Asimov's SF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Okay, all right, fine.” This wasn't going the way he planned at all. “I'm Victor.”

  “That's nice, Vic,” she said warily, emphasizing his name as though it were something she was flicking out of her teeth: Vic-K. “Why are you talking to me?”

  “I was wondering,” he started, but his own voice sounded far too craven to be the World's Best Lover, so he cleared his throat.

  “I was wondering if maybe you were free this Friday...”

  “Hah!” she laughed, and her scornful hah echoed across the cafeteria, caught the attention of the jocks in the corner and the hackers by the cash register and preening cheerleaders by the entryway. Every head in the lunchroom swiveled to turn and look at them, four hundred tiny cameras whirring into focus.

  He felt tears oozing out of the corners of his eyes, because he knew what would happen; their systems would inevitably register this instant as a highlight and post it in their vlogs. Five hundred vlogs, each chronicling the splotchy, weird-haired nerd getting what-for from a girl he'd asked out on a date. There were whole websites devoted to these kinds of rejections.

  The bees had been bad enough. This would turn him not only into the laughingstock of everyone at Wilkinson High, but also everyone who watched anyone from Wilkinson High.

  Rosalie grinned, encouraged by his tears, and her mouth opened to give him the most savage rejection he'd ever receive in his life.

  He implored her silently, his lip quivering, begging, please, don't, don't do this to me...

  * * * *

  She looked at him. Then she noticed the crowd she'd drawn.

  Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and only Victor was close enough to see the sliver of fear that passed through her eyes as she saw how many cameras were pointed at them. For an instant, they both shared this strange shame of being noticed.

  Then Rosalie pulled up her lip in a sneer, placing her hand on his protectively. Her slender fingers were cool, and her touch sent shimmers of emotion through him that he did not understand.

  She glared down the cafeteria.

  “He told me a funny joke!” she screamed, her face red, crouching in to almost touch her forehead to Victor's. “Any of you got a problem with that?”

  They didn't, or at least no one dared to say so. The students returned to their plates of spaghetti (the 4,121,283,498th best spaghetti in the world), leaving them conspicuously alone.

  She took the hit for me, Victor thought. She'll be in the vlogs tomorrow, not me.

  Her hand was still on his. If he moved, she might take it away.

  “You want a date,” she whispered, hunching over to speak to him in utter disbelief. “With me.”

  “Yes.”

  She chuckled, putting her elbows on the table in bemusement. He rubbed his wrist lightly where she'd grasped him. “Boy, you didn't do your research.”

  Victor had, actually. He'd tracked every reference to her on Worldwork and read about her great love of lacrosse; it was why he had tickets to Friday's game resting in the pocket of his corduroy pants. But nothing in all of his web travels had suggested this crazy woman in front of him.

  Still, she'd touched him. That felt ... oddly comforting.

  “I have tickets to the lacrosse game,” Victor suggested, starting on the script he'd memorized last night. “I could pick you up at 5:30 pm, Eastern Standard Time, and then we could....”

  “Lacrosse sucks,” she said, flicking a french fry off the table. He blinked. “Look, why are you asking me? I'm not really gonna be responsive to your overtures, Vic, and there have to be easier targets. What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” he said, but his ears went red again.

  Rosalie grinned; Victor had the uncomfortable sensation that she'd found a new toy to play with.

  “You've got something going on, Vic. I'm part of a scheme, aren't I? Am I your next yo-yo?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. He'd hoped that she hadn't remembered that, but of course everyone did.

  In his quest to become the world's finest yo-yo player (highest ranking: 3,312,156th), he'd spent his entire seventh grade walking down the halls with his yo-yo, walking the dog on the way to class, rejoicing at the way his score jumped each day when the vlogs were compiled and the scores re-tallied. But eventually he'd realized that while it was easy to get to the top 1 percent of the worldwide rankings, shaving that final percentage point took a natural talent he did not have. By then, he'd had his yo-yo stolen four times by bullies and had acquired a hateful nickname, and he was sick of it.

