martin-clark-blog1

[martin-clark-blog1]

When Martin was 11, he fell in love. Puppy love, he supposed now – although was it normal for puppy love to mold you, to form the pieces of your soul into a cohesive whole? Her name was Nora, and she was the daughter of the local grocer in their Sector 3 neighborhood. While they’d frequently been in the same classes growing up, he’d never really seen her until the day Bruce Perry – god, that guy had always been a jerk – had been harassing him and Phae, teasing them cruelly about some silly game he couldn’t even remember the details of now, and Nora had stuck a foot out to trip him. Bruce had yelped as he went down, his eyes seething as he glanced around for his attacker, but his fight seemed to ebb as he looked up at Nora. She stood holding up a fist ready to lunge, her own gaze glinting with a ferocity that made Martin’s stomach lurch even without being on the direct receiving end of such ire. Bruce scoffed and muttered something imperceptible under his breath, pulling himself up and shuffling away. Martin looked over at Nora, amazed, silent as Phae immediately began bubbling over with thanks to the other girl. Nora had only shrugged, still with a mean glint in her eyes as she glanced over at them.

After that, he noticed everything she did. He looked forward to getting up and going to school each day if only in anticipation of her nearness. During class review day, he noticed she nearly always knew all of the answers when teachers set them up for Jeopardy-style competition, but sometimes she’d say a wrong answer, looking bored, and shrug when corrected. One time she did that and glanced over, noticing Martin watching her. Before he could blush and look away, she smirked directly at him, so knowingly that he was suddenly terrified at the realization that she knew how he pined for her, that she not only knew but also thought him a sad, pitiful fool. But when she came up to him at the end of class, she said only, “You ever give wrong answers on purpose just to fuck with them, too?” – and Martin realized with a rush of euphoria that he’d been mistaken, she didn’t magically know every thought that went through his mind, and quickly he lied, “Sure, sometimes.” He then blurted, “I’m behind on the material for this exam, though – want to study together?” She had eyed him, seeming to appraise him but then gave that same bored shrug he was quickly coming to recognize so well.  “Why not.”

They fell into the habit of studying together. In spite of his desperation for her approval, he found himself competing with her – she had a maddening tendency to always know the answers, to instantly perceive things that he couldn’t see, and then explain them in a way that was so simple that he immediately felt stupid for not seeing it that way himself. He was near the top of his class, perhaps could have been at the top if he’d applied himself more to work that wasn’t directly relevant to his interests. Second top, anyhow – it was Nora who continued to earn the best grades, to speak the most articulately on presentation days, to break tasks down and delegate them the most efficiently during group work, to be the only one in discussion classes with an opinion that was remotely original. He resented the feelings of inadequacy she stirred up in him, yet he also couldn’t get enough of her – on some days or weeks he’d decide he’d not reach out to her, not seek out her company. She could come to him if she missed him. Yet it was a fruitless, childish game he played only with himself, as he inevitably caved and sought her out again. Life felt grey without her.

When he finally kissed her, they were fourteen and it’d been completely impulsive on his part, his weak willpower when it came to her finally stripped bare by their first few wine coolers they shared laughing behind the kitchen counter of her dad’s store. There hadn’t been anything spectacular about that moment in particular, he’d just been loosened up by alcohol for the first time in his life and then she had laughed loudly at something he’d said and he was done for, his hand reaching up to take her chin as he’d kissed her full on the mouth. When he pulled back, already aghast at himself – had he just ruined their friendship? – she had looked at him, wide-eyed, and he’d opened his mouth to stammer out an apology and she’d only laughed, exclaiming, “I’d thought you were gay!” He had glared at her in spite of himself and put his empty wine cooler bottle down, grabbing her by the shoulders as he kissed her again, hand moving under the collar of her shirt to feel the warmth of her skin as he felt her tongue in his mouth. It was an insult to his pride, to be sure, that she’d clearly not thought of him like this until now, but it didn’t matter, he could finally admit it to himself that she could insult him however much she wanted and he’d still be back to try to kiss her again.

For over a year and a half  – an eternity, really, for teenagers – they’d been happy. They shared music, books, stories about their days. He loved the way her mind worked; he loved the way that the hard glint in her eyes only ever seemed to soften when he touched her. He was certain he was in an unfathomably deep love that could never be broken, never be changed. But after his family was moved up to Sector 2 when he was sixteen, he detected a barely perceptible shift in her. She seemed bored as he spoke excitedly about his days at his new school, as if it were a fight for her to try and appear interested. He tried his best to help her understand what this change meant for them both. “This shows you could get moved up too,” he said to her one day, shifting in bed to prop himself up on his elbows, looking down at her. She only shrugged, that mouth he loved so much slack with apathy as she studied her nails, “Why would I want to?” He frowned, nudging her, “Why would you say that? Life is better up there. There’s opportunity up there.” She looked up at him then, her eyes flashing with that familiar meanness. “Opportunity for what, Martin?” He scowled at her, “Why are you like this?” “Like what?” she returned, her tone mockingly innocent as she shifted to sit up in bed. She changed the topic, acting completely bored whenever he tried to steer the conversation back to the original topic. Finally, he gave up, defeated.

