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

grass, though none of the men appeared in the light. Dyson parked close to the path that led to the cabin. He cut the engine. “Dyyyyyyssssoooon!” the men bellowed. “Dyson, what have you brought us?”

“Grab as much as you can.” He nodded at the back seat. “And run.”

We sprinted to the cabin with bags of junk food bulked in our arms. The lights inside were lit. We unloaded the food in the kitchen. We checked the bathroom and closet for men. We checked inside the trunk and under the sink. We barricaded the couch against the door.

Dyson whistled for Barney. “Don’t be scared,” he said. His voice was tippy with fear. He shook a bag of treats, but the cat didn’t come. He shoved the couch aside, hollered Barney’s name from the porch. “Barney boy, come get your dinner!”

I climbed upstairs for a change of clothes. The bed had been crisply made—comforter tucked beneath the mattress, pillows square at the head—and in the center lay Barney, a pair of flies looping above his body. I covered my nose and mouth to keep from gagging.

Dyson came back inside. “Barney baby!” he yelled. “I owe you a scratch on the head.”

“I found him,” I said.

Dyson remained in the loft with Barney for nearly an hour. I huddled on the couch with my knees to my chest, listening for agonized wailing, waiting for Dyson to curse out the men—even my dislike of Barney couldn’t keep me from crying. Dyson’s silence only heightened my pain. He climbed downstairs with Barney cradled in one arm. Bloody fur stuck to his T-shirt. He washed the cat in the sink, his face as blank as a sheet of steel. Afterward, he toweled Barney dry at the kitchen table, humming a tune and shivering. His grief tugged a loose thread of my anger, unraveled it all. I had never seen him so genuinely hurting.

He joined me on the couch and placed Barney between us.

I scooted away until I was practically curled over the armrest. “Say something,” I said. “You’re freaking me out.”

He retrieved an unopened bottle of rum from inside the trunk and drank from it. I drank from the bottle after he passed it to me. It was cheap rum, difficult to keep from spitting out.

He drank again and said, “They’re going to kill us.”

“They should leave if they hate you so much.”

“They can’t leave,” he said. “Not yet.”

“They can’t possibly be so loyal to you.”

“It’s not about loyalty,” he said. “It’s about money.” Before The Atmosphere started, when Dyson collected enrollment fees from the men, they each paid as much as they could—for most, it wasn’t much, but it was all they had, often their entire savings or the sum they received from selling a house. Their money had funded The Atmosphere. “The building materials, the food, their clothes. I didn’t have the cash to pay for that on my own.”

“You couldn’t have spent that much on this place.”

“I didn’t spend it all on The Atmosphere,” he said.

“Then pay them back,” I said. The solution couldn’t be any more obvious.

“I invested it.”

“In what?”

“In you,” he said.

It took me a second to understand what he meant. Once I did, though, I screamed into my hands. “Give me that,” I said. I took a long pull from the bottle, three full glugs, like a pirate.

“DAM seemed like it would thrive for decades,” he said. “Especially with you working there. They had a link to invest on their website. A bad sign, now that I think about it. They must’ve been starved for funding. But it seemed legitimate. I figured I’d recoup the enrollment money in no time, either to pay the men back or keep The Atmosphere running.” He rubbed Barney’s belly as he spoke. “This is why you’re the visionary. Between us: you’re the one who can lead. I thought I had it in me, but now it’s obvious that I don’t.”

“I refuse to feel bad for you,” I said.

“I just wanted to help them. I wanted to love them and they murdered my cat.” He scratched behind Barney’s ears.

I swiped his hand away. “You’re gonna catch something,” I said.

“And now they’re coming for us. They’ll kill us because of me.”

“Self-pity won’t help anything,” I said. Though I was swimming in self-pity and loathing. I wanted to punish myself for lashing out at the investors. I should’ve quietly slipped out the back. I should’ve never returned to the camp—but I needed to be here. Dyson needed me here. He could never untangle himself from this mess on his own.

Most of us want to be more than who we are. We want to exceed our conditioning. Dyson wanted this for himself and for the Atmospherians, for them to evolve into kinder, gentler men, men untroubled by rage. For years, I tried to obtain this for myself. ABANDON was founded on the belief that women should ignore the toxic impulse toward self-hatred and sacrifice. Women deserved to be more than who we were told to become. Yet here I was, correcting the blunders of men, correcting those very men, and finding in this an unsettling sense of purpose and drive. Perhaps this is because I loved Dyson. I still felt responsible for his heart attack when we were in college, though none of that was my fault. I still cared for the sad boy who invited me to his house to watch bootleg movies. Perhaps if he had been anyone else—if Dyson had been some other man, some man off the street, had he been Blake Dayes, or Randy, had he been Lucas Devry—I would have left him to fend for himself. I like to believe this is true.

Dyson grabbed a package of Oreos off the floor. “We’ll give them what’s left of the money,” he said as he mashed a small stack of cookies into his mouth. “I’ll pay back the difference in time.” Two more cookies. “And they return to their lives.” Three more. “And you return