Natural Selection Page 3

  I take her hand. Her skin is cool and dry, her grip firm as she tugs me up to my feet. There’s no mental connection between us; only the pressure of her hand. Without another word she picks up her pack and slings it over her shoulder. We head back to the trail.

  8

  Earth

  On Saturday, Ms. Lucas made us count off into three different groups of four. We were given cameras that printed out small photos, and we were supposed to take pictures of particular rocks and leaves in the forest and classify them on a chart. I wound up with Austin Weaver, Jessica Fowler, and Zach Montgomery.

  Zach knew I didn’t like him, but when we discovered we were in the same group, he waggled his eyebrows at me as if to say, I know Morgan told you what we did. I gave him a cool look, and he grinned back. He was cute enough for a boy. Not too bad of a haircut, clear blue eyes. He was also full of himself, and I didn’t understand why Morgan couldn’t see that.

  All morning, as Austin, Jessica, and I scouted for samples and took photos, Zach made snarky comments. As we flipped through our field guides to figure out whether we’d found the right rock or leaf, it got worse. Austin was a nice boy, kind of nerdy, and he let Zach walk all over him. Jessica’s face got this pinched look on it as Zach started to derail our project, but she didn’t say anything. Finally, as Zach grabbed one of the field guides out of Austin’s hands and waved it around as if he were in a game of keep-away, I said, “Zach, stop being such a jerk. Give that back to him.” Jessica smirked.

  Zach’s eyes narrowed on me, and he said, “I don’t take orders from jealous dykes.”

  I stared at him as my heart accelerated. I saw Jessica and Austin out of the corner of my eye, looking confused. “What did you call me?” I said in a low voice.

  He leaned closer to me, all bully. “Josh told me about you, and I can tell you’re into Morgan. But she’s into me, not you, because she’s not some kind of pervert.”

  I stood up. My legs were shaking. I wanted to say something back, something mean, but I was tongue-tied. So I left, stalking away from Zach and our two witnesses, Jessica and Austin, whose mouths were open in shock. I heard someone calling after me—an adult, I don’t know who—but I didn’t listen. I kept going, hiking up the trail away from the group, my stomach turning somersaults inside me and my eyes burning.

  It was all over now. The word would be out in minutes, and then Morgan would know, and she would never look at me again.

  * * *

  Ms. Lucas found me in a clearing off the trail. I was sitting on a rock, my head in my hands, thinking about the consequences of Zach’s actions. I was sweaty from the hike and from the knowledge that things were never going to be the same. Maybe it was a good thing I was leaving the planet in two weeks.

  “You can’t run off like that,” Ms. Lucas said.

  I glanced up at her. She actually looked worried. “Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t sorry.

  She frowned and crouched down in front of me. She was wearing a green V-neck T-shirt, and the skin of her throat was flushed from hurrying after me. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She gave me a skeptical look. “Did you and your friends have a disagreement over the project?”

  I almost laughed. “Not exactly.”

  There was a silver necklace around her neck, and as she breathed, the amber-colored pendant shifted in the hollow of her throat. “Zach can be a handful,” she observed. “Did he say something to you?”

  Yes, I thought. He called me a dyke, and it’s true, and now my best friend is going to find out and hate me. But I didn’t say a word out loud.

  Ms. Lucas looked at me calmly. She had brown eyes flecked with green, and a faint dusting of freckles over her cheeks. At school she always wore skirts or dresses, but today she was in hiking shorts and boots. The outfit made her look a lot younger. She told me, “Whatever he said, it doesn’t matter.”

  My face burned. Had she heard what Zach said? I dropped my gaze from hers and looked at the necklace she was wearing instead. The stone was teardrop-shaped, but there was something embedded within it. “What’s in that?” I asked, grappling for a change of subject. “In your necklace?”

  To my surprise, she unfastened the chain and dropped it in the palm of my hand. The pendant and the chain were both warm from her skin, and when I looked closer, I saw that there was a tiny leaf within the pendant.

