I ended up on Pluto on the night of my nineteenth birthday, after breaking my own stupid heart. It wasn’t even over anything important. All I did was jump in a pool, and then the chlorine got in my nose and I came up coughing on the side of the tiles, and then someone was hauling me up and telling me I got my heart broken, and I wasn’t on Earth anymore, and wouldn’t be for ages again.

Case and I change the sheets of the hotel rooms together on Pluto. We stack the limestone showers full of small green shampoo bottles, squeeze soap down the mirrors and sinks. We feed the mini-bars cans of Coke and tiny shots of tequila, and when Case mimes downing one, he asks me, “Think they’ll notice?” And I tell him don’t do it, just check the bathroom for used combs, and he raises me a cheers and unscrews the cap with one twist and pours the clear sharp liquid down the sink.

“Why even bother,” I say.

“It’s rebellion,” he says. “Our glorious teenage years,” and that’s when I snort at him, and when Case goes to the cart and throws the newest of the sheets onto the bed like he’s floating a picnic blanket down over summer grass, cool and airy, but there’s no sun here. It’s too cold to sweat. So he doesn’t look burnt or red or any of the kinds of things he’d look like if we were on Earth. He just looks grey and dusty, even when he smiles.

“Whoosh,” I say, and “Whoosh,” he echoes. We straighten the corners together. We smooth out the center with our forearms, and I watch him lift the mattress with one arm and tuck the sheet in at the corner with the other. The pillows get fluffed. The teddy bears get straightened. When we’re done, Case turns to me. “Miss anything else?” he asks.

“Nope,” I say, and he throws up his arms. I throw up my arms back.

Case’s dad got his heart broken when his second wife divorced him, and he showed up on Pluto with his phone in his left hand and a Bic pen in the other. We saw him while we were wheeling the laundry through the back doors, and had to take a detour through the lobby. The first thing I noticed was how similar they looked side by side, with the grey that should’ve been blond, the long limbs, the angular mouth. But Case didn’t move, and I wasn’t moving if he wasn’t moving. Then Case’s dad noticed him, and his face crumpled up like a piece of homework, scrunched in the fist. He said, “Buddy.” Case’s expression was as flat as the palm of a hand. Then Case shrugged, and crack—his dad disappeared.

The hotel staff went on with their business. Case put his hands in his pockets. “Didn’t think it’d be that easy.”

I didn’t want to say anything. It’s never easy, watching a heart break so quick, so I said, to make Case smile: “Bet he lost.”

“Bet he did, girly,” Case said, and he wasn’t smiling but the dust wasn’t creasing between his eyes anymore, because that’s how it works when your heart gets stomped. The winner stays on Earth. The loser goes to Pluto.

After work, the rink’s open.

We shuck our uniforms and walk through the lobby. We’re guests here, too, so we get in the elevator with two newcomers carrying a small picture frame by the edges. I try not to look at them because the woman’s got her head on her partner’s shoulder. She’s sobbing with her whole chest. The picture frame is limp in her right hand, like she’s forgotten about it, and when the elevator sings, Case and I skirt past them to our floor. We don’t say anything as we lope through long carpeted hallways, the rows of doors standing to attention on both sides. Case’s mouth is tight, and he’s walking fast, and we get to the hallway that leads to the ice rink at the basement of the hotel. It’s easy to freeze things here. Ice is easy to maintain, and Case is already pushing the doors open with his shoulders, holding the right side open so I can squeeze through.

“Too cold?” he asks, as the rink air blasts us, and I say, “No.”

“No?”

“Well,” I say, and I don’t say it’s a “no,” because I don’t know how to tell him a not-no. A not-no that isn’t a yes. “So many not-no’s,” he said when I tried to explain last time, and I didn’t know how to tell him it’s about not-asks, actually. Like that time you jumped into water so deep, your feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and everyone asked, “Did you not-check to see if it was shallow?” or, “Did you not-see all the signs?”

And instead of saying “no” or “yes” when the team coach asks you to a meeting at a bar, just so he can tell you how to get faster, go faster, and raise your arms so that your fingertips skim the water with every stroke, you think about it for a little while, and you don’t see any reason why not.

