Unwelcome Bodies (23 page)

“Well, it’s not like we chose each other,” I said. “The college randomly assigned us together.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to support each other, and she’s not letting you anywhere near her.”

“If she didn’t want a roommate, I’m sure the college would have given her a single,” Elizabeth said.

“You know what?” Brinda said. “Screw the weepy bullshit. I’m going in there right now, and I’m going to tell her—”

And then we heard Kay scream.

The three of us raced to my room. Kay was staring out the window in horror, gripping the window frame with scarred fingers. “It’s too late to do anything,” she whispered.

Brinda ducked her head under Kay’s arm and said, “Oh, that’s just an effigy.”

I looked past the two of them at the burning figure next to the dumpster and had to agree. “Kay, if your eyes were better, you’d be able to tell. It’s really not that convincing.”

“But…the smell…”

“The barbecue, remember?”

Brinda snorted. “I haven’t seen one of these since I left Kashmir. I’m almost homesick. Come on, Kay. I’ll show you.”

Kay stepped back from the window, her hands pressed tightly against her chest. “I can’t go out there.”

Elizabeth said, “Njeri, you stay here with Kay. Brinda and I will take care of it.”

After they’d left, I gently laid a hand on Kay’s shoulder.

She didn’t step away.

Out the window, Brinda and Elizabeth approached the effigy, which had drawn several onlookers already. Brinda picked a long branch up from the ground and poked the burning figure. Its torso toppled off in a distinctly non-fleshy way. She dug the stick into its innards and held up a wad of burning straw, then dumped it back into the fire, which Elizabeth put out with a fire extinguisher.

Kay deflated under my hand, then stiffened. “That’s an effigy of me, isn’t it?”

“I can’t tell. Probably not.”

She shot me a clear look of disbelief, and I couldn’t blame her. I guess I was hoping the lie would help her somehow.

She shrugged her shoulder out from under my hand, called the campus mental health center, and went over for an immediate session. When she was gone, I waved for Brinda and Elizabeth to come back up. They picked up the wooden sign reading “Light a fire under Kay Myerson!” and tossed it in the dumpster, then came upstairs. “Could she read it?” Brinda asked.

I shook my head. “No, but she figured it out.”

“We have to report this to the Campus Po.”

So we did.

Well, at least Kay finally let me support her a little, even if I blew it with a lie at the end. It almost makes me want to thank whoever set up that effigy.

* * * *

September 29, 2018

I’ve already broken up with my first college boyfriend. Damn it.

I was right. Rashid was just dating me to try to get to Kay. He kept asking if he could come visit me at Wellesley, and I kept telling him there was nothing to do here, and wouldn’t he rather see me in the city? We had one date in Cambridge (Toscis’s again), then he showed up unannounced at the dorm, and Kay said she’d take off so we could have some privacy.

As soon as he saw that she wasn’t there, he pitched a fit. So I pitched him out the door on his ass.

He can’t have Kay. Not if I can’t have her.

Why won’t she be my friend?

* * * *

September 30, 2018

Kay’s been walling herself off more and more. Damn it, I’m her roommate. She’s supposed to share with me. I talk to her about classes, about wishing I could find a boyfriend who was only interested in me for me, about how my mother doesn’t understand me… and she barely says a word back to me. She’s not rude or anything, just close-lipped.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” seems to mean, “I don’t want to talk about anything.”

But as far as I can tell, she’s not opening up to anyone else either. And even though it shouldn’t, that makes me glad.

I wonder if this is how stalkers feel?

I just want her to like me. She means so much to me and she has no idea.

* * * *

October 7, 2018

I’m about to fail chemistry.

If I fail chemistry, I fail the future.

God, I’m so melodramatic.

But damn it, I feel so useless! What good is a liberal arts degree when Greenland is almost totally ice-free? How can I even think of having children if I don’t build a viable future for them? I’d get into politics if I thought I could be the first politician to actually jolt the U.S. government into action. And I don’t have the brains or the money to create a company where I can hire brilliant people to create the tools for a carbon-neutral future. Hell, musicians and actors have done some of the best awareness-raising work for the cause, but I freeze up every time I hit a stage, so that’s right out.

