A Complicated Love Story Set in Space Read online

  PRAISE FOR BRAVE FACE

  A 2019 ALA RAINBOW BOOK LIST TOP TEN TITLE

  A 2019 BOOKLIST EDITOR’S CHOICE BOOK FOR YOUTH

  “Razor-sharp, deeply revealing, and brutally honest.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Raw and moving.”

  —SLJ, starred review

  “Beautiful and forceful… A bold, banner announcement that there is a future for everyone.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  PRAISE FOR THE PAST AND OTHER THINGS THAT SHOULD STAY BURIED

  “Only Shaun David Hutchinson could take on love, family, friendship, life, and death so deftly, hilariously, poignantly, and thoughtfully.…

  This is a book you can’t put down even if you wanted to.”

  —Jeff Zentner, William C. Morris Award–winning author of The Serpent King

  “A fearless and brutal look at friendships and the emotional autopsies we all do when they die.… You will laugh, rage, and mourn its loss when it’s over. If you haven’t been reading Hutchinson, this is a brilliant place to start.”

  —Justina Ireland, New York Times bestselling author of Dread Nation

  “Biting, hopeful, and laugh-out-loud funny. Dino and July’s story is a heartfelt exploration of how our friendships shape us, even after they’re dead and gone.”

  —Francesca Zappia, award-winning author of Eliza and Her Monsters and Made You Up

  “Hutchinson is going to knock your socks off.…

  His intelligent writing will seduce readers with its complex and spunky characters, lively dialogue, offbeat humor, and emotional depth.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “A grotesque, mordantly funny, and tender look at friendship, for fans of… Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End.”

  —SLJ, starred review

  PRAISE FOR THE APOCALYPSE OF ELENA MENDOZA

  “Provocative and moving… A thoughtful story about choice and destiny.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Hutchinson artfully blends the realistic and the surreal.…

  An entirely original take on apocalyptic fiction.”

  —SLJ, starred review

  PRAISE FOR AT THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

  “An earthy, existential coming-of-age gem.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  PRAISE FOR WE ARE THE ANTS

  “Bitterly funny, with a ray of hope amid bleakness.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “A beautiful, masterfully told story by someone who is at the top of his craft.”

  —Lambda Literary

  “Shaun David Hutchinson’s bracingly smart and unusual YA novel blends existential despair with exploding planets.”

  —Shelf Awareness, starred review

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  FOR LIESA, WHO HELPED ME NAVIGATE THIS SHIP AND NEVER COMPLAINED WHEN I GOT US LOST

  This book contains a scene describing a sexual assault in chapter fifty-four of the section titled “The End of a Very Long Day,” as well as references to the assault in the chapters that follow.

  STRANGERS IN SPACE

  ONE

  I WOKE UP ON A spaceship.

  I’d crawled into bed, my hair still damp from the rain, and shut my eyes, expecting to wake up in the same place I fell asleep. As one tends to do. But, no. When I opened my eyes, I was most definitely not in my room any longer. Nor was I in my apartment in Seattle or even still on Earth.

  I didn’t actually wake up on the spaceship. Rather, I woke up outside it, wearing a spacesuit. Drifting in the vacuum where there’s no oxygen or gravity, and basically everything wants to kill you.

  You might be thinking that I knew I was in space because I saw stars. It’s a good guess, but wrong. The first thing I saw was a note on the heads-up display inside my helmet.

  You are wearing a Beekman-Hauser X-300 Vacuum-Rated Spacesuit.

  You are in space, floating outside a ship called Qriosity.

  There is no reason to panic.

  My name is Noa North, and I am not ashamed to admit that I panicked.

  “Help!” I screamed so loudly that my voice cracked. Not that it mattered—there was nowhere for the sound to go. It’s a common misconception that sound doesn’t travel in space. It does; it just doesn’t travel well. That didn’t stop me from screaming, though. And flailing my arms and legs as if doing either was going to help. Cut me some slack. It was my first time in space.

  Also, hopefully my last.

  Warning! Your heart rate is exceeding the maximum recommended beats per minute. Please attempt thirty seconds of relaxed breathing.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Your health and well-being are no laughing matter. This alert has been a courtesy of Vedette Biometrics, a subsidiary of Gleeson Foods.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  The notification disappeared, replaced by a series of readouts that were no doubt intended to be helpful but which meant nothing to me. I wasn’t totally useless. I could build any piece of furniture from IKEA without committing murder in the process, I played a mean game of Mario Kart, and I could whip up a salted caramel buttercream that would blow your mind, but I had no business being in a spacesuit.

  And, yet, there I was.

  I did manage to locate the suit’s oxygen levels in the mess of information overload. I supposedly had seventy-four minutes remaining. I hoped that was enough time to get somewhere safe, though I wasn’t sure what “safe” even meant anymore.

  “This is fine. I’m not going to die. I am not going to die.” My helmet was transparent on three sides and let me get a good look at my suit, which was pea-soup green with eggplant accents. “I am not going to die in this outfit.”

  Being in space seemed unlikely. People didn’t just wake up in space. But I had two choices: one, accept that this was real and that I wasn’t dreaming or on drugs or in hell being punished for the time in sixth grade that I tied tampons I’d stolen from Mrs. Russo’s desk to Luke Smith’s shoes; or two, do nothing, wait to run out of oxygen, and pray that I hadn’t made a horrible mistake.

  I was tempted to do nothing, don’t think I wasn’t. It was the path of least resistance, which my mom and all of my teachers from first grade on would agree was my favorite. But I wanted to live, which meant I needed to stop freaking out and start trying to save myself.

  I patted the suit down and discovered a tether attached to my belt around the back. The ship my hud had named “Qriosity” was immediately in front of me within reach, so I fumbled about, using the hull to slowly turn myself around.

  That’s when the harsh, unrelenting reality of my situation hit me. I wasn’t looking at the stars, I was surrounded by them. Space was empty and filled with shards of light. It was terrifying and brilliant, and I was just a minuscule part of creation. I choked on the beauty of it, and I was strangled by fear.

  Immediately, my brain short-circuited. It couldn’t process that I was floating when it thought I should obviously be falling. Wave after wave of nausea flowed through me, threatening to overwhelm my senses.

  “Don’t puke in the suit. Don’t puke in the suit. Don’t puke, don’t puke, don’t puke.” I squ
eezed my eyes shut even though that was the worst thing I could do, but I didn’t care. All I knew for certain was that vomiting inside the suit was probably an awful idea that I should avoid at any cost.

  I quietly repeated Mrs. Blum’s macaron recipe until the sick, dizzy sensation subsided enough that I could open my eyes. Nothing had changed. The stars were still there; I was still outside the ship. It was time to remedy that. I grabbed hold of the tether and pulled myself along it hand over hand.

  Despite the stars, most of the useful light was coming from lamps on my suit, and those did little more than create a weak bubble of illumination that extended about a meter around me. I could see the hull of the ship as I passed it, but I couldn’t see the entire ship. I didn’t even know what the other end of the tether was connected to.

  “This is ridiculous. Who the hell wakes up in space?” I’d heard of waking up in Vegas, and once, the year my mom sent me to summer camp, Danny Forge woke up in the middle of Stonecana Reservoir in a canoe, but no one ever woke up in space. Except that I had. My brain kept trying to point out that it was impossible that I’d gone to bed in Seattle and woken up in space, but I couldn’t deny what I was seeing with my own eyes.

  “This is how people lose their minds, isn’t it?” I said aloud. Talking helped keep my stomach calm. “You have to consider the possibility that you’re actually sitting on the forty-four bus in your jammies, mumbling to yourself, and that a bunch of strangers are filming you so they can post it online for the likes.”

  That scenario seemed more likely than me being in space, but I had to assume that this was real until I had proof that it wasn’t, or I’d spend all my time questioning everything.

  Ahead of me, pale orange lights bloomed around an open hatch that I prayed was an airlock. The tether was connected to the hull on the side of the opening. I pulled as quickly as I could in the suit. It wasn’t as bulky as movies had led me to believe it should be, but it was still awkward to move in.

  Gentle blue lights filled the airlock as I floated inside. The moment my boots touched the floor, a notification appeared on my hud. Lithos Inc. Mag Boots have engaged. I shifted from leg to leg, grateful to no longer feel that I was going to spin off into the dark nothing. I detached my tether and watched as it was slurped up by a mechanism outside and disappeared.

  The airlock was about the size of a small elevator, but I’d take its cramped confines over the endless expanse of space any day. I just needed to figure out how to shut the door and fill the room with oxygen so that I could get out of the suit, which was growing more claustrophobic by the second. I spied a palm-size touchscreen built into the wall that looked promising. I tapped it with my finger to wake it.

  Cycle airlock?

  I had never wanted anything more in my life. I was going to get out of the suit and breathe air that didn’t smell and taste faintly of tin and sweat. I was going to get on my hands and knees and kiss the floor. I didn’t know if there was gravity in the ship, but if there was, I was going to jump up just so that I could fall back down. Sure, zero-G sounds fun in theory, but the reality sucked and I wanted off the ride.

  I reached out to tap the button that would affirm my deeply held desire to cycle the airlock when a voice spoke to me in a soothing Southern accent. “Uh, hello? Is anyone out there?”

  I turned my head, trying to pinpoint the voice’s source.

  “Anyway, my name’s DJ. I don’t know how I got on this ship—at least, I think it’s a ship—but I’m pretty sure it’s going to blow up.”

  TWO

  IT WASN’T ENOUGH THAT I’D woken up on a ship. I’d woken up on a ship that was going to explode.

  “Hello?” I said. “Can you hear me? Where are you?”

  “I can hear you!”

  This time when DJ’s voice came through, I realized it was inside my helmet. Because, of course it was. Where else would it have been coming from? Any embarrassment I felt over not realizing it sooner was overwhelmed by the visceral sense of relief that flooded through me. I didn’t know who DJ was, nor did I care. I wasn’t alone anymore.