There’s a lady who lives on the moon. Ten thousand years ago, she got married to the best archer in the world, and the gods gave them a single candy as a wedding gift. The candy would make them immortal, so they promised to eat it together, half and half, until the archer’s apprentice took a staff and killed his master out of jealousy. The archer’s wife heard the yells outside. She heard the door crash open. She picked up her skirts and ran into her room and ate the candy, put it in her mouth and chewed as fast as she could, sobbing as she chewed, because she knew in her heart of hearts what had happened to her love, and what would happen to her if she did not run.

She swallowed hard. She floated all the way up. She never came back down because she was safe there, on the moon. She was scared enough to get away.

The air tastes dry and thin. The ice rink pools in the center of the floor, and Case and I strap on our skates, crisscrossing the laces and pulling them tight. Case is talking about his home again. His old home, the one his mom had to sell, with the tree house in the back that the new owner broke down plank by plank. “That’s your Dad’s work,” his mom used to tell him. They didn’t even move that far. They just moved down the road, and Case walked back from school to watch the breakdown happen in real time, and he tells me at least they did it neat. “I would’ve done it neater, though,” he says, and holds out his hand to help me up.

He always talks like he’s going back tomorrow. Like he can fix up the tree house with one magic touch. “You can’t even fold the sheets properly,” I tell him, and he says, “Who says? You?”

There are a thousand ways to break your heart. You do something that fucks you up. Or maybe someone else does it to you, or the world just hates your guts, and you end up sitting on the side of the pool, pushing the goggles hard into your face and thinking: God. That’s it. That’s it for me.

So that’s how it goes. The world moves on without the people who get their hearts stomped, and Pluto strays far away enough from the sun that nothing really matters here. It’s not actually a planet. It only made the news for a couple of years. Then astronomy lectures, then children’s puzzles, then tiny planetary systems hung over cradles, all floating around a single self-loving star. Then they discovered how small it was. Then it got kicked off the list.

Who can argue with that? Stomp hard enough and some people just don’t get up. That’s what I didn’t say to the doctors and the officers, and the detective who called me afterwards when I was in class to ask what I did, or what the guy didn’t, and I held the phone to my mouth and told them in secret that I was going to Pluto. Then they said there was nothing to be done even so, they were going to call back later, okay, and to stay safe, and not think too badly of it all. Pluto’s got no service, they said. It’s reserved for emergencies only.

Case takes my hand and leads me out onto the ice. We clasp our grips over the rails. He skates fast, I skate slow, and you’d think I stayed away from the guy after it happened. But he was our coach, so I talked to him every day in my swimsuit in the summer afterwards, the pool tiles burning under my feet, and he smiled at me every time.

That’s the thing about college. You’re supposed to do everything yourself, like get good grades, and join a swim team, and talk to guys, and not have anything happen to you except for graduation and flowers and love and gifts and parents waving cameras and the rain misting down over tents, puddles like mirrors on the white plastic seats, nothing frozen and nothing grey, dresses simple and neat.

Case doesn’t shrug when I tell him I can’t let go. I’m holding the railing and telling him about a book I read in the tiny library we keep hidden behind the washing machines. It’s called The Gift of Fear. I want it to call it the gift of stupidity, but I can’t get the words out. I’m just folding over and Case is holding my hand and crouching beside me, and I can’t tell him that I didn’t feel any fear at all. I just felt excited, and then I felt cold. Like plunging into water, when the noise goes fuzzy when you’re underneath the surface, and all you can see from the bottom of the pool is everyone swimming above you, their hands slicing through the water. The bubbles a mask over their faces. And I can’t tell Case I wasn’t scared, I felt like I was going to lie there like something dead, with my underwear down my ankles, and the guy grinning at me and saying, “Oops,” and then you don’t feel anything until months later, when you jump into a pool during race practice and you think: “How could I have been so stupid?”

How? How?

And you’re stupid. You really are. But you’re on Pluto, too.

After I got off the call with the detective, I went and looked up all the myths I could. The ones about girls being chased, and girls being married, and all the gods that went after them and carried them away and stomped them to pieces for no good reason other than love. The countless moons named after wives. The countless moons named after consorts. Io. Europa. Ganymede. I lay in my dorm room and didn’t call my parents and didn’t go to class and scrubbed my thighs in the shower until my fingers hurt. It’s a gift, the book had said. You have to listen to fear.

