It Gets Even Better

by Isabela Oliveira

  “Hi,” he said, with a charming smile, after the immediate flurry of apologies was over and I was in the office kitchen helping him mop coffee off his cuff. “You must be Lila, right? I think I’ve met everyone else. I’m Robbie.”

  “Yeah. Lila.” I glanced up at him. Clare had good reason to be worried — Robbie was like a character off a TV show, all white teeth and boyish smile and clean spicy scent. His blazer fit his shoulders like it had been tailored onto him, and his dark eyes sparkled as if to say we shared a secret.

  Those eyes held mine. “I don’t know if you heard — I’m the new lawyer,” Robbie said. “Or so they tell me. I’m going to be consulting for you.”

  “I heard,” I said.

  Tall, dark, and handsome. So very tall, so very dark, and so very handsome.

  But he was still making eye contact. Still. Not looking through me, unfocused and confused. In fact, he was holding my eyes a lot longer than people usually did…

  “Lila,” he said, and my name was melted butter in his mouth. “I can’t help but ask. Would you let me buy you a drink sometime?”

  I was too stunned to answer for a moment. I couldn’t help looking at where my fingers were pressed against the small kitchen countertop.

  They were solid. Visible.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve already got a…”

  “Boyfriend?” His color heightened a little. “Oh, I’m sorry. I should’ve guessed —”

  “No, not a —”

  His mouth formed a little round O then, before bending into a genial, understanding smile. He nodded and straightened. “I see. No problem. Guess it’s hard to win the race if I’m never in the running, eh?”

  Part of me wanted to let it slide. Allow Robbie the Lawyer the dignity of letting himself down easy, and thank all the gods everywhere that apparently a relationship gave me newfound opacity elsewhere.

  But his words prickled under my skin.

  “Not a girlfriend,” I said. “And I do like men. I’m just involved with someone already. A person. Monogamously. Have a nice day.”

  * * *

  I smiled all the way home. Then I started myself a hot bubble bath and took my phone into the bathroom with me.

  I’ve never been able to shoot down an attractive person before, I told Yang, having related the story of Prince Robbie the Handsome. It was a rush!

  Ohhh. I’d tell you not to let it go to your head, but you’re so sexy when you’re drunk on power.

  I grinned, dropped the last of my clothes on the floor, and dipped a foot in the foaming bath. The heat buzzed against my skin. Perfect.

  So what ARE you going to call me? asked Yang.

  Paramour, I said immediately. I sank into the steaming water and lay back. Lover. Partner. My one, my only, my dumpling, my entire universe…

  You’re such an asshole.

  Master of jerkitude, my delightful pecan, my jelly doughnut…

  The WORST. Why am I dating you again?

  Fire raced up my legs, and not from the bath. I wiggled my toes, and bubbles splashed by themselves.

  Make love to me? I whispered.

  Anything to shut you up, dear.

  My phone hovered alone above the sudsy water. But the touchscreen still responded to my fingers.

  S.L. Huang is a Hugo-winning and Amazon-bestselling author who justifies an MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction. Huang is the author of the Cas Russell novels from Tor Books, including Zero Sum Game, Null Set, and Critical Point, as well as the new fantasy Burning Roses. In short fiction, Huang’s stories have appeared in Analog, F&SF, Nature, and more, including numerous best-of anthologies. Huang is also a Hollywood stunt performer and firearms expert, with credits including “Battlestar Galactica” and “Top Shot.” Find S.L. Huang online at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.

  Content notes can be found at the end of the book.

  Frequently Asked Questions About the Portals at Frank’s Late-Night Starlite Drive-In

  by Kristen Koopman

  Jessica’s first portal was to the Permian Era — not that anyone believed she’d made it herself. Five years old and pouting, she lay down on the blistering summer blacktop of lane 5 in a thin slice of shade and sulked about the dinosaur picture book her dad had just confiscated due to an unfortunate ketchup incident. She thought, with the spine-setting certainty of a kindergartner, A dinosaur would never take my book away. When she closed her eyes and opened them, it was to a sudden flood of white-hot sunshine.

