by Gish Jen
There is a big dinner at the end of the season—they have it in the president’s house, with real silver and wineglasses—you’ve never seen anything like it. And guess who got Rookie of the Year? I’ll give you a hint. You know her! I’m sending you a HoloPic of the medal.
Of course, as her spirits rose, ours sank. Still, we hoped for things to work out for her, and no doubt all would have had it not been for Ondi and Winny Wannabe. But besides Woody, only one person knew that Gwen had not Upgraded—Ondi, who told Winny. We heard the news via PigeonGram:
“So the word has come down,” Woody said. “Net U knows you didn’t Upgrade. And they’re not okay with it. I wish I could hide you but I can’t.”
Honestly, in some ways being Netted was worse than being Surplus.
“You’re probably more used to being strong-armed,” he said.
I agreed. But now the question was, Would I do it? Yes or no.
“I would prefer not to,” I said.
He looked like his dog had been run over.
“Don’t just answer,” he told me. “Think about it, Gwen. You’re going to get kicked out of Net U. It’s going to be the end of a lot of things. Your career here. Your education. Do you realize?”
“I do.”
“You have it in you to be a great ballplayer, Gwen. Don’t you care?”
“No.”
“You must not understand. I mean Great, as in capital-G great.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, Aunt Nettie cares.”
“That’s why I don’t care.”
He hesitated. “And what about us? Do you not care about us?”
That was harder. In fact, it would have been easier to jump from a bridge than to say what I knew I had to say. In fact, it would have been easier to push someone off a boat. He was the first and only guy I’d ever been able to talk to. He was the first and only guy I had ever wanted to talk to. He was the first and only guy I had ever had a beer with. He was the first and only guy I had ever kissed.
But I made myself a rock and said, “No.”
He said we could find the most insignificant improvement possible. A correction to my pinky toe.
“My mother lost her pinky toe to a ToeBomb. It isn’t actually so insignificant.”
“Something else, then,” he said. “Aunt Nettie just wants to see that you are willing to play ball, so to speak.”
“If you’re saying Aunt Nettie wants to see that there’s a little bit of the Wannabe in me,” I said, “there isn’t.”
“Gwen, please.”
“If you care so much about me you can follow me to SurplusVille,” I told him.
To which he had no answer, as I knew he wouldn’t.
Instead, he said, “I’m going to find that bastard Winny and shoot him with his own damn gun.”
“Now there’s a mature response,” I said. “I know you don’t want to move to SurplusVille, but honestly? You might feel right at home with the bottom of the barrel there. Right in there with the dregs.”
* * *
—
That wasn’t the end of it, of course. In the self-torturing manner of lovers everywhere, they made up, then fought again, then made up, then fought again. As my mother would have said, they were sun and rain, then sun and rain, then sun and rain. Gwen was surprisingly open about her feelings with Eleanor and me—as if she was just such a volcano of upset, she had to tell someone, even if it was her parents. She PigeonGrammed,
Some nights I thought he was right, and that I was being pigheaded and perverse. Some nights I thought that I had learned a lot about resistance growing up but nothing about compromise. Give and take. Flexibility. Or as Woody put it, the tacit accommodation upon which love depends. But other nights I thought he was wrong. In fact, other nights I realized that it was compromise itself that I did not borrow Winny’s gun and shoot anyone. Because Ondi certainly deserved it—Ondi the Destroyer, as Woody called her. Ondi of whom all is forgiven because she has suffered so. Ondi who has dragged us all into her craziness and confusion. Ondi who had been like a sister to me.
“How could you have told Winny?” I said to her. “How could you?”
“I didn’t realize he would report you,” she said.
“I don’t know that I believe that. I don’t know that you didn’t tell him knowing full well that he would, and that he would get credit for it. I don’t know that this wasn’t your chance to get back at me for refusing your offer to ‘help’ me, that I might help you in return.”
“That’s not true.”
“No matter what, you shouldn’t have told Winny,” I continued. “No matter what. It was simply wrong.”
Of course, that made her sulk.
“Why did you take me in your confidence, that’s what I want to know,” she said. “I didn’t want to be in your confidence. I didn’t want to keep your secrets. It’s like you want us to still be what we were when we were eight. I’m sick and tired of being your sidekick.”
“Go to hell, Ondi,” I said then, and meant it.
So why, when Woody said he was going to drop Ondi from the team, did I say, “Don’t be a child”? And when he finally said he was sorry that he had asked me for something I couldn’t give, why did I say, “Renata warned me about you”? Really, I had wanted to say, I wish I could give it. Really, I had wanted to say, I thought you were the most wonderful person in the world. Really, I had wanted to say, I gave you my heart and if I had the choice, I’d give it again and again, forever.
But instead I said, “This place corrupts people and you are Exhibit A.”
Then I packed up and—surprised at how easy it was to leave—called for an AutoLyft home.
Diego at first base was the first to see her. It was the top of the seventh, 3–3, bases loaded, and he did reflexively catch the ball being thrown to him by the shortstop. But in his shock, he took his foot off the bag, and when the runner slid in under his outstretched arm, Diego did not even look down. Instead he broke into a run, his arms flung back as if the pennant had just been clinched.