Case sits down on the ice. He’s still holding my hand. “I hate you,” I say.

Case doesn’t go away. He doesn’t vanish with a crack, or even crumple up his face. He just rubs his thumb in the center of my palm, and I sit down on the ice and I tell him I’m not going back. I’m going to stock showers forever, and the sun will always be a speck of sand, and I can’t cry anymore, even though my heart hurts like someone’s got it wedged under the heel of their boot. I’m saying things to stomp on his chest. I’m saying horrible things I don’t mean, and I’m telling him I’m never going to swim again, or go to college again, because there aren’t any glorious teenage days left for me. Days when nothing’s meant to be.

And if I stay on Pluto, nothing will happen to me again. I won’t get stomped on. I won’t get broken, and I’ll break all the hearts if I have to, and I’ll have the god-given gift of foresight, not fear. Case lets go of my palm. He puts his hands behind him and leans back on the ice. The movement hunches his shoulders up like a shrug.

“I bet the tree house wasn’t even good,” I tell him. “I bet your Dad didn’t even care.”

Case’s mouth is thinning quick. I can stomp him up. I’ve got this in the bag.

You end up on Pluto if you break your heart. You end up on Earth if you manage to break it again. That’s what happened to Case’s dad. He saw Case again on Pluto, and then crack, he was gone like that. “I won’t ever be like him,” Case had said after his dad had gone. We opened bottles of liquor, poured them clean down the drain. He had to stare up at the ceiling and blink hard from the smell. “Not when he’s there, and not when I’m here.”

I don’t know who I want to be like or not like. I don’t want to swim. I don’t want to dive. I just want to be in the pool already. Watching the swimmers go by.

If I hadn’t broken my own stupid heart, and Case hadn’t broken his, Pluto would never have happened. We wouldn’t have ever been working the cleaning shift at the hotel, or sneaking into the rink at night, or lying down with the ice freezing up our fingers and breaths. The only way you stay on Pluto is if you don’t care. I think about telling Case how much I can’t care sometimes, or how I can’t shrug when he shrugs, and then I think about the crack, and the Bic pens clattering on the marble floors, and I think: girly, that’s a no.

It’s like that, sometimes. Just a no.

Case stands up on the ice. He pulls me up and says, “You’re right. I don’t think my dad cared. It’s stupid, right?” And I say, “No,” but he says, “I tried calling him after he left, using the concierge phone when all the guests were gone. He didn’t pick up. I just let it ring. Stupid,” and I tell him it’s not, and he tells me it is, and laughs.

Case was thirteen when he hunted down his dad in an address book online, and thirteen and a half when his dad opened the door and said, who are you? And Case said, I wanted to ask if this was 1406? And it was 1506, he just stammered through the lie, and his dad had said, sorry, kid. Wrong address, it’s down the block, and Case had said thank you and walked the whole hundred and eight yards there.

Case can’t stop laughing. He’s miming the look on his dad’s face, making jokes about not recognizing your kid, who’s making the same damn face back. Genetics, right, and I swat him but I’m laughing, too. The tears are freezing on my cheeks.

The guy they named Pluto after carried his wife away, too. He made her a bed of primroses underground, and a crown of every burning jewel on the earth. But his wife starved herself until her stomach was a cave and her hair was dried grass, and she walked the House like she was someone dead, until she got so hungry that she gave in and ate six bloody arils from a pomegranate in a tree. It was her doom, said the messenger when they finally found her, just when she’d begun to go soft with relief.

“You can’t leave,” the messenger said. “Not without coming back,” and it was true. But the girl thought: Leaving for a while is better than never leaving at all. Even if it means that she’d have to come back again someday. Even if everyone in the millions of years after said that he was loyal to her forever, and that it broke his heart to see her leave every year, broke it so badly and resolutely that his planet was where everyone ended up when they broke their hearts, too.

It’s love, everyone said. It’s just what people do.

Case leads me out to the middle of the ice. The windows are open and there’s no need for any cooling system. The sun is too far away, and above us, the light drifts down in streams. I want to take a picture but there are no cameras on Pluto. You just come with whatever you were holding at the time. Case keeps a pair of sunglasses by his bed because he’d stopped to grab a drink at a store on the way back from his dad’s house, and he’d taken the sunglasses off to see the price tags, and crack—he went to Pluto.

