Page 55 of Under Story

“How did you find me?” Laurel asks.

“I was nicking a sandwich when I saw you leave. You aren’t the only one who’s done a runner.”

“Did you?”

“My fourth season. All those years, and I hadn’t been asked to be a lead. Patrick still wasn’t my boyfriend. I kept dreaming I was back in Yuma.”

“Yuma?”

Louis smiles, though it comes out like a grimace. “It’s my mum who’s British. She met my father after her first year of uni. He was deployed by the Air Force, and she was backpacking in Italy. Whirlwind courtship and all that; Mum never finished school. She’d been a student at Cambridge, and then she was a military wife in Arizona. It didn’t suit her. I would have been depressed, too.”

Louis holds his hands under Laurel’s arms like crutches. She’s never heard him speak about his life before Antarctica.

“My father is an alpha type,” he says. “But Mum managed to convince him to move to England. He took a job at the base in Lakenheath, and that’s where she had me.”

“What was she like?” Laurel asks.

“When she was happy, no one was happier. We’d put on Madonna and dance. I went through a llama phase, and if no one was looking, she’d chuck me over the fence at the zoo. But when she was sad, nothing helped. There was a phrase she used to use—down at the bottom of the well.”

Laurel tries to speak again but finds she can’t: her mouth is frozen shut. But Louis’s story is a rope. She can keep going if she holds on to it.

“My father was always telling her to get herself together, like it was a matter of will. When I was ten, she sent me to farm camp, because there were llamas. It sounded manly, which meant she could convince my father. He came to get me one day early. I knew something had happened as soon as I saw him. Mum had used one of his guns. He’d found her in the garden.”

Laurel pries her mouth open. Cold air rushes into her throat.

“Louis,” she croaks.

“I know,” Louis says. “That was the worst part. Shall I stop?”

Laurel shakes her head.

“My father moved us back to Arizona. Once, I heard him tell my aunt that Mum’s death was his fault. I could have been nicer to him, but I wasn’t. Hating him was easier than being angry at Mum. And I was. He sent me to a boarding school for teenagers with problems. I was a terror, to be fair,” Louis says. “I kept running away.”

“Those places seem brutal,” Laurel rasps. She’s heard of young people woken in bed and carted out of the house in handcuffs.

“Some are. That’s probably what my father had in mind. But the strangest thing happened: I actually liked it there. I’m not saying it was cushy. In the beginning, we had to live outside for three months. No phones—I couldn’t have called home if I’d wanted to—and no toilets, either; we carried our shit in a box. But everything was simpler. In the morning, we hiked, and in the afternoon, we set up tents. People had always gone on about nature, and now I understood what they meant.

“The rec room on campus had board games, like Sorry! and mancala. One day, a boy asked me to play. His name was Zachary. He liked to draw with ballpoint pens and listen to jazz. Music was contraband, so he hid his Discman in a ceiling panel,” Louis says. “I didn’t know if he liked boys, but I did know there were rules. No fraternizing—instant offense! Nothing happened until our senior year, when we got to go camping in the Grand Canyon. One night, I couldn’t sleep, so I used a stick to scratch on his tent. I saw his shadow sit up. I saw him see me through the mesh.

“We pretended we were dinosaurs. Then aliens—like kids. I can’t remember who kissed who. It didn’t matter. It was bliss.”

Laurel can tell that Louis is becoming tired. He pauses between sentences, and his hands shake under her arms.

“It was really fucking stupid. That’s my problem. I don’t think. It was almost graduation; I should have waited two more weeks. They would have kicked us both out, so I said it was my fault. Zachary was smart: he’d gotten into college, and I hadn’t even applied,” says Louis. “My father was furious. He let me move home under one condition: I had to leave by the end of the summer. Zachary wanted to be together, but I knew I’d only hold him back. I worked at Blockbuster, and met men online, and one of them worked at McMurdo.”

Laurel tries to respond, but her vision blurs, and she grips his arm to keep from falling. As they enter the dorm, her knees buckle. Louis steers her toward his room instead of hers.

“It’s not good, what happens next,” he says. “But it won’t last forever.”

Laurel has never had the screaming barfies so badly before. She vomits into a trash can. The pain is as brutal as the nausea. Braced on the floor, she writhes. It feels as though there’s something that she must get up and out of her.

When it’s over, Louis wipes her face with a washcloth. He wraps her in blankets as she stares out of the window. Outside, light moves in the sky like liquid. It’s the first time that Laurel has seen the aurora.

They fall asleep holding each other—not accidentally, as they did in the quinzee, but outright. In the morning, Laurel takes a shower so hot it stings, and then she walks to the supply closet. There are no cleaning services at McMurdo, so chores are divvied up and rotated. Today is her turn for house mouse duties.

Laurel scrubs the sinks and buffs the mirrors to a shine. She feels raw and somehow new, as though her body has molted. When she finishes the common areas, she brings the supplies to Louis’s room. She mops the floor and washes the trash can, careful not to wake him. When she leaves, he’s tousle-haired in sheets, like one of Caravaggio’s angels.

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