He and the songwriter had already scribbled some lyrics on a paper placemat.
“This is the story.” The producer directed his acetone breath at me. “Cole’s not supposed to get involved with your type—it’s against the law but he can’t help himself. And you can do what you want with him, can’t you, because your powers of persuasion are sort of superhuman. Your vorpal, yes? So here we go. The first part is Cole’s and the second is Epony’s.”
The songwriter read the lyrics off in a monotone:
I know what you are,
how you watch me.
If I go too far
will you stop me?
“Effing ethereal,” the producer cut in to remind us.
I know what they say,
how they watch me.
If I want your heart
can they stop me?
They won’t understand this.
They can’t come between us.
I stole a glance at Cole. He raised his eyebrows at me. I remembered laughing in the creek together and then quickly pushed the thought away. The creek was just another current in a morass of currents now.
“Right, let’s try it in the booth,” the producer said, and handed the paper placemat to Cole. “Sing it like a girl would, Cole, like a sweet effing innocent girl.”
While they mixed the final track, we went to a movieplex to watch Girl Queen movies. We rented a space that was nothing but a shelf on a stack of shelves facing a huge screen. Footrests rose up from the floor; pops rolled down from a fridge hatch.
On-screen, a river pooled around a city of sun-dazzled glass, and an actor portraying Dylan called a silvery creature out of the water. It was the seventh Girl Queen movie in a row we had watched.
“Watch out for the stinger!” I hollered at the screen, because I knew this movie by heart. It was based on a popular story someone had posted online about Dylan’s adventures with the Girl Queen and her brother. There was no telling if it had gotten the look of the Other Place right, but it seemed close enough to what Dylan had described in his own stories, so I was willing to go along for the ride.
During a lull in the action, Cole told me, “They shouldn’t have turned your vocals down on the chorus. I was drowning you out.”
“We aliens don’t like to be loud,” I said, poking him in the ribs. “We’re a shy bunch. We’re really only here to make humans like you sound better.”
“Seriously, though,” Cole said.
I shook my head. “It’s your voice that’s good. They’ll have to do all that thickening with mine. I never heard you sing so high.”
“Sounded like a mosquito in heat.” He climbed up on the back of the seat and popped open the fridge hatch to use as a headrest. The chemical smell of refrigerant reminded me of ice-cream bars and frozen lemonade. “Ethereal my ass.”
“Looks ethereal from this angle,” I joked, and prodded him so he leaped off the chair back.
He dropped into the seat and leaned against me. “If I had known they were going to try to turn me half into a girl, I might not have done this.”
“Yes you would have.” I slipped an arm around his shoulders, praying he wouldn’t pull away. My heartbeat was an overproduced version of itself, all bass notes. “Those tween girls like the non-threatening brand of angst. Get used to it, girly boy.”
He laced his fingers through mine so that his arm was across his chest. “Those lyrics . . .” He grimaced at the distant movie screen. “I hate acting that way around you.”
I stiffened. “Like you’re in love with me?”
“No, like I can’t do anything about it.”
The light from the screen lent his face an early-morning, dirt-streaked window kind of glow.
“You can do something about it.” I brushed my chin against his shoulder.
He shifted in his seat so that I thought maybe I was bothering him. But then he turned and kissed me, and the sound of river water from the movie reminded me of our islands in the creek.
Then he jerked away, scowled at the armrest. “You like doing any of this?”
“Kissing you?” I almost laughed. Was there some other reason to do it?
“No, I mean my non-threatening high notes.” He flopped back in his seat. “And these pants that are about three sizes too small.”
I touched the back of his shoulder, trying to coax him closer again. “It’s what everybody wears.”
He reached to pull his guitar out from under his seat. “Never mind.” He started strumming, and that was the end of that.
We ordered hot dogs and a case of designer candy that made smoke pour out of our mouths. Cole riffed on his guitar despite protests from the other shelves. “I’ve tasted sorrow, salt, and sickly sweets,” he sang. “Hate it all, but a boy’s gotta eat.”
I passed in and out of sleep for the remainder of the movie. I kept seeing my kitchen wallpaper in the Girl Queen’s palace, faded and curling. Cole’s hens scrambling for the fence line. In the dark nighttime scenes when blue light washed over us, I pretended the world was flooding and I was safe up on a high shelf with Cole and candy, and pretended that was enough.
“Will they buy it?” Cole asked, his thumb hitting an errant note that jolted me out of dreaming.
He meant the girls, the tweens with their lust for high-con. Would they buy that I was an alien? That he was in love with me? That was what he cared about. What kept his mind occupied even while he kissed me, so that he could hardly remember to enjoy it. His shrill tone set my teeth on edge. “They’ll eat you up.”
We stayed at the movieplex all night and into the following day. Just watched movie after movie and dozed during the boring parts and tried to remember if we existed beyond our shelf. I came to the conclusion that we kind of didn’t. The context for every moment of our lives was gone, underwater. Me with no profile, like some mythical creature exiled from Atlantis.
After they’d finished the track, they had us come down and listen to it, and I forgot it was me singing and got goose bumps from the shimmering synths and the bass notes like a heartbeat. Cole’s voice was a prepubescent version of itself and so sweet I could almost cry. Effing ethereal, after all.
