io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Spaceship Joyride” by Dominique Dickey. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!
The most beautiful boy you have ever seen in your life is hot-wiring a spaceship.
It’s an objectively unsexy spaceship, insofar as a spaceship can be unsexy—a six-seater built like a 2008 Honda Odyssey, a car model you’re only aware of because it continues to appear in memes.
The boy is decidedly not unsexy, though. His name is Eddie, he’s your xenobiology lab partner, and he’s currently bent over the spaceship’s popped hood. And he’s in his pajamas. His fleecy pants have rubber ducks printed on them, which he seems entirely unashamed of, which only makes him more compelling.
“You’ve done this before?” you ask him, just to have something to ask him. From the way his hands move . . . of course he’s done this before.
“All the time,” Eddie says. The spaceship makes a stuttering sort of whirring sound as it powers up. Eddie slams the hood down. “Bingo. Let’s go.”
He swings into the driver’s seat. You climb into the passenger side. You try not to watch his slender hands as he buckles his five-point harness, thinking, Eyes on your own work, kid. You’ve done this half a million times and you still fumble the buckle over your chest. The straps click into place and cinch down tight.
Eddie glances over at you. His smile is lopsided, like half of his mouth is slow on the draw. You feel something shift in your gut. “You ready?” he asks. You nod, not sure why you don’t trust your voice. He puts the spaceship in gear. He has one hand on the wheel, the other on the back of your seat, so close to touching you. If he were touching you, you think you’d lean into his hand. He’s touched you before, easy: a handshake that leads into a momentary hug, a slap on the back, ruffling your hair. Like he touches all his friends. Like there’s nothing to it. Like it doesn’t make his gut do . . . things. Not the way yours does.
He’s nothing like you. He’s normal, and you aren’t. What’s not normal about you? It’s just that he is a boy, and you are a boy, and boys aren’t supposed to feel like this. It’s that looking at him makes you want to set yourself on fire—and then at least your outsides would match how you feel on the inside, like every surface of your body is rippling and set alight.
And goddamn, the way he rolls his lower lip between his teeth as he looks back over his shoulder makes you feel something you don’t have the words to name. You force yourself to look out the windshield, at the receding parking bay of Sacred Heart Secondary School. Behind you, open space grows closer. You’ve half a mind to wish it would just swallow you and save you from the ways you’re certain to embarrass yourself tonight.
The vacuum of space is cold, cold enough to put out this ungodly fire.
The spaceship picks up speed, then tips backwards out of the parking bay and into the void. You float, straining up against the straps holding you in place. Your hair probably looks stupid in zero gravity, a cloud of waves around your face, but Eddie’s is perfect. He clicks a button on the dash. The door to the parking bay rolls shut. The ship flips over, though it doesn’t matter anymore which way is up, and then you’re zooming away from Sacred Heart.
“Where are we going?” you ask. You’ve realized you don’t know, and that’s stupid and more than a little bit reckless. Who are you to get in a stolen car with a heartbreakingly beautiful boy without a destination?
“I know a place,” he says. “About an hour out, tops.” He types a set of coordinates into the dashboard display. They’re unfamiliar to you, but not far away.
“What kind of place?”
“You’ll see.” When he grins, it lists to one side.
The radio is busted, or maybe it’s the speakers that are blown out. All that comes out is a tuneless rattle that morphs into abrasive static, and Eddie quickly turns it off.
Either way, the sound system is shot, you have an hour of driving ahead of you, and nothing to do but talk to Eddie. He’s easy to talk to—you like talking to him—but being alone with him in the little bubble of the spaceship is not making you any more eloquent. The low light from the dashboard turns his skin smooth and bluish, but you know it only washes you out, and any hint of a flush will be even more visible on your face. You hope he doesn’t look at you. You really wish he were looking at you. His eyes slide back and forth from the windshield to the dashboard monitors, his hands at a perfect ten and two.
