information Center only whispers lies to your father, lies that keep him awake all hours of the night, listening
and scheming.

With the assistance of the other Graces over the subspace corridor, you aced test after test after test – Biology Molecular, English Literature, World History, Chemistry. That is how it happened. That is how you know you will get into any college you want. You know.

I am still with you, after all these months –
I can’t pull myself away
– and I know this too.

The price you pay
is that you’ll never know how smart you really are.

When you finally get home, you yank open the mailbox door, prepared to gut it of its contents. There’s nothing in there. Your face is tingly and your clothes are sticking to you, sweaty and wet as a pupal skin.

As expected, your brother Luke is sitting on the couch, watching the History Channel. Your mother and father are short, good-looking
people, and it’s unclear who, if anyone, inherited their looks. Both of you are patchy and unfinished. Luke is twenty-four. He finished college in a prudent and cheap way, by attending community college for two years and moving on afterward to the state university. Yet here he is. It just goes to show that escape must be a drastic endeavor. You must seek out the best of everything. Otherwise you
will loop ever closely back to the source, an orbit decaying into sodden trash.

“Where’s the mail?” you say.

He rolls his eyes your way. “Kitchen table.”

There’s nothing there but catalogs and bills. “Nothing for me?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

He sighs deeply. You know Luke is tired from his nocturnal job, making X-ray copies for hospitals. He also works at a discount department store. But
you think this is no excuse for being such a butthead, a terrible brother, a faker, a conspiracy theorist.

“Uh,” he finally says. “Dad came by earlier. I saw him through the window. He took something out of the mailbox.”

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP HIM? DID YOU SEE WHAT IT WAS?”

“He would have made me let him into the house,” your brother says simply. “It was a big envelope. Stop
fucking yelling.”

The last time your father got into the house, he went around cleaning everything up, which meant collecting a bunch of papers and magazines from your and your mother’s rooms and ripping them up. Then he walked around the living room and took all the Christmas and birthday and congratulations cards that your mother had received over the years and put on the walls and he
ripped
those up too. You came home to three big grocery bags full of ripped-up paper clustered neatly by the front door, and your brother in his room with the door closed.

Your mother’s not much of a yeller, but that night she really went off on your brother, which at first appeared ineffectual because Luke already has the mien of one who has just been yelled at, regardless. But after that, he never
let your father into the house again.

Standing there in the living room, shoes still on (and your mother would kill you if she knew!), you consider your options. You’re not going to call your mother. It will only stress her out, and then she will stress you out, and then you will feel sorry that you ever said anything. After their divorce, you discovered that your father had given your mother
some kind of head injury, years and years ago. It’s hard to picture now. He is like King Mr. Head Injury himself now, a man who got knocked straight out of a world in which he was a millionaire and people were conspiring against him in buzzing clusters, into this world, where he’s a bum and no one believes a thing he says. He’s not capable of hurting anyone now, but you must remember: once he was.

You worry so much that this head injury might bite your mother in the ass in thirty or so years. For now, her memory just sucks, kind of. She forgets when she’s promised to take you shopping, because shopping makes her tired and always, always you demand far too much. Once upon a time she had three jobs (a main job at the shipping company, an occasional job at the nearby fried fish fast-food place,
and the jewelry counter at JC Penney’s on the weekends). Now she only needs one job, but the tiredness persists, deepened into something chronic.

It’s also a language barrier thing – this occasionally drifty quality to her; after all, if your life began happening in the Korean language, you wouldn’t be able to remember or express anything for shit.

You’ll only call your mother when you tell
her the good news about college. She’ll be thrilled. She is the saddest and least trashy out of any of you. This is why life is hardest for her – you allow yourself to behave badly while she abstains.

“I need a ride downtown,” you say to your brother.

“I’m busy,” he says.

“It’s the History Channel! They show everything five billion times!”

“Ancient astronauts,” says Luke. “In the Chariots
of the Gods. Chariots of the Gods.” He grins stiffly and holds his head back in a way that makes him look seedy and double-chinned, unpleasantly taxidermied.

“Come on, Luke.”

He’s gotten into a state. He does this all the time and it is so awful. He’ll repeat phrases from his conspiracy theory books over and over again, perform weird tics and squeaks (this is where the spitting on the floor
thing comes in). You know he doesn’t have Tourette’s, you
know
, but he likes to act like he does. Later you’ll understand that damage manifests itself in so many different ways. Later, you might have sympathy for Luke, with his fake Tourette’s. Today, however, all you can think is that he is disgusting