  “Please don't call me that,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

  “I didn't.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don't think about people,” she said, drumming her fingers on the cover of her notebook. “You're like me, you never socialize. You just show up with all these weird fuckin’ injuries—stings, burns, star-shaped bruises. And nobody knows why. People check the rankings to see if your parents are on the Abusive index, you know that? I hear ‘em talking to each other in the hallways, whispering that your dad's got some secret tech that hides the way he beats you from the cameras. That he experiments on you.”

  She licked her lips, relishing all the gory details.

  “But he doesn't, does he? You're too clean. Which means you're crazy.”

  Victor bristled a little at the term, irritated that anyone would believe a stupid rumor like that.... But there was something in her eyes that suggested kindness.

  “Crazy good, though,” she mused, sipping grape juice from her box. “Am I your yo-yo?”

  He squirmed in his seat. “I can't.... No. It's not like that.”

  “It is.” She'd turned cheerfully vulpine, her white teeth a little too pointed for him to be comfortable, but he didn't want to leave. “It really is. You're a terrible liar, Vic, you know that?”

  He had never been more turned on in his life.

  “I just wanted a date,” he wheezed, feeling the air stoppered in his lungs.

  She kissed her teeth, considering. “All right.” She pushed her chair back, shoved her book in her backpack, extended her hand. “You want one? Let's go.”

  Victor fumbled for his own laptop. “But I have Chemistry next period....”

  “You want to spend time with me?”

  His lips were dry. He didn't think this was how dates went, but maybe they did. He liked the way her hand had felt on his. He was a little nervous about maybe having to kiss her. But even if he didn't get to kiss her, even without the pressure of the World's Best Lover weighing down on him, Victor had the weird feeling that if he missed out on this moment, he'd wonder what would have happened for the rest of his life.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then you enter my world.”

  He took her hand in his and she escorted him off the school grounds. It felt like he was leaving Planet Earth.

  * * * *

  Rosalie's car smelled like old cigarettes and Juicy Fruit. Victor didn't know what to say as she drove down the freeway with the windows open, the first bloom of summer heat whooshing in to riffle their hair.

  “You're not getting any,” she said. “I just want to be clear on that.”

  “That's fine,” he muttered. He'd known that already. As they'd walked out to the parking lot, he'd felt his dreams evaporate into her palms. He'd soaked her fingers wrinkly with his own nervous sweat. And once she'd gotten in the car, she hadn't reached across to touch him again.

  These weren't the hands of the World's Best Lover (Male Hetero).

  He felt that familiar hurt of dreams shrinking to nothing inside his chest, leaving behind their usual residue of embarrassment. The more he thought about it, the dumber it seemed that he'd actually thought that he could just pick out some girl from school, and woo her with lacrosse tickets, and have her suddenly flop naked onto his bed out of, what? Gratitude?

  It was hard to believe he could be that stupid. But he always had been.

  Victo
r was seized by crazy ideas, and it bothered him how they snuck up on him. He'd see a video and know that becoming the world's greatest bonsai shaper was his destiny. He could feel the talent thrumming through his fingers, like chained lightning.

  Then, after months of careful cultivation, he'd finally realize these weren't hands that naturally snipped shrubs into a flowing Kengai waterfall; these were the fat-fingered hands of stupid old Yo-Yo Pino, 46,739,922nd place, and how could he have fooled himself like that?

  Sometimes he wished a deadly plague would wipe out seven-point-four-nine billion people, leaving Victor and only Victor to teach the survivors the mysterious ways of fencing and Bhangra dancing and Bodhran drumming.

  At least this stupid dream had only lasted for like two days. And his punishment this time was going to be not a dead swarm of bees, but an awkward afternoon with Rosalie Atkinson.

  Rosalie sang along with some girl folk singer on the radio while he scrunched down in the seat, watching her pull off from the freeway and turn down hardscrabble dirt roads. She snuck glances at him, looking away nervously whenever he looked back.