It’s an hour of driving and you have to talk about something. So, you talk about the latest xenobiology lab, because this is how you are useful to him. You want to be useful to him. You want him to like you, and usefulness is how you’ve always conned people into liking you. And Eddie’s good people, or at least determined to humor you, so he asks you questions about xenophyophores and makes little noises as you ramble to signal that he’s really listening.
“This can’t possibly be that interesting,” you say after a while. You check the dashboard display—you’re about fifteen minutes out from your destination, now. Damn. Either time’s sped up or Eddie’s really hauling ass in this clunky spaceship, probably because he’s realized that he’s trapped in it with you and your endless science bullshit. “I’m boring you,” you say. “I must be boring you. Your turn. You talk about something.”
“Hand to god, you’re not boring me.” His voice comes out with the same earnest intensity as his litany of well worded follow-up questions. “I think it’s really cool that you know all this stuff.”
Right. Because it’s useful.
“It’s useful, at least,” you say.
He makes a sound, glances down at the dash. “It’s not just that it’s useful, it’s that you really care.”
“Well, it was xenobiology or football, and you don’t want to see me attempt a free-throw.”
He reaches over and shoves your shoulder, laughing, and your gut does that thing again. Is this what people mean when they talk about butterflies in the belly? You hate how much you love the feeling.
Last semester, when you first came to Sacred Heart, you didn’t care about making friends. You were the new kid, starting your senior year in a strange place due to a series of follies that you’d left half a galaxy away. Whether or not the students here liked you was beside the point. Your objective was to hit your graduation requirements, pass all your classes, and hopefully get into a decent university along the way.
Then Mrs. Marian, the xenobiology teacher, paired you with Eddie for lab. Not being liked became a terrifying prospect. You wanted this boy to like you.
You got lucky. It was easy to make Eddie smile. When he laughed it came out all at once, like the sound waves were pushing past a bottleneck in his throat. He invited you to eat lunch with him and his friends in the garden. You said yes. He invited you to study with him and his friends in the commons. You said yes.
Halfway through last semester, the invitations stopped coming. After the initial stab of panic in your chest, you realized why: because your presence was a given. He didn’t need to invite you, because he knew you would be there. Because you were his friend. You’d made it.
A few weeks ago, the invitations started up again. Always texts, never questions, as if he knew you wouldn’t say no.
Meet me by the pine for lunch. I’ll bring sandwiches.
But why? Why would he go out of his way to invite you somewhere you were already bound to be? More importantly, why does he know your needlessly complicated sandwich order: a turkey and swiss with only one slice of bread toasted, extra mustard, and the barest smidge of mayo on the not-toasted slice?
Meet me at the statue in the commons. Let’s do the lab report together.
You showed up everywhere he told you to, at the appointed time, even if it meant extricating yourself from other commitments.
Meet me by the library steps. I’ve got a question about the xeno quiz.
Sometimes—more often than not—the rest of his friends weren’t there. This made you feel awkward at first, but Eddie’s easy as hell to talk to, and then there’s the matter of feeling like you’ve got the sun under your skin when you’re with him. How could you say no to even a second of that?
Meet me on the parking deck after lights out.
How could you possibly say no, even if you know he doesn’t feel the same? He’s trying to be your friend. The least you could do is let him.
“Ta-da!” Eddie says, with a flourish that is probably an attempt at jazz hands.
According to the GPS, you’ve arrived. According to the view out the windows, you’re precisely in the middle of nowhere. You look around, blinking, a bit afraid that you’re missing the joke.
“This is it.” Eddie kills the engine. The location indicator on the dash shifts back and forth along with the ship as it bobs freely in space.
“This is it?”
He turns towards you without taking his seatbelt off. “Yeah. I, uh, didn’t really know a place. I just wanted to take you for a drive.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Are you taking anyone to prom?” he asks, utterly without preamble.
All his friends—who you still have to remind yourself are your friends, too—are asking girls from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the girls’ school on the Source: Gizmodo