Author/Uploaded by Deborah Willis
Cover Title Season One Mars Now or Maybe Not Season Two KK, Mars Is Actually Happening Now Finale Acknowledgments Also by Deborah Willis Copyright iii v vi vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18...
Cover Title Season One Mars Now or Maybe Not Season Two KK, Mars Is Actually Happening Now Finale Acknowledgments Also by Deborah Willis Copyright iii v vi vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 i ii iv Girlfriend on Mars A NOVEL Deborah Willis W. W. NORTON & COMPANY Celebrating a Century of Independent Publishing For Kris SEASON ONE MarsNow or Maybe Not AMBER KIVINEN—DRUG DEALER, LAPSED EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN, my girlfriend of fourteen years—is going to Mars. This is real. This is what I've been told. Flashback. Interior. Day. Three months ago. Amber sat beside me on the Voyager. "Hey, Kev?" She tucked a blonde curl behind her ear. "You busy?" Me, clearly not busy, wondering if I looked as stoned as I felt: "What's up?" That curl bounced into her face again; she tucked it again. "I have to tell you something." I expected the something to be that she wanted to adopt a cat, or that she wished I would get a real job, or that she'd made out with a guitarist or a guy who writes graphic novels. I did not expect her to say that she would soon be on television in a Survivor-meets-Star Trek amalgam, where she would compete for one of two seats on the MarsNow mission. I did not expect her to say that within the year she would ("hopefully") strap herself into a rocket and blast into deep space, where she would float for nine months like a fetus in a womb before landing on the iron-rich red dirt of Mars. That she would then use the frozen water in the planet's crust to grow her own food and produce her own oxygen. And she would stay on Mars forever, because the technology to come home doesn't exist yet. And even if it did. Even if the technology existed, even if she wanted to come back, she couldn't—her muscle and bone density would have decreased so drastically that Earth's gravity would crush her to powder. She confessed all this while sitting next to me on our green IKEA Beddinge couch, in our basement suite off Commercial Drive. She used the same voice as she had when she told me, last year, about hooking up with a guy we sometimes sell to, a computer programmer/skateboarder named Brayden. (She "accidentally" went down on him on that green couch, one of our first purchases together—the couch we named the Voyager, because we've taken our best trips on it.) "So." She spoke quietly and looked at the constellation of confusion that was my face. "This is probably a bit weird for you." I wondered if I was more stoned than I thought. I waited for her to laugh. But she hadn't been joking about Brayden, and she wasn't joking about this. "I mean," she chattered, "it's not dangerous or anything. Mostly the ship will be remote-controlled by people in New Mexico. It's sort of like a drone." "Aren't drones notoriously inaccurate?" I said. "And what about aerobraking? What about solar radiation?" How did I even know those words? From hours of sitting on this very couch, in a nostalgic stupor, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Will you do something for me?" Amber took my head in her hands. "Will you be a little bit happy for me? For, like, one second? 'Cause I made it to the third round and that's kind of a big deal." "Since when were you in the first round? And do they know you're a drug dealer?" "We're not drug dealers. We specialize in hydroponics. Which, by the way, will be the technology used to grow food on Mars." "By the way,” I said, "we sell drugs." I remembered when we were kids and she went to summer camp, then mailed me letters