The one that usually upset him the most was little Mickey Mackeroy’s, because the boy’s cherubic face was embossed in bronze. Mick had been a great student, imaginative. Once, for his book report on Lord of the Flies, which he’d opted to read himself, Mickey had theorized that the other boys hadn’t killed Piggy because he was the weakest; they’d killed him because he hogged all the food.
It was actually pretty funny, the way Mickey wrote it. When he grew up, he wanted to be a satirist. Mick had been the youngest to die That Day.
At Janice’s grave, Steve dusted the letters of her name before enshrining the new flowers in her bronze vase. As was tradition, he gave the kids five minutes each to be alone with their mother.
Sarah always came back to the car with red, puffy eyes, whether or not she cried. JJ usually took the least amount of time. Sometimes he didn’t even like to go talk. Today, though, Steve saw him staring down, not at the grave, but at his Tether.
“Go get in the car with your sister,” he said, cutting JJ’s time short. “Go.”
JJ went happily.
Steve swallowed all the things he wanted to shout at him. “Sorry,” he said down at Janice’s grave, staring at her own relatively short lifespan.
Thirty-one.
His eyes slid over to the empty plot beside her. His.
“Everything’s changing,” he said. “The town, the world. And the kids, oh my gosh, they’re growing so fast, honey, you’d be so proud. Me, I just, I don’t know, I guess I don’t understand them. You were always so much better at that.”
Steve wanted to tell her the deeper truth, that, while he loved their kids deeply, sometimes he didn’t like them. He didn’t think he could ever say that, though, not aloud. Especially not here at his wife’s final resting place, where the plaque read, “Beloved mother, beloved wife. Her hair was never quite combed.”
Steve fought it. He never wanted to go back to that car, to his kids, and have them see his greatest weakness burning in his eyes. Because then who would be there? Who would be their rock, if their dad could crumble so easily?
“I just, I wish you were here,” Steve said, clenching his trembling chin. “You know, someone I can talk to, someone who can help me make sense of all this. Because I’m lost, Janice. I truly am.”
That’s what did it, broke the dam inside him. It would have flooded him, too, if Sarah hadn’t honked the car horn.
Steve whipped around, instantly angry. Kids! They knew how to get him there, real quick.
But then Steve saw his car rolling downhill, the steep, steep hill, with his children inside, windshield fluid spraying everywhere for some reason. Sarah clambered into the driver’s seat to slam the brakes. The horn honked again as her elbow struck it.
Scrambling, tripping over a marker, crying out as his feet hit pavement—slap, slap, slap!—Steve’s fingers brushed the door handle. The car sped away, while inside Sarah kept screaming.
The car rolled about two hundred feet. It smashed into a tree rear first, with a shattering, crumpling crunch. Then there was only the slap of Steve’s feet.
“Oh my God, are you all right?” he said, bumping his head on the doorframe but not caring.
Sarah, straddling the center console, one foot still mashing the brake, shook with each heavy breath. In the back JJ sat wide-eyed, looking incredibly small for his age. His phone, for once, was not in hand.
Steve pulled them both into a hug, even though it was awkward with JJ in the backseat. He pulled them into his litany, his rosary, “I’m sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“You almost killed us!” Sarah screamed, crying, but that wasn’t what Steve was apologizing for. Not really.
CHAPTER 10
“And you said the parking brake was on?” Bill asked Monday morning, under the car.
“Yes, dear,” Steve said. They had laid down a few sheets of the Burnt Valley Courier, so the deputy sheriff wouldn’t soil his uniform. Too many greasy old hash browns in the diner lot, too many old oily spots. Wouldn’t want to dim the shine of his star. Bill had been under there rolling around for the past fifteen minutes.
“It was even in park,” Steve added.
“Huh.” It was practically all Bill had said that morning, aside from simple enough questions he’d ask a child (he knew Steve didn’t know cars).
Huh.
