In The Orbit (Part I)

42. Karma

For the next few days, Karma avoids Azalea. She sits at the opposite end of the program kid lunch table. She sits in the closet and works on her poetry while Azalea lounges in the hot tub eating pizza, or other junky food.

Nobody ever expects Karma to be a poetry kid, but she is. She writes mostly long poems full of elaborate words. But a few of them are short, choppy, and full of emotion. Ever since her parents started fighting and her sister kept coming home smelling like smoke and cheap vodka, she would go into the bathroom and write and write and write. Until her boyfriend came along.

Anyway, why couldn't Azalea have just told her that she was a lesbian? Shouldn't there be some kind of warning about that? But behind Karma's initial thoughts, she feels like a chump. First of all, why did she sleep like that? With her arms curled around Azalea? Like what the hell was that? Also, was she subconsciously leading Azalea on? Oh boy did Azalea like her? Did she make Azalea like her with all the sleeping curled up together?

Karma furiously types out a short, five line poem.

Warm cozy lovely heat source

Had to go and freeze it

Spooning

Spooning is the word

Now she is cold, awake, and alone

She hasn't been able to sleep well. Azalea is always just laying right there, always spread out on her back like a starfish, but she can't go and curl up to her like she used to. Not if Azalea is a lesbian. She hates the fact that she can't curl herself around her, especially because she is literally RIGHT THERE. She misses her boyfriend like crazy.

She lays down and falls dead asleep on the floor of the closet.

She wakes up to her phone vibrating. It is her boyfriend. She stares at it for a second. Then the rush of longing is so much that she snatches her phone from the ground and punches the answer button.

Neither says anything for a second. She can hear her boyfriend sniffling in the background.

"Karma Kashner," he says. She remembers how long it has been since they last talked.

"What do you want," she snaps.

"You," he says.

"You haven't said a single word to me for two weeks and now suddenly you're all 'hey Karma what's up?'"

"I miss you."

"Yeah I missed you when you didn't respond. And when you made out with Marcie."

"That was a mistake."

"Oh, she just fell on your lips, is that what happened?"

"What? No! Karma, the point is, I miss you. I want to talk again. I want to visit you during visiting week."

Karma is silent for a while. This is all she wanted for so long. And now that it's happening, she isn't enjoying it. Maybe she got her hopes up for nothing.

"Fuck you," she says, then hangs up.

The next minute, Azalea walks in in her underwear. She yelps and jumps about a foot in the air. The screen light bounces off her hair and turns it to a weird color.

"Get out of here, I want to change," she says.

Karma blinks.

"I mean, if you want to stay, feel free, but that would be a very lesbian action, don't you think?"

So Azalea is mad at her. That is not a friendly teasing tone.

Karma gets up and goes, bringing her smartscreen and computer both with her. She wishes she didn't have to share a room. She decides to go and find a spot where she can be alone, just like she did before she could go to her boyfriend's house to escape the family drama.

She puts on her jeans with all of the gadgets in the pockets. She leaves the room quietly, and walks purposefully through the halls, pretending she is looking for something she lost, because of the cameras.

She finds a door that she doesn't know what it leads to. She has been keeping tabs on what every door leads to. It is a keypad lock, but on the side, there is keyhole, just in case the system gets hacked or something. Karma picks the lock and finds a stairwell inside, which is unusual. There are really only elevators in the satellite. She supposes it is some kind of fire safety thing, but she can't really tell, because all of the doors are locked from inside the stairwell.

She sits down on the floor and pulls out her computer. She surfs the net for a while, not doing much, getting inspiration for future poems. After a while, she slumps again, and falls asleep.

The next day, in the afternoon, they start learning physical combat and defense skills. Karma is still sore from sleeping in the stairwell and in general just angry. They have robots that they practice the combat on. Karma isn't bad on offence, but defence is rough, and she is too slow on offence to not get any damage done. Everyone leaves that afternoon with a few bruises, and Karma is even more sore.

She hardly says anything to anyone, even when Harold was being a bit chatty. She knows it's a mean thought, but she wonders if Harold is just this chatty because this is the first time he has had anything close to a friend. She scolds herself for being so hypocritical. None of them had good social lives, with the exception of Khan and Fifi, but she can see something about Fifi... it is off. She has been lying. That is what the tic in her forehead is, Karma realizes. Everytime she lies, the little tic is the only little thing that changes, probably because lying is just second nature and she has everything else under control.

In terms of the Fifi thing, the officers explained that she was being controlled on the headphones, and had been told to do what she was supposed to do by the officers, which hardly makes sense to Karma. While Fifi told this story, she said that she had been commended to not tell them, and that she was just doing what they told her to. The vein in her forehead stuck out so much while she said this that Karma was actually concerned for her circulation.

Karma picks up her computer in the stairwell that night and does some internet stalking of Fifi.

She finds out a lot about the Breckenhills. She sees that Fifi is a good shade lighter than the rest of her family, even though she is relatively dark-skinned. Also, her two little sisters both have little afros, and Fifi's hair is just wavy/curly. All of Fifi's social media accounts have her at parties and with friends, but they are carefully filtered. She found pictures of the same parties and other events on Fifi's friends' pages that were a lot more graphic. However, she can't find anything exceedingly suspicious. She decides that if anything else happens, she is getting Strom and doing some hacking.