Page 6 of Under Story

“We aren’t as evolved as you are,” says Louis, as Nita throws another pretzel. “I’m serious!”

“I’m not opposed to an ice husband,” says Charlie, with an admiring look at the band’s front man.

“Well, you know what straight women say about Antarctica,” says Louis. “ ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ ”

Laurel and Charlie groan, but Nita frowns. “They also tell you to carry mace. Last year, a mechanic reported an assault, and she was the one who got fired.”

Laurel flinches, but she wishes she were more surprised to hear it. The station’s population is still 70 percent male. In 1969, a geochemist named Lois Jones proposed an all-female expedition. Until then, the US Navy, which built McMurdo, had only allowed men. Women, they claimed, would bicker, or get bored; they would go to pieces in a crisis and make advances on the sailors. Jones’s proposal was accepted on one condition. The team would have to spend all four months in the Dry Valleys, a region so extreme that NASA later used it to test robots bound for Mars. They received a private warning, too: if they were not successful, the door would close on any women who came after them.

The Dry Valleys lay two hundred miles from McMurdo. All day, the women broke rock, collecting specimens. At the end of the mission, a helicopter arrived to retrieve them. Jones’s team approached with their boxes full of samples. When a male crew member strode forward to take them, he sank to his knees from the weight.

Laurel traveled to Antarctica with a printed photograph of Jones’s team. She pinned it beside Nita’s octopus calendar, but now she resolves to move it to the public bulletin board in the galley.

Nita touches her arm. “There are still some good eggs. Are you looking?”

Laurel takes a sip of beer. It’s thin and slightly sour, but it’s still alcohol. “Absolutely not.”

“Don’t be so sure,” says Louis. “You might fall for an OAE.”

“Old Antarctic Explorer,” Nita translates.

“Beards to get lost in,” adds Louis.

“Too soon,” Laurel says.

To her mortification, she realizes that she might cry. She didn’t tell Eli about Antarctica. After all, their lives are separate now. Laurel keeps her memories of him—like those of Silas—in a closed box deep inside her body.

Louis kisses her cheek.

“No tears in Antarctica,” he says. “They’ll freeze.”

Laurel leaves soon after Louis drags them to the dance floor: her body feels sluggish, and her heart isn’t in it. Ahead is a footbridge, constructed over pipes. At the top, she pauses, thinking of Nita’s ice wife and her land husband. Laurel wonders whether meeting Sam felt, to Nita, the way that Maisie once described having a second child: You go in thinking that the first is your entire world, that you can’t possibly love anyone else as much. And then your world doubles.

A tall figure approaches from the opposite direction: Jules. They’ve spoken briefly in the galley, but not with any privacy.

“You made it,” he says when he reaches her.

Laurel spreads her arms. “In one piece.”

“Eighteen years later,” says Jules, “and we’re neighbors again.”

Jules Javurek was Laurel’s first friend. At school, they sifted into different social groups—but they spent summers together, searching for fireflies and giant puffballs.

“Do you remember the limestone quarry?” asks Laurel. “The fossils we found?”

Their families owned adjacent land, the Salters’ apple farm pressing up against the Javureks’ dairy operation. In ancient times, a sea covered part of both properties. It decayed into a limestone reef that provided calcium to the Salters’ soil and left the Javureks with a small quarry, not used in their lifetimes. Shapes were etched in the rock. Her father called them earth’s first photographs. Laurel thought of the imprints as ghosts: not life, but the shape of it. Some could be pried with tiny fingers from the edges of the quarry. Afterward, she and Jules paged through books, making identifications.

“Of course.” Jules grins. “Cephalopods, right?”

Spirals, segmented, curling into themselves. Laurel brought one back to her bedroom, but she couldn’t shake the sense that she had stolen it. Distressed, she returned to the pit, where she slipped the stone back like a book to the library.

“And brachiopods,” she says. “With all those wavy lines.”

“Never did find a trilobite.”

The search had consumed them during the summer before sixth grade. They’re quiet, now, in a way that reminds Laurel of that time, looking down in unselfconscious study. Then Jules turns to her, as if daring himself.

“Were you surprised when you saw me?”