  “It’s a piece of amber from Mexico,” Ms. Lucas said. “That’s a leaf from the extinct Hymenaea tree—the tree that produced the resin that formed this amber.”

  I ran one finger over the smooth surface. It was a pretty color—like a dark orange flame. “It’s a fossil, right?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Fossils occur when the original organic structure has been entirely replaced with minerals, but amber is still organic. It’s basically unchanged from when it was first formed.”

  “How old is it?”

  “I’m not sure, but probably this piece is between twenty and thirty million years old.”

  I held the piece of amber up to the sunlight and looked at the leaf embedded within. It glowed. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  Ms. Lucas sat down on the rock beside me. “It is. Did you know that in Greek mythology, amber is supposed to come from the tears of the Heliades? They were the nymph daughters of the sun god, Helios, and when their brother, Phaeton, was killed by Zeus, they were turned into poplar trees as they mourned him, and their tears became amber.”

  I made a face. “That’s depressing.”

  She grinned, and it lit up her entire face. “A little, yeah. Less depressingly, amber was also thought to have attractive, magnetic qualities, because when you rub it with a piece of cloth, it will create static electricity. In fact the Greek word for amber is elektron, and that’s where we get the word electricity.”

  I handed the necklace back to Ms. Lucas. “Why are you telling me this? It’s not on the test, is it?”

  She took the necklace and shook her head, laughing. “No, it’s not. I suppose I’m telling you because… well, things are complicated. This piece of amber is a lot more than just a pretty piece of jewelry.” She paused, and when she began speaking again her voice was low and earnest. “Whatever Zach said—and I’m not saying I heard it—but whatever he said, I want you to know that the world is complicated, and what some people think is bad, other people don’t.”

  I broke into an involuntary smile at the seriousness of her tone. “It’s okay, Ms. Lucas. I’m fine.”

  Her forehead was furrowed. “Are you sure?”

  “I know it’s okay to be gay,” I told her. “Zach is… he’s a jerk.”

  She smiled slightly. “Yes. Yes, he is.” And then we both broke into laughter. “Don’t you repeat that to anyone,” she warned me.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  She got to her feet. “Come on. You have to rejoin your group. If you want to switch to another one…”

  “It’s fine,” I said, standing. “I can handle Zach.” It was Morgan who would be the problem.

  9

  Kurra

  The resting spot is located about half an hour’s walk from the temple. It’s a building constructed in the side of the mountain, anchored to the bedrock by cables silvered by the moon. A lighted path branches off from the trail, and we follow it toward the structure.

  As we enter, the building’s lights glow on, and I see that it’s a big space, large enough to accommodate at least a dozen people. The room is fitted around the mountain itself, so it’s irregularly shaped, with posts scattered across the floor. There are no solid walls, only a railing to separate us from the night. Hammocks hang from the posts, and in the rough center of the room there’s a circular heater for use in winter.

  I walk over to the heater and drop my pack on the floor, holding my hands out to warm them. I’m not really cold, but the heat feels nice. Nasha selects a hammock facing the heater and climbs in. We probably have a few hours before
dawn. The bells will ring about an hour before sunrise to wake us in time to finish the ascent to the temple. I should try to sleep, but I feel wide awake. I keep thinking about Nasha’s question. How did I feel on Earth, a lone Imrian among humans?

  The more I think about it, the more I remember the way I felt silenced on Earth. There were so many things I couldn’t say. It went beyond not being able to have a susum’urda type of connection with someone. I wasn’t able to be myself—not even with Morgan. Especially not with her.

  “It was hard,” I say out loud. My voice sounds tinny in the vaulted ceiling.

  Nasha’s hammock sways. “What?”

  I feel like I have to take her seriously because tonight is our kibila’sa, and that means I have to answer her question. “You asked me how I felt when I was on Earth, not being able to really connect with humans. It was hard. It didn’t feel right, but not only because humans can’t do susum’urda. Because I had to lie about who I was.”

  Nasha regards me with pale gray eyes. “Did you like being there at all?”

