It was easy to fall in love in the V. Everyone was gorgeous, their bodies crafted to be in peak physical condition. There was no body odor, no hunger, no bathroom breaks, no death. Every moment belonged to you and the people you chose to share it with.

I saw him on the first day of one of my weekly years. An hour in here was a minute out there so entire lifetimes could be lived in just a few weeks Six hours per six days was the maximum a brain could handle, however. People who stayed longer without unplugging tended to end up drooling and immobile. I had too many responsibilities back in the Real for that.

Six hours at home with your head plugged in was a nice 360 days in the V, more than long enough to develop real feelings.

He smoked a cigarette across the bar from me. I liked the way the smoke hung in the air as he watched me, creating a fog through which I could barely see his hazel eyes. He said something to the bartender, our eyes never breaking the stare. A moment later a drink appeared before me. I raised my eyebrows in a thank you and watched him watch me take a sip. Like all the drinks here, it was the best Old Fashioned I ever tasted.

When I looked at the red doors that led to the auditorium where we would be part of the 1956 Academy Awards audience, he came to stand beside me. He wore a white tuxedo and fedora, a perfect match to my tight black dress.

“You seen this movie before?” he asked.

“Which? Lots of nominees.”

“The one that’s going to win. Marty.”

I nodded and took another sip of the drink. “It’s one of my favorites. About two ugly people who find love with each other. It’s very sweet.”

He took my free hand and held it for a second. “Based on a true story?”

“Not in this world.”

I watched his full lips return to the rim of the martini and felt a quiver in my own mouth.

We skipped the show and went straight to my hotel room. The V was designed for pleasure, and I had had my share of affairs, but none felt quite like this. When his hands were not on me my body yearned for his touch like a stump crying out for a missing limb.

360 days, 360 hours, 360 minutes. Time lost all meaning with him, replaced with a million wonderful moments. We ate sushi carved from fish plucked directly from the sea and served to us on silver platters on a cruise in the Sea of Japan. We skied naked from the top of Jade Dragon. We jumped off the Burj Khalifa and soared over Dubai.

There were plenty of people who would rightfully point out that it is easy to fall in with someone when all you do is have a good time. And to them I say, so? It felt good to catch feelings for someone while narrowly avoiding getting chomped to bits by wolves in the middle of a national park or during a shootout at the Long Branch Saloon. Even simulated near-death experiences had a way of sorting the chemicals in our body so that the heart, brain, and loins all fired up in the same way as in the Real.

This was different, though, and we both knew it. There was a primal nature to our feelings. I desired him with every fiber of my being like a person stabbed and bleeding out desired the sweet release of death: overwhelming, all-powerful, inescapable. Our souls were one, tethered through time and brought together by Fate to the V. The settings were fantastic, the bodies imaginary, but the feelings authentic.

“I’ve had good times with people I met in the V before, but never like this,” he told me toward the end of that year. We sat across from each other in a bathtub filled with pink champagne, our legs intertwined, our arms stretched around along the rim so the edges of our fingers touched. “It’s amazing, actually.”

“What is?” There was an unfamiliar sparkle in his eye. I had stared into those eyes for countless hours in the V and was stunned something about them could still surprise me.

He leaned forward as if to kiss me but paused when inches away. “Every time I look at you, you’re better looking at than the last time I looked at you.”

Another perfect line. “Optical illusion in the V,” I responded with a smirk. He laughed. I grabbed his face and kissed him as I felt the familiar burst of warmth in my chest. Life had become the Before and the After. Before Him I was little more than an animal wandering the world, surviving on whatever scraps I could scavenge. After Him I had discovered fire and was now fully a human being, fully a woman.

When our lips parted, I could not help but utter the words, “I wish-,”

He cut me off. “Come on now, you know this is this and that is that.”

It was an unspoken yet firm rule. Out there was to remain out there and in here, in here. The V was the pure, safe, sacred place. The Real was the dirty, unsafe land of obligations and responsibilities. The V was beautiful, the Real was ugly. To try to combine them would irreparably tarnish both. “When the timer’s up, we are strangers again.”

“But what if we didn’t have to be.”

He looked away from me and stood up, his chiseled nude body shiny with droplets of bubbly. He stepped out of the tub. “No.” His demeanor chilled. He walked to the bedroom of our suite in Rio. I could hear people outside celebrating Carnival. I reached over the edge of the tub and grabbed my champagne flute. I scooped a full glass from the tub and threw it back. The bubbles tickled my throat.

