The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

“Are you flirting with me?” I asked. Though it was obvious.

“Only if that’s okay.”

Such frustrating caution. I leaned in to Peter; he did not lean away. His lips were soft and inviting and tasted of raspberry cough drops. It was a brief kiss but a thrilling one. I was starved for romance, for touch. When I backed away, Peter shuddered.

“Wowza,” he said, without any irony.

“Meet me tonight at The Crucible,” I said through a smile. I hooked my index finger around his. “Once everyone’s sleeping.”

He squeezed my hand in response.

That night, Peter and I made out on a tree stump in the woods—he was too nervous to do anything else. The next night he went down on me in the barn, and the night after that we fucked in The Crucible, where the mirrored walls suctioned the bare skin of our buttocks and backs. I was on my period, but this didn’t faze him, as it did most of the men I’d been with, nor did it shock him into pity as we cleaned up. He was an attentive, confident lover who rarely came. The pressure made him tense up. The few times he came, I had to cover his mouth, with both hands or my mouth, because he let out bullish grunts that would’ve awoken everything in the forest.

What was Peter to me? A lover? A distraction from my surroundings? A way to react against Dyson’s increasing secrecy? He was all of these things to me, which is to say he was nothing to me, because he was never merely and entirely Peter. I wasn’t interested in Peter but in how I made myself feel when we were together: powerful, sexy, admired, independent. I could say more about Peter—I want to say more about Peter—but I can’t. It hurts too much to talk about him.

twenty-two

SOMETIMES, AS PETER and I fucked, my mind flashed to him on his knees weeding the old woman’s garden, bundling lettuce and kale as she shouted in terror. The line between his actions and those of the horders who heaved bricks was thinner than I liked to admit. What made him capable of the former made him capable of the latter, and capable of violence I didn’t intend to imagine. The same thing that had driven him into the horde—his loneliness, his upbringing, his gender—would summon him back (men were three times as likely to horde if they’d been in a horde, according to the CDC).

I feared the existence of a threatening Peter lurking within him. Even he couldn’t detect that part of himself. Someday, that Peter would wrap an arm around my Peter’s neck and drag his obedient body into a horde. During sex, I tried to distract myself with his body. I tugged his waxy hair, I bit his neck, I dug my nails into his shoulders, his ass, pulled him closer to me, deeper inside me, an act of spellcasting that might silence that Peter inside, the one who wished to relapse.

twenty-three

DURING THE EVENING lectures, I paced along the northern shore of the pond inside the sliver of cell service where Cassandra and I had spoken. She hadn’t called since our fight. But every night I returned to the shore hoping to find a message from her. Every night she didn’t reach out carved a fresh mark on my heart. After an hour of pacing, my hope would harden to anger. I’d grip my phone in both hands, shaking it like I might squeeze out a call if I clenched hard enough.

Normally, this resulted in emails from Roger Handswerth. Your talent and experience would be crucial in making DAM one of the world’s greatest technological achievements, he might write (without explaining what he meant by talent and experience). We know you’ll fall in love with the lifestyle and the professional opportunities that only DAM can provide. The idea of accepting a position—even just visiting—based on Cassandra’s pitying recommendation curdled my stomach. But ignoring his pitches became harder and harder as Cassandra’s and Blake’s popularity continued to rise. Her online talk show received an afternoon slot on NBC, and Blake’s album The You I Knew hit number four on the charts. The Atmosphere, meanwhile, was losing its hold on the public’s imagination. Rumors were spreading that Martha Stewart had started her own castration camp, either inspired by mine or the inspiration for mine, and as she was a larger celebrity figure, all the attention once devoted to us had tilted over to her. This hurt Dyson more than he liked to admit. “I’m just glad your name’s out of the news,” he’d tell me when I asked him how he felt about these developments. “We could use this time to regroup and reassert ourselves, to remind ourselves of our core mission: helping the men.” The men were hardly any better than when they had arrived, and we were both paranoid over their waning interest in daily activities. The Atmosphere teetered on the brink of imploding. Despite Dyson’s faith in attention, no one had stepped up to invest in our cause. According to Roger, DAM gained an average of two dozen investors a day.

One evening, during my pacing time at the pond, Roger’s number showed on my screen. I let the call drift into voicemail and listened immediately to the message: Sasha: Roger Handswerth again. It’s June fourteenth, nearly a month since my last call. How’s this weekend for a campus visit? We’ll send a car to you—we know where you are. We’d love to bring you to campus to talk compensation. Please call me at your earliest convenience. This is, I regret, a time-sensitive offer.

After a few more listens, I deleted the voicemail and sprinted back to the cabin, worried I’d stayed out too long. The lights were on when I returned. Barney was not on the doorstep yowling to go back inside. I took a few elongated breaths. “You didn’t do anything