“‘Rogue Objects’ reimagines the traditional boarding story by confining its protagonist in a school for disobedient girls built on the moon. Absurd and moving, this story captures the fraught loneliness of youth in prose that is sharp, witty, and honest. Longing for home but unwilling to admit to her desires, this narrator blunders tenderly through a space we all know too well: the clutching muck between guardedness and vulnerability. “Rogue Objects” is my favorite kind of space story—the kind that shows us how to make the most of our time on the earth.”
—Isle McElroy, contest judge and author of The Atmospherians

Rogue Objects

by Josie Tolin

Winner of the 2022 Fiction Contest

In eighth grade my parents sent me to a school for disobedient girls. The school was on the moon. Back then the moon had a telescope, a Taco Bell, and not much else. Rovers roamed the moonscape with their wire tires creaking.

At Moon School I had a roommate. Her name was Elena. She was an optimist, which was initially difficult for me, but I quickly grew to enjoy spending time with her outside of our dorm room. Elena was adventurous, for one thing. Adventurousness was rare at my school—the collective trauma of being exiled to outer space by our own families hung in the exosphere, outweighing most of my classmates’ desires to go running for the craters past curfew. Within weeks of our arrival, most of the girls at my space school would become so homesick they forgot to change their underwear. 

I’d smuggled a flask of moonshine onto the spaceship. Our first night on the moon I convinced Elena to follow me to the dumpster behind Taco Bell. We sat cross-legged with our temples pressed to the rusted metal, passed the flask back and forth as our jeans collected a fine layer of dust. The moonshine burned my throat, and I tried hard not to twist my face up. Elena coughed and spat on her first sip, a tiny puddle of her drool dampening the ground between us, but she kept it together thereafter. On the dumpster someone had spray-painted a red pentagram.

“The moon isn’t so different from Earth,” I said. I handed the flask to Elena, traced the graffiti like a lifeline. There was something about all this gray emptiness that felt like possibility, and when I sat still enough I could hear the thud of my own heart.

 “So much horizon here,” Elena observed. I checked her earlobes: unpierced. She took another swig. Elena was from Buenos Aires. I was from a tiny midwestern town that was mostly horizon. She asked me what was the first thing I wanted to do when I got back home.

“I’m not sure. I mean, we just got here.” I held the flask near my ear and shook it, heard what couldn’t have been more than just backwash pinging against the steel. My head felt like a bobber on a fishing line.

“I miss my parents already,” Elena said. “And my uncle’s big orange cat.”

I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, ask her why parents who sent their daughters to the moon should be people worth missing at all. Instead I helped her up and we stumbled over pebble-dusted ground all the way back to our little room.

The craters, too, were a fun part. Elena and I hiked their circumferences, barrel-rolled from their rims to their floors, stood on their central peaks and howled at the stars. We really were trying our best.

The spot we liked more than all the others was high up, at the end of a neat path that spiraled the peak like a drill bit. I’d heard Earth looked like a marble from space, but from our secret summit I could parse the textures of land, sea, and clouds—less marbled than tangled, like something that might wash up on the beach.

On top of our peak I crushed the roach of a joint beneath my rubber boot. I had started to smoke pre-rolls I got from the Taco Bell cashier. “Do you think I’m the first person to litter on the moon?” I asked.

“One small step for man,” she said. We laughed a little bit, then pressed our lips together for the first and only time. Our mouths were very dry. I thumbed her naked earlobes and thought of the neighbor girl from home, how we’d sucked hickeys onto each other’s collarbones behind the shed behind my house. “Practice,” we’d both called it. So when Elena started kissing my neck I asked whether she was practicing.

“Practicing for what?” She looked at me as though I was from a planet besides Earth.

“Nothing,” I said.

She touched the mark she’d left below my jaw. “Did you bring any concealer?”

“On our hike?”

“No, dummy. To the moon.”

I crouched, swept a pile of moondust into my cupped hand, then rubbed it all over my neck. “How’s that?”

“Easy, breezy, beautiful,” Elena said. I sneezed. A lunar rover came rolling by. It had six wheels and a little camera on the end of its robotic arm.

“I heard these things take color photos,” I said. We posed with our tongues out and our hands on our hips. The rover turned and started back down the path without so much as a flash.

“It thinks we’re ugly,” Elena said.

“Impossible,” I said.

Elena and I walked back to our dorm room, chapped hands swinging awkwardly at our sides. Our door sucked. I twisted the key around and jiggled the doorknob until something happened. This detail, too, felt like home.

In our room we had loft beds with desks underneath. I had wanted a loft bed since I was a tiny child and now that I had one I hated it. In my dreams I was always falling, from my bed, from the moon.