I got up to apologize. He was right. This is this and that is that. Nothing in the V was really real, no matter how it felt. “Hey, look, I’m sorry-,” I dropped the glass on the carpet. The cold liquid splashed my feet.

He was gone.

I clapped three times and said my password aloud.

---

The worst part of returning to the Real was the diaper.

As soon as I removed the V-Hat, a black motorcycle helmet with no visor, I felt the wetness and smelled the remnants of meals past. While my mind was fully plugged into the V, I was able to ignore my physical body. No matter where my brain went, my bodily functions continued while central command was distracted. Sometimes a one-hour session left me clean but a five hour one like what I just finished left a terrible mess.

I recalled the way his muscled chest felt against mine and thought, Worth it, as the rank stink of digested pizza and salad attacked my face.

“How was it?” my husband, Fred, asked. A lumpy man in with a too-thin mustache, he looked like he was just getting back from taking the kids to a park: tan shorts and red polo with dark sweat stains around the crotch and pits, respectively. Unlike me, he was the outdoorsy type in the Real and shunned the V. “I just don’t trust it,” he told me once. “It’s putting all this information and stimulus in your brain, but at what cost? What is it taking out?”

My ability to deal with your crap, I thought when I remembered that question. Allegedly they took nothing, but tech companies had lied for generations about what they did with user data and information. This could not be any different.

Take what you want. The V was worth any price.

He was worth any price.

“Mommy!” my five-year-old, Sherise, exclaimed while squeezing my legs. With a head that reached my waist, she was in the perfect position to catch a whiff. “What’s that smell?” She pinched her nose and leaned her face away from my body.

“That’s just Mommy’s peepee and poopoo from helmet vacation,” my seven-year-old, Sharonda, said.

“Ew, Mommy. You need a shower.”

“Indeed, I do,” I said. My husband gave me a knowing wink, as if he had any idea of what went on during my time away. I wondered sometimes what he would do if he knew the truth about what I was up to in the V.

Probably tell me he was happy I was having fun.

In the shower I thought of him. He had told me his name was Derrick, an alias (mine was “Bernadette”) for the V, but I heard someone call him Joseph in Egypt, at the bar at the foot of the Sphinx. His face changed and he rushed off to talk to the guy whom I never met. He came back with a wide-eyed, twitchy smile. “Who was that?” I asked him.

“Just an old friend from out there. We went to high school together.”

“Why don’t you ask him to join us?”

“Because I don’t want him to join us.”

A new round of drinks appeared and that was that. It was early on in our time together, easier to let things slip.

Joseph in the Real, Derrick in the V, where are you? My hands slid down under my belly as I pondered the question while memories of his face and body rushed at me like the rain from the showerhead.

Last Christmas a mermaid died in the school swimming pool. It was only a small pool, built up at the sides with wooden panels, more like a tank for training children in. That meant it froze over very easily, but a mermaid couldn’t know that. It stood in a courtyard in the shadow of the school, and the sun reached it only at rare intervals.

Behind it lurked a stone and sulking outhouse, pebbledash walls lashed together with a corrugated plastic roof. In its damp darkness the children undressed, and tripped, and snapped tight, powdered rubber caps over their skulls. Under its benches something black grew wetly out towards them. It was the hut that Freya hated most of all.

Miss Wallace had caught Archie Dorrick from Upper Third belting down the corridor but she hadn’t told him off, not properly, just asked him why he needed to be rushing so quick. He said there was a mermaid dead in the pool, that it must have happened in the holidays, and Miss Wallace was so interested that she didn’t ask Archie why he had been down there on his own, which was definitely cigarettes.

Miss Wallace was young and pretty and was allowed to wear any jumper she liked, unlike Freya, who was a pupil and had to wear a plain grey one like everybody else. Miss Wallace also had colourful bracelets on her arms and hair that rose up above her head and fanned out like branches. When she moved they swayed about her; the bracelets and the hair both. In the older years they had a teacher for English and a teacher for history and a teacher for comparative mythography, but Freya was only nine so Miss Wallace was her everything teacher, and she needed no other.

Freya’s last teacher had been Mr Heagerty, who had folded himself into a corner of the classroom, spiderlike, and spoke to them only in riddles. His interest in the outside world was oblique at best, and he’d never once worn a bracelet or even a colourful tie. For Miss Wallace, the outside world was the whole point, it was something to push both your hands into and wiggle about. That was why Class 7C were allowed to follow her, symmetrical grey cygnets, through the hall and out the fire escape and down the iron stairway that led to the pool with the mermaid in it.