The plan was that when the single hit the airwaves, every flexi-screen within range of a signal would light up with an image of Cole’s haunted expression. Anyone who clicked through to the webpage would discover a forlorn Cole reaching for me as I faded away. Below the image, a single line of text: “They won’t understand this.”
It was almost the exact pose from that most viral of ancient feeds, the moment Michael faded away from Brixney. Despite what the lyric said, everyone would understand it.
I was wheedling the guy at the grocery counter to let me take some tomatoes and a head of lettuce when the single dropped. His flexi-screen lit up. He tapped on it in a way he thought was discreet, arm below the counter. His gaze went to my wrists and found no screen or red bracelet. Wide-eyed, he waved me on. I thought, See? Who needs credits?
On my way home, past house-fronts painted white against the early summer heat, it hit me: I was an alien now.
I started running.
Cole was fidgeting in the entryway of my family’s premier town house, his boots smearing dirt on the new white premier tiles. I pointed at the brand-new flexi-screen on his arm, which was spouting our single. “Take it off, what are you thinking? Before they get here.”
He jolted. Tugged it off. Then paused, the music echoing, his screen still lit up with the image of his own face. “Wait, who’s they?”
“I don’t know, they, people. Fans. Turn it off, they can track your location.”
Cole swiped at the screen and our singing stopped. We looked around. We waited. I kept staring at the door. “Should we barricade it?” Cole asked. He cracked a smile. I chucked the lettuce at him.
“Turn it bac
k on.” I nodded at his screen.
He made a swipe, tapped through to our website. “Six hundred eighty-seven subscribers.” His face went premier white.
The tomatoes slipped out of my grip. “Turn it back off.”
A sound of thunder on the stairs and then my sisters barreled into the room. “Come see—you’re on CelebriFeed!”
I stamped up after them on shaky legs.
“Stop running!” my dad called from the kitchen. “It’s hot enough in here and the a/c won’t turn up.”
“Dad!” I said.
“Did you get the groceries?” he called.
“Dad!”
“What?” He poked his head in. The wall monitor caught his eye. There was the image from our website, large as life on the screen. “Well, what in the world? I never saw a boy’s hair look like that.” He turned his gaze to Cole’s yellow thatch, nothing like the gelled nest of hair on-screen.
“Are you going to get in trouble?” my younger sister asked.
“For what?” Cole said.
She sidled up to him, as eager to bask in his annoyance as in any other form of his attention. “For interfering with an alien.”
“She’s not an alien, she’s your sister,” Dad said, and slumped back to the kitchen.
“Besides, she doesn’t have a red bracelet,” my other sister said. “She’s supposed to have ditched it. How will they know anyone’s interfering with her?”
“They’ll know from CelebriFeed!”
Cole scooted away to leave them to their shrill bickering.
“Are we going to get in trouble for this?” I murmured to him.
“In trouble with who?”
“The FBI or someone.”
“The FBI won’t believe that an alien could want a human. Aliens and humans aren’t even the same species. Only high-con fans believe crap like this.”
He was right—I knew it firsthand. Aliens didn’t fall in love with silly fourteen-year-old girls or even glammed-up seventeen-year-old girls. “The aliens, then. They’ll be mad. They don’t like to draw attention to themselves.”
“If they didn’t want attention, they wouldn’t wear those bright red bracelets.”
“They have to.” My younger sister had inched close again and stood inspecting the way Cole’s sweat-dampened clothes stuck to him. “The government said so.”
Cole went to the a/c and tried to override the peak-usage sensor. “Anyway, the aliens can just go ahead and kiss it; they’re not the ones whose egg is in the frying pan.”
For the next few days, CelebriFeed cycled our photo through a hundred times, each with a different headline. Close Encounter Leads to Illegal Love . . . Vorpal Abuse: He’s Under Her Spell . . . Does She Have a Tail? Cole and I hid out in the township and let our mystique build. Then we flew out to L.A., city of camera angles.
I found out what heat was. The heat of the desert, the press of the crowds, heat from the tailpipes and the gleaming hoods of cars. The heat from Cole, coming close for a kiss in direct sight of a streetlamp camera. The burn of humiliation at realizing he was only mooning over me because he’d spotted a line of camera lenses embedded in a shop awning. It was the same game over and over: Pull close, pull away. Disappear around a corner, into a waiting car, to leave Cole feigning heartbreak. All for the cameras, for the act.
By the third week, when the cat-and-mouse thing started to get old, our new fans made it easy for us to evolve our act. When Cole went out, they’d swarm him like flies. I’d appear at the right moment, cutting a wide swath through the frightened crowd. Is she really? they’d whisper. Or, Save him from her! Later, Cole would get me alone with the cameras and try to tell me he didn’t want those other girls. I’d tell him he should be with them, that it’d be better for him. A few tears on my part and then I’d leave. We kept it short. We always kept it short. They couldn’t get enough.