  “I did. It wasn’t all bad.” That’s what makes everything so bittersweet. My mixed feelings confuse me. Parts of it I hated, but parts of it I loved. “I miss it,” I finally say.

  “Why?”

  “I guess… I miss my friends.” I go to the hammock behind me and crawl in. It’s made of stretchy material that molds itself to my body, sort of like a cocoon.

  “But if they couldn’t share your emotions, how could they be true friends?” Nasha asks.

  “It’s not like that. I know some Imrians think that humans are less evolved than us, but they’re not. They’re just different. They make connections with each other too—just not through susum’urda. They… they talk. They share their emotions by speaking about them.”

  I shift so that I can see Nasha’s face in the golden glow of the overheads. She’s attentive, curious. I find myself telling her about living in the dorm with the other girls at Hunter Glen. About how fast news can travel through texts and messages online and plain old gossip. Nasha seems fascinated by boarding school since Imrians almost always live with their parents until after kibila’sa. I talk about the dining hall and classes and cliques and even watching TV with my friends in the common room at night. Nasha is immediately interested in television, and I spend several minutes explaining what it is.

  We have something like acting and theater on Kurra, but it’s very different from human performances. I’ve always thought that there’s a rawness to human TV and movies that our performances lack. Maybe because humans don’t have susum’urda, they spend a lot of their energy trying to simulate it in their TV shows and books and movies. All of those things give humans an approximation of getting inside another person’s head.

  Imrian performances, in contrast, would probably look totally bizarre to a human. They take place with very small audiences, because the point is for the actors to lead the audience into a shared emotional experience, and too many people fragment the experience. The seats and the stage in an Imrian theater are made of a special material that can conduct the actor’s emotions—sort of as if everyone were holding hands—and a lot of the performance is silent, although there are incredible costumes and what humans would call special effects.

  Nasha asks me about my favorite human performances, and I start to tell her about all of Morgan’s favorites, because she was the one who liked movies. I always liked books more; they felt more like susum’urda to me, whereas movies always seemed too distant.

  “Who’s this Morgan?” Nasha says. “Were you two hilima?”

  My eyes widen. I must have been talking about Morgan a lot for Nasha to ask that. “No,” I say. “We were just friends.” Part of me finds it hilarious to think of Morgan in this Imrian context. She would have been so far out of her comfort zone. The night that Zach kissed her, she acted as if it was as important as a marriage proposal.

  “But you liked her, I can tell,” Nasha says of Morgan.

  “Yes, well, she didn’t like girls.”

  “I’ve heard about that. How humans have these restrictions about pairing off. It sounds so limiting.” Nasha says limiting with something like disgust, almost in the same tone of voice that Zach used when he called me a dyke.

  “Humans are different,” I say.

  “You didn’t find it bizarre?” She looks shocked.

  “At first, yes, but I got used to it.”

  “Did your friend Morgan know that you liked her?”

  I hesitate. “She—she found out.”

  Nasha swings her legs out of her hammock so that she’s using it more like a chair. “What happened?”

  I tell her about the camping trip, and Nasha’s face grows increasingly incredulous. “Why do they think love can only be between people of opposite sexes?” she asks. “It’s so strange.”

  I turn so that I free one of my legs from the hammock, and I push my toe against the floor to rock myself back and forth. “Not every human thinks that way,” I say. “But that is the way a lot of them think. It doesn’t make any sense to me either.”

  “Is it because they don’t have susum’urda?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re going back, aren’t you?”

  “In six months. I have to. That’s why I was born.” My parents created me to do this: to be in between places. After kibila’sa, I will have a job to do on Earth.

  Nasha asks, “Do you want to go back?”

  I think about it. I’ve always known what my responsibilities are. Despite Aba’s advocating for me to make my own choices, their expectations have never felt like a burden; they have felt like a gift. “I do,” I say. “I like humans, even if they don’t always make sense to me. And maybe someday—if what my mother and the others are doing works out—maybe they will make sense to me. To all of us.”