The ice was frozen over most of it, a thin sheet, breakable. One arm punctured the surface, a long, grey-brown javelin that reached up and out and seized around the metal rung of the ladder in a tight fist. Frost followed up it and caught on the trail of fine hairs that sloped along its back. Freya couldn’t see down below the ice, Miss Wallace had them at a distance, she had first dibs on exploration. Freya jostled her way to the front of the group. She knew she had to be as close as was allowed.

Miss Wallace stared down at the mermaid, and her hair quivered, and her breath came out in clouds. Below her the arm was stiff, and quiet, and altogether too close to her throat. In the end it was Juno Clarke who asked the question that held them all close with a ferocious anxiety. Juno asked if Miss Wallace was sure it was really dead, and Miss Wallace said yes, and everyone turned to Juno and sneered at her stupidity.

Then Miss Wallace said “I can prove it,” which was something she said a lot, and she felt around inside her pockets and pulled out her fountain pen. Freya had long watched and desired that pen, it shone bronze and under Miss Wallace’s direction bled blue, looping calligraphy that far outranked Freya’s lumpen hieroglyphs. Miss Wallace took off the lid, and lifted the pen high, and then stuck it deep, deep into the mermaid’s arm.

Later, when Miss Wallace encouraged them to come close, to huddle around and stroke the arm for themselves, to learn what they could from this rare chance, Freya’s finger found the hole the pen had made. Without really meaning to, she dipped it inside, into the cold and sleepy meat. It resisted her, but she felt deeper, she wriggled her finger down to the end of the incision and scratched at the bone. Freya thought to herself that she might be the first person in history to reach inside a mermaid’s arm and scrape their nail across the bone, and in that thought there was no horror, but a realisation that for the first time, in her life of classmates and brothers and older cousins, she had experienced something truly private, something that could not be shared and that belonged to her alone. And Freya understood that there was and would be nothing else she desired as she desired the mermaid, and she knew what she had to do next.

First, before the science lesson had begun, Miss Wallace came back across the courtyard and told 7C that she had an important question. Her face was suddenly very serious, and she went round in turn and asked if any of them had put the mermaid there, and Freya said no and Tim said no and Fergus said no even though if anybody had put it there, it would definitely have been him. Marybeth asked Miss Wallace how the mermaid had got into the pool, since it hadn’t been any of them, and although the class glowered at her automatically, Freya felt it was a Good Question. Miss Wallace said that if it hadn’t been anybody in another class, then maybe it had crawled out of an estuary and dragged itself inland. Mermaids could manage that, for short distances. Maybe it had seen the pool and thought in its animal mind to refresh itself. It would have heaved its long body up, over the wooden side, and only when it hit the water would it have realised its mistake.

There were a lot of questions now; the pack had grown both curious and tolerant. Jason wanted to know if it was a boy mermaid or a girl mermaid. Miss Wallace said she couldn’t tell because of the ice, but that if the tail was big and squashy that might mean it was full of babies. Joanna Fitch asked if it was saltwater or freshwater, and Miss Wallace reminded her that mermaids were freshwater, that if it had been saltwater then it would have been a dead selkie instead. Juno Clarke, hungry for redemption, asked what it was that had made it dead, and Miss Wallace looked a little sad and said it was the chlorine, that would have poisoned it long before the cold snap made the water freeze over. The chlorine would have filtered its way inside very fast, she told them, in a voice that tried to make it sound less painful than Freya was sure it was.

When the questions were over, 7C clustered around the body in the pool. The head was quite visible, from this angle: smooth, with black orb eyes, wide-set on a yowling face. Its nose was otter-like, a black pad of a snout that protruded enough to disrupt the human geometry of the skull. There were sprays of thick white whiskers on either side and the teeth below were small and sharp. The lower body was more obscured, but Freya saw a long torso, studded with dark nipples, curving into one great sinuous limb coiled beneath it. It was a dumb animal, and dead, but in that it was entirely beautiful.

It was nearly time to go back inside. 7C had had their fill of the mermaid’s dead hand, some of them were getting bored and were stamping their feet. Freya took her chance when Miss Wallace was distracted by Jason, who had found a pine cone and was proud of it: an ill trophy compared to what Freya had in mind. She ran her fingers over the back of the mermaid’s hand one last time, over its thick knuckles and into the folds of frost-crackled webbing. She found her target and she closed her fingers over it and pulled down hard.

