Where Futures End Page 6

  Griffin got me the job at Flavor Foam so I could help my brother chip away at his debt and get out of MyFuture. As a minor, I can’t have any debt attached to me and can come and go as I please. But Brandon’s stuck there, can’t even go around the corner to get a burger or take a swim in the lake or anything. Not even to, say, get a job with which to pay off his debt. What he can do is try to come up with some clever activity that will make his feed popular and attract advertisers. But nothing that involves nudity, or suggesting nudity, or suggesting anything else that typically goes on in a motel, because then the government comes in and confiscates all of MyFuture’s cameras and e-frames, and no one makes money, least of all Visa. The government doesn’t mind what your average person does with a camera and an Internet connection, but it’s pretty intent on preventing debtors’ colonies from becoming porn plantations.

  Residents in MyFuture are great at pulling together to attract hits on their feeds. Once we did a reinterpretation of Les Misérables, with Javert as an obsessive collection agent and Jean Valjean doing everything he could to avoid having his adopted daughter grow up in a debtors’ colony. Small-time review sites called it “poignant” and “relevant,” but Rotten Tomatoes never mentioned it, and it didn’t catch on at FeedBin.

  We also had a good gig going where we charged local schools to bring in kids so they could see firsthand the dangers of high interest rate credit cards. But a couple of credit companies shut that down real fast with some bad press about children being exposed to former addicts and dropouts.

  Brandon did everything he could to play up our own hardships for the camera—Isn’t It Sad That A Couple Of Orphans Are Stuck In A Mold-Infested Motel With Former Gamblers And Alcoholics? We got a week’s worth of advertising by drawing out an argument about me quitting school to get a job.

  And people really tuned in to see my relationship with Griffin build.

  The first time Griffin saw me, I was crying in the stairwell at MyFuture. It was my first day there and I’d just found out Brandon and I had to share a room with another person and discretion dictated that I sleep on a cot in the bathroom.

  Griffin tried to cheer me up by telling me that at least the place had a pool.

  But there’s no water in it, I said.

  You have to bring your own, Griffin said.

  I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and peered up at him from the dingy carpet of the stairwell landing. I figured this was the best he could do at being funny, so I played along. No one told me, I said.

  He considered for a moment and then said, I could let you borrow mine. He took my hand and pulled me up while I was still trying to figure out if he was joking. Then he led me outside and down into the empty pool, where an entire sloping wall was covered with 3-D chalk art of a whale swimming in sun-lit water. It was so beautiful that the only thing I could think of to say was, This is better than the water I would have brought from home. And Griffin shrugged and said, It’s the only water you can’t get wet.

  He had tons of ideas, all the time. Once he used his chalk to add a footnote to the slogan MyFuture had painted on a giant sign on the roof:

  MyFuture

  where my future belongs to me*

  *once I obtain a release of lien

  He always told me not to take it all so seriously. Stop staring at the sidewalk, he would say at the plaza. It’s not like you’re in debt to these specific people. And I’d try to shake the feeling that tourists were going to walk up to me and demand that I pay them for the toothpaste I’d used that morning.

  With Griffin, it was easier not to wallow in self-pity. So I spent all my time with him, at work and at MyFuture. In the mornings when the food truck delivered breakfast, the cost of which was added to our debts, we’d peel the foil off our plates and fashion it into ninja stars. In the evenings, we’d browse FeedBin, watching families watch TV together, and spying on old friends from schools we’d never again attend. On clear nights, when the stars were white on black instead of smoggy gray, we’d lie on the roof together and say cheesy things like, At least they can’t charge us for moonlight. Although later they did, by way of imposing a curfew and fining those of us who broke it.

  Then Griffin started talking about us leaving the colony together and sorry if that meant not helping alleviate our families’ debts but didn’t I want a future? A real future without a lien on it? Our sobby love story got decent ratings, enough to pull in ad revenue, even. Customers came into Flavor Foam to watch me argue with Griffin in person. Mr. One had our supplier make a mold in the shape of Griffin’s head. You can still order Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town, although nobody does. Nobody except me.