  The drive-in’s awning was gone. The blacktop was gone. The cloudless blue sky arced above her. Something moved in the corner of her eye, a scaly shift against red dust.

  Jessica closed her eyes again, trying to blink away the black-yellow sunspots in her vision, and thought, I liked it better shady.

  And she opened her eyes back in lane 5.

  That was the first thing she learned about the portals: they gave her what she needed, at least for a moment.

  Almost immediately after, she learned a second thing about the portals: nobody believed her when she said she made them.

  * * *

  Is this a joke?

  If you don’t believe us, check out the third booth from the emergency exit, near the pie case. Sit on the west side when it’s in direct sunlight, and you’ll find yourself standing on the Scottish moors amidst rolling fields of heather in (we think) 1866. Bring an umbrella or poncho, since it will be raining. (This is because of the specific time the portal drops you into, not a comment on Scottish weather.)

  Who built a drive-in around a bunch of portals?

  Frank Freedman Jr. opened the drive-in July of 1982 in honor of his father, Frank Alfred Freedman, who operated an A&W restaurant from 1958 until 1977. Frank Jr. aspired to maintain the high quality, low prices, and personal touch that his father brought to the A&W, and named Frank’s after Frank Sr.

  What does that have to do with the portals?

  You asked who built the drive-in, not who made the portals.

  So who made the portals?

  Your guess is as good as ours!

  * * *

  Jessica’s guess is very good, actually. But she’s learned to like secrets — she had to, when every time she gave the truth she was taught that sometimes a question is just an invitation for a comfortable answer. Nobody wanted to hear me, actually, and I don’t know why; that was too simple and too inconceivable at the same time. Instead her choices were to be the girl nobody believed or the girl who stayed quiet. Maybe someday she’d be the girl who found the place that made her heart clench and say yes, here, you belong here.

  Instead, at age twelve, she dreamed of a beautiful alien mermaid she could run away with, maybe by selling her voice to an enterprising alien sea witch or something, and made a portal. Through it, she’d flailed around in darkness while the cold turned every bit of her skin from knives to numb until she finally kicked her way back out into the men’s restroom and coughed up what felt like half an ocean.

  Everywhere she went had a dearth of something. Europa, it turned out, had a dearth of alien mermaids.

  * * *

  Is Frank’s really a family business?

  Yes. Frank, Marian, Claire, and Jessica Freedman all work at Frank’s; in fact, Jessica is the author of this FAQ.

  Is Frank’s really on the county registry of historic buildings?

  Yes! Back when it was the A&W, this drive-in was the site of the largest desegregation protest in the county, and in 1964 it became the first restaurant in the area to fully integrate. The plaque and photo gallery in the vestibule of the seating area commemorate this.

  So it’s not on there for the portals?

  No. Although the portals clearly exist, have material effects on the lives of everyone around them, and create circumstances that simply could not exist without portals, the courts have determined that there’s no way to legally prove they are physically real. Probably because acknowledging them would requi
re asking some uncomfortable questions and rethinking our conception of not only our world, but our place in it and how we got there.

  Not that that’s a metaphor or anything. Anyway, just look at that commemorative plaque!

  * * *

  Jessica’s after-school afternoons were spent wiping down the six inside booths, acting as carhop whenever the audio system failed, and watching the way the sunset hit lane 5 ten minutes later than all the other lanes. She would ignore her math homework, pressing the faint marks of equations and angles into the heel of her hand as she levered herself up to get a better view over the booth, to watch the refraction of the shadows through lane 5 and the way the pink in the surrounding air tinted the lane blue in contrast.

  Her favorite moments were just after the sunset, those last ten minutes that lane 5 glowed, a strip of air that refused to be what was expected of it.

  Lane 5 was a force of nature, glowing so bright that nobody could claim it wasn’t there. Nobody could ignore it or discount it, so nobody would have to put up a plaque to remind the world of its existence. Jessica envied it for that.

