Lovely, Dark, and Deep

  My balled fists release. I am alone, which is what I wanted, right?

  …

  Right?

  By the time the reporters are talking with you, they already know the story. They are really only giving you the opportunity to explain.

  —Lee & Li Communications

  Inside the War Room: The Crisis Management Playbook

  The darkness in the basement has weight and heft. Despair in three dimensions coils around me. My lungs are collapsing under its pressure.

  Good, I think. Good.

  It would be so much easier if I could drown.

  …

  I don’t drown.

  …

  I have become Persephone, locked in a world not of my own.

  My phone is no longer a lifeline to the world. It is the dead weight of a life that no longer exists.

  I free the phone from its beautiful coffin and let go.

  The phone drops to the kitchen floor. The screen cracks, forming a glass mosaic, splintered like my hopes and dreams.

  Regret, that’s all I can muster. I am too tired to grieve.

  “Honey,” says the trespasser in my bunker. The basement door opens wider so a little natural light creeps in. So does Dad. Mom’s footsteps patter closely behind down the steps.

  “I’m doing homework,” I answer, glaring at the problem set as I work on my bed. Who knew that I’d miss being in math with everyone else? Who’d have thought I’d want to be at school on a Friday?

  Do my parents listen? (No.) Are they uninvited? (Yes.) Unwanted as they are, Dad spins my desk chair around and plants it in front of my bed. He gestures for Mom to take the seat of honor. Sitting on the edge of my bed, Dad says, “Sweetheart, we need to talk. You. Us. Words.”

  Mom scoots the chair so close, her knees touch the mattress. “It occurs to us that maybe we went a little overboard.”

  “You don’t need to sequester yourself in here,” says Dad, waving around the basement that glows softly with my safety-proofed lighting. “We want you to live as normal a life as possible.”

  “We made a mistake. That’s what we’re trying to say,” Mom says, and squeezes my foot. I draw it away. “We are really sorry.”

  Apparently, not all that sorry. Dad beams at me. “Ms. Kavoussi showed us your college essay.”

  “She what?” I fume, dropping my pencil on my math homework. “What happened to college counselor–student privacy?”

  “There’s no such thing,” Mom corrects me and leans forward so she looks like she wants to dive into my future. “Anyway, more accurately, we went to Liberty to meet with your teachers about their curriculum for the next couple of weeks, and Ms. Kavoussi gave us her comments on your essay to work on at home.”

  “It’s good. It’s really good, honey,” Dad enthuses. “You really thought through why you want to be a journalist. We just didn’t know you were so serious about it.”

  Now, astonishingly, my parents become the professional cheerleaders for the future they’ve never wanted for me. Never mind the multitude of dinner conversations about the unenviable future of journalism: Newspapers are dying; magazines are dead; truth itself is being questioned. I say as much, even quoting them verbatim. A cold dose of their own reality does little to deter their newfound cheer.

  GIVE ME A P! POTENTIAL! Mom: “So we were thinking that while, unfortunately, newspapers have all but cut their foreign desks, you could be a news producer for a morning show. Or,” Mom says, lifting both hands up over her head. Dramatic pause. “A writer for a talk show! That is completely safe.”

  NOW, GIVE ME A D! DREAM! Dad: “How about going into academia? You could be a professor in a communications program. You could work in your own office, teach, and keep the classroom as dark as you want. Huh? Huh?”

  WHAT DOES IT SPELL? POTENTIAL DREAM! Mom: “Yes! Or work in a public policy think tank. You could be a researcher. Someone who gets quoted in the news.”

  I am not making this up: My parents actually fist-bump each other, so pleased with their Viola Wynne Li Revitalization Program.

  “Come on upstairs,” Dad coaxes me. “I’ll make popcorn, and we can brainstorm together.”

  “No, thanks.” My voice is creaky from self-imposed solitary confinement.

  “Now you’re just being stubborn,” says Mom.

  Well, kiss my calm good-bye.

