Not a Love Story

This is a story I wrote up based on the interactions of two students in my class. It is not a love story. I'm not really sure what type of story it is, but it is not a love story.

The first time he saw her, she was wearing a frumpy blue dress and clutching a tattered backpack in her left hand. Her mom had nicely braided her hair that day, but it had fallen out on the crazed dash between the airlock and the elementary school. She looked lost, just another member of the Third Colony. She was eight. He was eight and a half, and had lived on Mars for two years, an infinitely longer timespan. The teacher, a worn-out old husk who had come to Mars at the behest of her ludicrously rich son-in-law, had told her to sit next to him.
Ethan had never seen such a pretty creature in his entire life.
For her part, she would recall years later that she had taken a single look at the sterile white walls and the twelve children sitting in long, straight lines, and had wanted to cry for Earth. He had offered her a candy, one of the homemade type that the chemists dreamed up when they were bored and waiting for machines to calibrate.
She thought he was throwing scum at her and had screamed.
And so, the first day he met Andi, he went to detention and helped the maintenance man bore holes in the ice layers that protected the school from radiation. But, if there was one thing he knew, as he handed the drillbits to Jose, it was that he was in love.
Andi, on the other hand, mostly put up with him. Mars was new and strange and just a bit scary, but she had always wanted to walk among the stars. Her dad was an astronomer and her mother a physicist, so it ran in the family. School ran in the family, and math and puzzles and books. This boy who had thrown candy at her (she still couldn’t eat it, it looked like algae) was constantly trying to distract her from everything she loved.
On the next day, he offered her some stained rocks he found outside the dome on an EVA. She looked at them, classified them as silica, took them and put them in her backpack. Then she went back to writing a full geometric proof.
“Do you like them?” he asked.
She ignored him. He poked her. She ignored him some more. He poked her again. She slapped him.
On the second day since they had met, she spent most of the day drilling holes in the ice overing the school. She was equally convinced she was not in love.
The insufferable boy and the quiet girl spent all of their elementary school years locked in the same classroom. Mars had a total of four elementary school classrooms, scattered over the three settlements. The only one at Second landing had both Ethan and Andi. Andi felt trapped.
In fourth grade, he tried to make a paper airplane for her. She told him it couldn’t fly because Mars didn’t have an atmosphere. They were both sent to drill holes in the ice.
In fifth grade, he offered her gum for 164 consecutive days. She tried to tell the teacher about his behavior, but the teacher was so tired that she simply confiscated the gum. Every day, for 164 days, until finally Andi took to putting habanero oil (given to her by Jose) on his pack of gum and watching him choke. He, of course, thought the gum was naturally hot and bragged to the class about how he could handle the hottest gum on the planet. The planet, she thought, was not very populated.
In sixth grade, they went to a boarding middle school at First Landing. For the first time, there were almost forty students in their class. Ethan managed to sit next to her in every period, until two of her girl friends started piling books in the chairs and escorting her to them like an Earth-bound president at a press conference.
In seventh grade, besieged by puberty, he ripped off his shirt in front of the entire school and revealed a fake tattoo of his name entwined with his then-girlfriend’s. He was looking at Andi the whole time, as he washed his girlfriend’s name out. She left the room wailing. He kept on smiling at Andi, smiling like he had done something incredible and courageous. She had turned her back and deliberately refilled her soda, the only sound in the cafeteria.
In eighth grade, he tried to show to the entire class how to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. He had no idea how to pronounce Fermat, so Fur-mat had apparently proven that all prime numbers could be divided by any number except two. He had proceeded to show that, in fact, 3, 5, 7 and 9 were all indivisible by 2, and only 9 was not a prime, which made, so he said, his proof 75% accurate. The math teacher, a young man who moonlit at the astronomy lab, had laughed so hard he had sounded like he was dying. Andi wrote “Fair-mah” on a piece of paper and sent it to Ethan. The look on his face at receiving a note from Her made him entirely miss that she was correcting his pronunciation.