Case turns around. He throws out his arms, nothing too high, like he’s unsure he’s doing it at all. He waits for me. I throw my arms out back. The lights are on us, and my breath is fogging up, and my feet keep slip-sliding out from under me, and I can smell the ice and the cotton detergent we use for the sheets, the freshness that sticks to us both all the time. It’s like nothing on Earth, and Case says, “I give horrible hugs. You should know.”

“Everything you do is horrible,” I say, but my face is making an expression, like it isn’t part of me anymore.

“I’m a genius.”

“You look like a plane,” I say. “One with a propeller, and the red paint from Snoopy.”

He raises his arms a little higher, like they’re wings. I’m giggling again, a watery sound, and I can’t stop it from coming out of me. I can’t stop crying either. It comes out with more giggles.

“Aw,” he says. “It can’t be that bad.”

“Raise your arms higher,” I say, and he does, he puts his palms facing the ceiling and the roof and the universe above us, like he’s balancing out some weight. Then he turns around and tips his chin up, and begins to fall backwards, and I shriek and catch him, and we both go down. “Shut up,” I say, “God, if you hit your head,” but we’re sinking onto the ice, and I caught him, and it’s not like those kinds of days will ever not-happen. It’s not like the coach guy would ever not-smile, and that I would ever say not-yes in the way I should’ve known. The gift of fear. The gift of here. The gift of showing up late to the swimming pool, so late that everyone had already left, so I just sat on the rim and kicked my legs in the water. The gift of the day when I broke my own stupid heart in the end, which was the day I sat in the shower and scrubbed, and the day before I went to the pool and jumped and thought about how stupid I was that I’d fallen for anyone and for anything just like that. How stupid it was that it hurt and that I’d called the police over it and hung up on the third try, and tried again and succeeded on the fourth.

That’s how it works, isn’t it? You never think of Pluto until you find yourself there with nothing but your swimsuit on, everything frozen and grey, and the day you get there is a normal day where you don’t get stomped and where you never thought of asking yourself—what if I’d said something else?

What if this? What if that?

The ice is a bright solid wall underneath us. Case is holding my hand again, and his thumb is in the heart of my palm as we skate, and I turn my face against the chill to look at him. “Guess we’ll be here forever,” he says.

Forever doesn’t mean shit. When I first got into swimming, they made us do laps until we were dizzy and white with cold. I used to race the guys in the pool, thinking that I was like them, or that they were like me. I wasn’t a girl until I was. We swam the same races until we didn’t. And until I stopped swimming, I didn’t get why some people went to Pluto and never came back, and why some people spent almost no time there whatsoever. There aren’t any swimming pools on Pluto, and as a kid, I thought I’d never go. Who would want to swim in a planet of ice? Who wouldn’t ever want to go back?

They say some people are still on Pluto. They say some people never come back to Earth. And I understand them, I do. It’s not my fault I’m up here. It’s not anyone’s fault either, because people will always talk. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe he just couldn’t help it. I don’t tell them that’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard, and I don’t tell him that the guy wasn’t the one who broke my heart in the first place. You have to be gentle before you can be hard. You’ve got to be kind before you mean what you say, and that’s what I tell Case as we walk through the lobby and out of the hotel. He has his sunglasses over his head, pushing his hair back though there’s no sun. And I don’t tell him how much it hurt. I don’t tell him how little I still feel. But one day we’ll tell each other as much as we know, like how fast you can go on a road, or how to fold a military corner onto a bed, or how to look up at the sky one day with a telescope we’ve borrowed ourselves, and wave at anyone on Earth who’s watching: wave from the not-planet that’s never meant to be remembered, the not-planet that’s never meant to be reached. They’ll wave back. We’ll throw our hands up in mirror images. And I won’t tell him that I’ve stopped waiting for that one day in the future, when we’ll break our hearts one more time—one winner, one loser—and when maybe I’ll find myself on Earth once more, feeling around for room keys in my pocket, and wishing that I’d never left the ice rink in the heartbreak hotel.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from J. Halls during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Sarah Davidson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors