I didn’t have time for an existential crisis, so I gently set aside the question of life after death and focused on a different question. I could guess how I had died—I’d run out of oxygen and suffocated—but how had I survived?
“What happened to me?”
On the far wall, an image appeared of someone wearing one of those hideous spacesuits. I recognized the airlock. “I’m coming for you, Noa.” That sounded like DJ; it had to be him.
He opened the outer airlock door, attached the tether to his belt, crouched down, and then jumped. Out of the airlock. The video skipped forward a minute. DJ returned, and he wasn’t alone. The recording lurched ahead again. There was a body on the floor. The body was me. Someone—DJ, I assumed—had stripped me out of my spacesuit, and I was spread on the floor in nothing but a gray bodysuit. It hardly looked like me. Waxy skin, eyes wide but empty. I couldn’t see DJ, but I could see his hands, one on top of the other, pushing on my chest as fast as he could.
“Please don’t die, Noa. Please don’t leave me here alone. I need you, Noa. Please.” The recording paused and then vanished.
But DJ’s urgent pleas lingered; the plaintive sound haunting me. He’d been so desperate to save me, so lost and afraid. My heart hurt for him. I remembered what it felt like to need something that badly. I wanted to crawl into the recording and tell that boy that his efforts hadn’t been for nothing. That he wasn’t alone. Instead, I’d have to settle for finding DJ and thanking him now. If the stupid MediQwik thing ever let me go.
“How much longer is this going to take?”
An irritating three-note chime sounded from the cuff as it popped open and hung loosely around my arm. “Congratulations! MediQwik has completed treating you for cracked ribs and hypoxia-related brain injury. Please avoid oxygen-deficient environments in the future. Additionally, drink three liters of water over the next twenty-four hours, and return to the medical suite if your urine luminesces for longer than seventy-two hours. MediQwik, health redefined. MediQwik is a trademark of Prestwich Enterprises, a subsidiary of Gleeson Foods.”
There was nothing funny about the situation, but I laughed anyway. I’d done the same thing during Grandpa Andy’s funeral. Busted out laughing right during Father Diaz’s opening prayer. I apologized to Gamma Evelyn afterward, and she told me it was okay. That life was ridiculous and absurd, and sometimes the only way to keep it from overwhelming us was to laugh right in its face.
In the last few hours, I had woken up on a spaceship—no, not even on the ship. I had woken up outside a ship. A ship named Qriosity that was in danger of exploding. With the help of a boy named DJ, whom I’d never met, I’d repaired the ship, and then been blown into space for my trouble, where I’d apparently died.
It was absurd. It was the most absurd series of events that had ever happened to me, and if I hadn’t laughed at them, I would have screamed and screamed and kept screaming forever.
“Your treatment is complete,” MediQwik said. “You may exit the medical suite at your leisure.”
When the laughter faded and my body stopped shaking, I said, “Are you programmed to diagnose mental disorders?”
“Yes,” MediQwik replied.
My mom and I hadn’t discussed it, but the fear that I had inherited my father’s mental illness had hovered over our lives. I had to face the possibility that this was all happening in my head. “Am I sane? Have I had some kind of break with reality?”
The lights in the medical suite dimmed slightly for a moment. “According to your most recent brain scan, MediQwik has detected no physiological abnormalities that would indicate the presence of a psychiatric illness.”
That should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Not entirely. If this wasn’t a delusion, then I’d died and been brought back to life and was still stuck on a spaceship. But if it was a delusion, then all I’d accomplished was having my delusion tell me that I wasn’t deluded.
It was a rabbit hole I couldn’t go down, or I would second-guess myself until the end of time.
“What would Mom tell me to do?”
“Your mother is not on board Qriosity,” MediQwik replied. “Therefore I am unsure how to respond to your inquiry.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I muttered.
I knew exactly what my mom would say; I could practically hear her voice. She would tell me to take it one step at a time. First step: get dressed.
My legs were wobbly and the floor was cold. It took me a few seconds to find my balance before I was able to cross the room to the pile of clothes, which turned out to be a revolting tan onesie with the name “Nico” stitched across the chest. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered wearing it, but these were not normal circumstances. Besides, step two was to find DJ, and I wasn’t about to explore the ship in my underwear. I doubted they were even my underwear. I never would have deliberately chosen to wear a pair of dingy white briefs with a saggy ass. The whole outfit was sad with an I-dressed-myself-from-the-lost-and-found-box vibe, but it was better than nothing.
I approached the door, expecting it to slide open, but it remained firmly shut, forcing me to open it manually. “Seriously, what kind of spaceship doesn’t have automatic doors?” No one replied.
Harsh yellow-tinged lights cast the corridor outside medical with a sickly glow. One of the guys my mom had dated for a while had tried to score points with me by taking me to the Naval Undersea Museum when I was nine. It hadn’t worked; the guy had smelled like sauerkraut and thought “Pull my finger” was the funniest joke ever invented. Anyway, Qriosity reminded me of those submarines I’d toured. The steel beams, the rivets, the pipes running overhead. And whoever had chosen the color scheme should’ve been tossed out the airlock without a suit. The tan and green were dire and depressing.
For my first spaceship, it was disappointing.
“DJ?” I stood at the junction of three corridors, unsure which way to go. I wanted to find DJ and thank him for saving me, but I also didn’t want to wander around the ship looking for him while he was wandering around the ship looking for me. The smart choice would have been to return to the medical suite and wait for DJ, but a pounding sound caught my attention, and I decided to follow it.
The thumping grew louder as I walked, and I thought I heard a voice as well. I paused and turned my ear to listen. Yeah, someone was definitely shouting, “Let me out of here!” at the top of their lungs.
I picked up the pace, not paying attention to where I was going, and when I finally reached the source of the noise, it was coming from behind a door with the word “Head” stenciled on it. I pulled the lever and opened the door.
“Let me—” A young woman spilled out and punched me in the shoulder. We tumbled into the wall and hit the floor in a tangle of arms and legs and profanity, not all of it mine. The girl seemed to take a second to realize she was free, and then she scrambled to her feet, stepping on my hand in the process, and backed away from me.
“Who are you, and why did you lock me in the toilet?” The girl was shorter than me, which most people were, with shoulder-length rust-red hair, a haphazard dusting of freckles across her fair nose and cheeks, and wide, dreamy eyes. She was wearing black pants, a gray shirt, a fitted, high-waisted black jacket, thigh-high boots, and a murderous scowl. She also looked to be about my age.