In ninth grade, he had tried to program a piston drone. In doing so, he had completely crushed an entire herbarium and had to page for help from Engineering Central. They had sent their best technician - Andi, who had been volunteering for three years after she discovered fifth generation programming languages.
In tenth grade, he asked her out to a dance. He had even offered to dump his current girlfriend (the former best friend of the girl he had erased from his chest, in fact) for her. She had turned him down and gone alone. She had only gone to ask the physics teacher a rather technical question, but since she was drunk and grinding on the history teacher, Andi tried to go home early.
Which is how she ran into Jacob. Jacob was the sort of boy you never noticed because he was always quiet and had a lot of happy dreams that propelled him through a nasty life of bullying and interplanetary separation from his imprisoned mother. He was insanely artistic, with artwork featured on every digital screen lining the public hallways of First and Second Landing. He was tolerably good at math, but hated reading out loud because he had a speech impediment.
In fact, he was hiding from the reading teacher, who was trying to get him to dance with his peers, when he smacked into Andi, who was running from the sight of her physics teacher grinding her history teacher.
“I’m so sorry,” he said with a slight lisp.
“No, no,” she said, slightly out of breath. He had been walking quite fast and she had not been looking where she was going. “Are you leaving?” she asked, after an awkward pause.
“I gotta get outta here,” he said. “Everyone’s always asking me to say ‘sandwich.’” They had discovered in fourth grade that he could not say the word properly. Last year, some of the other boys had even made shirts bearing the word “shamwish” and a picture of Jacob looking very distraught.
“Why did you come anyway?” she asked. “They’re such brutes to you.”
“My mom says it will be good for me,” he said.
His mom was the First Landing superintendent of human welfare and a licensed psychologist.
“I know what will be good for you,” she said. “How about we both leave and we can tell everyone we were social. And instead, let’s climb to the highest dome and look out at the stars.”
Now, Andi said this knowing full well that Jacob was a social recluse and, really, out of pity since she had just knocked him over. But what she had forgotten was that she had recently become very good-looking, the way sixteen-year-old girls are when they are nerdy but careless about their looks. She was pretty much the first pretty girl who had ever talked to Jacob without being distracted by his lisp and ignoring almost everything he said. She could have suggested lighting Jacob’s hair on fire and he would have followed her.
So they left the high school and it's pounding rhythms and tribal allegiances, and they walked out an airlock and across a red Martian sunscape to the astronomy dome. Andi used her employee card to get in (on Mars, everyone worked) and they climbed to the highest dome and looked out at the stars on their strange new world.
There are some feelings you feel only when you are lying next to a nice person. The intensity and power of lying next to your lover pounds on your head and wrecks your stomach. With your friends, you laugh too much and ignore the view. But when you are with a nice person, not a friend yet and not yet a lover, you sit and think about the world and life and the universe and where you fit, without the pulsating need to share. Or so Andi was thinking.
“Do you think people will ever return to Earth?” Jacob asked. It was, Andi reflected, the longest sentence she had ever heard him utter. “You know, when the Big One comes and life is wiped out and our children’s children’s children can return. Will anyone bother?”
“I don’t think humanity can do all of that to itself,” she said. “We are very good at surviving. We’re the first species to travel between planets. At least in the observable universe.”
“I made some textures last night,” Jacob said. “They were about the Big One.”
“I saw them in the hall this morning,” she said.
They were silent for a long time. There are no shooting stars on Mars, since the atmosphere is so thin. Instead, the entire Milky Way is thrust upon the viewer, like the darkest night on Earth, but still more vibrant and glorious. Jacob took her hand with his own, his fingers gently clasping her knee. It was one of those moments where tenderness and loneliness mingle together, although it destroyed that nice, but aloof, feeling.
“I wouldn’t go back,” she said, at last. “Although I’ll have to, to get my degrees. But Mars is my home.”
“I don’t think it is my home,” Jacob said.
She squeezed his hand, gently, and brought it back down on her leg.
They lay there and talked the way teenagers do, when the world is open at their feet and they have the energy to think and feel and be free. Jacob’s lisp faded, had been fading for years. It was a sign of nervousness, now, not of disability. He smiled at her as they stood up to go home.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re my only friend on Mars.”