  * * *

  What should I do if the portal in lane 5 transports my car to the Permian Era and it runs out of gas?

  We only recommend using lane 5 with a full tank. Frank’s keeps a limited number of gas canisters on-site and is not liable for tow fees across geological eras. Please obey all relevant signage when entering lane 5 and do not feed the wildlife. According to paleontologist and Frank’s regular Dr. Rivera, they are likely Brithopus priscus and are herbivores.

  There is one B. priscus who is notorious for begging. Don’t be alarmed if she slinks up next to your car — she’s impossibly quiet for a ten-foot-long creature that looks like a giant capybara in a lizard costume. Feel free to pat and tell her she’s a good girl, but Dr. Rivera informs us that we have no way of knowing which of our contemporary foods are toxic to her, so, again, no sharing.

  Capybara in a lizard costume?

  We’ve thought about this a lot.

  How do you know it’s the same B. priscus?

  She’s a sweetheart and answers to “Chonk.”

  * * *

  In tenth grade, Jessica had to write an essay on Jane Eyre. Instead of outlining it after school, she closed her eyes in the sun-flooded third booth and imagined what it would be like, fog like a mass of tiny airborne pearls and the smell of rain on earth.

  She’d done this enough that she could feel it now: leaving an impression in the universe like a thumbprint in Play-Doh, letting the edges of it swell and morph around her intention. It wasn’t a conscious process, just a feeling at the base of her neck every time she was in the drive-in that she could focus on and draw out.

  Her destination matched her mood, three days away from prom and still unable to articulate to her friends and parents why she’d turned down the two boys who had unenthusiastically asked her at the last minute. As she stood on the hillside and let the mist condense on her cheeks like tear-streaks, she felt like an old maid, a wronged madwoman, a tragic and romantic silhouette slipping into the night. She felt different from the unwanted seventeen-year-old sitting in the booth of her dad’s restaurant, and that’s what mattered.

  She stayed there for hours, waiting for signs of nightfall, but none ever came. It was just a moment — looping or dilated or something Jessica couldn’t even guess at — and when she finally gave up and came back, no time had passed in the drive-in, either.

  It only added insult to injury that the trip left her hair irredeemably frizzy.

  * * *

  I pressed the button for lemonade on the fountain soda dispenser and instead a disembodied voice whispered the time and manner of my death, but not the date. Also, it dispensed root beer. What’s up with that?

  The label correcting “lemonade” to “auguries of death and root beer” keeps falling off. We’ve contacted the manufacturer to request a custom insert, but they think we’re pranking them. For the time being, we’ve moved the lemonade to the root beer spigot.

  What about the death thing?

  Don’t worry about it. It’s probably fine.

  * * *

  On a day that the school bully asked her on the bus home from school if her parents had pulled her out of a portal because a freakshow like her couldn’t be from Earth; a day that the drive-in was too small to contain everything she felt; a day she wanted to be sharp-edged, to be feared if it meant being respected, to cut the world to make it take her seriously. A day she wanted something inarguable, absolute, and had nothing.

  That day she punched the soda fountain, snapping off the lever for the lemonade, and as the pain throbbed hot in her knuckles a quiet voice whispered you die at 3:42 a.m. of a heart attack.

  That was how she learned that what she needed and what the portals thought she needed might not always be the same thing. The root beer part was an accident; the auguries of death were definitely an outright mistake.

  * * *

  Is that someone in scuba gear heading into one of the bathrooms?

  Frank’s only has one bathroom (gender-neutral) open to the public, in part because fourteen inches into the restroom formerly labeled “Men’s” there’s a portal to the subsurface ocean of Europa. Please do not attempt to use that restroom for any purpose other than extraterrestrial oceanic exploration; the key is available upon request.

  Why did I hear someone call it the men’s room, then?

  Habit.

  Seriously, why did the portals appear?

