The girl who would live.., p.4
The Girl Who Would Live Forever, page 4
True, she had her defenders too, but they were getting attacked in turn and she wanted to protect them, too. And she couldn’t. It felt weird walking around after reading all that drama, but she did.
She hadn’t spoken with Shelby again either, but she wasn’t surprised. Shelby was busy curing death and spending $93 million. One had to work overtime to accomplish that kind of thing. Or at least Ivy imagined one did.
At least she was off the plane. Everyone around her spoke English with an American accent like a giant tour group straight off a cruise ship. At home, if she walked a few yards away someone would be holding an umbrella and everyone would be speaking Japanese or German or Russian. Here when she kept walking, she heard English all around. It felt alien after her years away.
She brushed at a spot on her jeans. She’d planned to change into an interview suit in the airport, but her suitcase hadn’t gotten on the plane in Riga. So she gave the airline Shelby’s address at Millennium Tower and wondered if her suitcase would ever turn up there. Maybe a troll had stolen it and was doing unspeakable things with her underwear right now.
Instead of putting on a business outfit and walking around like a grownup professional, she hunted up a restroom in the terminal where she swabbed herself with a wet wipe that smelled like rubbing alcohol and swiped on another layer of deodorant. She went out of the stall, brushed her teeth and hair, washed her hands, and checked herself out in the mirror. Terrible.
The woman standing next to her gave her the kind of encouraging smile you give people who look like they need validation. And Ivy needed validation on so many levels today. She gave the woman a thumbs-up. Neither of them seemed encouraged and the woman hurried out.
Not her best look for meeting the people she might interview with. At least she still had her jacket and her backpack and laptop. And the weird Estonian salted licorice Shelby’d asked for. She’d almost forgotten it, then bought it at the airport and tucked it into her backpack. Licorice was everywhere in the Nordics.
As she descended the escalator, she looked for Shelby or someone who looked like an Olivia with a sign with her name on it. Limo drivers in caps held signs with other people’s names on them, including a large one for a Mr. Carver. A couple dressed in Christmas sweaters came together for hugs and enthusiasm. A man in uniform swung a small child up in the air. Nobody waited for her. But at least there wasn’t some guy with a plunger.
Olivia had assured her she’d send a car and she’d seemed so sincere. Ivy tried to call, but her Estonian phone didn’t work. She hunted up a store and bought an overpriced SIM card, wondering if she could expense it to Nyssa, and tried again. Olivia still didn’t answer and neither did Shelby.
Sure, they wanted to hire her. For a second, she wondered if this was a prank, but couldn’t come up with a rationale and told herself to stop being paranoid about every. Single. Thing.
She couldn’t exactly stay in the airport, so she used her Uber app to call for a ride. A black Nissan Leaf was seven minutes out. She used that time to get a coffee so she’d at least look conscious when it arrived. The coffee came in a red cup that looked festive against the green and white logo and the caffeine helped.
The Uber driver’s name was Karlo, and he was a solicitous guy. He pressed cold water and chewing gum and wet wipes on her. She accepted them all, because it was nice to think someone cared. Then she gave him the address from Olivia’s email. While he drove and played easy listening music, she finished off her coffee and started in on the water. It was like being in a fancy elevator on wheels.
“Did the water help?” he said. “You’re looking refreshed.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Five stars.”
He smiled at her in the rearview mirror, face earnest above the pine tree air freshener. “It really helps.”
“I live and die by the star rating system myself.” She realized she hadn’t checked her Amazon reviews or her Twitter feed in almost an entire day while she’d traveled. She logged on and gave Karlo his stars. A quick scan of her email showed more troll messages, but nothing from Olivia or Shelby.
Her editor had sent her a long email telling her this attention was a good thing for sales and a good thing for her long-term career. All publicity is good publicity. Easy for someone who wasn’t worried about ending up the wrong end of a plunger to say.
And the editor also said that she should finish the second book while attention was so high. But every time Ivy started, she second guessed every word and every idea, terrified they would rain doom upon her too. Then she argued with herself about not letting herself be silenced, about forging away to write her own truth. And then her writing time ran out and she had written and erased paragraphs all day.
She’d forwarded her the flight info before she left, and the editor told her that she’d booked a reading at Kepler’s Bookstore, right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Right into the mouth of Troll Cave. It would be a good turnout, her editor promised, with a sympathetic crowd. Sure.
On Twitter, the hate continued. Hard to believe so many people hated her little book so much. But Ivy stood by the logic that had set them off. It was unassailable. If you wanted to colonize a new world, you’d send women and sperm, not men. Ten women could have 100 children in ten years. If you had sperm from 1,000 genetically diverse men, none of those kids would be true siblings. That was more than what scientists calculated as the minimum to rebuild a population. If those women kept going, they’d have 200 offspring, more than twice the necessary amount to be self-sustaining in a single generation. Or, if they were busy building the colony, two generations. Biological math valued wombs over dicks.
What she’d never calculated was how much her biological math would prove incendiary to random men on the internet. The thought of their entire essence reduced to a couple of ounces of goop ready for insertion into a much more valuable womb broke their angry tiny brains. And they weren’t shy about voicing their displeasure. She scrolled until she realized she was hyperventilating. Then she forced herself to stuff her phone in her pocket.
She took off her jacket and stared out the window. The internet wasn’t the real word. This was. Even though it was overcast, the morning light was too bright. Sun glinted off windshields and hurt her eyes and all the cars crowded too close and moved too fast. Jetlag? Or was she really out of sync with this bright, fast world? She bet there weren’t as many cars in all of Estonia as in this one city. Karlo drove expertly through the glare, really earning those stars.
She took a deep breath, inhaling the fake scent of pine. Not exactly the forest. She let it out. Closed her eyes and did it a couple more times.
They exited onto a city street where the cars were slower, but crowded up closer. An accident here would give her whiplash, maybe a minor concussion, but not the kind of thing that would call for the jaws of life to pull her out of shredded metal. The kind where everyone could get out and yell about it after. Until someone noticed her name and refused her medical treatment for the crime of angering the internet.
“Which business you going to?” Karlo cut the wheel to the side to avoid a cyclist. “That address is an industrial park.”
“Nyssa,” she said. “My friend works there. I know it’s Saturday, but she’ll be there.”
“Nyssa?”
She spelled it, like it mattered, and glanced at her phone. Another dick pic. This one had lipstick on it, presumably applied by the owner in a yogic feat she didn’t even want to think about.
“Sure that’s the name?” Karlo sounded uneasy.
“Why?” She stopped messing with her phone and looked at him.
“I thought I heard something about them on the news. I must be mixed up.”
“What did you hear?”
“I must be mixed up. I’m sorry.” He turned the radio to a classical station and didn’t look at her in the rearview mirror. She didn’t rescind his stars.
“Something about VC funding?” she said like she knew what that was.
“That must have been it. That.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him. “Was it something bad?”
“I don’t remember,” he said unconvincingly.
He pulled into the parking lot of a glass and block office building and up to a section painted half pale blue and half white. Nyssa’s corporate colors. Shelby had a color theory behind it, but all Ivy remembered was that the pale blue matched a certain species of jellyfish because Nyssa’s logo was a stylized jellyfish. Allegedly, those jellyfish were immortal and aged normally, then returned to earlier life cycles again and again.
Ivy sighed. The thought of regressing to any earlier life stage was too damn depressing to even think about. She stuffed her empty coffee cup into the garbage bag Karlo had thoughtfully provided in the back seat. She didn’t feel properly caffeinated for a job interview.
“We’re here, ma’am.” He was already out of the car and pulling her backpack from the trunk.
Shrugging back into her leather jacket, she climbed out to take it off him. She didn’t like people touching her stuff. He smiled, glanced worriedly at the building, and drove away. She’d figure out what he’d been so worried about soon enough. She’d had enough bad surprises lately and wasn’t eager to run right into a new one.
Instead, she took a long look at the waves rolling in all green and pretty and with no chunks of ice on them. Shelby was right about the weather. Even overcast, it was better here. The air smelled of salt and fish and waves broke clean against the rocks.
She was surprised Nyssa’s office was so close to the sea. Shelby used to have a terror of the ocean. Back in college, she hadn’t even watched movies with the ocean in them. Maybe she’d had therapy for it. No time for crippling phobias in her new life.
As Shelby had promised, a row of palm trees lined one side of the building. Presumably, her office was behind one of them. Ivy sketched a wave in the direction of the window.
With a tired sigh, she hoisted her backpack onto her good shoulder and hiked to the front door. The office had opaque windows, like a sex toy store. Anything at all could be going on in there. Immortality, apparently, was murky.
Ivy opened the door and stepped into an empty lobby. An aquarium on one wall faced a shining high-tech desk clearly designed for aliens. Chairs in the same pale blue as the Nyssa logo clustered around a coffee table holding an illuminated jellyfish sculpture. The whole place felt like a spaceship. Not the kind of spaceship she’d designed in her novel with algae tanks and mushroom farms. More like the first-class section of a luxury liner.
She put her backpack next to a chair and stood, afraid if she sat she’d fall asleep, maybe snore, and jinx her chances of getting the job. She pretended not to notice that she was putting a lot of mental energy into a job she didn’t want.
“Hello?” she called. No answer.
Two closed doors flanked the desk. Like the windows that faced the street, the glass in the doors was opaque. She tried to push the first one open. Locked. The second one too.
So she retreated to the aquarium and checked it out. Jellyfish. Tentacles swayed and bells rose and fell as the jellyfish paced inside their illuminated prison. Too big to be the immortal ones, so they must be a metaphor for show. Slick and soothing to watch. Five stars for the keeper of the aquarium. She rubbed her gritty eyes.
“We’re not open to visitors today.” A woman spoke from behind her.
Ivy turned to face her. The woman was short and freckly, with earplugs and a nose piercing and a tattoo of a mandala on the back of her left hand. Her fiery red hair matched her outfit. She had a mood going.
“I have a meeting with Shelby Linton today,” Ivy said.
“It’s not a good time.” The woman started toward her like she intended to herd Ivy right back out the door, one hand raised in a shooing motion.