  “This is what you wanted. You made this room without even telling me.” Injustice fuels my exasperation, and I combust, reminding them, “You were the ones who left reams of research on my desk with all those scary pictures of all those photosensitive people with burned-up skin. You were the ones who lectured me on how irresponsible I was for going out.” Did I or did I not just see my parents exchange a triumphant glance? I see their psychic high five: They got me to speak to them for the first time in days. I ignore them and their short-lived victory. “You were the ones who planned for me to live in this bunker.”

  “Basement,” Mom can’t help correcting me.

  “And now you’re actually telling me that I’m being stubborn because I want to stay inside?” I scoff. (So, please go away and investigate the pros and cons, advantages and dangers of me staying inside a basement-bunker like good little crisis managers, shall we?) I tell them, “Maybe you need to work on another crisis plan.”

  “Maybe you do,” says Dad softly.

  The decisive strikes of Auntie Ruth’s Harley-Davidsons later that Friday morning announce her presence well before the basement door swings open and she barks, “Okay, girl, enough is enough.”

  I crank up the volume on my tape recorder, still playing and replaying Nocturne, and turn my attention back to my handwritten essay on The Bluest Eye.

  Auntie Ruth drops her lipstick-red backpack on the floor, where it lands with a thump. She pulls out a stack of books from the backpack: Unbroken. Seabiscuit. “Laura Hillenbrand. Chronic fatigue syndrome. She still created.” When Breath Becomes Air hits my bed, nearly grazing me. “Paul Kalanithi. Lung cancer. He still created.”

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “I’m having some work done at my shop. You should come see.”

  I don’t respond. With a sigh, Auntie Ruth settles uninvited on the edge of my bed. Her voice gentles, as she rests her hand on my calf, the candlelight glinting off her wedding band. “You’ve locked yourself in your tent.”

  “This isn’t a tent,” I tell her.

  “Are you sure?” She glances around in all of its candlelit wonder. “You’re right. It’s more like a yurt, but girl, there’s a world outside.”

  “Have you talked to my jailers?”

  “Have you?”

  Here’s the woman who’s maintained a safe border between her militant singleness and her well-meaning friends and family who’ve wanted to set her up over these last few years. I call her on it now. “But don’t you love your own tent, too, Auntie Ruth?”

  Auntie Ruth flattens the rumples on the bedcovers, and I’m sure she won’t reply. But she surprises me. “You know, I was perfectly fine on my own. After so many years being single, I thought that love wasn’t meant for me. But then, along came Amos, barreling into my auto shop, Mr. Big Shot, Mr. I Own Every Dealership in the Northwest. I kept ignoring him, and he kept coming back. And then, one day he told me about his 1937 Bugatti 57S Atalante.”

  “The one he found in a barn.” We all know this family legend.

  “The one that was a rusted piece of mess. He presented it to me as a special project for us to refurbish together.”

  “Bait.”

  “Courtship.”

  “Wooing,” I say, my eyes widening.

  “Yes, wooing.” The candles on my bedside table flicker. Her eyes grow misty. “That was just so, so … so specific to me. Like he knew the way to my heart would never be through a diamond bracelet or clichéd roses. Like he wanted me to know that he loved how I rebuild things. Like he wanted to get to know me. Honestly, I don’t believe in a second big love like that
.”

  “Do you want to be alone?”

  That question startles Auntie Ruth into silence until, slowly, she says, “All of the men your mom’s been setting me up with? They’ve all been—well, most of them—perfectly wonderful. I haven’t been ready.”

  “You’ve been scared.”

  “That’s right.” She looks at me meaningfully. “I just don’t know if I could ever recover if my heart got shattered a second time.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “Exactly,” Auntie Ruth says, leaning forward. “What if it doesn’t?”

  My own question, reflected back at me, cracks my defenses wide open. I liked my Life Before, my secret plan to be a foreign correspondent who tells the stories about the hardest places of our planet, and maybe, just maybe, in that way, helps the world. Blaming everyone else—my parental jailers, my princess sister, Auntie Ruth, Josh himself—is a heck of a lot easier than admitting I’m scared of Life After.