  We genuinely don’t know.

  * * *

  Jessica for sure genuinely knew, no matter how much people tried to convince her she didn’t.

  When she was ten and still not believed, she thought away, anywhere but here, don’t make me come back and escaped to London like a plucky accented orphan. There, she learned the hard way that not all portals went back — and that she could only make the portals at the drive-in. That, plus saying things like “I made a magical portal” would open the door to not just accusations of lying but also international incidents.

  She stayed quiet after that.

  * * *

  What’s up with the warning on your menu?

  “Consuming raw, undercooked, or extradimensional meats, poultry, seafood, shellfish, or eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness.” We source our meats locally and our shrimp from a shrimp-dimension portal located next to the boiler. By shipping distance, the shrimp is local; by multidimensional cosmologies, it is not.

  And the eggs?

  Just from chickens.

  Someone said you have a bunch of transdimensional pigs that regurgitate their cud. Does this make them kosher?

  We asked three local rabbis. One sighed very angrily and said, quote, “I guess.” The second ghosted us. The third stared at me for like five minutes and then started laughing and said, “Oh, that’s good.” Then she put us in touch with a shochet to perform the slaughter.

  Our kitchen as a whole is not kosher, but we’ve separated out cooking implements and dishes for the kosher bacon. The rest of the cuts of kosher pig are available at the weekly farmer’s market and, for some reason, contain gluten.

  * * *

  Jessica’s silence wasn’t all bad. There was an afternoon her senior year when Amy Lin came to the drive-in after school to “help out” (read: get a free burger in exchange for theoretically helping theoretical customers). She liked hanging out with Amy, even if Amy had a boyfriend; she still listened and laughed and made jokes. Days spent with her felt less like lies than the other days.

  Jessica sat on the backrest of a booth with her feet resting on the table, stretched out and crossed in front of her as the sun began to set. Amy sat on the actual booth seat, staring at the delayed dusk of lane 5.

  “See?” Jessica said.

  “What about the sunrise?” Amy asked.

  Jessica frowned, suddenly wrong-footed. Her mom and dad worked at the drive-in and Claire was slowly but surely moun
ting a coup d’état in the kitchen, but Jessica was the one who felt, instead of ownership or employment or obligation, a sense of kinship with it, and now she’d been asked a question she didn’t know the answer to — a part of her own psyche unmapped.

  “Huh,” she told Amy.

  The next morning she snuck out of the house before dawn and biked to the drive-in. She sat on the gravel across from lane 5, feeling the grit work its way into the weave of her pajamas, and watched intently.

  In lane 5, the sun rose ten minutes early.

  She made it back home before anyone else woke up, and never told Amy Lin. Instead she kept the feeling of ten extra minutes of sunrise nestled in her chest — her secret.

  * * *

  A translucent teenage girl in a 1950s-style poodle skirt keeps inviting me to dance near the picnic tables. Is she a high-school-prom serial-killer-victim ghost?

  No, that’s a temporal recording of Claire Freedman. She was cast in Grease in high school and “borrowed” her costume for Halloween. The recording of that moment kind of loops there. Social Media Manager Jessica frequently watches the loop on her break, chuckling to herself because her sister’s horrible bangs are right there on display forever.

  Do you really think the bangs are that bad?

  I mean… look at them.

  Do you check passports for the portal to the Forbidden Planet Megastore in London?

  Frank’s is not liable for any legal action arising from use of the Forbidden Planet portal without a proper passport, customs compliance, et cetera. That said, there’s nobody checking on our side.

  Is anyone checking on the other side?

  It’s the only one-way portal, so, yes, they do usually check passports at Heathrow.

  * * *

  Jessica tried to leave the portals behind one other time.

  She half-assed her way through three semesters of a communications degree at the state university. If everyone else thought her life had nothing to do with the portals, she figured she might as well live that perception of her. She dyed her hair, changed her wardrobe, pierced body parts, and flitted through different extracurriculars to try on different versions of herself.