  She cruised to a stop by an abandoned power substation, a cluster of big industrial equipment squatting in the middle of a net of power cables.

  “C'mon,” she said, tugging him out of the car; she sensed his unease, but wasn't having any part of it. She had something to show him.

  A shot-up warning sign told them to keep out, but Rosalie peeled back a portion of the fence and gestured for Victor to crawl underneath. They strode by walls of electric equipment, gigantic transformers painted in fading teal and bristling with cooling fans, pipes, locked switches, dials, HIGH VOLTAGE signs in faded red. Her high-top sneakers crunched on gravel as she led him to the heart of the complex, past the dead cameras.

  Rosalie walked different here, Victor realized. Instead of rushing from place to place like she did in school, her stride opened up and she ambled along, letting her notebook dangle down in one hand. He trailed behind her, his own strides lengthening as he got caught up in her energy.... And she kept looking back to watch his reactions with an eager grin.

  He only felt a little stupid, smiling back.

  Rosalie got to the center of the complex, then whirled around three times, her head thrown back and her fingertips flung wide, before collapsing into a cross-legged squat on the dry soil.

  “You feel it?” she asked, sighing with contentment.

  “Feel what?”

  “The worst reception in all of town,” she explained patiently. “Check your vlog-glasses. Zero bars. Even if someone wanted to film us here, they couldn't—the signal wouldn't reach back home. The ghost of electricity in the air statics it up.”

  Victor frowned. “Why would you want that?”

  She blew air through her lips in exasperation. “Christ, Vic, you're a real dunce sometimes, you know that?”

  Victor didn't have anything to say to that, and she wasn't really that mad anyway. He picked up an old metal washer and began playing with it.

  “I come out here a lot,” she said, looking up to the sky. “Nobody can judge you here. You go to school, and it's like ... everyone's just stealing bits of your soul. They used to think that, you know. Some of the old Africans thought that cameras stole your soul, so they wouldn't let people take their pictures. Now everyone's a star. Me, I think you have that much of yourself on display, pretty soon you got nothing left. Right?”

  Rosalie looked at him expectantly. Victor toyed with the washer, unsure of what to do with his hands. “I guess,” he said, not really certain of what she meant at all.

  She peered at his fingers. “What are you doing?”

  Victor looked down with a start and realized he'd been twirling the washer between his fingers nervously, a remnant of his old attempts at prestidigitation (11,752,312nd). He dropped it, but Rosalie grasped his hand as though she expected to find some mechanical device.

  “That was crazy!” she said enthusiastically. “That washer was just zipping in and out between your knuckles. Your fingers were rippling, man. I didn't know you could do that.”

  “I'm not much good at it,” he said.

  “Crap, you're better than I would be,” she said, whistling low. “So you keep bees and do magic. What else can you do?”

  He thought about listing all the things he couldn't do, but that would have taken too much time. “I can juggle,” he volunteered.

  “Get outta town,” she said, punching him in the arm. “You're like a piñata, Vic. I keep poking you and weird shit falls out. Juggle for me.”

  His stomach clenched; he hadn't juggled since his final ranking (3,212,091st). “I'm not good at it.”

  “I'm easily impressed. Here.” She hunted for three rocks, then pressed them into his hands. “Go.”

  Victor had stopped his quest for juggling stardom four years ago, and as he began tossing the rocks he remembered why. The arcs of an object as it proceeded through a pass were supposed to take the same path every time, and he still hurled things in wobbly loops; he had to lurch forward to catch up with the rocks, because he was throwing them out in front again. His bad form sickened him...

  ...until he saw Rosalie, clapping her hands in glee.

  His parents merely tolerated his hobbies, never asked questions aside from how his ranking was. When he went to competitions it was all about being sized up, his competitors checking off his inevitably poor techniques. His instructors always yelled, to the point where he'd started self-teaching.

  Rosalie was pure with amazement.

  He smiled back at her, and began doing trickier things; he picked up another rock, tried for four, did a behind-the-back he almost bobbled—but she giggled anyway as he caught the four stones in one hand and bowed.