Chemistry was my only way.

God, I am such a waste of oxygen.

Advocacy—now that’s something I could do. I’m passionate! I’m devoted! I’m even knowledgeable! Only I’m a total nobody, so who would listen to me?

They’d listen to Kay. I could help her get the message out. We could work together. She’d just have to be the face of the movement, and I’d do everything else.

Only every time I bring it up, she invents some need to leave the dorm and goes away.

I don’t know what to do.

* * * *

October 9, 2018

I’ve spoken to my advisor, and she says that if I drop chemistry before next Wednesday, it won’t show up on my transcript.

When I got back to my room, I cried harder than I have in years. And for once—finally!—Kay was supportive. I tried explaining what was wrong, but she just shushed me and stroked my hair. “It’s not up to you to save the world,” she said.

“But if we all say that—”

“There are plenty of people fighting the good fight. Maybe your job is to send them checks when you get out of college.”

I can’t accept that. I can’t live that way.

How can I be more committed to the cause than a woman who once set herself on fire for it?

* * * *

October 10, 2018

Kay hasn’t been going to the library. She’s been going to the Lulu Wang center to get coffee with Celeste.

I saw the two of them sitting at a table together, talking, giggling. Hell, Kay even reached out and gave Celeste’s arm a playful shove.

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

When she came back to the room, I confronted her. “I’m pretty sure she’s the one who went to the press, you know!”

“She was.”

“So why—”

“I’m glad she did it,” Kay said. “Yeah, it hurt at first, but in the long run, it’s been liberating. People are finally letting me be me instead of making me be The Cause. And she gets that. It’s great.”

“But she… I…”

Kay patted me on the arm—she couldn’t have been more condescending if she’d tried—and said, “It’s admirable how much you care about global warming. But I can’t be that girl anymore. I need friends who understand that.”

I could have been that friend. Why didn’t she let me be that friend?

No, actually, she doesn’t need that kind of friend. She needs the kind of friend who won’t let her walk away from her brave actions, who won’t let her sacrifice be for nothing.

Think, Kay! Think!

* * * *

October 11, 2018

I’ve figured out what I have to do.

* * * *

November 29, 2018

Like someone once told me, “If I’d really wanted to die, I wouldn’t have set fire to myself in the chem lab.”

And like someone also once told me, “It hurt worse than anything you can imagine.”

The pain was…

Well, probably not as bad as Kay’s was.

I didn’t use gasoline like she did, I used a biofuel—I think it was the switch grass stuff. We’d been creating various biofuels in lab that week, and I grabbed the nearest one, poured it over myself, then set off a flare and jammed it against my side to set it off. That stuff doesn’t burn nearly as hot or as fast as gasoline, which was one of the very few things I’d managed to learn in my short, doomed chemistry career.

But it still hurt so much that it makes my eyes water just to think back on it.

And then, of course, there was the burn treatment. It’s come a long way, or so I’ve been told, and the artificial skin really speeds up the healing process, but my god, the pain…

I wish this artificial skin weren’t so much paler than my own. Well, at least “flesh-tone” bandages will finally match parts of me. The lab goggles protected my eyes and the skin around them, so that’s the only original color left on my face. I look like a damned raccoon. And I don’t even want to get into the patchwork that is the rest of my body. The doctors tell me they’ll eventually be able to give me darker grafts, but I think that’s crap. Touchingly, several students from Ethos have volunteered to help me put makeup over the grafts once I’m out of the hospital so they’ll match my original skin tone. And they’ve found a wig maker who makes wigs that look just like natural black hair. I feel bad that I never attended a meeting. You know, back when I was black all over.

And, of course, there was the manifesto…

Oh god, that manifesto will be my epitaph.

I set my computer up to send it out if I didn’t get back to my dorm to switch it off by noon. The press is still talking about the damned thing. So, mission accomplished there, I guess. I just wish I’d taken more than an hour to write it. I could have done a much better job if I hadn’t been in such a pointless rush.