They’d jacked up the car, too, at Bill’s insistence. They’d taken off two of the tires to inspect the brakes.
Why in the middle of the diner parking lot, I’ll never know, Steve assured himself.
He shot a glance at the windows of Hayworth Diner, expecting to see old man McLean looking out, perhaps amused at how kids changed a tire these days.
He caught Sarah instead, staring out the window at him. She and her brother were already inside, eating. JJ was staring at the deputy-turned-auto mechanic, shoveling cold cereal into his mouth, and Barksdale was staring at Bill too, chewing nothing.
Sarah looked away from her dad, who turned back to Bill.
Bill’s boots and bony knees, anyway.
“Sarah said it was like the car just started driving itself.”
“Well,” Bill said. He scooted out from under the car and stood up, wiping his big grimy hands on a rag. “Brakes look fine. Shoes look fine.”
“Yeah,” Steve said, “it got us home all right. Seems to be driving fine.”
“Huh. And, uh, windshield wiper fluid, you said?”
“Yep.”
Bill put on his cowboy hat, using it to scratch his head. “Maybe Sarah hit the thing?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Steve said. He and Bill bolted on the tires and put the jack back in the trunk.
“Before I forget . . .” Bill handed Steve some red tape for his taillight. “Why give everyone a ticket, you know?”
“Thanks,” Steve said.
After washing their hands in the diner bathroom, they went to their booth and sat down for breakfast.
“What’s wrong with it?” JJ asked from the booth over, scratching Barksdale behind the ears.
“Apparently nothing,” Steve replied.
“Hah! See? I told you!”
Bill gave him a weird look, and Steve said, “He’s got this app on his phone.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s called Car Whisperer,” JJ said, already aiming his Tether into the lot. After a few seconds, he showed Bill the diagnostics. Not of his dad’s car, though. Of Bill’s cruiser. “Your oil’s low,” JJ said.
“Huh. So what, it just talks to the car’s brain then?”
“No,” JJ said. “It whispers.”
“Ah.” Bill eyed him suspiciously. “Can’t drive it, can it?”
JJ laughed. Steve was glad to see an adult could still do that, genuinely amuse his son.
“That’d be awesome. No.”
“That’s good.” Bill sat back in the booth as Cathy set down his biscuits and gravy. “Well,” he said to Steve, “I’d still take it to a mechanic if I were you.”
“Waste of money,” JJ said, but he looked completely disinterested in anything but his phone.
Bill took out his own Tether. “What’d you call it? Car Whisperer?” He shook his phone and said, “No, you stupid thing. Not horse.”
Steve shook his head. Kids and their toys.
He glanced back at Sarah, who hadn’t said a word this whole time. She wasn’t sleeping with her head on the table like usual. She was staring out the window like Barksdale, or perhaps lost in herself, in her own reflection.
It wasn’t atypical for her to be so introverted—JJ was the boisterous one. But Steve could tell something was eating at her. He was annoyed at first, thinking it was this petty business with the phones. Then he reminded himself that small things were sometimes manifestations of problems much larger and more complex. Imbalances, even. Because it’s never really about the phone, is it? It’s about the phone call.
After the accident at the cemetery, Steve also knew he couldn�
�t blame his kids for being unhappy jerks. They had been through so much, were asked to cope with so much.
And guess what? They weren’t always jerks. There were those rare occasions they proved to be decent human beings. And in those small blessed moments, Steve actually felt he’d done something right as a parent.
Sighing, he looked out his own window at the late Harcum Cemetery. Construction on PCo’s data center was well under way, and the First Step was no longer visible, swallowed up, gone from the physical narrative of their town.
Days flashed by right in front of his face, flickering across the diner glass. The food changed on his plate. Cathy alternated with Jayna. One day there were raindrops that went away.
Each day, Steve watched the PCo workers scurry around like bees building a nest. Their data center grew brick by brick, growing up the rebar until it was finished. Still no windows and no doors, at least none facing the street.
