Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  He paused. “I know it was mean. And it’s not what I wanted to be thinking about. It’s just what I was. Then I looked around and tried to laugh it off, like everyone’s just a sap for taking these things to heart. And that maybe I have this special advantage by not having to . . . but you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m missing out. I don’t know quite what it is, or how it would feel, but I have this recurring dream where there’s a party that everyone’s going to but when I show up a guy at the door says, ‘Nope, you can’t come in, you little weirdo.’ And that makes me so angry . . . so I find a basement window and go upstairs anyway. I’m like, ‘Hey everybody, I’m the weirdo you wouldn’t let in. I’ve cut the gas line so that’s probably what you’re smelling now, but don’t try to run ’cause it’s too late for that.’ They’re all silent and smelling the gas and giving each other panicked looks until finally some of them are like, ‘Dude, we’re glad you came,’ and offer me a beer, but I know they’re just waiting for a chance to tackle me and call the police. So, I go ahead and take out the matchbook.

  When they see it, one says, ‘Don’t be mad at us; Gary’s the asshole who wouldn’t let you in.’

  ‘I’ve seen all of you hanging out with Gary before,’ I say back, breaking one off. ‘And it’s pretty shitty for you just to throw a friend under the bus when I know’—I emphasize those words—‘when I know most of you think the exact same thing. It makes me hate you even more.’

  Just as I’m about to strike the match, another one yells, ‘It really is just Gary. We’re only his friend because we feel sorry for him.’

  And then I’m like, ‘Prove it. If he’s such an asshole, then just put him out of his misery.’ And I take out a gun from inside my jacket and hand it to the one who was talking. He turns really pale and doesn’t know what to do—looking around at everybody and everybody’s looking back at him—and when he finally opens his mouth to say something, his voice is just this tremolo.”

  Jaden smiled. “Then, it’s like there’s something that clicks inside him because you can see his fingers tighten around the grip. It’s my favorite part because he really thinks he’s going to make it out okay and is all dramatic about raising the gun to Gary’s head, waiting for a few seconds before, drumroll . . . swiveling around and firing at yours truly. But of course the muzzle flash ignites the gas and everyone burns up, and I mean they really burn up. People are running around half-exploded with their clothes melted into their bodies, screaming their heads off. And I’m on fire, too—blood streaming out of a hole in my chest—but I’m just standing there calmly saying, ‘You guys really should’ve let me into your party.’”

  Jaden shook his head. “That dream used to be a favorite. But when I think more about it I get sad. Really, really, sad. Because I know what I did is awful. And going around through that basement was super lonely . . . super lonely.” He paused. “So, if there were a way for me to go through the front door and get to see what everyone else has, I’d do anything you asked. Because, that’s what we’re talking about, right?” He looked directly at me. “Right?”

  Chapter 3

  I scrolled through the status page for my Tethys tele-companionship application the next morning and, after some time, found my number: I was 295 out of 738. Only the top eight had been chosen, so I wasn’t even sort of close. It wasn’t that you needed geniuses to talk to grandmothers in Japan and Russia, especially with the built-in translator and all but, if you had your pick, why not take the top scorers?

  I’d been desperate to get a summer job lined up for next year and tele-companionship for the elderly was one of the last things that only required low skill. There were bots like Mr. Jefferson that could listen to you and converse, which many preferred because the bots always told them what they wanted to hear, but there were still a handful of curmudgeons smart enough to know they were getting shafted. Tethys didn’t like getting them tele-companions because corporations never liked hiring actual people—people who’d get sick, require workers comp, severance, or God forbid disability—all that eating, breathing human stuff. But they still made great margins since non-Revised people would line up to do any job nowadays, no matter how shit the pay.

  I closed the screen and rubbed together two of the coins Ethan and I had stolen, watching the light bouncing off the metal. Tangible proof that, despite the close call, it had actually worked and maybe we weren’t so freaking crazy after all. The thought that I’d have Revision money after just a couple more houses was surreal—dizzying, and it sent me drifting back to my conversation with Ethan when I’d first realized we had a choice.

  Our anger had seemed so innocuous then, like a block of unsculpted thought. You’d look right at it and never conceive of what it’d become heated in the kiln of desperation. Ethan had stuffed a rejection slip of his own into his jacket, then made a bank shot into the corner left pocket of his basement’s pool table. “Dad told me to stop wasting my time. And I told him he was right, and he should stop wasting his time on me. Which makes him start stuttering and backtracking, all red-faced. ‘Uh, well, I, um didn’t mean . . . I just meant . . . well, you know how it’s been with your mother lately.’ And I’m like, ‘My mother? How the fuck does Mom have anything to do with this? Neither one of us has seen her in like three months.’”

  Lately, as Ethan had gotten more upset, impressions had become his go-to way of evening the score, ridiculing anyone who he thought was responsible for his situation. Which at different times meant pretty much everyone. “Anyway, he was just all over the map, trying to say how proud of me he is and everything—which was obvious horseshit after what he’d just dropped. Though . . . do you want to know how he ended it?”

