• • •
Wendell has skipped a few services at Holy Family to avoid conflict with August and his parents, but he asks Trenton one Friday if he can join his family again. It is the same as last time, a chaotic but hearty breakfast at the Walmart apartment followed by the service. Afterward, Trenton accepts an invitation to hang out with Wendell at the Megamall.
“Damn,” says Trenton, eyeing Wendell’s gaming equipment. “You must get some crazy tips if you can afford all this.”
“I don’t work,” Wendell says matter-of-factly. “My funds paid for all this.”
Trenton raises his eyebrows. “You use teen funds?”
Wendell feels embarrassed. Maybe they don’t have teen funds at Walmart or something. Maybe he’s just made Trenton incredibly jealous. Not knowing what else to say, he just asks.
“Of course we’ve got them at Walmart,” Trenton laughs, “Everyone in Texas can get their loans if they want them. But me, I don’t. I just don’t want to be part of that system.”
Wendell’s eyes narrow at this. “What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re kind of taking advantage, making this money accessible to kids who don’t think too much about the future. They make a killing off the interest. I want to go to UT, maybe grad school, and I can’t afford to have all that debt.”
“So you’ve never had a teen fund?”
“Nope. If I ever need something my family can’t help me buy, I help out at the loading dock at Walmart for a few hours. They let students do that for extra cash.”
Wendell feels like he’s been insulted, though he doesn’t know why. Things are a little awkward after that, and Trenton says he’d better get home. When he leaves, Wendell doesn’t feel like doing much.
Teen funds are my right, he thinks, feeling his face redden with inexplicable anger. Everyone has the right to a little bit of spending money, even if sixty dollars doesn’t buy a damn thing. Teen funds teach responsibility. They keep the mall up and running. Everyone benefits. Why would the mall do anything to hurt us?
• • •
After a while, Wendell begins mentally preparing to say goodbye to his girl. There’s nothing for him at the Mall of America. There’s more there than at many major centers, including his home, but nothing that he can’t find by taking a bus. It’s all the same crap. Some places lacked a multiplex but had a synagogue; others housed third-rate colleges but at least had American Apparel. But it was all the same. For years Wendell had counted the minutes in school until he could get home and proceed with his life in the mall or on a screen. If he wasn’t doing that, he was shopping or with August. At the end of the day, what did he have? A sense of accomplishment maybe, if he’d been playing Halo with fervor, or leveling up to godliness in WoW. But nothing to speak of in the world, nothing to speak of at home or at school. Surrounded by his games and magazines and music and clothes, Wendell begins to feel that he has nothing.
Following August will only hold him back. From what, he wonders. He doesn’t have a goal in the real world. He can’t remember ever having one beyond saving up money for something. It feels really lame, but sitting in homeroom that morning, he sets a goal and swears to keep it. When he looks up, he sees the crucifix, same one that’s there every day. Even though he’s not really into all that, he thinks someone else has heard him, and figures he’d better make good on his promise.
• • •
Graduation day finally comes at St. James High. August’s name is announced with the word “honors” attached. Wendell, who has just barely passed, feels small as he tosses his cap. He doesn’t understand the cheers and the tears coming from his classmates and their parents. Trenton’s family is rejoicing because he was accepted to UT—he’ll be taking the bus from their new standalone house to the Supercenter every day. Wendell wonders how many of the other graduates’ lives will actually change beyond starting to pay back their teen funds in a few years.
• • •
Even though it is the end of July and Wendell hasn’t looked for a job, an apartment, or a plane ticket to Minnesota, August is convinced he is coming. Wendell knows that she is scared, even though she’ll never show it. He’s been spending more time alone, plus Sundays with Trenton’s family, and she’s been spending more time at Strawberry. Finally, August goes to 6C in the Pepsi Texan Megamall, to tell Wendell that he’d better get it together.
The inside of his room looks different. The PlayStation and games are all gone. Wendell sold them for less than half of what he paid originally. He hasn’t taken a teen fund out in weeks. He feels poor.
“You know I can’t come to Minnesota,” he tells August gently. “I’m sorry.”
She throws a fit, just like all the fits before. What exactly does he plan to do, she asks. What’s so important in Texas that he’s staying around for? Wendell tells her what he’s done over the past few weeks to prepare for his new life. His graduation gifts and the last teen funds he’d ever taken are in his account and are just enough for a deposit and a month’s rent at the central Houston Walmart. Why the Walmart, August wants to know. What kind of trash is he, she asks, to think that it’s acceptable to live there. It’s the same attitude his mother has, as well as just about everyone from snobby-ass St. James.
The truth is, he tells her, that a Walmart apartment is the closest place he can live to Holy Family and still afford. He won’t make much money, he knows, and in a few years the Megamall will be sending the monthly bills for his teen funds—the ghosts of all the games and clothes and unnecessary food court meals he ever bought will come haunting.
“You’re staying in Houston because you want to go to the stupid little church?” she bellows. “Wendell, you don’t even believe in God.”
He understands why August would say this about him. It’s pretty much true anyway.
“Maybe not,” he says, “but I believe in something else.”