  “Teach me,” she said. And he did. He tried to get her to keep her elbows in more, but Rosalie didn't care about technique; she was just happy to be juggling at all, enjoying the act of it more than he ever had, and they spent an hour as she mirrored his actions and accidentally bounced rocks off his skull.

  “What else can you do?” she asked, beaming with happiness. “Show me!”

  He taught her the beginning turn vaults of Parkour, the palm and loads of magic tricks, the Ginga footwork patterns of capoeira martial arts. She had no shame, giggling at every error, which made him laugh a lot, and for once he wasn't afraid of how his voice sounded when he laughed.

  There were no numbers. No numbers at all.

  * * * *

  It was dark by the time they headed back, and they rode in a comfortable silence. She pulled to a stop a block away from Victor's house, her GPS flashing directions at her.

  “Why'd you ask me out on a date, anyway?” she asked.

  Victor exhaled a long breath, shuffling the old fast food wrappers on the floor around with his feet.

  “I wanted to be the World's Best Lover,” he admitted after a long silence, then added, “Hetero Male.”

  “On the Worldwork rankings?” she asked, confused.

  “Yeah.”

  She snorted in mild derision. “What do you wanna be that for?”

  He didn't have an answer for that any more.

  She shook her head ruefully, smiling. “You gotta do better research, Vic,” she chuckled, then leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. It felt sisterly. “See ya tomorrow.”

  He got out of the car and walked down to his house, a sweeping three-story colonial with picture windows. His mom was out front, sweeping dead bees off the sidewalk, but when she saw him she dropped her broom and ran to him and hugged him tight, first asking whether his glasses had gone on the fritz and then giving him a big lecture about always calling in if he was going to be late.

  Rosalie had a lot of ways around that kind of thing. She'd told him that parents got all suspicious when you went off the grid, suspecting you were up to no good, and she'd shared hints on how to quietly sabotage your glasses without drawing attention. Victor wasn't sure he wanted the advice, but he li
ked listening to Rosalie talk.

  Victor walked up to his room, his step strangely light. He flicked on the switch and looked at the computer monitor, then the shelves full of discarded hobbies. A violin here, an old rigged top-hat there, a half-empty can of lighter fluid next to the ball-and-chain of a fire poi, the machete-like blade of a hive frame-lifter, and...

  ...the yo-yo.

  He looked at the yo-yo for a moment, then took a folded piece of paper out from his pocket. On it was a picture Rosalie had drawn of him in pencil in her notebook while they were at the power substation. It was done in a fine, wavering hand that struck him as being so beautiful he couldn't imagine it ever being any good on smart paper. In the picture, he didn't have any bee stings, didn't have any miscut hair from fire injuries; he just looked calm and happy. He liked that.

  Victor flipped over the paper, curious what she'd doodled on the other side. There were all sorts of poems about girls, and lots of tiny head shots of the girls in his class, and why would she spend her time doing that...?

  Oh.

  Well, that wasn't listed on her Worldwork profile.

  He laughed at his own naivete, taping the portrait to the wall over the yo-yo. And then he realized, with a wave of warmth that shot through his entire body: she'd never been interested at all, and yet she'd still wanted to be his friend.

  He smiled so wide his cheeks hurt.

  It was such a stupid plan, anyway. Even if Rosalie had been more amenable to his charms, it never would have worked with her. His calculations required someone who didn't know anyone else and never would, and that was so not Rosalie that it made him giggle. She was so cool that she must have tons of other friends.

  He took down the yo-yo and blew the dust off. He felt the curve of it in his palm, an imperial wooden Duncan F.A.S.T. 201 series, so streamlined it had been a classic for almost a century.

  Victor slipped the loop of the string around his middle finger, feeling the comfort of it flood back into him. He remembered how good it felt to fling it down with just the right weight so the yo-yo tugged on your finger, hearing the papery rasp as it whirled in place at the absolute end of the string, waiting patiently until you beckoned it back into the palm of your hand.