Love, Ish Read online

  Also by Karen Rivers

  The Girl in the Well Is Me

  LOVE,

  ISH

  Karen Rivers

  Algonquin Young Readers 2017

  For Linden, with love. I hope one day you get to Mars,

  but I also hope you never leave.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  Chapter 1

  As a planet, the Earth is mostly OK, I guess. It’s just not for me. You don’t have to try to change my mind. It won’t work! I know that there is plenty here that’s terrific. But none of it is enough. Like, it’s hard to argue against blue skies and puffy white clouds, fresh-­cut lawns and cold, clear lakes, but these things are already on their way out. Thanks to global warming, the lawns are all dead and the lakes are drying up and the sky is polluted. We’ve wrecked it. Global warming is a real thing. You can pretend it’s not, but that’s just dumb. It’s science.

  There are still things that will make me ache inside from missing so much: ice cream, my parrot, Buzz Aldrin, and watching TV from the living room floor. I know that I’ll lie on my bed in my dome, hearing nothing but the howling Mars wind, and I’ll miss the silvery-­shivery sound the wind makes in the trees when I’m lying on my bed at home, watching the shadows of those leaves moving around on my wall.

  I’ll miss jumping off our dock into the lake when the weather is really hot and the lake is cold (and not half-­empty like it is right now because of the drought). It’s the best feeling in the world. There aren’t any lakes on Mars. Yet.

  But even though I love Christmas mornings and piles of library books and the hammock that Dad strung up between the porch rail and the mailbox post and looking up at the stars at night, I’m still going to do it. I have to do it. It’s what I was meant to do. I just know.

  Most people don’t get it, but in my mind, it’s no different from what the explorers did when they came to America. They didn’t know what they were in for. They definitely knew that they might not ever go home. So what’s the diff? Someone has to be first, that’s all. And if we don’t spread out to other planets, the human race will eventually just die altogether.

  Here’s something you might not know: We are all made of stars. Up until last week, I just thought that was another poetic lie, like you see in the dentist’s waiting room scrawled over a terrible painting of a night sky with the artsy-­blurry kind of stars that make you feel like you need glasses. But according to Google, it’s an actual fact: Every element on our whole planet—on all the planets—was created by imploding stars. People talk about how God created the world but really, the stars did. The stars are God. And we are stars. Think about it.

  Why do we think that what we look like and what we wear matters at all, given that we’re celestial? It doesn’t! Who cares who you sit beside when you eat your sandwich at lunch? Why does it feel like it matters when Amber Delgado laughs at you in gym class when you fall off the uneven bars and practically break your neck on the mat? Those are all just lies that our brains trick us into thinking are important so we don’t remember that even though we’re made of dead stars, we’re alive, and one day, we’re going to die, too.

  I bet they just left the word dead off the poster and the coffee cup because death freaks people out. But everyone dies. What’s the big deal? Life is a one-­way trip for everyone. Right this second, your cells are slowly falling apart and you are that much closer to being dead, to being finished with your story. Don’t you want yours to be amazing?

  I do.

  I don’t believe those stars died so that we could have boring jobs so we can afford to buy a bunch of stuff that we later throw away, overflowing the landfills so bad that we have to leave the planet, which is exactly what’s happening. It’s already happened. Mars is the only option. Everywhere else is just too far. You might think that we can clean up the Earth and save the day, but no one is doing it. They are all just looking at their phones and complaining about the weather and not doing anything to undo the damage that’s been done! It’s a travesty.

  And it’s also why Mars is so important.

  Everyone’s scared, but not me. I’m ready. I was made for this. Mischa Love (Dead star #7,320,100,901), reporting for duty. I’m not going to waste this amazing, incredible life that the stars gave me. I’m going to be brave. I’m going to be special. I’m going to do what everyone else is scared to do.

  And I’m going to be first in line to do it.

  You’ll see.