  “What the hell is going on? Where am I? Did you do this to me? I swear to God when I find you, I’m going to make you wish—”

  “I didn’t do this.” DJ’s voice cut through my rage. “I’m somewhere called Reactor Control. That’s what’s stenciled on the door, anyway. There’s a huge chamber with a bunch of pipes running out of it that I think might be the reactor, but I’m just guessing here. I was kind of hoping you knew what was going on.” He sounded a bit winded.

  “Oh.” I felt like a jerk for losing my temper, especially since DJ and I seemed to be in the same screwed-up situation. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m clueless. I mean, I’m smart, except when it comes to math. I’m awful at math, but I’m decent at everything else. Anyway, you said something about blowing up, and I’d really like to not do that, so how do we keep it from happening?”

  DJ was quiet for a moment, and I worried that he’d decided to abandon me. I found myself desperate to hear his deep, soothing voice again. There was something familiar about it. The tenor and tone wrapped around me like a hug, and I was incredibly grateful that DJ hadn’t actually bailed. “The note on the computer says there are a couple things we need to do to keep Qriosity from exploding.” He paused. “Qriosity’s the ship, I guess.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Got it. We’re on a spaceship. What do we have to do to prevent the ship from blowing up?” I wanted out of the vacuum suit so badly that I was willing to do just about anything to make it happen.

  “Uh, so the instructions say we have to patch a leak in coolant conduit F-dash-519 and then shut down the reactor.”

  “Sure, sounds easy.”

  DJ hesitated before saying, “I know my way around computers some. Mostly taking them apart and putting them back together, and I know a handful of programming languages too. I also spent a summer rebuilding the engine of a ’62 Mustang, but I don’t know how useful that’ll be in this situation.”

  A buzz like an electric current began pulsing through my brain.

  Warning! Your heart rate is exceeding the maximum recommended beats per minute. Please attempt thirty seconds of relaxed breathing.

  I had to get out of the suit or I was going to die. The idea began small but swelled in size until it had shoved my other thoughts aside. I couldn’t think about anything other than getting out of the damned suit. I reached for my helmet, my clumsy fingers searching for the latch that would release me from this smelly, canned-air prison.

  “Hey? You still there?” DJ’s voice squeezed in. It was a gentle tap on the shoulder that pushed through the nonsense and noise and stalled my hand.

  I stopped, suddenly aware that I had nearly removed my helmet in an unpressurized airlock. If it hadn’t been for DJ, I would have done it and died.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “You okay?”

  A manic, frantic laugh escaped my lips. “Of course I’m not okay! I’m supposed to be at home in my bed, but I’m in space. I’m in space, DJ! Nothing about this is okay!”

  “There are worse places to wake up.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Stuck in a slimy cocoon spun by an evil alien that tortured you with bad jokes until it was time to eat you?” DJ said. “Snuggled up in the guts of a tauntaun? In the hallway at school, late for first period, wearing nothing but your socks?”

  “Fine!” I said. “You win. There are worse places to wake up.” I shook my head and smiled in spite of myself. “You’ve put way too much thought into this.” Talking to DJ like we were friends hanging out helped me regain some sense of calm. He had a comfortable ease about him. Talking to him made me feel like it was possible we were going to survive this. Whatever this was.

  “You got a name?” DJ asked.

  “Noa.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Hey, so, I know this is a lot to ask, but there’s a countdown in here saying we’ve got about seventeen minutes befo
re the reactor overloads—”

  I shut my eyes, ignoring the rest of what DJ said, and breathed until I was completely calm. Okay, fine. Mostly calm. The low-level panic and feeling of impending doom were going to stick around no matter how many breaths I took.

  “We can do this,” I said, mostly to myself. “Where’s conduit F-519?”

  At the same time as DJ said, “I don’t know,” a path to the conduit appeared as an overlay on my hud. And, of course, it led back out the airlock.

  “That figures,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “The conduit is outside the ship.”

  DJ fell quiet again, and I wished he’d stop doing that. I wanted him to fill every second of silence while I was stuck in the suit. He could have recited the periodic table of elements or read Moby Dick aloud and I wouldn’t have complained. Much. All right, I would have complained, but I wouldn’t have made him stop.

  “I bet Qriosity’s got spacesuits,” DJ said. “If I can find one, I can get out there and fix the leak, but that means you’re going to have to come to the reactor room and—”

  “I’m already in a suit,” I said. “I woke up outside the ship. I’m in an airlock right now. I was about to come inside when you called. I haven’t even pressurized it yet.”

  “Good,” DJ said. “That’s good. You can fix the conduit and I can stay here and take care of the reactor.”

  “Lucky me.” I didn’t know anything about shutting down reactors, but I was jealous of DJ because at least he got to be in the ship. I would have traded places with him in a second, but apparently, time was one thing we lacked.

  “You think you can handle it?” DJ was asking.

  “No?” I said. “I don’t know. This is my first spaceship. I don’t even know what fixing a coolant conduit entails. But I’m out here and you’re in there, so I guess I’m going to have to try.”

  I felt like if I concentrated hard enough, I could picture DJ’s face, which was ludicrous, of course. Just wishful thinking in the dark.