Ivy didn’t budge. “I’ve traveled all the way from Estonia, so it has to be a good time. Shelby asked me to come.”
“When did you last speak to Shelby?” the woman asked.
Unlike Olivia, she didn’t call Shelby Ms. Linton. “Last Tuesday. She asked me to come for an interview today.”
“Tuesday?” she said. “How did she seem?”
“That’s your business, how?” Shelby wouldn’t want her telling some random woman about their conversation. “I’d like to speak with Shelby now.”
“That’s going to be a little hard.” The woman wiped her hand on her pants and held it out. “Wendy.”
“Ivy Corva.” Ivy shook her hand. Her grip was intense, like a tiny chihuahua picking a fight.
“So, about Shelby.” Wendy smiled and Ivy’s stomach dropped. “She had an accident, probably not long after she called you.”
“What kind of accident? Is she OK?”
“She’s not.”
“Where is she?” Ivy moved closer to Wendy. “Take me to her. Has someone called her father?”
“He knows.” Wendy looked like she was enjoying the conversation. “The funeral is today.”
Ivy’s knees gave out and she fell into a hard chair. Jellyfish rose and fell, living with no idea of the wider world in a state of blissful ignorance.
Ivy gulped. “Was there a note?”
“Interesting,” Wendy said. “Should there have been?”
“In college.” She took a deep breath. “What happened to Shelby?”
“She jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a long way down.”
Ivy shuddered. Shelby would never have wanted to die in the water, pulled down into the cold and dark. Ivy had been to the Golden Gate Bridge once. It had a fence with high railings. No one fell off it, not without trying. Shelby must have been motivated.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Not for Shelby.”
Wendy glanced at her phone. “I have to go.”
“There’s a funeral already?” Ivy asked.
“I know it’s fast,” Wendy said. “Her father insisted.”
When Shelby’s father insisted, things happened. She remembered her words from a long moment ago: Shelby insisted. Not anymore.
“I don’t have any other clothes,” she said, because Shelby cared about fashion. “For a funeral.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I’m coming.” She could insist, too. She glared. “Would Shelby want me to take an Uber there?”
“Maybe.” Wendy said. “Is this you asking for a ride?”
“Thank you.” Ivy’s tone was the fakest one she could muster.
She followed Wendy out the door into the bright parking lot. Everything looked like a movie set now, unreal and remote. The sun was a giant floodlight. The ocean CGI. Somewhere, beyond her visions, cameras recorded a story. Just a story.
The sound of a car door opening brought her back. She sat in Wendy’s Prius. It had that new car smell, like probably everything she owned, and it made no noise as she started it and drove, too fast, toward Shelby’s funeral.
Ivy leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger-side window and closed her eyes against the movie world outside. Shelby hadn’t been immortal after all. Ivy inhaled the twin scents of new car and licorice and remembered the time she’d been able to save her friend. The time when she hadn’t been too late. She closed her eyes and remembered their first year at Carnegie Mellon.
CHAPTER SIX
Freshman Ivy had finished her shift at the computer science center in Wean Hall at midnight and had hurried across campus to her dorm at Morewood Gardens. Fall air bit her ears and fingers, and she shivered in a leather jacket that had once been her mother’s, or so her aunt said. Ivy’s parents died when she was fifteen, and she never saw her mother wear it. But Ivy wore it everywhere.
She checked in and took the elevator to their floor. The hallway was well lit, but all the room doors were closed. Late on a school night, after all. The space between her own door and the frame was dark, meaning Shelby was probably asleep inside. Following roommate etiquette, she eased open the door and walked carefully across the carpet.
She glanced over at Shelby’s bed, lit by the streetlights outside. The bed was empty so all the quiet had been in vain. Ivy wasn’t sure why the empty bed made her uneasy, but it did. She tried to argue away her feeling. Shelby had a boyfriend. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. Not a big deal. Only Ivy slept at the dorm every night. Everyone else was out having fun.
But Shelby’s empty bed was made and Shelby never made her bed.
Ivy clicked on the desk lamp. A bright white envelope rested atop Shelby’s pillow. No name. Sealed. Pushing down a feeling of dread, Ivy tore it open.
Dad,
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let you down.
Shelby
Ivy’s heart raced and she ordered herself to calm down. Why would Shelby leave a note to her father on her pillow? Ivy looked around the room for answers. Shelby’s boots were gone, along with her coat. So, she’d dressed to go outside.
Her gloves lay on the floor next to her desk. The gloves were expensive, a present from her father and made by a famous designer whose name Ivy forgot before Shelby finished the sentence. One glove probably cost more than Ivy’s entire wardrobe. Shelby wore them everywhere, sometimes even in the drafty lecture halls, and definitely when going outside on a cold night.
Still no reason to panic. A freshly made bed, a weird note, and a pair of gloves weren’t compelling evidence of anything.
So she called Shelby’s cellphone. When something buzzed in the room, she opened the desk drawer and stared at a vibrating phone. The screen displayed the word Roommate. Not even Ivy’s name. Ouch.
She hung up and activated the screen. It displayed a picture of a much younger Shelby. She and her father wore matching tweed coats and a pumpkin patch filled the background. Ivy closed the drawer.