It broke under the skin first. She was compelled to swivel it around the joint until the skin was torn all around, and even then it was difficult, it nearly sent her flying to do it. There wasn’t time to inspect her prize, just to thrust it down into the quiet black of her trouser pocket. She could feel it, small and cold and curled like a monkey nut. She squeezed her fist around it and the tiny spark of selfishness that had jumped inside her blazed, she was an inferno, she would collapse, if only something separated her from this fragment, this fossil of a perfect moment and a beautiful thing now dead.

As they trooped back up the stairway and into the honey warmth of the school, Joanna said it was funny, she had expected it to look more like a person. The others scoffed, but Miss Wallace heard her and said that it just went to show there was a world of difference between bipedal and human, and then Owen said Miss, how can it be a biped, it didn’t have any feet at all. Miss Wallace said that was a good point but in a voice that made it sound like she wished it was Owen there dead under the ice and trying to scratch his way out. She said that a mermaid physiologically speaking was an honorary biped, it was a biped in every way that mattered except the feet, and for homework she set them all the project of making up a word for things with two arms that humans and mermaids and gorillas could all be part of together, but not kangaroos or meerkats. Which seemed simple enough to Freya, as she caressed the gobbet of mermaid flesh in her pocket. Really, all it came down to was thumbs.

“Ten to one he holds like an ox,” I say.

What I meant was, I sure as shit hope he hangs on to her. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t trust my friend, but I’m betting with coin I don’t have. I’m not saying I’m not good for it, because I am. Just, you know, my pockets are empty today.

So I sit and watch between the legs of elves and hope he keeps her off the tavern floor.

I nod at the barman for another drink and slide him some coin while the good bard Pussywillow balances the poor girl on his shoulders, his knees vibrating like lute strings.

“Nay, Milo,” Bertrand says. “Make it twenty to one,” and he’s got his hand held out to make our simple gentleman’s agreement into a done deal—a slit-your-throat-if-you-don’t-pay-up sort of bet. It’s not the sort of bet I want to make, yet I’m shaking Bertrand’s hand, allowing the ale ravaging both my innards and inhibitions to make the decision for me.

I can see it in Pussywillow’s dour face. He knows he’s going to drop her dumb.

I slap Bertrand on the back, pleasantly surprised by the absence of his usual musky odor, and hand him my last coin.

“Next round is on me,” I say, and slip out the door, noting the unmistakable thud causing the crowd to crow is not from the door slamming behind me, but the poor girl falling—and perhaps my luck.

---

“You asshole,” I say.

Pussywillow lounges in his chair.

“What?” he says. “You’re the one who bet in favor of me in matters regarding a feat of strength. I’d say that makes you the asshole.”

“Because I believed in a friend?”

“A foolish asshole.”

“Bertrand isn’t going to let it go this time,” I say. “How much coin do you have, by the way?”

Pussywillow leans forward, his brunette coiffure still flattened from the tavern fiasco.

“What—why?” he asks. “I’m not bailing you out.”

“Well,” I say, making sure I’ve given myself room to dodge whatever he’ll throw at me once I tell him. “Because you’re…well. Sort of roped into this too.”

He grabs an apple from the table.

“How? Explain to me how I am responsible for your financial misgivings?”

“I mean, you dropped her,” I say, and I’m flat on the ground while the apple zips past my head. Better than the last time. I still have a scar from the cat.

Pussywillow chases me around the room while I create obstacles for him from chairs and end tables and various decorative baubles.

“How much?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I said ten to one…”

He’s slowing down, giving up.

“But then he raised it twenty to one,” I say. “But I don’t remember the initial wager. Honestly, I’m not sure how gambling works. I’ve never been much of a betting man.”

I pick the apple off the floor and take a bite.

“Oh no,” Pussywillow says. “There’s that look.”

I’m more of a thinking man.

“I have an idea,” I say.

The mud flats twinkled with the light of a million stars above us in the darkest sky I’d ever seen. Emma knelt beside a salty tributary. It ran in a sandy rut from shore to sea, or at least to the deeper and murkier water waiting to rush back over the sand when the tide came in. A trapped fish—a tiny pollock, from its silver scales—wriggled furiously, its world suddenly narrowed to a salty but barely wet gully.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving tomorrow,” Emma said. Already the nights had turned colder—it was just September, but her purple skullcap was pulled down tight over her ears. Despite the chill, she insisted on going barefoot, as if encased in slick seal skin instead of human fragility. Her feet were pale, nearly blue. Asking her if she wanted to put her shoes back on would be met with amusement, so I let her be. If she wanted to warm up, she would. She didn’t need my anxiety heaped over her—not when we had other things to worry about.

I wasn’t used to the abrupt turn of weather or the frozen low tides. My blood ran warm, and hers—apparently—ran icy. I was wrapped in wool and denim and fleece, head to toe, and none of it helped.