  “They’ve been working on this for so long. Do you think they’re close?”

  “Yes. I really do.”

  Nasha considers this. “That’s good, then.”

  I stop my hammock from swinging back and forth and tuck my leg up inside the warmth of the fabric again. “What about you? What will you do after kibila’sa?” After the ritual, most Imrians transition out of school into apprenticeships. The transition can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year, depending on how certain an Imrian is about what they want to learn.

  Nasha smiles at me. She’s very pretty, with bright eyes and curving cheekbones that seem more prominent now that her hair is so short. “I’m thinking of becoming a performer. I might apprentice at the theater in Sakai’uru.”

  “Oh.” That makes sense, given Nasha’s many different looks and her curiosity about human performances. “When will you go?”

  Her smile turns sly. “I don’t know. I’m starting to think maybe I should stick around for a while. Six months? I don’t know why we’ve never been… friends. Maybe we should.”

  There’s a flirtatious look in her eyes, and a flush heats my skin. “Maybe you were busy,” I suggest. “You had so many hilima.”

  She laughs her warm laugh. “There’s always room for more.”

  Her invitation hangs in the air between us, and if this weren’t kibila, I know she would reach for me, and I would be more than happy to be another of her hilima. But it is kibila, and it’s getting late.

  “We should try to sleep,” I say, smiling.

  She stretches her arm up to touch the pillar at the head of her hammock, and the lights dim. “We should,” she agrees. “Dream well, then. Tomorrow you will be a new person.”

  “And so will you,” I respond. “Dream well.”

  As I lie in the dark, I think about kissing Nasha. Or—not about Nasha, but this girl in the hammock nearby, who wants to become a performer. I imagine her on an intimate stage in Sakai’uru, dressed like the legendary Gashan Tabira, the lead in the most famous theatrical production of the last thousand years, with her gleaming fishtail and mouth colored purple by the fruits of the sea. She
will be magnetic. I pillow my head on my hands and fall asleep thinking about her lips.

  10

  Earth

  Morgan avoided me all afternoon. At dinner—hot dogs this time, with potato chips and a three-bean salad that nobody except the teachers ate—she sat with Zach. I sat at a different picnic table where the other kids didn’t talk to me, but kept sneaking glances at me when they thought I wouldn’t notice. I noticed.

  As night fell, we gathered around the bonfire and Mr. Santos led us in telling ghost stories. I didn’t listen. I sat on a blanket and hugged my knees to my chest and wished Zach had never existed. When it was time to get ready for bed, I walked with the other girls to the bathroom, but when we got there they all looked at me and one of them—prissy Kayla Moore—said, “Maybe you should wait till we’re done.”

  I glared at Kayla—Morgan was sort of half-hiding behind her—and I was about to say, Afraid I might turn you gay? when I saw Morgan flinch. My anger died, and all I felt was lonely.

  I turned away to go back to my tent. I heard them whispering about me as I left.

  When Morgan returned a while later, I heard her unzip her tent and toss her bathroom stuff inside. I thought she was going to ignore me and go to sleep, but instead she said in a low voice, “Can I talk to you?”

  I sat up, hope crashing through me. “Sure.”

  She unzipped my tent and knelt down, halfway inside. Her face was in shadow as she said, “Is what Zach said true?”

  I could deny it. Would that make things okay? But I’d already lied to her about so much—about practically everything real about me—and I didn’t want to lie anymore. With this, at least, I could tell her the truth. “Yes,” I said. “What Zach said is true.”

  She sighed, seeming to deflate a little. “You know I don’t feel that way,” she whispered.

  Maybe I had expected her to be disgusted, because the tone in her voice—the sadness in it—took me by surprise. And then I remembered: This was why I liked her in the first place. She was honest. She was a horrible liar. I always knew exactly how she felt about me, even without my Imrian abilities. Maybe that gave me the idea—false, I now understood—that she was like my people. “I know you don’t feel that way,” I said. “That’s why I never told you.”