It looked like a giant brick made out of smaller bricks, completely impenetrable.
“Castle keep,” Bill had called it.
Landscapers had yet to plant the conceptual maples. Instead, hardhats were erecting a chain-link fence, complete with razor wire, all to protect PCo’s precious data.
Steve could practically feel it in the air, all those waves of information rolling downhill. They saturated Cracked Rock, reverberating even through the uninhabited wilds. They’d find squirrels or something, years from now, riddled with tumors.
At school, too, the week fluttered by like a flip book, a page per day. Visiting the faculty lounge for coffee, Steve found Mary McPhail and his rival English teacher, George Ingram, comparing Tethers.
Mary’s laughter died a little when she saw Steve enter the room. She focused more on her phone.
Ingram didn’t seem to notice. “Hey, Steve, check this out.” He demonstrated how he was using PCo’s online courses to allow students to submit essays. “It tells me when the little pukes plagiarize. And to grade them, all I got to do is . . .”
With a few taps into the app, Ingram opened a student paper and was able to comment upon and highlight specific passages of writing. He tapped a button and said, “Done. I graded a whole class on the toilet last night.”
Mary McPhail snickered, but then caught Steve’s look and quieted down. She was so juvenile.
“That’s cool,” Steve admitted, nodding at Ingram’s phone.
Over the course of the week, Steve had seen a variety of ways teachers were implementing the technology. Students could take quizzes online, and the computer would automatically grade them. Pretty cool. It had cut some teachers’ workload in half. Because they didn’t have much of a workload in the first place, Steve thought.
“Hey, George, I’m curious. With all this newfangled stuff, how do you plan to use the ol’ weight method?” Steve raised and lowered his hand like a scale.
“Excuse me?”
Mary McPhail couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing, and Steve grinned. He had always been quick to forgive, and he really liked Mary. Ingram? Not so much.
George had been known around HMS to grade student papers by how much they weighed: the heavier, the higher the grade. Girls always got A’s. And football stars got C’s, no matter how much their paper weighed.
Steve left the lounge that day feeling like it might be a good week after all.
The Tethers were cool, he had to admit. Begrudgingly. But for all its graces, Steve was most impressed by the Tether’s scarier capabilities.
Apparently, Principal Warner had caught a kid skipping school, using some sort of tracking app. The app could also figure out who’d recently cut class.
Steve didn’t understand how it worked. Did it somehow reference school attendance records? And maybe student-phone GPS? The mystery turned out to matter far less than the content of the Tether’s absentee report. For whatever reason, the report included both elementary and high school attendance.
Mr. Disney’s daughter was on the list.
So was Steve’s.
* * *
JJ’s week blurred into one long day of phones, phones, phones, and stupid school. During lunch he sat with Mini Mark and the Dick in the library, because it was warm in there, and they’d found outlets.
“Dude, in Buttcrack Rock I dug into this old mine and there was gold.”
“Cool,” JJ said, more absorbed in his own phone.
“You can use it in, like, circuitry and stuff. You can build machines and clocks with it, it’s really cool.”
“Nice.”
“I added a bunch of stuff to the cell tower. Oh and, dude, there’s this special kind of building block, sort of like soul sand in Minecraft, only it’s really creepy.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
JJ had taken to playing nothing but Drones while his friends were around. He didn’t mind. He just imagined the enemy as the Dick or his dad, and he was entertained for hours.
But whenever he could, in those small, quiet moments to himself throughout the day—whether it was when he took the bathroom pass and everyone else was in class, or when he was alone in the backseat of the car—JJ would tune in to his favorite app, The Enormous TV.
The Meg Disney Show had been fun for a while. He’d kind of learned her routine, the times of day she did interesting things. But her singing in the shower had ruined it, honestly. Meg thought she was so good, but she needed some serious auto-tuning.