They went out of the dome, still holding hands, and across the redscape to the boarding school. They took off their EVAs and opened the inner airlock.
Ethan was standing there, surrounded by three girls, but his eyes were on Andi. They looked betrayed, but he smiled nonetheless and licked his forefingers with a rakish gleam.
“He needs to go to hell,” Andi whispered to Jacob. He smiled.
The planets turn and float through space, little caring about the evolved amoebas on their surfaces. Jacob and Andi were not high school sweethearts, they never shared their first kiss, never slept together and felt the empty longing of losing your first love to fate and choice. Mars was dangerous in those days, and when the inflatable habitats began to wear thin in First Landing no one had the experience to realize a blowout was imminent. Jacob went home on fall break the next day, and his entire family was thrown out into the frigid cold and near-vacuum of Mars by a blown habitat. There was a great deal of adult fuss, investigations and even congressional hearings on Earth (this was before the Big One ended congressional hearings once and for all).
There was a four hour service commemorating them (Jacob’s family were Black and as Baptist as they come). They buried them in a small graveyard, in the red soil of their new home, in the red soil that Jacob had repudiated. Andi had cried then, small tears for a small love. Ethan had tried to angle up to her, to put his arm around her and comfort her, but she had burnt that suggestion out of his mind with a glare.
Eleventh grade and twelfth grade were filled with studies and work in the astronomy lab and college applications. Ethan continued as his gregarious self, dating literally every girl within two years of himself on the surface of the planet, except Andi. Andi, the only girl he had ever loved.
Andi got into MIT and returned to Earth. She pursued a bachelors degree in physics and geology, a masters and PhD in the brand-new science of Martian geoscience. She made several award-winning presentations and publications, was asked to chair a few important dissertation committees, and even had a type of mineral named after herself. She returned for field work to Mars, where she was the toast of the scientific community there and the delight of her parents.
Ethan went to jail. He had been caught peddling the one unforgivable item on Mars: oxygen. From oxygen came not only life, but water and propellant and so many other things. It was the most tightly regulated substance on the planet, on a planet infamous for its lax outlook on drugs and alcohol and sex. He was released after a few months (Mars had no correctional facilities) and put on probation while working for the boring companies at the northern pole.
Andi was defending her dissertation when Ethan received his first promotion to foreman of a boring crew. She was detailing how to predict the effect of melting the polar ice caps on land formations throughout the subequatorial belt while he was planting charges designed to speed the melting of those same polar ice caps. She was flown from Earth to Mars to advise on how to best divert the massive currents of water expected during the melting process. He was on the landing pad to greet her.
She swore then, fresh back from Earth and looking at her tormentor from third grade.
“Excited to see me, Andi?” he asked.
“I’m excited to work,” she said.
“You always have been,” he said.
He gallantly offered to carry an equipment bag. She took the heavy one, with the probes, and handed him her personal bag stuffed to the brim with books. They walked on the ice sheet, ice boots clinking on the brittle ice.
“We’ve been placing charges,” he said. “As soon as you’ve finished your calculations, we can blow this place to the sky.”
“There is no sky,” she said. “That’s why we’re blowing this ice sheet.”
“You are so literal,” he said.
“And you can’t keep your mouth shut,” she said. “Are you really intending on chatting the whole way up to the advance base?”
“It’s better than your morose silence,” he said.
“I’m not silent when the conversation is interesting,” she said.
“You have to loosen up,” he said. “There is so much pent-up energy in you.”
“It’s called ambition,” she said.
Their conversation, if it can be called that, was cut off by their arrival at the advance camp some five hundred yards from the hovercopter. The next few days went the same way. He would talk to her. She would refuse, shut him down, ignore him. He never gave up. She never gave in.
She left six days later, stressed out and tired and barely able to register than she had just started the terraforming process on Mars. She visited Jacob’s grave, and though she was still somewhat sad, she had had other loves. She knew he would have been different from her memory remembered, that he would have changed. But he was dead, and that had made him frozen as the boy who went up the dome with her.