“Gwen!” he shouted. “Gwen!”
Then the outfielders were all speeding toward home plate, and the other Lookouts were converging there, too, much to the confusion of the Beastie Burgers. It was, said one of them later, as if there was a fire at home plate and the Lookouts had just invented PutItOut. Gwen! Gwen! Gwen! People were hugging her as if to reassure themselves that this was not some sort of GwenGram who had come; everyone had to touch her, see her, hear her to be able to believe, Yes. It was no HoloPic. Standing there in a gray hoodie and gray sweats, her blue hair blowing big and free in the wind—yes, it was Gwen. You came back! You came back! Many were crying; even Gunnar the bison, who now played second base for the Lookouts, was wiping his eyes on his sleeve. What with a new beard, he looked very different from his twin brother, Bill, and yet still somehow identical, especially when Bill—who had also abandoned the Jets for the Lookouts—began wiping his eyes on his sleeve in just the same manner. And Gwen was crying as hard as anyone, her face lighting on one friend after the next, as her joy whooshed like an unaccountably warm mist up to the sky.
“Wow, a real field!” she managed to say at last. And, “I missed you guys!” And, “Yes, I’m just the same!” And, finally, “Can I play?”
Then there she was, on the mound with a borrowed glove. Eleanor and I watched from the stands with the other parents as she rocked back, her arms and knee rising. Then she whipped the ball forward with such force that the whole field stopped in awe and no one could say with certainty what she’d thrown, as no one could see the stitches or the spin, only that it was, of course, a strike.
And now came a succession of batters, each trying to hit her sinkers and cutters and slurves—or at least to make contact—and each,
in turn, failing.
“Holy shit!” they cried. “Holy, holy shit!” And, “What was that?”
The sun seemed to stop at three o’clock—the afternoon distending palpably, as if it were made of rubber. But finally, the game over, time returned; it was dusk. The wind died down. Could the Lookouts now make a real campfire on which to toast their marshmallows? Gwen was amazed. And what a warm cocoon the fire seemed to make around itself, she said later, a live cave in the cool air. The fire sparks rose, as against the blue-green sky first Mars appeared—Mars, which we had never visited but knew some Netted had—and then the moon, a more popular destination. But never mind; the friends sat in a circle, focused on a place both nearer and farther. All that mattered was what it was like at Net U and why Gwen had come back.
“It’s hard to explain,” she kept saying.
But because they were listening, she explained. Little by little, she got them to see something of the strange world she’d come to know—or so it seemed as they fixed their attention, and questioned, and nodded. Aunt Nettie learned via a million trials and a million errors, made in a flash, but humans, it seemed, still slowly gleaned things by leaning forward on their arms and putting their chins in their hands. They turned as a friend asked a good question and turned back as another friend gave a good answer. And how much more attentive this made them seem than the Leaguers Gwen had left just a few months ago. It was as if having a real student among them brought out the students they might have been in another society, just as—transfigured by the firelight and her efforts to convey something she knew—Gwen looked for all the world like her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, and her great-great-grandmother, and all the other teachers who had come before her in her long line.
* * *
—
There was much to catch up on, including how utterly the Surplus Fields ruling had transformed the League. No more furtive playing in marooned places. Now they played as much as they liked, right out in the open. Some of the Surplus fields did double duty as soccer fields, and many boasted brand-new backstops, built by the very same League parents who had once stalwartly hauled equipment and food out to the games by boat. Some fields even boasted night lights, something with which the Leaguers had no experience. The glare, they complained. The glare and the cold. The pitchers, especially, disliked playing at night. But to play the Netted League teams, they had to accommodate the Netted League supporters, and the Netted League supporters worked in the daytime. And so our players put up with it.
The reward was that there were, in astonishing short order, new teams everywhere, and play of such a different level that we had had to split the League into intramural and competition teams. Also, now that we were just one league among many, we had needed a league name. And so we had become, despite Eleanor’s objections, Aunt Nellie’s All-Star Resistance League—the Resisters, for short.
We did miss our routines—the secret messages, the dawn swims, the pies. If, as my mother used to say, a secret is a shame or a treasure, these were treasures. It was liberating but disconcerting, too, to have no more drones to watch out for. Out of habit the technical team still brought equipment to the first few games, but since there were no Nosy Drones, much less SwarmDrones, to track, there were no glitches over which to scratch our heads. Could all now really be forgiven and forgotten? It was hard to imagine, but then again Aunt Nettie was a program. She did not harbor grudges, suspicions, hostility. Humans could feud over the theft of a recipe; Aunt Nettie had categories. When your status improved, everything improved—for which change, let me say, we could not be more grateful. But we were also disoriented, even a little let down. It was as if a play had been canceled at intermission. Never mind how we had abhorred the first half, we somehow still missed the second.