  “What if I get that sick again?” I ask, tenting myself in the safety of my arms. I rest my chin on my knees. “What if my body really reacts next time?” (What if I die?)

  “What if it doesn’t? What if you’re okay?”

  There they are again, my words, used not against me but for me.

  Auntie Ruth bends down to collect her backpack. “Gastrodiplomacy.”

  “Gastro what?” I ask, lifting my head.

  “Diplomacy. Winning the world over one bite at a time. It’s a real thing. NPR did a piece on it.” Auntie Ruth whips out a printout of the story before I can make excuses: limited tech time, bad Wi-Fi connection in the basement, massive amounts of homework. “See? Studies show that people actually think better of a country after eating their cuisine. When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she created a program to send chefs to cook for foreign dignitaries. And”—she taps a section highlighted in hot pink—“some universities teach courses in gastrodiplomacy. Like American University, in DC.”

  “I cook soup.”

  “Even your Souper Bowl Sundays have meaning. You’ve done about a billion bake sales to get the word out about so many issues. And more than that, you try to get people involved.”

  I am absolutely still now, hearing the echo of Josh from weeks and weeks ago, pointing out that I didn’t just report what happened; I wanted to change what happens. I hug my knees even tighter to myself, missing that boy fiercely. Missing myself even more.

  Auntie Ruth continues relentlessly, “When you think about all that, isn’t it funny how you’re uniquely qualified for gastrodiplomacy? You know how to research issues, you know how to connect people to causes in a nonthreatening way through food, and you know how to tell a story.”

  “I doubt my parents are going to let me go away to college now.”

  “No. No. No.” Auntie Ruth slams one booted foot on the ground, startling me. “Your family is all no-no-no. Can’t. Won’t. What if. It makes me wonder if I am literally and truly from a different planet sometimes. And you.”

  “I’m no better?”

  “The absolute opposite. You were scared to be in the tent in the Serengeti when the lions sounded like they were surrounding us. But you went out first thing the next morning to get me coffee when I was scared to take one step outside.”

  “The tour guides told us it was safe.”

  “But did you see me going out? You did that all on your own, like the most intrepid war correspondent.”

  “Which I can’t be anymore.”

  “Fine. I suppose, if you want, you can be the princess.”

  “Yeah, I’d take being Roz any day now.”

  “Princesses are locked in towers or put in deep sleep, waiting for someone to rescue them. I should know. It took years to convince your dad that I didn’t want or need to be pampered. Being pampered is a prison in its own way, you know.”

  That’s hard to deny when I look around my bunker, tricked out with everything a girl could want except for her freedom.

  “So why not try this on for size?” Auntie Ruth holds up her article on gastrodiplomacy. “Or something else entirely? Give me one good reason.”

  I have no answer, but my traitorous stomach growls as if it’s ready to be the first teen gastrodiplomat on this planet.

  DEAR JOHN LETTER

  VERSION 2

  Dear Me,

  Where’d you go, Viola Wynne Li? Where did you go?

  Viola

  “Viola?” A tentative rap. Then Aminta asks more insistently, “Viola?”

  I remain stubbornly quiet.

  She does, too. When I’m wondering whether she’s left, Aminta says one word, “Iceland.”

  I breathe out and engage despite my best intentions to stay wordless. “What?”

  “They only get four hours of daylight in December … You can read about it here.” Then I hear the soft patter of her light footsteps leaving my home.

  I have zero hours of daylight in my bunker. Beat that. I stay on my bed.

  Iceland.

  I squelch the thought.

  Iceland.

  The place beckons, silent and cold, dark and safe.

  Even if those adjectives remind me a little too much of Snoqualmie Pass—locale of the infamous Singeing of My Skin, I can at least find out what Aminta has left at the top of the stairs.