  Chapter 2

  Mom thinks that I’ll grow out of it one day and decide that instead of being a Martian settler, I’ll eventually choose to be someone normal, like a teacher or a doctor. Well, she’s nuts and she’s wrong. When I see pictures of Mars, it looks like home to me, much more than our split-­level, four-­bedroom house on the water in Lake Ochoa, California. Mars is my destiny, if you believe in stuff like love and Fate. (I don’t give two beans about love, but Fate is the real thing. I know it is.)

  Even if I die on Mars (or on the way to Mars), at least I’ll have tried. If you aren’t trying, all those stars died for no reason! And that’s tragic! They sure didn’t go through all that compressing and colliding and imploding and creating so that we can buy new Converse high-­tops at the Lake Ochoa Mall, which is what we are doing right this minute, even though my old Converse high-­tops are perfectly fine. If you’re keeping track, my feet are a woman’s size 6. I choose black ones, even though Mom is going berserk over the pink.

  “If you like them, you should get them for yourself,” I suggest.

  “But I don’t like them for me,” she says. “I like them for you. They’re fun.”

  “Mom,” I say. “I’m not fun.”

  “OK,” she says, looking sad. “We’ll take these.” Mom has a way of saying some things so that it sounds like one huge exhalation, a sentence made from a sigh.

  “Sorry!” I say. “I just can’t . . . pink.”

  She smiles at me. “I know.” She pokes her pointer finger against the end of my nose and I duck. I’m too old for that. Seriously.

  The salesman wraps the black shoes in tissue before putting them back in the box, like they are precious glass ornaments and not just regular sneakers.

  I roll my eyes. I hate packaging. All that waste! “We don’t need the box,” I murmur.

  “Pardon?” he says.

  “Mischa,” Mom says, with a warning in her voice.

  “What?” I say. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I’ll meet you out front,” she tells me. “I’ll just pay.”

  I wasn’t going to tell him about the island of plastic floating around the Pacific Ocean, killing seabirds and whales! I just didn’t want the box!

  I wander out to the front of the store and wait, leaning on a fake plant’s huge pot. I wonder who the first person was to think, “Hey, real plants are a lot of trouble, let’s make plastic ones.” The whole world is the laziest. Period. One day this terrible plastic plant will get thrown away and it will never disintegrate. This ugly thing is eternal. It hurts my stomach, just thinking about it. />
  People are wandering by, looking at their phones, typing with their thumbs. Hardly anyone ever looks up. What is so important that they can’t even get from Taco Bell to Old Navy without typing something? More points in favor of Mars: There won’t be cell phones. There won’t be cell towers. And no one will care if you have the iPhone 42 or not.

  The only bad thing is that missions won’t be leaving for at least ten years. In the meantime, the Mars Now website says they are sending up supplies so that by then, everything we need will be there. Biomes and food supplies and equipment and vehicles and everything like that. (If you don’t know, biomes are the gardens that we’ll grow inside geodesic domes on Mars, protected from the elements. The biomes are in domes so that when storms blow, the wind doesn’t tear them apart. The wind just slips off round things. It can’t fill them up like sails, lift them up and destroy them.)

  We will have plenty of biomes on Mars. (And storms.) Maybe a dome for each of us, like houses of our own. A whole neighborhood of biomes. Can you even imagine? It will be so amazing.

  But what they’ll need most of all on Mars is young people. People like me are going to be important soon, no matter how unimportant I am right now, shopping with my mom for stuff I don’t want while unmanned missions are filling a crater that Mars Now has named New America with everything we’ll need to survive, to start over.

  In ten years, I’ll be twenty-­two. It doesn’t sound that old. I mean, it’s old but not ancient, not Mom-­aged, not dying. And if you think about it (and if the organizers think about it), twenty-­two is the perfect age: Young. Healthy. Strong. My frontal lobe will have finished developing and I’ll basically be the smartest that I’ll ever be in my whole life. (After your early twenties, it’s all downhill. That’s just science.)

