Girlfriend on Mars


 
 
 Cover
 Title
 Season One Mars Now or Maybe Not
 Season Two KK, Mars Is Actually Happening Now
 Finale
 Acknowledgments
 Also by Deborah Willis
 Copyright
 
 
 
 
 
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 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