Ground Control to Major Tom

Emily pickering

Scarlett and I were camping up in Washington—a solution, she claimed, to the impressive claustrophobia of our small town right off of Seattle. It was December of our freshman year of high school. Scarlett drove, despite her alarming habit of sliding through stop signs and once, simultaneously hitting two cars while backing into a parking space at a Waffle House, and regaled me with the death of Vladimir Komarov.

“—orbit Earth, and if he backed out, his friend would have gone instead, and then he would’ve died.”

“What?”

“So, there’s a cosmonaut stuck up in space, and he just keeps circling the globe, right? Totally convinced he’ll never touch Earth again. Complete disaster. He’s completely aware that he’s heading to his doom, and as the ship is going haywire, he’s cursing anyone and everyone for making him go on this trip.”

“Wow.”

Apparently satisfied with that conclusion, Scarlett went back to fiddling with the radio, switching between twangy country and sugary-sweet pop, settling on a throwback station, David Bowie’s Space Oddity. “Appropriate for the occasion,” Scarlett said. I stayed mostly silent.

Two days later, I woke up to a call. The day was buttered in sunlight and I felt a sharp pressure by the edge of my eyes.

“He’s dead,” Scarlett said.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up. “What?”

I could hear her shaking her head through the receiver. “Michael. Dead. Last night. Something with his car, someone hit him, or he ran into something—maybe a wall? Another car pushed him into a wall, I don’t know, something happened.”

I laid back down quickly and closed my eyes. I was swimming in a dark space, stretched-out and rubbery.

“I know,” I said. “Scarlett, I know.” She went quiet, then continued.

“Okay, so someone beat me to the news, then, it doesn’t matter. You have to listen to me, I don’t know what to do—you have to help me figure out what to do. He was my brother.” Tiny white spots dotted my vision. I blinked, and everything was still.

“I’m really,” I said, softly, “not the person to ask.” And then, for some insane reason, I hung up the phone. She didn’t call back.

The funeral was the seventeenth. A soft Sunday with enough morning light to sustain me as I rode, pressed against Scarlett, to the church, where I glanced around at all their faces, features sliding off and blending into each other. Everyone looked the same, gathered in groups by the chapel, by Michael’s coffin. Pantyhose runs and nun hair twists and tears like a lake overflow, with water just sitting there. I tried to imagine myself placing a thin white flower on his body, or maybe just the coffin lid, and walking away slowly, my hands clasped. I sat in the second row or maybe the third, surrounded by his family, surrounded by people wearing his face, and suddenly every feature I could pick out in the rosy crowd was his. I tried to imagine a dead body but all I could see were television-style zombies and then, alarmingly, a limp puppet.

Suddenly I tripped, sliding into a couple with the same sad expressions, the girl making a noise of surprise. Some water splashed out of my paper cup onto the floor, and I stopped and stared, the crowd shifting around me, around the sleek section of floor. Then suddenly an arm was finding mine. Scarlett.

She sighed. Her eyeliner was dripping at the corners and her lipstick was smeared, giving her the impression of a wet watercolor painting. “Okay,” she said. Her teeth looked so sharp to me and I could pick out stains under the fluorescent lighting. “Enough of this.”

I found my hand around her, all soft edges and a tight black dress, hair loose.

“Scarlett,” I said. “You don’t—get it.”

“He was my brother,” she said, turning to me. Her face was so close. I could see every mark on it.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said.

“I know. Yeah, I actually know that’s not what you meant. I’m asking for a little support here.” I held her tighter.

First time I met Scarlett, really met her, was at fifteen years old: her eyes on me, pressing a warm knife in my hand. The idea, I was told, was a kind of bonding. Forever, she had said. Or at least through high school. Both of us were in her basement, a mess of folded cardboard boxes and friendship bracelet beads embedded in the carpet. She had shoved everything down here she wanted to forget: a broken treadmill, an easy bake oven. And a small collection of pocket knives. She selected her favorite, carefully; it had been her grandfather’s. There was an elephant carved into it. And now the blade pressed against my palm, the tusks making little imprints. Swear on it, she said. And I did. I swore on it with my words as pointed as I could make them. We swapped a moment of stillness. Then, she stood up, and the air exhaled.

My hands were bursting blood, fingers linked with hers, the brown carpet peeling up at the corners. A lazy yellowed fan spinning above us. I had a headache and the air was cold.

Camping, Washington, it all scared the hell out of me. Here, everything was clear and empty. The first time we went camping was in May, a month before Michael. I looked around to see if I could pinpoint the exact curves of the darkened overclouds, cupping us like fish in a bowl. Nothing. The sky: straight and black and motionless. Even Scarlett was silent, so I told her about empty spaces between electrons. She was staring at the stars and I was watching her. There was something large and unnameable pressing on my chest, constricting my airways, making me uncomfortably warm despite the frigid air. I so envied her brand of exquisitely sterile perfection, untouchable, impossible to flaw.

First time I met Michael I already knew who he was. I had seen him at Scarlett’s, just in passing, could hear the beat of his music bleed through the walls, but had never met him. He would never look at me, I knew. I still had braces that year, had just gotten them off, and kept running my tongue over my teeth.

It was June now, my fifteenth birthday party. This was the first time I had looked him in the eyes; he was about my height and not good at eye contact. The ground was wet and stained with everyone’s leftover drinks. I was dizzy, weaving through the mass of pulsing, sweaty bodies, pushing off each one, until my fingers found an arm that felt familiar, close enough to Scarlett’s.

“Whoa,” he said, putting his hands out. “You good?”

I nodded.

He looked around, his features big and drifting apart, before he told me to meet him out back. He left first and I waited, my limbs growing, expanding. Then I followed him out past the edge of the field.

We paused while he lit a cigarette. I tried to take it casually, but I had watched him too intensely and my hand shook a little too quickly. He laughed and reached back out, taking it from me and tapping it against his lips, two quick beats. “Like this,” he said and demonstrated slower. His eyes cut to mine, and in that moment I knew, more than I had ever known anything in my life. The grass was hard against my back, and I let him do what he wanted. In that moment, he could have had anything he wanted. He told me he would call me again. And the next morning I rolled over, makeup smudged, on a blanket covered with dirt and rain, and reached for Scarlett on the ground next to me.

“I have something to tell you,” I said, and she brushed my arm away before sitting up, quickly, brushing grass from her face and fixing me with a blank stare.

“Whatever it is, it better be good.” And it was.

Michael, three years my senior, was just willing enough to drive me and Scarlett two miles to a gas station, where he met the same group every week in his little black Audi that left a smudge on the landscape as they drove away. That left the two of us and a car and a fall weekend, air freshener dangling from the windshield and working hard, though the windows were rolled down. Scarlett put her hands over mine and demonstrated when to twist the wheel, how to navigate around parking lot streetlights. It wasn’t like she had been driving for much longer than I had; I had watched her just last week narrowly scrape a curb. Michael never looked at me when he gave us the car. In moments like these, Scarlett was the one with total authority, and I let her.

The three of us went camping together for the first time in July. Scarlett had unfolded the tent kind of sideways and suddenly we were in a vacuum of black fabric that whipped against us, and I was laughing, closed-mouthed so I wouldn’t taste it, and then it all stopped and there was Michael’s tanned arm holding the tent down for us. His hair was cropped short and his jeans were too tight and he smiled a crooked smile up at me. And then it was a little like dark matter: unseeable, with a visceral effect on the visible, forming a knowable silhouette.

When she first started buying from Michael, it was simple. An afternoon with the house to ourselves. A ride to the mall, where we spent most of our time on the couches in the middle, watching people walk above and around us, fantasizing elaborate ways to steal the shoes off the mannequin in the rack. Now, the trades were more complicated.

“Seventy-five,” he said, as the Audi unloaded him, limbs easy.

“Absolutely not.”

He laughed. “At least. I left you here for five hours.”

“Like it was some hardship.”

As usual, he didn’t look at me while she said this. I was to remain entirely invisible, I knew this, or maybe I had decided it on my own. But this time, I spoke up.

“Couldn’t have been too hard for you,” I said. He turned to look at me. This was the wrong thing to say, I knew it.

“I’m not paying you seventy-five dollars, I won’t do it. Family discount.”

“Come on,” he said, turning to me, finally. “You want to learn, right?” And I did. And the trades shifted over, one girl to the next, except the way he looked at me, treated me, was entirely foreign and yet I saw every move coming.

We went to a Walmart on the edges of town.

“So,” said Michael, turning and fixing his eyes directly on me. “You ever done anything like this before?”

I shook my head. He grinned.

“Great,” he said, tossing me an ID. “You gotta be the one to do this. They know me here.”

I looked down at the ID. A younger girl, hair darker than mine but the same steady gaze. I read out her name and Michael nodded.

“You’ll be a natural,” he said. “They’ll never suspect either of us.”

“What about Scarlett?” His eyes flashed. This was the wrong thing to say.

“What about her?” he said. “What, you two can’t be separate for one minute?”

“No, we can.”

“Well,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And I wanted him to believe me, I did, I wanted to be one step removed from pity, so I let him pick out the bottle he wanted and I brought it to the cashier, who narrowed all of her features, but she let me pass. She let me win.

What I bought with Michael turned out to be more than just a few hours. I started out eighteen and from New Mexico, then twenty-two and from Ithaca. The best time, Michael would laugh, is when I was forty-five and from New York City, ID worn and plastic loose. My face was still tucked within the strange in-between of adolescence, baby fat collecting over my cheekbones. I never asked where he found the IDs, but he’d always have at least a few tucked in his overgrowing wallet, ready to pass them wordlessly to me with his unspeaking hand, the motion lodging haphazardly in my raw throat. I did the only thing I could: act like Scarlett, my face always stilted and awkward, inhabiting her figure, pilfering her beauty the same way she claimed mascara tubes and flashes her fake at cashiers with sagging skin, gathering beer cans and crumpling the Walgreens receipt on her way out. It was the most fun I’d ever had. A summer passed just like this.

One August night after driving practice, Scarlett and I sat together, swapping lip glosses and talking about the year. Eighth grade had been, as she put it, one of the worst experiences she could imagine a human having.

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t tell me you don’t think the same.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Come on,” she laughed. “Did you see your own haircut?”

I blushed. My mother still trimmed my ends every six weeks; before the start of the year, she had gotten over excited and cut me a short bob, the ends of which now brushed my collarbone. A year’s worth of proof I had survived something.

“I’m never taking another gym class in my life.”

She laughed. “Oh,” she said. “Me either. But you know, I might miss it. At least in four years, I will.”

“I’ll miss this whole place,” I added. And I would. There was no space left between us, and I planned to keep it that way.

Several more laps later, she was finally satisfied. “You have it,” she said. “You really have it. We’ll be the first in our class to drive.”

“Do you think,” I said, “that it’s even going to matter?”

Scarlett shook her head. “Of course it will,” she said. “Everything matters. You’ll understand soon, just like me. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but you’ll get it. Eventually.”

Our last camping trip, in November, went quicker than we both expected. The grounds were predictably bare, apart from a lone pair setting up their tent south of the Lightning Tree, the bark ruined and stripped from lightning decades earlier. The sun had already closed its eyes, and the night felt heavy, draping over us like a shroud. Scarlett talked, eventually, and once she started she didn’t stop; she said the stars made her feel small, dizzying scale, this infinite universe. They were like a fleet of buzzy fluorescent boats, oars sliding through black, sails unrolling across a cupped palm. And we sat there, together, surrounded by everything empty in the world.

Four in the morning: my phone ringing, tucked somewhere in the sheets. I turned around, fumbling for it before my hands hit something solid. The screen flashed a neon picture. Scarlett.

“Hello?”

I couldn’t see her face. Everything was just a big white blob, and my fingers twitched. I imagined a video game controller, tearing through a field of hundreds or thousands of pale fleshy aliens, ruthless and endless and full of fury. Then I blinked, and I was fine, and suddenly so thirsty. My bathroom faucet screeched.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “We haven’t even spoken since the funeral. Like, I get you’re grieving too, but I lost my brother. My parents won’t even tell me the details. They actually told me not to talk to you about it, can you believe that? I have nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Empty words.

“I mean,” she said. “We all were so close. We used to, like, joke.” And then I could see her face, so skinny with little crab apple hollows under her cheekbones, and she was so sincere. And I pictured the hollows, light searing down to the back of my eyes.

“But even—even if I don’t get it, get what you’re feeling, I think I can see you pretty clearly, and here’s what I’m seeing,” and I nodded.

“Sometimes—sometimes in life, we just, we’re vulnerable, and we’re looking for someone to, sort of, see something in us. And so we take this thing, and we latch onto it, even if it’s not really great or special because it’s something. But that, that thing, is just so far out of reality like you can’t even see it from here. And you’re living this entire world, just, in your head, floating up in space.”

“Right.”

She was crying now. “But it’s not—it’s not real, okay? It’s never been real, for you and him. You totally neglected me, you do get that, right? I had no one. That’s not how friends are supposed to be. I’ve always been there for you. I taught you everything. Do you think that wasn’t exhausting for me? I always had to learn first.”

The air in the room was hot, and everything inside of me churned together until all I had in me to say was: okay, and that I understood, and I pressed the sheets close to my eyes until everything was black and I saw stars. I drifted away, unmoored. I saved you, I wanted to say.

“You don’t get it,” I tried to say. I wanted to explain what I had done with Michael, the kind of access I had tried to pry my way into. Some adult life for both of us, me and Scarlett. I was shielding her from something, too, something she would never understand. But I didn’t say anything. I was Komarov. I was Major Tom. I moved myself further into space.

Michael wasn’t a good guy. He was infamous in our school for his elaborate games, the way he’d barter and buy from anyone he could, or ask girls to do the stealing for him. He was infamous for his other trades, too, person to person, a less tangible kind of sacrifice.

It was December when he got in the car and took it out for a spin, past the drive-in and dilapidated houses on the very edges of Clayton, until he finally crashed it into a traffic rotary. It had never gotten fixed and so there it stood, disfigured concrete and uprooted weeds, caving in on itself, collapsing, demolished. I knew. I had been there to see it all.

After Scarlett’s call I decided to drive, the sound of the car cutting through the morning air, disrupting the soft sky. The town unfolded itself to me, too small to be special but not small enough to have anything to do other than this: drive aimless laps and think about the same people, tighten the same friendships until there was no space left to consume anymore.

I was twelve miles away from my house when I saw it. The rotary caved in from all the force. Michael, driving ninety miles per hour, a hundred miles, maybe more, Michael egging the engine on, Michael slamming the gas pedal, me leaving the scene unscathed, minus a half-broken wrist, while behind him stood a proudly gaping hole, like God had smashed its fist into the side. The wrist was hardly fractured, they said. I couldn’t have done anything else.

And I saw Scarlett and her face. I watched her face move, and something small and sharp burrowed tightly inside of me knew. And despite how terrible it could be, I had that one thing, and I held onto it. All my life I had wanted something over her. All my life, I wanted to have an experience her shadow didn’t cover. Every time I looked at her I thought about the car, soft and fuzzy, the lights relaxing even as Michael tensed, turned sharply. I had been there, I knew. I had felt the car stop with a heartbeat, and Scarlett didn’t know.

I jolted awake from staring at the rotary. The car had lulled during my stop, and I couldn’t remember how long I was there. Ten minutes, an hour, maybe more. I started the engine back up and pulled the car away. Quietly, so no one could tell I was ever there.

Emily Pickering is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy from Memphis, Tennessee. Her work has been published in Narrative, Rattle, Dialogist, Best American High School Writing, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, the Youth Poet Laureate program, the Adroit Prizes, the Hippocrates Society, and more. She will attend Columbia University in the fall.