• • •
August leaves in a huff, and Wendell wishes her well. He’s not so sad, but thinking of bigger things, like what his life would be like if he lived in a house and drove to work and church and stores. One day he might escape the malls altogether. One day he’ll have to. There’s no going back now anyway. He is bound by the goal he set and the promise he made to himself that day—to find what lies beyond the sliding doors.
© 2014 by Gabriella Stalker.
Gabriella Stalker is a cubicle-dwelling worker drone by day and a writer by night. She studied linguistics and Spanish language and literature at the University of Pittsburgh and the Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile. Gabriella enjoys being outdoors and attending local metal shows in her spare time, as well as doing karaoke to keep her persistent urge to burst into song at bay. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick
Charlie Jane Anders
After Roger broke up with Mary, she only had two places to go:
1) Her home, which was a single room with a bed, a bath, and a kitchen that were three identical rectangles which came out of the wall and occupied the exact same space.
2) Her job at the smart-cookie makery, where she stood in an asymmetrical trench surrounded by screens, monitoring peptide levels. Colored lights swirled around her head, almost too fast to see.
She couldn’t even bring herself to cry. She walked around under a gray sky, feeling dead inside—as if she’d missed a couple of days of smart cookies and her brain was consequently shutting down.
Loss was not an ache or a pang, or anything dainty. It was more like a bucket of shit that kept falling and falling on her head: itchy, ugly, humiliating.
Mary’s friends kept calling, wanting to hang out, but she couldn’t face anyone. She wanted to avoid the places she and Roger had gone together—which was every place she liked to go. She couldn’t face eating a fancy meal because right now food tasted like dirt, and she could just barely manage to look presentable for work. Her friends all said that she had to get righ
t back on the horse. Mary had never seen a horse, but she imagined that being ejected from one would lead to bruises and maybe some sprains or fractures, plus an angry horse that had already won the first round. That’s assuming the horse didn’t just trample you once it had already thrown you underfoot.
At last, two days after the breakup, she gave in and went out for drinks with her best friend, Stacia. Some part of her still remembered the three A.M. trash talk sessions about guys that she and Stacia had, back in college when the Sisterhood was new, and imagined it could be that way again.
“Don’t say anything about horses,” Mary growled preemptively at Stacia. “Or getting back on them, or anything else along those lines.”
“You know me.” Stacia shrugged, raised her palms so her bracelets jangled, and laughed. “I always change horses in the middle of a stream.”
This was so true. The whole time Mary had known Stacia, almost ten years since college, Stacia hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than five or six weeks. The six years Mary had been with Roger was like a million years in Stacia-relationship-time. Just hearing Stacia’s laughter made Mary’s shoulders unhunch fractionally.
They were at the Swan Dive, the place with the white wing-shaped chandeliers and cherry-wood couches, and Stacia kept glancing around to see if there were any cute guys worth throwing some negs at. Mary would never stop envying Stacia’s ability to turn flirtation into a way of life.
Just when Mary was starting to feel slightly less tragic, Stacia leaned in and said, “You’re totally right to be scared to go back to the dating pool,” using her low, confiding tone. “Dating is a nightmare.”
At first, Mary thought Stacia was talking about whether Mary could still attract a man, with her cornsilk hair and fading kina-minx features, concerning which Stacia was always volunteering makeover advice. But then she realized Stacia was talking about something more fundamental.
“Dating is this relic of a primitive age, before kina-chat and smart cookies,” Stacia said. “You have to spend all this time getting to know someone: what they like to eat for breakfast, and all their hangups. And then once you’ve gathered all of this useless information, you probably realize that you’re not compatible after all. And then you have to start the whole process over from scratch.”
Back when Mary and Stacia first became friends, they’d both worn the black turtlenecks and hiking boots that were still Mary’s daily uniform, but after college Stacia had reinvented herself as an über-femme. Now she had special eyelashes that fluttered all on their own, hypnotically, and her black hair cascaded in waves around her creamy shoulders. Stacia’s ankles crossed sinuously on the bottom rung of the barstool, with her red ruffled skirt lapping against them. Two separate guys were trying to send her drinks, and she was rolling her eyes at them.
Stacia went on about what a chore it was, getting to know a new person. “You have to wait for him to open up, like the world’s slowest Venus flytrap. And meanwhile, you keep unspooling yourself for him, little by little, just enough to keep him interested, but not so much that you’re oversharing or overloading his buffers. Everybody has sex on the first date these days, but you have to wait until the fourth or fifth date before talking about your messed-up childhood.”
Around this point, Mary started to cry, for the first time since Roger kicked her to the curb. She would be alone forever, in her tiny apartment with the three rectangles. She couldn’t do this whole dance all over again, the way Stacia was describing it. She usually loved Stacia’s cynicism, but right now she was just too raw.
“And that’s why I think you should get Roger to do it,” Stacia was saying. “Everybody’s going to be doing it soon, so you’ll just be an early adopter. And honestly, since he’s the one who dumped you, he owes you.”
“Do what?” Mary was so startled, she stopped sniffling.
“Oh,” Stacia said. “You know. The memory thing.”
