But. Even if I could go back in my own life, I would still arrive, eventually, back at today.
In my apartment—a two-room—now that I live alone, I take off my shoes and sit down on the rug from the old apartment, right in the spot where my father vanished.
I know I’m leaving tonight, but it’s not time now. Instead, I place the glass sphere on the patterned rug. Its reds and oranges and browns are as familiar to me as the backs of my own hands. Soon, one of the other single females who live in this block of apartments will come to make sure I’m all right. I have to wait until after that visit before I start to leave.
My father vanished so completely that they think he must have left the Globe and died out there in the Middle. That’s why I was an Untouchable: I vowed that I’d seen him go, that we’d stolen a transport and gone out of the Globe, where he climbed out and died. It took two weeks before all the tests were finished and they were sure I was clean. Two weeks of being an Untouchable. It wasn’t long, in some ways.
But it was long enough.
When I think of their version of how he left, I picture him stepping out of the transport and into the black, dead landscape and then sizzling up, just like that.
When really he left so much more carefully. When really it took so long.
“I’m going to go find one of the Beautiful People,” he said. He pointed to a picture of a woman with huge eyes and red lips and long, luscious hair. In the picture, she reached down to a child of another color. The child reached up, smiling. “That one, if I can. It might be a long time, but I’m going to try to bring her back.”
I nodded.
“We can’t keep living like this,” he said.
What he meant was, “I can’t keep living like this.” Without my mother, he meant. She died when I was born. I don’t remember her at all.
But my father did.
I think he stayed as long as he could.
“Don’t touch me when I leave,” he warned me. “I don’t know what could happen.”
So I didn’t.
He sat down and I watched him go.
He got darker, and darker, and more solid, more real. He didn’t fade; he condensed. Smaller, smaller, sharper, sharper, until I realized with surprise that he was tiny, that I’d been watching him for hours. My vision had narrowed until all I saw was him. There he was, and then he wasn’t. And he was gone and his glass sphere sat alone in the center of the rug.
I knew right away that if I could focus as long and as well as he did, that I might be able to do it too. But for those first shocked days and weeks, I didn’t want to think about leaving.
And then, after I realized that I would forever be Untouchable, it became the only thing I wanted to think about.
There’s a knock on the door.
Laura from upstairs stands there, smiling, an excited look on her face. “How are you doing today?” she asks, stepping inside. She’s much older than I am, probably thirty. She lives alone.
“I’m doing well,” I say. Laura is kind. She stays at arm’s length, always, but I hear genuine warmth in her voice.
Laura beams at me, and for a moment, I think she’s going to hug me. But of course she doesn’t. I’m imagining things. “I got a message from your school,” she says.
“You did?” My heart races a little. Since I don’t have parents, Laura is the one who gets any news from the school about me, but usually there is no news to receive because I don’t cause any trouble.
“About the dance,” she says, waiting for me to say something.
“I didn’t go to the assembly,” I admit, worried. Could that really matter? Suddenly I feel nervous. No. No complications. I have to leave tonight. “But it’s not mandatory.”
“They voted you as one of the stars!” Laura says, beaming.
“That can’t be right,” I say.
“It is,” she tells me. “You have to go to the dance. They’re saving your crown for you.”
A joke. It has to be. The opening line is perfect: What happens when an Untouchable comes to a dance?