Which brings me to Kay.

I was very careful not to mention her name in my manifesto. If I died, I didn’t want my death to weigh on her like those other dead teenagers. But she read between the lines, and she stepped up, and she’s a superstar all over again. She looks as comfortable in the spotlight as she did back in her HippieChix days. “Njeri’s actions opened my eyes. When I walked away from the conversation that I started back in 2016, the conversation stalled. Well, I’m back. And we’re not going to stop talking until the problem is solved. No one else has to burn themselves for this. Please, no more burning.” She’s taken a sabbatical from Wellesley to throw herself full-time into things—she’s already spoken at three fundraising rallies, testified before Congress, and has an audience with the Pope coming up next month. She’s doing great things, just like I knew she could. She’s going to shame the world into changing.

And she’s asked me to join her once I’m feeling better. I’m the new martyr, apparently. I’ve already seen pictures of people at rallies wearing makeup that looks just like my black and white face.

It’s…creepy.

I…I think I’m done.

This fake skin I’m wrapped up in, it’s…not me. I feel like the brave part of me burned away and all that’s left is…

Well, I’m actually not sure what’s left.

It doesn’t feel like much.

Kay was right—this fake skin is too porous. I can feel everyone’s expectations when they look at me, like I’m the second coming of Kay, the disciple who brought her back to the fight. And I’m completely helpless to block it out, it just slips right through and coils and squeezes and—

I miss Cervantes.

Damn it, I’ve done my part. I got people to pay attention. I made a big noise. Why don’t people think that’s enough?

Why doesn’t Kay think that’s enough?

You think she of all people would understand.

Notes on “Firebird”

Global climate change frightens the crap out of me. Self-immolation terrifies me. Obsession freaks me out. I figured that throwing the three of them together should make for an interesting combination. Originally, I was going to tell the story from the point of view of the teen who’d set herself on fire, but then I realized that I could tell a better story if I switched the POV to someone else, since the protagonist’s story was already over. I set it as Wellesley College as part of the “write what you know” philosophy, but for the record, I never lived in Claflin, so I’m not actually sure if has a room with a lovely dumpster view. Although I know there’s one in Munger, because I lived in it.

Brushstrokes

SEPH STOOD ON THE COBBLED streets of Old Town, one gloved hand covering the bare spot on his painted face, waiting for the next crawler back to his neighborhood. He kept a watchful eye out for the Caste Police and tried not to think about the smear of cobalt and gold he’d just left across the rough brick wall of his favorite alley as Roland had clenched him from behind and eased himself into Seph with practiced strokes.

A crawler rounded the corner, its flat, segmented body rippling across the cobblestones, and came to a halt as the driver pulled on its reins. It crinkled one front leg into a set of stairs. Seph tapped his earbug to pay his fare and climbed up the stairs onto the crawler’s back, then took a seat along the bony ridge of its spine among the dozen or so other late-night passengers.

The crawler stood again and continued scuttling along its route, and Seph tried not to remember the groan that had escaped Roland’s painted lips as he’d shuddered and collapsed against him, tried not to dwell on the spasm that rocked his own body moments later, on the boneless puddle he’d become as he slid down the wall, leaving yet another streak of paint in his wake.

Seph cast a quick glance at his fellow painted passengers and put a second gloved hand up next to the first, just to be safe. Any of them could be Caste Police. Worse, any of them could become informants with the mere touch of an earbug.

The crawler left the brick and mortar confines of Old Town and entered the jungle of extruded spires of the City proper. The closest Wall previewed tomorrow’s
Views from Earth
which promised to take a look back at the great strides in men’s makeup in the wake of the Kennedy/Nixon debates. As they rounded a corner, another Wall advertised that an exciting new reconstruction of the lost
Los Ricos También Lloran
episodes would be available soon, and urged Paintclad to run out and buy the limited edition commemorative undergarments while supplies lasted.