  The day Griffin turned eighteen, he took his share of the revenue we’d gotten from companies who had advertised on our feeds and he bought us Tickets To The Big City. But I wouldn’t leave Brandon alone in a debtors’ colony with no way to get out. So Griffin left and I had to do (terrible, disproportionate) chalk art on my own. And I stopped going on the roof to look at stars. And I stopped watching feeds of happy families in real living rooms. And foil was just foil.

  My Tuesday afternoon regular is a guy I think of as Saint Professor, a brand-new English teacher who comes in after school. His cheap suit and cartoon character tie prove he’s straddling the line between determined and defeated. He must be finding it hard to meet his classroom objectives, because he likes to lecture me on how to do my job.

  “What have you got in the way of historical heroes in government?” he asks.

  I use my e-frame to scan his tie. An old Bad Dad cartoon episode pops up. “Honestly, I wouldn’t count on that being a demand we cater to.” Bad Dad always reminds me of junior high—watching episodes after school with Brandon while we ate maple syrup straight from the bottle. We would have inhaled flavor foam if it had existed back then. Sometimes I bring it to him from the restaurant, but I can tell he only eats it to humor me.

  He’s obsessed with staying healthy now that he’s all I’ve got.

  Saint Professor gives his patient sigh and slowly unfolds a menu. “When I ask for a certain type of mold, you hold open the menu like this.” He spreads it in front of me and pushes my e-frame out of my eye-line. “See here where the categories are listed? See how they’re color-coded?”

  I try to decide which pointy objects I’d most like to hide in his flavor foam.

  “Want to guess what color historical figures get, or do you already know?” Saint Professor says in his slow, deliberate voice. “Hmm?”

  The color of your blood when I stick you in the eye with that Bad Dad tie pin?

  “It’s green,” he says. “Historical figures and aging athletes both get green. Now, if I scan the menu for green stars, I’ll find—look here—that’s Oprah. She also gets a light blue star for being a religious figure. That’s not political, which is what I was looking for, but you know what? Close enough, because actually I believe they made her honorary mayor of a couple towns during that year she was battling colon cancer. So I’ll take Oprah Bellowing Her Generosity.”

  “How ironic,” I say, thinking back to Oprah’s online tirade against Bad Dad’s parenting methods.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.” I whisk the menu out of Saint Professor’s hand.

  He glares at me over the top of his glasses. “I’ll have Blueberry Muffin flavor gel, young lady.”

  I plod to the mold machine. My other manager, the one I call the Other One, is lounging behind the counter, nibbling melted cheese off an order of cheese fries. “Fries are fattening,” he explains when I give him a look. “Which mold you need?”

  “Oprah.”

  “Eyes Shining With Empowerment?”

  “The other one, Other One.” I chuckle at my joke.

  “Why do you call me that? You never call Jeffrey Mr. One to his face.” He uses a clicky pen to separate the cheese fries from th
ose that have already been de-cheesed. He’s the only one who still uses pens to write down orders instead of tapping pictures on a Flavor Foam app. “Why can’t I at least be Mr. Two?”

  “You don’t really want to be that closely associated with Mr. One.”

  He stops sorting cheese fries to use his pen to whisk hair back over his bald spot. “What if I told you the walk-in freezer is on the fritz again and the ice-cream nuggets are in mortal peril? Then can I be Mr. Two?”

  I pause. I could indeed use a good handful of half-melted ice-cream nuggets. And Mr. One would never miss them. We’re not allowed to serve them to customers because even frozen solid they make the Flavor Foam Heads melt, which ruins the customer experience. We’re also not allowed to throw them out because company policy dictates that any food thrown out before the expiration date be donated to a local nonprofit, but it also dictates that we not donate high-caloric food to people of insufficient means because, as Mr. One says, “That’s the way to a slow genocide, a genocide of the lower class.”