Her calculations had performed far, far ahead of expectations. Terraforming had never been done, and although she had missed a few details (and diverted a massive stream of water directly into a mountain, for instance), she had been close enough to publish several papers. She returned to Earth to be feted and honored, lauded with honorary lectures and appointments.
Ethan, meanwhile, began drilling more holes to blow more ice skyward. As he was doing this, he noticed that, contrary to the latest flow dynamics theories, the angle at which ice broke off from a sheet did not matter. In other words, it flowed in the same direction no matter how it broke off the ice sheet. He began asking around and no one could explain this. He wrote up a description of what he saw and posed a few theories. A few physicists and geologists involved in the terraforming project noticed his views and came out to inspect what he was saying. He had been enrolled part-time in an online college for years, but their laughter at his suggestions made him determine to finish his degree.
He pursued a masters degree when it became obvious no one was taking him seriously. He did not have the stamina for a PhD degree, he knew, but he needed someone with the degree to uphold his views.
Which is how Andi found an email on her phone at 3AM, Greenwich Mean Time. She was awake, having stayed up for a wild post-conference party in her honor. She had escaped that as quickly as she could, but it had taken hours of precise mathematical proofs to calm down. Now, she was staring at an email from the most annoying person in the world.
And, she had to admit, his mathematics were correct and his observations were surprisingly detailed. He even still used the little laboratory journalling introduced in their eighth grade science class. She waited until the morning to reply, acknowledging the email and promising to pay attention to it when she could get away from her conferences.
She checked and rechecked his calculations until they were burnt onto her brain. He was correct, although he had no theory to explain what he was seeing. She postulated it was the gravity and lack of an atmosphere, although the magnitude of this effect were out of proportion to these factors. She constructed several models to explain the effect, none of which were perfect but all of which were better than current flow dynamics. Two months after the original email, she sent Ethan all three models and a long, detailed summary of her views on the matter.
“K.” He replied.
This, she thought, was hardly a meeting of the minds.
But he continued to send her documentation of the strange effects of ice flow on Mars. She mined this information for new papers, and for two years Ethan propelled her career along quite nicely.
She met with him in First Landing, just outside their old high school, when she returned with the Interplanetary Fleet. He was smiling broadly, like had for all these years. She frowned and made several caustic remarks about some of his mathematics.
He replied. It wasn’t perfectly rigorous and it betrayed the biases of an ice borer, but he replied with a mathematically correct expression.
“Are you surprised?” he asked. She realized she was staring.
“I’ve come a long way since I couldn’t pronounce Fermat,” he said, saying it Fair-mah.
“Let’s return to the flow dynamics in a sheet underneath a larger sheet,” she said.
“Will you help me write a dissertation?” he asked.
“Will I what?” she demanded.
“A dissertation,” he said. “I’ve taken all the classes I need for my PhD, but writing a dissertation scares me.”
She found herself stuttering that, in fact, she would be happy to help the boy who threw scum write a dissertation.
They began the next day, going out to the ice floes just downflow from the blasting sights. Ethan had a fantastic eye for the bizarre and seemed to genuinely enjoy proving the stodgy theorists back on Earth wrong. Although she still doubted his nonconformist motives, she found herself enjoying his excitement for a subject that provoked yawns on Earth. On Earth, the point of these advances in flow dynamics was to build new weapons systems for the Big One. Here, on Mars, with him, the point was to study the thing in itself. She found herself relaxing after years of public spot light, enjoying the sound of his chatter for the first time in her life.
She found herself staying at the northern pole longer than she had expected. Usually, a field season lasted a few months, and then almost a year and a half of data analysis. Now, however, the discoveries were coming so quickly that she could not afford to leave for analysis. She spent her nights analyzing what she saw during the day, sending out articles for publication once every six weeks.
Almost a year went by, and Ethan’s dissertation was nearly complete. His mentor was now the foremost expert on Martian geosciences and flow dynamics, while he was a close second. He submitted his dissertation early in the spring of his thirty-third birthday. Six months later, he was on the Interplanetary Fleet headed to his defense, his mentor at his side.