“Pretend I don’t know,” Mary said. She sort of knew. She’d read about this on the kina-cast a while back. It was the thing where your ex gave you a memory wisp, right? A download?
“The important thing is, he doesn’t give you all of his memories of the relationship,” said Stacia. “Just the happy ones. The ones from the first two or three months, or maybe four or five if the relationship went on longer. Especially, no memories from the tail end, leading up to the breakup. Not even stuff that seemed happy at the time, because in retrospect it will all seem terrible.”
“Yeah,” Mary said. “But I already remember our relationship, more than I honestly want to. Why would I want his memories of that stuff? I might as well just jam hot needles into my tear ducts.”
“It’s not for you, dumbass.” Stacia slapped Mary’s arm. “It’s for whoever you date next. Your new boyfriend can get implanted with all of Roger’s memories of getting to know you. That way, the new guy can know how you like to be touched in bed, and what your favorite flavor of mycosnuff is. He’ll already know all the awkward details, but it won’t feel like too much too soon, because he’ll have memories of learning it all over a period of months. And the best part is, if he gets Roger’s memories and decides he doesn’t want to date you after all, he can get them removed, as long as it’s within a few days. After seventy-two hours, Roger’s memories become integrated with his own, and then they’re permanent.”
“You’ve thought a lot about this,” Mary said.
“Well, yeah,” Stacia said. “In the unlikely event I date someone for more than a few months ever again, I want him to do a memory download for sure. Think about it: You wouldn’t get a new kina without transferring over your address book and settings and stuff, right?”
“I doubt Roger would want to do that,” Mary said. “I don’t even know if he has any good memories of our time together.”
“That’s why he has to do it now,” Stacia said. “He still has the happy memories, buried somewhere. But every day that passes since the breakup, the happy stuff gets buried deeper and deeper as he convinces himself you never had anything. A week from now, those good times you shared will be beyond the ability of science to retrieve.”
Mary still wasn’t sure, but Stacia gave her the hard sell: “He owes you. All of that time you invested in him, it’s like you put equity into a home. And now that he’s evicted you, he owes it to you to cash out your equity, so you can put it into a new place. That’s all this is.” When she put it like that, the whole thing made sense.
• • •
Seeing Roger’s face for the first time since the breakup caused Mary’s brain to make a correction in real-time—fast, but not fast enough to be painless. The instinctive “partner-bond” signal fired in her brain, causing waves of pleasure and comfort. Like a hot bath on a frozen day. And then she had to pull back, as if the hot bath had turned out to be boiling instead. She had to look at Roger’s perfect hazel eyes and breathe in his pine-forest scent … and remember that this was over.
Mary’s whole life was neurochemistry, so she knew that a lot of this sensation was just the chemical battery in her brain, sparking erroneously based on out-of-date information.
They met for lunch, the day after Mary’s conversation with Stacia. Mary had the day off from the makery, and Roger could take a long lunch break at his strategic consulting firm, where he was helping to re-position the troubled rejuvenation sector. (Roger had heard every joke about the rejuvenation industry getting old, a dozen times.) They were eating at the same restaurant where Roger had told her that he needed space: a hand-pulled noodle place where a man stood in the front window pulling noodles, 24/7. Mary had loved this restaurant, which had red lanterns, grease-stained tablecloths, and chewy noodles, but now it was tainted forever.
“I don’t know, Mare,” Roger said, after she explained what she wanted him to do. “I mean, those are private memories. You’re talking about a piece of my identity.
“Even if they could pull out just the memories pertaining to our courtship—which I don
’t believe for a second they can, that’s awfully granular—those are still my memories, they’re personal.”
“Oh, come on, Roger,” Mary said. “Don’t be a jerk. I’m not asking for your life story. Just a few months of specific memories, which won’t have any of the context. So they won’t mean the same thing to anyone else that they mean to you. If they do mean anything to you.”
She was starting to sob again—weakling—so she reached for the longest and slimiest noodle in her bowl and slurped it loudly to mask the sound. She gestured for the waiter and demanded a scallion pancake.
“You can’t say that.” Roger’s eyes widened in a way that would have melted her brain when they were together. “You can’t say they mean nothing to me. They mean a lot to me. Those memories are precious to me. Of course they are.”
“I guess not,” Mary said. She had avoided recriminations when he had jilted her. She had taken the bad news with composure, but now this felt like a second jilting. “Obviously, none of this ever meant anything to you. None of it ever mattered at all. Right?”
Mary never knew what Roger had seen in her in the first place, any more than she understood why he had broken up with her, after six years that had seemed happy to her. The whole thing was a mystery, beginning and end.
“Did Stacia put you up to this?” Roger said. “I swear, you two were always like this hive mind. The whole time we were together, I felt like I was dating both of you.”
“Leave Stacia out of this,” Mary said. “This is about you and me.” She stabbed her onion pancake with a single chopstick, skewering and gesturing. “Those memories that you don’t want to share, I bet they’re just memories of you figuring out how to seduce me, so you could use me and get your fill and then throw me aside. You probably treated it just like one of your strategy briefs.”
Roger didn’t know how to respond to that. For a moment, he just held up both hands, like he was about to gesture. Then he let them drop again.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 13