  “Better hurry,” chimes in my coworker Lola. “I already sold off two boxes of those ice-cream nuggets at a premium to table seven.”

  “Uh, you’re not really supposed to do that,” the Other One says, pointing his pen at her.

  “Uh, too late.” Lola rolls her eyes.

  Lola’s what you’d call enterprising. She spends her entire shift orchestrating complicated lovers’ quarrels with customers for the sake of Flavor Foam’s cameras. Then she goes home and spends all her free time orchestrating complicated lovers’ quarrels with her friends for whatever cameras might be mounted in shop windows or soda machines or her dining room ceiling fan. You’d think she’d be making enough in ad revenue now to quit working at Flavor Foam, but her ratings are all over the place. I think people sense that all those shrill fights with brooding boys are staged.

  Right now she’s using her e-frame to search the tables of college boys, looking for ones on scholarship who might be willing to do desperate things for a cut of ad revenue.

  “Darn, full ride,” she mutters. “That hardly helps me.”

  She gives up to watch a feed of a guy trying to convince his girlfriend he’s not cheating on her. “What girl would actually be attracted to me?” he says. “I mean besides you?” The feed is coming from one of our own cameras.

  “Lola, they’re right there at table twelve,” I say. “Why are you watching them on your e-frame?”

  The big screen over our heads switches to the same feed she’s watching. Now all of our customers can watch the guy ask the girls at the next table if they’re attracted to him. “Like, would you ever ask me to take off my shirt or anything like that?” he asks. His girlfriend plunges his e-frame into a Flavor Foam Head. Some bot picks up on the fact that the ratings are soaring and plants an American Eagle Outfitters logo in the corner of the screen.

  “Love ’em and leave ’em to keep the ratings high,” I mumble as I pour myself a pilfered soda, “to keep the ad revenue coming in, right?”

  “Add a Cake Batter flavor gel into that Coke,” Lola tells me. “Sweeten it up. Your bitterness is poisoning the air for the rest of us.”

  I take a swig of soda and eye the mold dispenser. I’m in a bit of a self-pitying mood. “Other One, give me Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town.”

  “Not again,” Lola says.

  But I’m already full speed ahead into moody territory. “Push the button, Other One.”

  “Stop calling me that,” he says, but he pushes the button.

  I inject flavor foam into Lover Boy With Big Plans. The giant TV screen quickly cuts to my feed. Mr. One always likes to get this on camera.

  I ignore the screen and consider Lover Boy’s sad smile. It’s been two months since Griffin left. He joined this street art movement in L.A. We still talk some. In fact, we talked just last week. He said he misses me; I asked him why he never calls. There was this long pause during which he was either breathing really loudly or the wind was hitting the mic on his e-frame, and then he said, I always answer when you call me, like that makes up for it. Then he told me I should come out to Santa Monica, and I told him he should ask his dad to. I admit that was a mean thing to say. We both know his dad can’t leave MyFuture until he pays off his debt. But I also think it’s mean to abandon your own dad when his only wrongdoing was that he lived off his credit card too long when his unemployment ran out.

  I can still hear Griffin’s voice, low and sad and mixed in with the sound of the ocean: Brix . . . It’s hard here. It’s hard without you.

  It always kills me, that voice.

  Then come back, I told him.

  I lean down close to Flavor Foam’s counter. I return Lover Boy’s sad smile, and for a moment it’s almost like we’re apologizing to each other for everything that’s happened. Then I pour my Coke on top of Lover Boy’s foam head. It eats through his face and comes bubbling back out of the mold. Fun fact: There’s a little bit of baking soda mixed in with the flavor foam. Keeps it foamy. Also turns molds into mini-volcanoes.

  A caption on the screen lets our customers—and any viewers—know that they can order Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town plus a third-tier flavor gel for $12.99. And that Brixney herself will bring it to your table and would probably even pour her soda on it if you asked her real nice. Mr. One must be typing furiously up in the control booth.