“I’d like you to stay, Jeannie,” she said. “Can’t you stay?”

I was a shivering, chattering mess, and her request made it worse.

“Tourist season is over.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “My aunt’s lease is up at the shop, and the landlord won’t let us stay any longer.”

“It’s the ice.” Emma popped up and twirled along the seabed, hands upraised to the dark sky and toes ripping through the small stands of sea water. It was new moon, but the stars were bright enough to spotlight her dancing and dipping. The flame of her red hair bushing out of her hat made it look like a fireball tumbled along the sand.

“What about the ice?” I watched her, stuffing down a well of longing. It would do me no good to want what I couldn’t have.

“Homer Spit is so narrow,” she said, as though that explained everything. When I didn’t answer, she added, “The winds blow pretty fierce over the road and up the shoreline—and with the waves coming so high, and the weather so cold from here on out, it doesn’t take much to freeze the pipes and ice everything up. No one in town is willing to risk coming out this way. Well, no one except the fishermen—that’s why the bar at the end of the spit stays open year-round. They’ll endure anything for a beer.”

The sound of my laugh echoed off the stands of long, flat rocks. They were usually hidden underwater. The surfaces were still slick, algae clinging to the corners, refusing to let go, even for a second. I could understand the compulsion.

Emma plucked something out of the sand and slid it into her pocket. “I’ll admit, there’s not much to do in the off-season—you’d be bored. Still, we’d make our own fun. Shake things up a little.” She paused. “It the night to set your intentions, you know.”

The way she said it—intentions—it was like I’d never heard the word before. “It is?”

“It’s the new moon.” Her voice was firm. She sounded so far away. “A night for manifesting our desires.”

“You sound like those people who go to bore tide parties and the full moon festivals. My aunt says things are tourist schlock.”

The smile in Emma’s voice was clear when she said, “Some of it is. But intention-setting and manifesting are just the same as wishing or saying a prayer. And I wish for so much right now.”

“So…like going to church? Church on the beach?”

“Sure, we can think of it like that.” Her bare feet struck wet sand and puddles, and suddenly she stood tall in front of me. “I’ve learned some things—it’s not quite like church, but it’s not…I don’t know. It’s not like other things.”

I would miss this when my aunt and I left—the way Emma talked in circles and didn’t quite answer questions, yet still made me curious enough to want to know more. The way her hair looked in starlight. The way her words were so pretty in the night air. I’d be back on the east coast in a week or so, far from Alaska, and there would be no one like her.

“So what is it like then?” I asked, just to hear her speak again.

“We live with nature. We live with the sea and the salmon and the moose and the kittiwakes. The bald eagles and the otters. The whales. Or, I should say, we are allowed to live with nature. It’s different here.”

“Here as in Homer? Or here as in Alaska as a whole?”

“Homer, I think. But intention-setting came long before there were gods to worship. It’s just putting what you want out into the world and hoping it comes true. Manifesting our deepest desires.”

I smiled. “It’s a nice idea. If only prayers and wishes worked.”

Emma flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Maybe yours haven’t, but others’ wishes have come to pass. Last summer I wished for you, right here on this beach, and here you are. Maybe this is just a lucky spot. I don’t know.”

I wrinkled my nose and touched her hand. She was sweet, so sweet. “Do I have to remind you that there are tsunami warnings all up and down the spit. I know Homer has earthquakes. People die from silly accidents. That doesn’t exactly strike me as lucky.”

“Luck is what you make it. Perhaps you simply have to make the right offerings to the universe.”

“Offerings. What, like animal sacrifice?” I laughed.

Emma smiled, but she was dead serious when she said, “I’ve seen intentions specified with bird feathers—some with animals caught or hunted. It depends on what you wish for, I guess. The strength of the wish you’re manifesting.” She dipped her toe into the pool where the pollock still frantically squirmed. “This fish, for instance. We’ve been talking about wanting you to stay in Homer, and this fish has been witness. It would make a strong inclusion in our spellwork.”

“Spellwork? Isn’t that witchcraft?”

“Semantics. Spellwork is the same as prayer. It’s the same as yearning. It’s intention work.”

“You can keep saying intention this and intention that, but I doubt that fish intends on dying. Look how hard he’s working to get back to the ocean.” The pollock surged forward, eager to find its way to a larger pool of water.

Emma’s eyes sparkled. “I just don’t want you to go, Jeannie. I know I keep saying that, and so do you…that’s what I want. I want you to stay.”