That was one of the worst parts of April disappearing. I kept feeling like I had to solve the problem. Unfortunately, you can’t solve someone being dead.

But I could at least start on the problem of Altus. The stress was coming from two places. First, Peter Petrawicki was succeeding. Bad people shouldn’t get power, and he was getting more and more of it. I wasn’t even so much worried about what he was going to do with the power; I was too caught up in the fact that he was getting it.

But I probably would have been able to ignore that eventually because it’s not like I had to look at Peter Petrawicki all day. I did, however, have to look at rat brains all day and think about the fact that right now, in Puerto Rico, a bunch of people were working on science that would almost definitely make my research completely obsolete. And that was my second source of stress, eating away at me and getting worse every day. I was getting snappy with people, and my stomach was always a little upset. Professor Lundgren kept telling me all research is supposed to be additive, and that science doesn’t actually work in breakthroughs the way we’re all taught.

She could say that, but I couldn’t believe it. If the “service” they were going to provide included some high-bandwidth neural link, they were decades ahead of our lab. So what was the point of my thesis? What was the point of driving, head down, every day through piles of mind-numbing data entry to build something that might, in six months, look like an Apple II?

That’s when I started looking at Altus job postings.

JUNIOR SCIENTIST BIO-MICROFABRICATION—PUERTO RICO

State-of-the-art research lab is seeking an R&D chemical and materials scientist to relocate to Puerto Rico. Our lab is pushing the boundaries of what is possible, and this is your chance to make the future. We’re looking for an energetic, resourceful chemist and/or materials scientist with experience in experimental design, and expertise in organic, polymer, and analytical chemistry. A passion for what’s next is a must. Team players only.

Now I just had two problems:

 1. I was qualified for this job, but not tremendously. They were probably looking for a postdoc candidate, though the fact that they didn’t say so was promising. It was also telling—they might not be being picky because of how fast they were hiring.

 2. My name was Miranda Beckwith, and I couldn’t change that. Most people wouldn’t recognize me, but the moment some recruiter Googled my name, they would see that I was friends with April May.

The nice thing was that, with some time separating me from my initial find of the article, I was less angry and a little more calculating. I started thinking, Well, this probably won’t work anyway. Might as well give it a try! It felt like doing something.

I remember the day I sent the application in because I was also distracting myself from the other piece of stress that I definitely couldn’t do anything about. It was the one-year anniversary of the Carls and of me sending my first email to April. Everyone was using it as an opportunity to shout at each other. The Defenders didn’t exist anymore, but all of the people who were sympathetic to them still did, and the arguments were never really about Carl anyway. Even with them gone, pundits were getting powerful by arguing that we needed to be more afraid. It felt like the public was only getting angrier every day. A group of people had decided to have a Carl parade in New York, and it was cute, but then it was blocked by protesters and the whole thing fell apart. Twitter then got very angry on absolutely everyone’s behalf.

The whole thing made me feel sick. Maybe I even knew that the chances of something going more wrong were higher than usual. We were all a little on edge. So instead of looking at angry people calling out racism and xenophobia from citizens, pundits, and politicians alike, I guiltily scrubbed references to April and the Som from my social media profiles, spruced up my LinkedIn, and wrote up a cover letter.

As months passed after the Carls disappeared (that’s how everyone thought about it, though for us, of course, it was also the time since April died), I kept feeling more and more like my time with April, Andy, Maya, and Robin was some kind of other life that I hadn’t really belonged in. My brain did a fairly good job of convincing me that I wasn’t actually an important part of the group. This is just impostor syndrome, of course, and I know it is, but that didn’t stop me from believing it. I mean, I built the Som. I know I did that. I also know that very little of the code was mine, and there were way too many people working on that project for anyone to claim credit. And my brain also told me that being basically a high-level employee did not mean those people were actually my friends. They were obviously too cool for that, and if I looked back, there were plenty of examples of them (by which I mostly mean April) not treating me super well.

Yeah, I knew a lot about things that April and Maya and Andy didn’t know about, but they knew things about themselves and about culture. I can tell you all about how valence electrons affect conductivity, but I didn’t even know I was queer until I hooked up with April. I didn’t even know I was queer after I hooked up with April. I thought maybe it was just that she was famous and cool and I wasn’t really sexually attracted to her, just to who she was. April and Maya had known so much about themselves and about how to imagine the world. This is maybe going to sound gross, but I was envious of them, and mad at myself for not spending more time trying to figure out who I was. I’d just gone with what I looked like and what people expected, and assumed that since I was attracted to guys I was straight. How could a person unfamiliar with her own sexual orientation possibly be cool enough to be in April May’s inner circle?

I’m trying to show you how good my brain was at convincing me that I never belonged where I was. These are the lies our brains tell us to push happiness out of our reach. What is the evolutionary purpose of that? Is happiness stagnation? Maybe. Maybe life (all life, not just human life) is nothing more than wanting something and being able to go for it. What is life with no want? Satisfaction sounds lovely, but evolutionarily it was apparently selected against.

What I’m trying to say is that the more time that passed, the weirder I felt about initiating contact between me and any of the group. Maya’s text to me from a dressing room at Cowtown had felt like a gift, a mystery, and a cosmic mistake all at the same time.

I never stopped feeling like being the first to send a text would be intruding upon the real main characters of the story. Even right now as I write this I feel like they just invited me to tell my part of the story because they wanted to be nice to me. Which is ludicrous because the things that happened to me over these months were both intense and absurd. It’s a great story! It’s just the rut my mind gets stuck in.

God, I talk too much, I’m sorry.

The point is that, before I sent off my application, I felt like I needed to talk to someone, but I didn’t know who to call, and I felt really weird about it. Finally, after pacing in my apartment, I called Andy.

“Miranda,” he answered. He didn’t sound right. It was almost like he was resigned, definitely stressed. Like he had begrudgingly accepted the reality that I was calling him on the phone.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, yes. I’m sorry, I’m great. I just got offstage, so I’m a little amped. It’s good to hear your voice.” The weirdness was gone, or he was just hiding it better, but his voice still sounded echoey.