  “How?” I asked, reaching down to pet Ethan’s sorry-looking basset hound, Wilfred, who’d wandered up next to me.

  He says, “But Ethan, you do have to learn your place.”

  Throughout the conversation he’d been smiling, a subtle upward curve of the lip he’d use to let you know he wasn’t taking things too seriously. That the world wasn’t worth taking seriously. Slowly, however, almost imperceptibly at first, the smile had flattened and by the time he stopped talking, he was looking at the floor. “But what happens when you don’t have one? What the fuck do you then?”

  Usually all it took was a few pointed remarks to pull him out of one of his existential crises, but that time had been different, like the words really were vessels for something that had been welling up inside him.

  Not having an immediate answer, I stood up and rested my cue against the table. It was lit by only a couple of ancient, exposed incandescent bulbs on either end, leaving the pool balls in the middle—and half of Ethan’s face—mostly obscured in shadow. And like the rest of the basement, it was a little dingy: There was dust around the edges. Beer stains in the felt and in the rug underneath that looked like they’d been there forever. But it was quiet—Ethan’s dad was hardly ever home and his mom was “temporarily” living with her sister in Utah—so it’d been kind of our headquarters over the summer.

  “Maybe Martin Birch wasn’t so crazy after all.”

  Frowning, I shook my head. “No, no, fuck that. There’s no freaking way you’re going to pull what that little puss did.”

  Martin Birch had been this kid at school who’d blown his brains out all over the kitchen table with his mom in the next room. At first, I’d thought that it was a pretty shitty thing to drag your parent into, but apparently at one point she’d said that his bullies “had a point,” so you could see the thought process.

  “Suicide is . . . like the worst thing you could do, even if one moment it feels like the best. Feelings change. People change.”

  He smiled sarcastically. “Hashtag it gets better.”

  Ethan had a flair for the dramatic, but unlike most would-be provocateurs, he tended to follow through with even his most outlandish notions—so I was understandably alarmed. However, that same cavalier amenability w
as the reason I ended up working with him; out of everyone I knew, he was the only one I would ever have dared broach the subject with.

  “It’s really not such a leap. You climb up to the top of your ladder, realize that it’s not tall enough, and then what?” He cocked his head and looked right at me. “Lean against the wall forever?”

  I shook my head.

  “Letting go isn’t so crazy. I know you want to be romantic about life but, at some point, it’s just horsepower. And we don’t have it . . . which is why we’re doing this.”

  “We don’t have to,” I said, but not really meaning it. The prospect of doing stamps, the new go-to neurotropic recreational drug around town, had been the only thing that got me through a day of football camp and chores for my parents.

  Never one to disappoint, Ethan smiled dismissively. He’d been doing stamps longer than I had and even bragged about selling them when he got good enough bulk pricing. “It’d be one thing if you had a plan, but you don’t. So, might as well just make the best of it.”

  “Quit everything, you mean.”

  He got out the letter box and began mixing the solution in a tube. It was a little tedious, but several of the chemical components oxidized, so you had to make it up fresh each time if you wanted it to have its full effect. “Call it whatever you want.”

  I was about to blurt something back but stopped myself. For the longest time I’d been so depressed I couldn’t move. Anesthetized. Bottled up in my own little world, flicking the glass every now and again to check that it was still there. I’d thought I should be feeling something more, given how snubbed I felt being passed by everyone who could afford to Revise, but increasingly there was only apathy. I’d begun to think that all the VR games and link videos, instead of just being mindless, were actually sucking something out of me. Every time I got a cheap chuckle out of watching asshole YouTubers shooting each other with Tasers or dogs making silly faces, I felt myself care a little less about the world and myself and my homework.

  After all, it wasn’t like I was watching things out of love. I was just bored enough to see how they’d turn out and then, inevitably, would stick around for what came after, and so on and so on, each revolution sanding off a little more of my senses in the process.

  VR was better because I was actually making decisions, like what building to go into and whom to shoot and stuff like that. True, they were all choices off pre-scripted menus and I could tell what the developers wanted me to choose to keep the game going in the right direction, but I at least felt like it was my story.

  And they were fun as hell. My favorite was Wolftac R8, where you’re this corporate espionage agent trying to steal algorithms and trade secrets from other companies while at the same time maintaining the cover of a nine-to-five family man. You got big points for theft and causing system outages but scoring in the top 10% required keeping your family perfectly in the dark, and to break the top 5%, you really had to make them love you. It wasn’t just the job that was challenging, but the wife, Genevieve, was needy, and the kids, Evan and Selena, were these little brats who were already spoiled from the beginning.

  So, given the game’s time constraints, the only real option was to spoil them even more.

  It was all amusing enough, but in the end VR and the link videos were just a well-developed means to a certain end: to take your mind off things. What made stamps different was how they cut right to the chase. One lick and you were there, two and you were on the other side of wherever there was. It was beautiful, in a way. You felt like you were attached to balloons and being whisked off, everything light and floating and formless, and it didn’t matter that it was all on a cloud that would evaporate as soon as you touched it, because the thought of that happening never came to mind.

  “It’s just that . . .”