“I’m going to change my underwear,” Elena announced. “It’s been three Earth days.” I told her I had her beat at four. She slid out of her sweatpants shivering, did a “shoo” motion with her hand. I faced the wall, stared at the photos I’d tacked there. Both featured the neighbor girl. In one she was holding up a peace sign and my eyes were two different sizes. The other we took the day after I pierced her nose in her basement cubby hole, my needle sliding slowly through the dot I’d marked with a highlighter. Then we watched a movie together, about a sailor who dies alone. The next morning her mom saw the nose ring and started to cry.

“Maybe you’ll get sent to the moon with me,” I said to the neighbor girl in the park later that day. The neighbor girl twisted the chain of her swing around her arm, smiled her saddest smile. Under the dogwood tree at the fork in the road, we’d snapped a photo, a photo worth taking to the moon.

“Can I pierce your ears?” I asked Elena.

She took one of her lobes between her thumb and index finger, rubbed it like a lucky penny.

“Why not,” she said. I got out my tin lunch box, where I kept my piercing supplies. Elena shook her head like she’d known me her whole life.

I did it the way I’d done it back on Earth, tearing the top off the sanitizing wipe’s little square packet. Right before I left for the moon I went to the drugstore with my mom. I wore my little brother’s cargo shorts, stuffed handfuls of these packets into my pockets while my mom was in the makeup aisle.

I wiped Elena’s lobes, which were soft and detached, pulled her hair into a twist at the nape of her neck. I penned a dot where I thought the hole should go. I grabbed my piercing needle, which had been soaking in hydrogen peroxide in a cereal bowl on my desk. I held the needle perpendicular to her lobe, asked her to take a deep breath in. There was a popping sound as the needle broke through to the other side, but Elena was still, still holding her breath. I reminded her to exhale as I threaded the earring shaft through the needle’s hollow center; she’d selected, from my baggie of stolen earrings, a pair of metallic studs. I held the earring in place as I removed the needle, slid the plastic backing onto the post and showed her her ear in my pocket mirror. She tilted her head, gave her reddened lobe a flick. “Other side, please,” she said.

When someone was sent to Mars for starting a food fight in our cafeteria, Elena lost interest in venturing out past curfew. Soon she had other friends—a leggy girl from her Basket Weaving class, a redhead from Interpersonal Communications. In the afternoons, the three of them hiked to our special spot together. I always hung back, claimed I had more homework than I knew what to do with. Really I was arranging the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling into forgotten constellations, like George’s Harp or The Solitary Thrush.

I took the required classes: Conflict Management, Sex Education, and Ethics. I wasn’t friends with my classmates, though they respected me, especially once I started piercing ears and noses in the school bathroom. Piercing Elena’s ears had reminded me how alive I felt poking cosmetic holes in people’s skin—tweezer-running hoops through nostrils, Kleenex-wiping eye corners. For the full effect I tied their hair in high ponytails, said, “Wow, look at you!” as they examined their new jewelry in the bathroom mirror. I made people feel good.

I offered girls pre-rolls on the playground, especially the ones who looked like they’d been stoners back on Earth, their hair middle-parted, their pants so ill-fitting they could’ve hula-hooped the waistbands. Most everyone turned me down, including Elena.

“Why is everyone acting like prudes?” I asked her after she rejected my offer. We were standing next to a slide I’d never seen anyone use. Behind us, the redhead girl was juggling moon rocks the size of ping pong balls. Several more girls sat on top of the monkey bars, watching her with their downy legs dangling.

“Some of us are trying to make it back to the people we love,” Elena said. Her voice was soft and distant.

“Our parents sent us to the fucking moon, Elena.”

“And they could’ve sent us farther. But have fun pressing your luck.” The redhead caught her moon rocks one by one, hugged them to her chest before dropping them. She and Elena linked arms, then turned to walk inside. I kicked at the ground before following them.

Before school the next morning, I went to Taco Bell with the goth girl from Sex Ed. “What a crock of shit that class is,” she said, brushing dust from her black turtleneck. She was surprised by the abstinence-only thing. She was probably Swedish, or French.

Unlike the Taco Bell in my hometown, the Taco Bell on the moon had not discontinued its breakfast menu. We ordered hash browns and Cinnabon Delights. This was far better than what they had for us in the cafeteria: peas, bacon, and crackers in vacuum-sealed packages. We ate our breakfasts on top of the giant boulder behind the playground. I’d seen a small girl get catapulted from the seesaw once. She’d drifted slowly to the ground, like a feather dropped from a balcony.

The goth girl asked me if I could pierce her eyebrow sometime. I examined her face. She had all the other possible piercings, just about. And her eyeliner wings were very even. I agreed. My first eyebrow! We slid off the boulder, our fingers coated in cinnamon sugar. “Meet me in the bathroom at one,” I said. Everything ran on London time, despite.