  GEEKS FOR GOOD CARE PACKAGE

  Lonely Planet Iceland: pages about winter travel strategically flagged with green Post-it notes.

  iPod Shuffle: loaded with podcasts from Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and Talk Nerdy to The Narrative Breakdown and virtually every single lecture given on Khan Academy.

  Photosensitivity Prototype #2: The Astral Projection Hat1. Take one wide-brimmed, UPF-protective safari hat. Cover it with a veil made of sheer UPF protective fabric. Rig the crown with a UV-protected headlamp angled backward. Add a special FX filter that turns the light source into eight-point stars, and meet your personal reading light that does double duty, filling the darkest of days with starlight.

  A bag of orange and black foil-wrapped Halloween chocolate Kisses.

  Persephone, special edition #1.

  * * *

  1   Prototype beta test is sanctioned and approved by Lee & Li Communications .

  I had no idea that Josh had reworked the first issue of Persephone. Without me. It is all kinds of ridiculous that I feel hurt, because what? He was going to crystallize his life and ideas and plans in amber, not moving forward just because we weren’t speaking, his choice?

  Then I read the title: The Night of the Geminids.

  Persephone is surfing atop a meteor, a jet stream of gold stardust trailing across the cover.

  Oh.

  My rug is a galaxy of wadded-up wrappers from all the Hershey’s Kisses I’ve inhaled. The new hat tops my head, the veil shrouds my shoulders, and my own constellation of stars sparkles above me. It doesn’t matter that I’ve read this Persephone redux no fewer than seven times last night. The comic is back on my lap, and I’m studying it this time with the detailed attention of a forensic anthropologist sifting through bones. For good reason: I can’t shake the feeling that I’m eavesdropping on all of my conversations with Josh. To fortify myself, I unwrap yet another Kiss and savor the sweetness that almost hurts my teeth.

  First, there’s Persephone, fully clothed on the cover. As in: Real clothes drape the entire expanse of her body. Granted, her uniform is body conscious, but so are Auntie Ruth’s mechanic’s coveralls, not to mention Superman and Batman’s skintight bodysuits that leave exceptionally little to the imagination. This uniform turns Persephone into a revolutionary firefly: a blaze of bioluminescent light over a midnight-blue paratrooper jumpsuit. Modern and fierce in a way that would make both Zoë and River Tam from Firefly proud, this superhero glows.

  Then there’s the moment that Persephone discovers that devices—phones, computers, the laser she uses to communicate with Planet X—are hazardous to her strength. Near the middle of the issue comes the devast
ating moment when her isolation hits her: alone, in the dark, and five billion kilometers from her closest kin. She hides that kryptonite sadness from everyone, living on Earth like she is one of us, even though she’s here to find her twin sister, who has gone missing in a meteor shower. Such are the perils of being twin intergalactic meteor-surfing sensations.

  Along comes Oskar, a twentysomething, Thor-turned-astrophysicist who’s been tracking the Geminid meteor showers for geomagnetic anomalies. (Well done, nonscience guy.) He finds Persephone, crashed on an ice field, burning hot, even though she’s wearing a teeny, weeny bikini. He bundles Persephone into his superjeep, one with ridiculously oversize wheels, and slams over frozen lava fields and flies through rivers to get her to his home. Her head lolls back on the seat rest, her cheeks are flushed. She looks like she’s dying.

  (Did I look that bad on the night of the Draconids?)

  Finally, they make it to Oskar’s home while Persephone alternates between burning fire and freezing cold. To keep her warm, he tucks her under pelts of fur (which Josh will have to amend because if he thought the photosensitive were sensitive, just wait until the animal rights activists get ahold of this). (Seriously, the guy needs a crisis-trained editorial consultant.)

  Josh (I mean, Oskar) tells me (I mean, Persephone), “It was my fault you almost died. I’m not letting you almost-die a second time.”

  “Now you’re being idiotic.”

  “I wrote about Santorini. The vampires there almost killed you.”

  “Sorry to break this to you,” she snaps at him, “but you’re not the boss of me. I sent myself there.”