Happily, whatever Aunt Nettie had forgotten, the players had not. Indeed, with the help of the ShelterBoat tattooist, they had prepared a thank-you surprise for Eleanor, which they now bared for Gwen to see: on every Resister’s forearm was a tattoo of Eleanor brandishing a foil, with a heart around it. Gwen touched these one by one, laughing with delight and admiring the way the tip of the foil pierced the right swell of the heart like the tip of an arrow. Eleanor’s splayed free hand broke the left bottom curve like the arrow’s feather. As for how Eleanor had reacted to this honor, the report was that she had at first frowned, and had even seemed about to scold Andrea, who had organized the tattooing. But in the end, she could not help but soften when she saw the ribbon motto at the base of the design: RIGHT MAKES MIGHT.
There were other changes, too. Could the Lookouts really all have official T-shirts? LOOKOUTS was emblazoned in script across the front, and each player’s number and name was printed across the back. And were those honest-to-god Lookouts fans Gwen had seen in the bleachers? The bleachers were portable and low—not more than eight rows high. Still, for some games, she learned, they were packed—meaning hundreds of fans, all of them Surplus. Where did they come from? And were they drop-ins or diehards?
“Diehards,” Diego said. “They even leave little offerings for us.”
“Offerings?”
“Little plates full of food, or fresh baseballs, or socks. Sometimes a poem.”
Gwen was touched. As for whether she would play in the playoffs, if the Lookouts made it that far?
“Of course!” she said.
Diego had to check, but he did think she could play since she was an original member of the team. And after the playoffs, he said, they were planning an all-star exhibition game, weather permitting. Would she play in that, too?
“Of course!”
“What if it’s the best of the Resisters versus the Netted League stars?”
“You’re not seriously asking which side I belong to, are you?”
Diego laughed. “Just making sure you’ve still got the right name branded on your heart,” he said.
In the meanwhile, the Lookouts were focused on their competition. They were currently in fourth place in the League, but they thought that with luck and application they could maybe move up. That would mean beating the Jets, the RosyDrones, and the DreadNoughts.
“Let’s do it,” said Gwen.
Her public manner was crisp, full of confidence and ease. And for the most part, at home, too, she slipped back into her earlier life as if into a warm bath. We were still astonished every time we saw her, though. For she had returned Gwen 2.0, as Eleanor and I joked—a version of herself even stronger and more beautiful and more affectionate than the Gwen we had known. Her new knitting project, for example, was a baseball jacket for me, to thank me for teaching her to play baseball. It was red and cream and, as I slowly realized, bore on the back the number one.
Daughters.
She helped put the boardwalks across the garden for winter. She made dinner, setting the table with candles and conversing as if conversation was—imagine—as important an activity as baseball. She asked about Eleanor’s work. She confined herself to just one comment about how much warmer we could be if we would simply turn on the zone-heat. And, of course, she fenced with Eleanor when it wasn’t too gusty.
But now, she went easier on her mother and tougher on Aunt Nettie. It was as if her edge was still there but flipped over like a knife, to face outward. “How can there be no real schools here?” she demanded. “How can there be no university? How can that have become normal? Why do the Netted have dorms and ballparks and coaches? What did they do to deserve that? Are Diego and Brianna any less trainable than Pink and Sylvie? Why are so many Surplus living on houseboats? Why are we being spied on by the house, and why were there emanations from the Surplus Fields and why are there winnowing agents in the mall-truck food even now—when we really are Workless, not Worthless! as the AutoAmericans Against Apartheid say? And is all this really even because of Automation, exactly? Or is it because the people who controlled things didn’t care to give up cont
rol, and Automation helped them keep it?”
Her eyes burned with a fury so deep it seemed to darken her very pupils.
“I will never go back,” she said flatly. “I miss nothing.”
Still, Pink and Sylvie missed her. Outraged when they learned that Gwen had left rather than GenetImprove, they started Sweeting her fans, who petitioned Net U to do something. Did #BringGwenBack intend to target Woody? It wasn’t clear. But soon Renata was Sweeting, too—both to put Gwen’s situation into context and to bring attention to her own. As for the resulting outrage—for Renata, for Gwen, for #RenataGwen—it did not focus, as it did in Gwen’s heart, on Net U and Winny and Ondi so much as on Demo Johnson and Woody. Of course, Demo was indeed very wrong, and Woody, too. As my mother used to say, No paint job could cover that. But had Woody, as social media assumed, really taken advantage of Gwen, when she knew about Renata before they got involved? When there were no rules at Net U about student-coach romances? And when he had not, as was assumed, presented an ultimatum, but had in fact protected her as best he could against the pressure to GenetImprove? Gwen thought she might write something in his defense, especially since Net U was going to open an investigation into Renata’s case.
“Great, but make sure you’re ready,” I advised.
“This is likely to go on for months,” Eleanor concurred, adding, “Whatever people are Sweeting, you will not be the focus of the investigation, anyway. The focus will be on the rape and its handling.”
“And Woody.”
“Of course.”
“And his character.”
“It doesn’t look good that he had two women pitchers leave school abruptly. But while you can testify that you departed for wholly unrelated reasons and that he’s not the villain he is being made out to be, it does appear that he protected the guilty at the expense of the innocent.”
Gwen chewed her oatmeal.