“It’s been almost twenty-five years since I’ve been on Earth,” he said. “I don’t know if I remember what the gravity feels like.”
“Its like jet lag,” she said casually. “You get over it.”
Ethan had never had jet lag. She teased him, then, about being from the most technologically advanced backwater in the history of humanity. He had laughed, but said nothing. For the first time in the entire time he had known her, she had teased him and for the life of him he could not say anything.
His defense was hardly a rousing success. One of the theorists went over his proofs with a fine-tooth comb, making several oblique references to “the young woman overseeing your work.” In retaliation, Andi had written an extensive treatment of one of his pet theories, disproving several key assertions. In the end, however, the committee recommended Ethan for a doctorate.
He had looked so glorious, so happy, as he ascended the stage to received his doctorate from her that she could almost say she enjoyed his company. The party afterwards had been loud and noisy, the type that Ethan loved and she hated. He had looked at her, maybe an hour in, and frowned. He came over and took her arm.
“I couldn’t have done it without you, professor,” he said.
“Flatterer,” she said. “Of course you could have.”
“Shall we leave?” he asked. “The noise is getting to me.”
“Ethan,” she said. “When has there been a party you didn’t enjoy?”
“When my head is full,” he said. “Like right after receiving a doctorate.”
And he walked her out, into the nighttime silence of Earth with its crickets and its free oxygen and its light pollution. The Milky Way wasn’t visible behind the streetlights and a car horn was blaring in the distance.
“It’s a good night for a walk,” he said.
“Go back in and get someone to walk with you,” she said. “My feet are tired and I want a milkshake.”
“I know a fantastic place for a milkshake,” he said. “But it’s, oh, thousands and thousands of kilometers away.”
“You will travel an awful far way to get in a girl’s pants,” she said, not meaning to hurt, not meaning to lead him on.
“Eh,” he said. “This is Earth. It’s overpopulated and birth control is illegal on half of the planet.”
“There are probably twenty women and ten men who would leap at the chance of banging an exotic man from Mars back in that room,” she said.
“Probably,” he said. He turned to her, looking into her eyes. He brushed a strand of hair out of her face.
Ten years earlier, she would have shouted, “What are you doing, pervert?” and pushed him into a wall before executing a cutting krav maga attack on him. Twenty-five years earlier she had gotten him detained for a much smaller aggression. But tonight, she looked back into his eyes and realized they reflected the sickly Earth sky.
He leaned in to kiss her, his fingers caressing her ear. Overhead, a jet came in to land at the airport.
“Not here,” she said. “Not on Earth. We are Martians.”
For the first time in his dealings with her, he backed off as she said no. He stepped back and nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said. “But Earth is the wrong place.”
“It is.”
They boarded the last Interplanetary Fleet headed out in this two year cycle. The thirty day return trip was spent proofing papers and telling jokes. Ethan had a thousand stories about life on the ice caps, about the escapades of ice workers when they returned to the Landings. She told him the stories of her undergraduate days, about making Everclear in a lab and poisoning a hated security guard’s dog with it.
They landed on Mars to a reception that lasted hours. Ethan was the second Martian citizen to receive a PhD after being educated on Mars, so there was plenty of celebrating. If anyone noticed Andi’s impatient glances at the clock, or Ethan’s occasional unfocused smile as he looked at her, they said nothing. Far in the back, a math teacher nearing retirement smiled to himself and shook his head.
The last guest left, the administrative dome was closed, and they wandered the halls hand-in-hand. Neither had quarters in First Landing at that time, so they were staying at the only hotel. The clerk was a high school friend and he gave them a raised eyebrow.
“I’m glad he didn’t start rubbing his stomach and erasing names,” Andi said.
“That was so dumb,” he said.
He leaned in then, in their hotel room, and kissed her. It was one of those kisses that starts slowly, but impatience wins out. His hands were wandering over her body, she was holding on to his neck. She closed her eyes.
“That was candy!” she said. “I’ve never admitted that.”
“It’s ok,” he said.
Whatever the hotel clerk thought the next morning, as she left for her work with the terraforming commission and he headed north to the ice, he never said.