I waited where I waited for everyone, on the bench in the defunct shower next to the accessible stall. I tapped my foot, started humming a song I used to sing with the neighbor girl. The song was about being beautiful and knowing it. I missed my road bike with the handlebar streamers that fluttered in the wind. I missed the fucking wind.

I heard the squeak of boots against tile. I whisked back the shower curtain, holding a long needle. My Ethics teacher was wetting her moon-frizzed hair in the bathroom sink. She looked at me and screamed.

Later, I sat in a bloated armchair in the principal’s office, listening to the principal brainstorm all the places he could send me. I needed a more specialized school, he said, something particular to my brand of rebellion. All the Mars schools were full; Uranus was for mean girls. Boys went to Jupiter, and Saturn with its chastity belt rings was basically a boot camp for abstinence, which, he noted as he checked my file, I had indeed been practicing since my arrival on the moon. I said nothing about that comment, though it disturbed me. Stranger things had been said, would continue to be said for the rest of my life.

“I’ve got it!” he said. He slammed his fist against the desk and some dice rattled in his pencil cup. “We’ll send you to Pluto.”

“That’s not even a planet.” I rubbed my arms, imagined the full-body prick of ice beads, which were sure to blossom from my body hair in urgent clusters.

“Neither is the moon.” He blew his nose, left the used tissue crumpled on his desk. “A spaceship will leave for the outer edge of the solar system in a few Earth days. In the meantime, with the exception of the dormitories, we ask that you please stay off school grounds.”

I never did tell Elena I was leaving. I spent my final moon night on our once-secret peak, smoking and sleeping on some balled-up shirts. My joint roaches littered the ground like confetti.

The sun that morning wasn’t beautiful; it was bright and hot and far too close. I was sweating through my jacket and both my sweaters. I peeled them off layer by layer, hiked back to the dorm in my sports bra with my clothes tucked under my armpit. The sun followed me like an eye.

School was in session by the time I shimmied our door open, and Elena, predictably, was gone. On her desk were the two metallic earrings I’d pierced her with. I put one of them in my pocket, left the other for if she changed her mind about letting a hole close up.

I stripped my bed, cleaned out my dresser, stuffed all that fabric into a giant duffel bag along with my empty flask, my lunch box of piercing supplies, and the photos of me and the neighbor girl. Then I climbed my loft bed ladder for the final time. My glow-in-the-dark stars were arranged in Cancer Minor, the shape of a feeble arrow, and I picked them off the ceiling one by one, wondering, mostly, whether I’d ever sleep in a loft bed again.

With my swollen bag over my shoulder I made one last stop at Taco Bell. I traded four pairs of stolen earrings for two pre-rolls and the cashier threw in a third. I thanked him, then told him I was leaving. Instead of asking where I was going he asked where I was from. “Indiana,” I said. 

“Nice. Is it anything special?” He was high.

“I think so.” He mentioned the telescope at the edge of the deepest crater he knew, said I should go before I leave, that I could borrow his electric scooter to get there.

“You can see everything through that telescope. For example, my Earth wife bought a tiny new dog. I was able to find them out on a walk in the neighborhood. The dog had long hair and little booties on its paws.” He sniffed. “So cute.”

I was skeptical, hopeful, down for a joyride. On the scooter I swerved moon rocks and craters, moon shadows that seemed to quiver while I was in motion. I smiled at the illusion of wind in my hair.

I scootered past the spot Elena and I had claimed for our own. Someone was up there—probably her, I realized from the slope of the figure’s shoulders. She looked like a mysterious champion on her space podium, the Earth her watercolor discus. I ached to snap a picture. But all I had was my memory and an earring that had once punctured her skin.

The neighbor girl had told me she would make a fire every night I was gone. “On a clear enough day you might see it from the moon,” she said. It was so stupidly kind, the kindest thing I’d ever heard of. 

The telescope was giant, a tube long as a smokestack in the distance. I was going to find my corner of the Lake Michigan shoreline refracted back to me through convex lenses. I was going to sift through cornfields until I saw the mills that lined the beach, the power plant, waves lapping at crushed beer cans. I’d scan for my neighborhood, woods cleared for beige houses and bike trails. Once I located the neighbor girl’s home in the field of view, I’d twist the knobs. The flicker in her backyard would fade in and out of focus. 

I ditched the scooter and ran. 

I put my eye to the eyepiece. It was pitch black inside the telescope tube. I turned the dials: darkness still. My palms were wet. I was sliming up the whole thing. I jogged to the opposite end of the telescope. The lens was bigger than my head. There was no lens cap but I left handprints on the glass trying to find one. I tried the eyepiece again. The field of view remained empty, though my fingers had added some grey smudges to the black. I jiggled the dial as though it were one of my doorknobs, then began to slap it. I karate-kicked the tripod, got my leg up high and everything. I kicked it again, then again. I dented nothing.

Published June 26th, 2022