  I know that I can convince them. I have to convince them! I will convince them.

  My heart races with excitement just thinking about it. I take a deep breath and lean slightly onto this hideous plantlike thing, grinning like a weirdo.

  I’ll probably be famous back here on Earth. People will say, “Mischa Love was the first girl on Mars. Mischa Love was the one who paved the way. Mischa Love changed everything.” And I won’t even know, because I’ll be busy surviving, making a new world for people to live in. If that isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is! (Hint: definitely not a 50-percent-off sale at Forever 21.)

  On Mars, no one will care about back-­to-­school fashions. On Mars, there are no malls. There’s survival. And that’s it. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to go to Mars, to start over, to never shop again.

  “If you move to Mars, won’t you miss this?” Mom says now, coming out of the store and handing me the bag, gesturing at a crowd of people sitting around the food court, stuffing Cinnabons into their pieholes as though there is nowhere else they would like to be.

  “No,” I answer, very honestly. “I definitely won’t.”

  The mall air is so terrible that even my eyes feel dry. When I blink, my eyelids make little tick, tick, tick sounds. I do it a few times in a row because I can’t tell if it’s a feeling or just a sound. “Can you hear this?” I ask Mom, blinking extra hard.

  “What about your friends?” she asks, ignoring the question. “Won’t you miss them? Want a Cinnabon?”

  “Are you saying friends with ironic air quotes?” I ask. “And no. Cinnabon is gross. Empty calories.” I believe in eating what you need to eat to survive and not a bunch of chemicals disguised as food. Mom knows this! If my body gets used to eating sugar and fat, then Mars will be very hard for me. There aren’t any fast-­food outlets there. We’ll mostly be eating easy-­to-­grow, fast crops, like potatoes and root vegetables and whatever else is going to thrive in our biomes. And, of course, freeze-­dried things and protein packs, at least for a little while. I can’t be a fussy eater on the ship we take to get there, either. There’s no room for that.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t use ironic air quotes. I meant, ‘the kids in your class, who you sometimes socialize with.’ ” She makes ironic air quotes with her fingers around “the kids in your class” and smiles, to let me know she’s being funny.

  “Then definitely not,” I say, not giving her a laugh. “One hundred percent, for sure, no.”

  “I like Cinnabons,” she says, wistfully.

  “Mom,” I say. “Ugh.”

  “Fine,” she says. “OK, you’re right.”

  We stand there for a minute, just watching the people ebbing and flowing and chewing and swallowing and spending money on credit so they can own a pair of jeans that go in at the bottom instead of out, or whatever the random Jeans Rules are this year. I close my eyes. These are definitely not my people! Why are most people not my people?

  Here is the most important thing you can know about me: Tig Diaz was my people. My only person. My one-­and-only-­forever-­friend.

  And now he’s not just gone, he’s DTM (Dead To Me) for reasons, not the least of which is that he moved to Portland last year and never once answered any of my messages. I guess that after he got there, he decided to be someone new, someone whose best friend wasn’t the weirdo-­girl-­next-­door. And just like that, “forever” and “I promise” were done and dusted, blown into the past in a whoosh of wind and rain.

  His new friends are probably all boys, tough and wild, who hurtle on their BMXs down ramps at bike parks, their knees scratched and bleeding, grinning from ear to ear in that dumb, vacant way that only sporty boys have. I bet they don’t care about Mars. Probably Tig has stopped fainting at the sight of blood. Maybe he can ride like a champ now, bouncing off those jumps like he’s flying, white teeth gleaming in the sun, not scared to death about what happens if he falls.

  The thing is that he promised—we promised—that we’d never leave each other behind, alone, to fend for ourselves. Not on Mars. Not anywhere.

  And he lied.

  So, like I said, DTM.

  Get it? Got it?

  Good.