He couldn’t keep up, couldn’t understand her moods. One day she asked in a tone of seeming casualness to see his textbooks and she flipped through them, mocking every other page she saw. Yet when he surprised her at her home weeks later, he sensed her trying to block them from moving towards her room. Immediately wary, he’d darted around her, looking around in confusion before spotting a library stack of the same textbooks he’d shown her. All the same ones – geometry, mythical literature, earth science, Western civilization. “Why do you have these?” he asked with interest, but she’d only glared at him and pushed him out of her room. She wouldn’t talk about them.

More and more she withdrew, withholding herself whenever she was with him so that he felt he was lying in bed with a stranger. The more he tried to cajole, seduce, or outright plea with her to open up to him, the more distant she became. “Why are you so obsessed with reading?” she asked one day, but it wasn’t a question so much as an insult, a sneer. He looked up at her, brows raised. “Because it gives me ideas?” he offered cautiously. “Ideas for what?” Nora scoffed, shaking her head mockingly. “The /Mars colony/? Right, because that’ll fix all of society’s woes, huh?” she spat words out individually, twisting the syllables angrily. He opened his mouth to respond, but she had already turned and walked out of the room. Later that day, he learned her father was closing his business. Her family was barely getting by in Sector 3 collecting unemployment. In spite of how he knew her well enough at this point to anticipate how it would end, he went to her and pleaded with her to let him give her money, to see if they could convince his mother to take her in. She had looked at him without seeming to really see him, in a way that made his blood run cold. “I don’t need you, Martin. You’re the one who needs me.” He’d glared at her, his chill dissipating as his skin flushed with anger. He felt clammy, sick. Something within him had finally snapped. He’d looked at her and tried to conjure up the girl who had made faces at the taste of ice coolers with him, who predictably yelped a giggle and jerked away whenever he skittered his fingers over her left hipbone, who had made him see the stories he’d read differently, who had honed his sense of who he was and what he wanted from the world, from life. The girl who was smarter than he was and never let him forget it; the girl who, he finally realized, wouldn’t or couldn’t forgive him for being moved up a sector when she probably deserved it more.  

“Bye, Nora,” he’d muttered without looking at her. And he’d left. And after, he’d thought about going back countless times, any time he heard a love song or watched a sad movie or saw anything remotely beautiful, and countless times he would force himself to remember the hateful words she’d spat out at him. I don’t need you. You’re the one who needs me. And damn it if she wasn’t right. Why /was/ he the sort of person to need someone and she wasn’t? Even years later, the image of that mean eye and sly mouth would still flash across his mind during quiet moments. And so he avoided quiet moments, and kept busy, working on becoming someone who needed only himself.

[martin-clark-blog1]

Martin Clark, 22. Born and bred in Sector 3, Martin's family was desperately poor growing up. His father Luke was a dreamer who loved music and painting, but struggled to focus on any one career path, at times leaving for weeks on end to pursue a new "lead" and predictably turning up empty-handed. The Clarks got by mainly on the charity of fellow Sector 3 families, particularly the parents and siblings of Martin's mother Loretta. One day, Martin's grandfather and uncle cornered Luke and politely suggested he may be happier elsewhere. Luke promptly took a suitcase of his clothes and books and left, leaving little behind but his name and the two children who bore it. Martin inherited his father's love of music and the visual arts, but he also inherited something from Loretta - a steely-eyed focus and unrelenting ambition. After Luke's departure, Loretta worked relentlessly to become certified as a teacher, eventually breaking her family past the near-impossible Sector 3 barrier into the more respectable Sector 2 quarters when Martin was a teenager. She was able to scrape together just barely enough money for him to attend college to study architecture, his lifelong passion - something she couldn't or wouldn't do for Martin's older sister, Anna, who quietly married and moved out shortly after Martin left for college. However, Martin dropped out after just barely two semesters, insisting that school had nothing to teach him and he preferred to join the workforce immediately. Through sheer force of his charisma, persistence, and overconfidence, Martin was able to freelance a few small projects on the basis of fudged credentials. His work caught the attention of Grant Wescott, a senior architect for The Colony. Once again lying through his teeth and producing a phony bachelor's degree, Martin has secured a regular position and is now part of a team working to design and redesign sections of Exodus' interior spaces. His dream is to design entire cities for a Martian colony, and he'd do anything to achieve that goal - some nights he even stays up late pouring over textbooks of physics, biology, geology, history, and more in an self-aggrandizing attempt to figure out how to make the Martian colony possible. Martin is passionate, innovative, at turns joyful and furious, horrible with money, arrogant, and utterly without shame.