JJ had branched out to other reality shows after that. Kids at school. Teachers, so he could cheat. The girls’ locker room had been wild at first, but he’d graduated from that kind of stuff. He’d matured.
Now JJ spied on the Dick a lot. The fat little penis was always mewling that he was hungry, always making his poor mom dump fungal powder on his feet. The Dick liked picking at his butt in the bathtub, too. JJ had started to feel sick and sorry for him, started to understand why he was so shallow and mean.
It was gross and animal, what people did when they thought they were alone. JJ knew it was wrong to have this kind of power, but he had it, literally at his fingertips.
By far, though, Bill was the coolest character to spy on. JJ had been there with him, alongside Aaron in Bill’s ear; he’d heard Sheriff Perkins threaten Bill about Marv.
If he does something stupid . . .
If he hurts someone else . . .
Idly, JJ wondered if Bill and the sheriff would face off later in the season.
He had noticed, too, that he couldn’t watch anyone who didn’t own a Tether.
Sarah, his dad.
Marv.
JJ had tried, but the only way he could watch anyone who didn’t own a Tether was if another Tether was nearby.
That’s how he found out his counselor had a phone. It made sense, really. All school employees had received a Tether. It was part of PCo’s program.
So JJ sat right in front of Mrs. Keeler on her office couch, using the TV to look down her blouse and up her skirt every which way. He’d even zoomed in on her lip to see the pursed wrinkles there, and the hairs.
She had no clue what he was doing, how he was violating her privacy. Violating her in ways she hadn’t even conceived of yet, because the technology was new. JJ found he could even see inside her, like an endoscope, only to the layer of detail you’d expect from MRIs.
As he’d learned with Meg and the mirror, there was absolutely no camera flying around the office. Nothing but dead air between him and Mrs. Keeler.
He reached out to feel for something where the camera should have been.
“JJ?” Mrs. Keeler said.
He met her gaze over the top of his Tether. He could see from her eyes she wanted him to put it away. He didn’t want to, though. He’d zoomed in on her eyeball, her iris like the iridescent filaments of a peacock feather, the pupil slightly dilated to her internal dark.
“I’ve been playing this game,” he said, “this war game. It looks really real.”
“Is it violent?” Mrs. Keele
r asked.
“I mean, when you die in real life, it’s not like you re-spawn. You don’t just come back as yourself, you as the same character.”
“Yes. Death has a certain permanence to it, doesn’t it?”
“Have you ever heard of the uncanny valley?” JJ asked. “It’s a gamer word.”
“No,” Mrs. Keeler said.
“Well, it’s about how video game characters look like humans, but you can tell there’s something missing. It creeps people out. And it’s not like there are any green health orbs or anything in real life. No convenient first aid.”
“And what about in the game, JJ? What’s it like in Drones?” She must have seen what was happening on his face then, because she leaned in, frowning. “JJ? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just . . . some of my characters, they’ve committed suicide.”
“They’ve committed suicide?” Mrs. Keeler said. “JJ, can you tell me what that means? Have you been having dark th—”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just a game, I know that. But I can tell from their faces, I can spin the camera around and look at them, and I can see they don’t know they’re being controlled. They think it’s their choice, because it’s so horrible there, and there’s no other way out.”
“Where?” Mrs. Keeler asked. “Horrible where?”
“War.”
Mrs. Keeler thought about something for a moment. “So you’re controlling them, and they don’t know it? Isn’t that the illusion of the video game? The idea that you are the character?”
“I guess.” JJ wasn’t interested in exploring that. “The other day I broke into someone’s house and shot them because I could. Just this family, screaming and crying. I shot them all. Dead.”
Mrs. Keeler nodded and chewed on the tip of her glasses. “I know it’s just a video game, JJ, but might this game mean more to you than just a simple app? I mean, personally?”
He shook his head. “I just don’t know why it’s so much easier killing someone in a game than it is real life. If they never come back either way? I mean, is life just a video game?”
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