  Chapter 3

  Applying to go to Mars was Tig’s idea in the first place. He fell in love with Mars before I did.

  We talked for six whole years about what it will be like when we finally go. Tig had journals filled with pages and pages of our plans, what we could grow, how we’d survive if we got left behind like that guy in that movie. Left for dead. How we’d be able to figure it out and keep going, all written out in his tiny, perfect handwriting. Boys are supposed to have messy writing, but that was just one of the billion ways that he was different from everyone else.

  Different and better.

  Sometimes he’d call me in the middle of the night on the landline that Mom and Dad let me have installed in my room, as a compromise, because I needed to be able to communicate but they didn’t want me having a cell phone. Not yet. Anyway, I’d keep the ringer on low and sleep with it under my pillow. Almost every other night, he’d have an idea, and my phone would ring soft and low and I’d answer it and there he’d be, in the middle of a sentence about how to leach the perchlorate (which is toxic to humans) out of the Mars dirt using this one kind of bacteria that eats it. Or he’d be like, “If the outer layer of the biome is shattered by blowing dust, the inner layer should be made to push outward while robots build another inner layer. But I guess the biome would get smaller and smaller. I’ve got to go. I gotta think about that some more. Bye, Ish.”

  He always said good-­bye. Right up until he didn’t.

  Now I don’t know if he’s even still sending applications to Mars Now. His old house has been empty for nine months, four days, and sixteen hours. The FOR SALE sign, which I can see from my bedroom window, went crooked in the last windstorm and no one has righted it. Even the realtor must know that it’s hopeless. No one moves to Lake Ochoa. Not since the factory on the other side of the lake spilled a bunch of chemicals into the water that made the lake turn bright blue-­green. It looked beautiful, like a postcard, but it turned out it was poison.

  It’s b
etter now, that’s what they say. They did tests and the water is plain old water, it’s just that nothing lives in it anymore. Tig says that we can bet it’s full of perchlorates that they aren’t telling us about, that they are everywhere here because humans have made a mess of things and pretty soon we’ll have the same problem as Mars does: water, but none we can drink. But Dad says he’s wrong, that the tests have come back clean. I never know who to believe. Either way, I can see how that doesn’t look good to people coming in from out of town. They just keep on heading down the highway to bigger and better lakes, lakes without beautiful toxic sludge, normal gray lakes with trout swimming in them, with water-­skiers and good futures.

  The front grass at Tig’s old house is as high as my knees and full of angry-­looking weeds, spiked with thorns. I admire weeds. Weeds are what grow when nothing else will. Weeds have an enthusiasm that prettier plants can’t be bothered with! If people were all either flowers or weeds, I’d be a weed. Weeds are survivors. Weeds are what they need on Mars. Nothing fragile. No one who will die at the first sign of trouble. But still, the Diazes’ old lawn doesn’t look very good. The place looks abandoned (which it is), and a jaggedy crack has formed above the front door and goes all the way up to Tig’s old bedroom window.

  “I know how you feel,” I tell that yellow house every time I ride by on my bike. If people broke when their hearts did, I’d have a crack just like that from my forehead to my feet, that’s how bad I miss Tig. Instead, I’ve just decided that my heart is officially closed for business. Locked up for good. Love just gets in the way of what matters! (Even if it’s not love-­love, just friend-­love, which is a totally different thing.)

  What matters is Mars. Mars is the way we’re going to survive! Earth is broken. We aren’t weeds. We won’t survive it.

  “Oh, look,” Mom says, startling me. “A sale on those cute sweaters!”

  The way she says cute makes me cringe. “Cuuuuuuuuute,” with the u’s all drawn out like that, in a swoop of violin-­string vowels. All the girls at my school talk like that, but when I do it, it sounds like I’m pretending to be someone else, which I guess I am. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate those girls or anything. They’re fine, but they’re just so girly. I don’t get them. Which is fair because they don’t get me, either.