Kate Day - In the Quick

He started and sat up. His curly hair was wild and there were dark circles under his eyes.

What do you want? His voice was gruff; the space heater was on and the room was warm and close.

I’m not here about homework, I said.

I had some sheets of paper I’d drawn on and I held them out.

He didn’t take them, so I sat in Theresa’s chair and spread them out on top of his desk. I’m trying to figure out how—I paused, but this time the words came easier. How to create adaptive grip in a robotic hand. I kept talking and pointed to my drawings and tried to describe what was in my mind.

He listened and looked at the sheets of paper. He asked me a question and I answered it. He drew on one of my drawings. Like this? he asked.

Yes but— I took the pen from him and drew again.

We went back and forth like this for a minute or two, and then he put the pen down and rubbed his eyes. It’s an interesting idea, he said.

I beamed.

There’s only one way to find out if it will actually work.

Build it.

Exactly.

I can’t do that without permission.

Why not?

Because it’s a group project. Because Theresa said I was supposed to watch and learn.

He snorted. It’s your idea. Do what you want.

The next day I made a model. I did it alone after everyone from Materials lab had gone. It was a latex glove attached to a simple vacuum pump, and when you squeezed the pump the glove filled with water. The next night I cut up a bunch of silicone-coated gloves and sewed little open compartments inside the fingers. I found a better pump in the supply closet, with a dial that measured the amount of water in milligrams. I filled and emptied the glove, filled and emptied.

My next model was another silicone glove, constructed in the same way but filled with tiny plastic beads I’d found at the back of one of the supply cabinets. They were about the size of a poppy seed and kept spilling. But I managed to fill the pump with them and then watched the beads move into the glove, increasing its volume slowly, slowly. I put a ball into the palm of the glove and watched the glove gently hug it.

It felt good, like I was making the idea I had seen in my mind, turning the blown-up and shrunk-down hand into a solid thing. But the materials I was using wouldn’t hold up in the vacuum of open space. And the glove couldn’t actually hold the ball—it could only sort of squeeze it. Over the next few days I drew more pictures and dug through the parts bin in Materials lab; I thought about the hand every free second I had.

I went back to James and Theresa’s office early in the morning hoping to see James alone. I brought my prototype wrapped carefully in paper under my arm. The door was open, but no one was there. The space heater was off and the room was chilly. I sat down in James’s chair, unwrapped my model, and set it in the center of his desk.

That day we had a substitute in math class, a short man with a tie and a beard who wanted us to raise our hands before going up to the board. Theresa was absent the next day too, and Lion and I didn’t see her on the Candidate track. We didn’t see James or Simon running either. I checked James and Theresa’s office again and this time it was locked. I wished I hadn’t left my model inside. But I hoped their absence was a good sign and meant the task force had approved the Inquiry rescue mission.

I hadn’t seen any of them—Theresa, James, or Simon—for two weeks when we got on the bus for our dive time at the pool on a rainy Wednesday. I sat next to Nico on the way and told him my theory about Theresa being gone from class. I wasn’t the only one—lots of kids were talking about it, wondering what it meant and hoping it was good news. I asked him what he thought as rain flecked the window, and he actually smiled and said, Maybe.

At the pool I crowded with the other kids around the equipment cage, found a wet suit in my size, and began to pull it on, folding the fabric before pushing my limbs inside. Then I walked to the edge of the pool. Carla and Lion and Nico were already there, and we did our safety checks together, put our regulators in our mouths, and began our descent. Once we reached the bottom I joined a group that was performing the box exercise I’d seen Nico doing during my first dive. I worked with two other kids—a girl whose bed was near mine and a boy who sat next to me in physics—to untie the box from its first location, drag it across the pool floor, and resecure it in a new location. We had some trouble at first; the thick rope wouldn’t come loose from the metal rings holding it to the pool floor. Finally we were able to unhook it and begin dragging the box across the slippery floor. We reached the second location and quickly figured out how to retie it. I secured the last restraint and felt a sense of satisfaction as I locked it in place.

When it was time to begin my ascent I paid attention to my depth gauge and timer as Simon had taught me to do and slowly rose from the bottom of the pool up, up, watching the shifting light and splash of flippers on the surface of the water above me.

When I emerged the air was full of noise and commotion. Someone was screaming. A teacher was hauling something large and dark from the water onto the pool deck. My mask fogged—I pulled it off. The large and dark thing was a person. Whoever it was their limbs were limp and heavy. Kids were yelling, climbing out of the water fast; I got kicked in the stomach, splashed in the face. I swam hard for the edge of the pool. I scanned the pool deck for Carla and Lion and Nico. Nico was climbing out of the water, and Carla was pushing through the crowd. I pulled myself out of the water, my arms and legs humming with adrenaline.

The teacher was yelling, Stand back!

I ducked between two kids. The figure lying prone on the pool deck looked like Lion. It couldn’t be him, but there were his long legs, his circle of hair, dark with water, his face. The teacher pulled off his mask and it was him and my limbs went cold.

The teacher blew air through his mouth and his torso expanded like a balloon. She thumped the heels of her hands on his chest. I crawled closer, around kids’ bare feet and shower shoes and damp towels that had been dropped to the pool deck. Carla was down on her knees next to Lion, her eyes like dark hollows in her face. Time seemed to bend and stretch. The kids around me were shifting on their feet at a normal speed but the teacher’s breaths and thumps seemed to slow. Lion’s lips were flat and blue. Carla blinked her eyes once, twice, three times—

Then with a splutter and a start Lion’s body seemed to fold in half. Time sped up and bubbles came from his mouth. The teacher pushed him on his side and slapped his back as he coughed and heaved. Spurts of water came out of his mouth, more water than I thought possible. They made puddles on the pool deck, and Carla reached her arms over his body even though the teacher tried to pull her off.

The next morning they wouldn’t let me see Lion at the infirmary, but I sat so long in the waiting room one of the nurses came out and told me he was going to be okay. You can visit after he does another session in the hyperbaric chamber, she said, and held open the door for me to go.

I wandered the snowy yard and tried not to think about Lion’s body lying still on the cold pool deck. His dark wet hair and blue lips. Carla and Nico were walking on the other side of the track, toward a building beyond the dormitories. I caught up to them; they were talking in low voices, their heads together.

I hadn’t seen Carla since yesterday at the dive pool, but she barely said hello.

I relayed what the nurse told me about Lion, and Carla said they already knew.