  Then the old replay starts. Even though I’ve specifically asked Mr. One not to play it ever. It’s me and Griffin in our Flavor Foam uniforms, the old ones without the slimming panels we have now and you can really tell the difference. We’re making our Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town. The old Chevron Gas icon shines in the corner of the screen. I just made ten cents. Thanks a bunch, Mr. One.

  I decide to take my break early and head out to the patio overlooking the lake. I find a guy sitting on a marble statue of a soda can, very lifelike and squirting some type of brown liquid. The marble soda can, I mean. The guy isn’t lifelike. He’s sitting too still and when I hold up my e-frame, it can’t identify him. The screen shows a little clock icon and then, instead of displaying his name and online profile, just says, NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

  My food scanner app is a little hyper, always jumping in before I ask it to.

  So he has no profile. Very interesting. Means he’s either a criminal who’s found a way to scrub himself from the Internet (except he’s too clean for that), an e-free who shuns social media (expect he’s also too clean for that), or a richie-rich tourist with some outdated idea of discretion (of which we get plenty around here). His hair is shaggy, skin luminescent. I recognize his clothes from a boutique at the other end of the plaza. Definitely a richie-rich tourist.

  He gazes out across the plaza, ignoring the notebook in his hand and curiously watching preteens buzz about the pavilion where a Feed-Con expo is going on. In about an hour, all of those kids will be buzzing over to Flavor Foam for a snack break. Probably sans tip money. My calves ache at the thought.

  The truth is, I’m not making nearly enough money at this job to put a dent in Brandon’s debt. And contrary to what collection agencies think, no relative is going to take interest in our sad plight and come up with the cash to spring us from MyFuture. All we have left is an uncle who subscribes to the idea that throwing money at a problem never solves it, which usually I would agree with.

  Also, with Brandon’s interest piling up the way it is, he’s on track to be transferred to a colony thirty miles south where they sleep eight to a room and get one bathroom for an entire floor.

  So a good-looking, richie-rich tourist is just what I need right now. He can either add some pretty to my feed and get me some ad revenue, or he can give me cash directly once I become his temporary townie girlfriend.

  I try again with my e-frame. It still can’t get a read on him. It also tells me the plume of brown liquid coming
from the marble straw is not for human consumption. Way to advertise a soda, right? I try to think of something to say to him, something Lola might say to lure him into the choppy waters of our shop and moor him in a booth with a good camera angle.

  I can get you a flavor foam Girl With Pleasing Anatomy four hours before the evening shift.

  Please be advised this is not a public drinking fountain but a flawed attempt at advertising soda with something resembling soda but completely unsafe for consumption.

  I’m covered in my own skin!

  That last one is a line from a feed that was popular last week, but maybe it’s too old to reference? Maybe he’s heard it so many times it’s not funny anymore? He’ll have to force a laugh and then wonder why he wastes his vacation hanging out on the plaza meeting desperate locals.

  I get so flustered thinking about it that I finally just say, “The seating is located inside. Where the chairs are.” It comes off a little snarky. I’m not having the best of days.

  Saint Professor, my Tuesday regular, is not happy that I abandoned him.

  “I’ve been watching your feed on my e-frame here,” he says. An image of me through one of Flavor Foam’s cameras shows on his clunky, school-prescribed e-frame. “I saw you loitering on the patio. When I place my order, you fill it right away.”

  I’m guessing he had a particularly bad day at school.

  “And you don’t shove it onto the table like you just did,” he continues. “You approach from right here near my elbow and gracefully slide it in front of me. Like a seal gliding over butter.”

  As Saint Professor leans over the table, I notice a little notebook in his shirt pocket on which he has scrawled T. S. Eliot. I almost grunt in frustration. If you’re going to lecture me on something, how about poetry? How about ultra-dense symbolism that I’d never be able to decode on my own?