  Ethan had finished mixing the stamp solution and now was drawing a few milliliters up in an eyedropper. I followed the liquid’s progress in the tube, before starting again. “Well, the thing is . . . I want to do something great, whatever that means, but in order to be great you have to have something driving you. But it’s hard to get that when stamps and VR give you everything you need . . . they just kind of peel the feeling right off. We can know deep down that we want to be excited and better at stuff, but if there’s no urgency we just . . .”

  “Eat the crumbs.”

  We ended up licking stamps that night, and kept it up for the rest of the summer. In August, we took our second round of the college Preliminary Learning and Cognition Exams (PLACEs), and even though Ethan and I were in our school’s vaunted gifted program, our scores still weren’t even close to what we’d need to get into a respectable college. Up until then I think we’d still had this notion that things were going to eventually fall into place. Hell, the teachers had told us as much, and that’s what really started scaring people the most: the fact that even the adults were so wrong about everything.

  I became even more depressed. The kind of depressed where it felt like you had this layer of lacquer coating you and the things that once mattered just slid off. I didn’t want to get out of bed or practice piano because it all seemed pointless—especially as school neared and I knew I’d be headed back to the same depressing place that hadn’t taught me anything before. It was all starting to seem like one sprawling farce.

  All of that changed, though, when I saw Lena in the park that first time. It’s kind of hard to describe because you wouldn’t think that just seeing someone could alter things so much. But it was more about having your insides turn to water. About being inspired enough to feel like you were going to cry, simultaneously on top of the world and ground into the dirt. Looking through a window into a different reality. One where you got to fill in every shade and texture exactly how you wanted, and—no matter how hopelessly farfetched it seemed—you wanted to draw it perfect.

  Chapter 4

  “Are you just going to stand there with your dick in your hands or what?” asked Ethan as he put another handful of silverware into his backpack.

  “They’re probably like heirlooms or something. It’ll be freaking obvious if you take that much from each set,” I said.

  Ethan took an even larger handful and began dropping the pieces of china one by one into the backpack, as slowly as he could.

  I would’ve been more worried, but it was an enormous collection—bundled instead of each utensil having its own groove in the felt, and looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.

  Besides, there wasn’t a rush like last time. The Van de Kamps had not only posted three albums of vacation photos from Thailand on Facebook, but a freaking annotated map of their itinerary, too. They weren’t getting back for days. What was more, they shared pictures that the neighbor kid had posted walking their dog, conveniently time-stamped so we knew that he came around once at 9 a.m. and then again at 6 p.m.

  I’d remembered Jean Van de Kamp from middle school, where she’d done the whole rich-housewife-volunteer thing, updating social media accounts and doing graphic design for our yearbook. That is until her kids got Revised and sent to Lawrence. She was the sweetest lady in the world, always smiling and asking about our days when we saw her in the hallway. Once she’d even taken me home sick from school.

  I can still picture her opening the car door in the parking lot and me asking, “Don’t you lock it?”

  “I’d rather live in a world where I didn’t have to.”

  What a funny answer. When we were thinking about the places we could rob, the memory bobbed to the surface and I blurted it out. I tried to walk it back, but Ethan wouldn’t let it go. And he was right; it was exactly what we wanted in a mark. No alarms. No networked cameras. No thermal sensors. Her house had been locked, but getting the key had been as simple as watching the neighbor kid lift up the potted plant next to the door before he walked the dog. And even the dog—Buzz, a golden retriever—didn’t bark. We’d brought along a steak filled with tranquilizers as a precaution, but it was still s
itting in the cooler.

  The thought made me sad. And angry. The two emotions wrestled each other. I wanted to sprint back down the hall into the dining room and unload on Ethan. That fucking thief, grabbing more china than we’d talked about. We were doing this to such nice people—not taking a lot, but we were still doing it. And then a few seconds later fear would emerge and smother both the anger and the sadness. White-hot terror that they would come home early. That something would go wrong. That it would be the Moores’ house all over again.

  I padded extra quietly down the hall and slowly turned the doorknob. I hated myself for doing it—all those well-reasoned arguments about giving myself the same chance that she’d given her kids felt distant and thin pressed up against the reality of being in her house. The sound of silver hitting silver in Ethan’s backpack. The high-frequency white noise ringing in the hallway.

  I opened the jewelry box and took out an inconspicuous bracelet and a buried jade necklace that wouldn’t be noticed by a cursory glance. Then I opened drawers looking for gold coins. Almost anyone with money had them since hyperinflation had hit last year, and even if their possession had been legal, no one would keep them at the bank because of the negative interest rates and nosebleed storage fees. It made robbing houses that much more lucrative.

  I found a purse full of them in the sock drawer and took four.

  “Whatcha got there?” asked Ethan, making me jolt and spin around.

  He looked menacing in all black. In the ski mask. In real life, he kind of had this hard-to-take-seriously air, being tall and toned but awkward and butterfingered at the same time. He was almost handsome with angular features and blemish-free copper skin, but his forehead was slightly too big and his jaw line was a little irregular, producing an uneven impression.