When the temperatures soared, the rolling blackouts were a relief. The power to the city’s cameras went out, giving Cole an excuse to be offline for a couple of days. He ditched his flexi-screen so no one could track him and we drove out to Santa Monica. From Ocean Avenue, we took in the sight of the storm-wrecked pier still in splinters, the Ferris wheel motionless above the dark water like a giant eye peering over the edge of an abyss.
“Don’t care how they see you, I’ll never leave you.”
“I’ll keep us together, stay with you forever.”
Cole and I took turns singing over a thumping beat, crouched in an abandoned warehouse whose cameras couldn’t be traced. The same building Warehouse Burn often used, according to our producer.
“Stay with you forever.” Cole whispered into my ear, “Or at least until I get feeling back in my legs.” He shifted into an easier crouch, flashed me a quick smile. I hoped the mic hadn’t picked up his joke.
Our producer stood out of sight, flapping his arms at us and mouthing, More effing intensity!
“Stay with you forever!” I belted. Then the breakaway wall crashed in and I slipped out of sight, leaving Cole to gape at vaguely threatening forms. The dark, hulking men could have been FBI or some kind of alien task force but were really day laborers in black turtlenecks. The cameras went dead on cue. The producer checked his flexi-screen and reported that we were already number forty-three on FeedBin.
“Intense as heck,” the producer said of either our performance or the ad revenue.
Forty-three didn’t sound great to me, but he seemed confident we’d topple the teen mini-shows and the clips of skateboard tricks. I figured he knew better than I did.
He pointed a thick finger at Cole. “We need to talk before you go.”
I started to follow them but the producer waved me away. “No, Epony. Just Cole. Vocal issues,” he said, pointing to his throat. “Don’t worry about it. Separate cars out of here, and if you two are going to meet up later, for eff’s sake make sure you’ve disabled any cameras. You’re completely offline until prime time.”
I swiped Sheetrock dust from my shoulders and shook it out of my hair.
Cole was standing frozen, a spray of white dust turning half his face pale. I gave him a questioning look.
“Cole, did you hear me?” The edge in the producer’s voice made me look up. Cole snapped out of whatever spell had held him, jerked his gaze away from me.
“Yeah,” he answered. “Alone and miserable and crying into a camera lens at eight o’clock tonight.”
I rode to my hotel. The driver tuned the car radio with his flexi-screen since I didn’t have my own. All the songs were the same anyway. Girls singing about falling asleep in their party clothes, about glamming up their profiles. Boys singing about cycling through disposable shirts, about their screens too tight on their arms. Lyrics about things I’d never experienced and didn’t understand. They’d fake alien accents, something I’d gotten good at in the last couple of weeks, or they’d affect drunkenness and slur their lyrics. The song would build to a climax, there’d be that moment, that one bit of emotion I could grab on to. And back to talk of hairstyles and camping out on high-speed trains.
Not like when Cole sang—when he sang a song he wrote, anyway. The whole thing so charged through with feeling, the emotion so palpable it made ladders in the air. One day I was going to reach out and touch them and climb up to somewhere.
At the camera-free suite I had come to call home, it was a ration day—no air-conditioning. The balcony doors let in smog and not much else. The same news story kept looping on the wall monitor: “The taskforce will attempt to train people with strong vorpals to cross into the Other Place, which will strengthen the link that allows solar energy to flow into the alternate universe.” I’d already heard all about it, already wondered how they’d find anyone with a vorpal strong enough to sense the Other Place. They’d been trying for years now. I switched it off.
Cole came in.
He had his own apartment where we sometimes moped together for the cameras, but we could only drop the act here in my suite. He dragged out the battered guitar he kept stashed there, clipped a guitar string, and used it to override the a/c controls.
We collapsed in front of the a/c unit and lay where we had fallen, looking like a fashion spread of third-world heat casualties. “I’ve lived L.A. by camera light,” Cole sang lazily, strumming his guitar, “swelter days, blackout nights.”
Then his fingers left the guitar strings and trailed to my arm, my hair. He traced circles and lines on my neck as though mimicking some foreign and complicated pattern. My heart tried to follow it, surging in time with his movements. When he leaned in for a kiss I reminded him there weren’t any cameras around. He reminded me not to be an ass. We added a little more heat to the world.
Until Cole stopped mid-kiss, pulled away as usual, that defeated look coming into his eye again—same as when we played for the cameras. It had gotten to where I couldn’t tell when that look wasn’t real. “I’m not actually an alien,” I told him. “I’ve got all the right anatomy and everything.”
He didn’t laugh. “They didn’t go for your idea.”
“What idea—the thing where we run away together?” I tried to angle myself close to him again, missing the weight of his arm around me. “Preferably to Europe. I could use a vacation from this place.”
He rolled onto his feet, fiddled with the a/c knob again. “Yeah, I just said they didn’t go for it.”
I huddled on the couch, stung. “Is that what you and the producer were talking about? Did you tell him London is completely blanketed with lenses? All those old surveillance cameras are connected to the Internet now.”
“They said it would cut all the tension we’ve been building.”
I sat up. “Who’s they?”
“Producer, rep.”
“She’s in town? When did you talk to her?” I leaned forward until I could put my hand on his back. “What if, like, we can’t get passports—nobody can get entry to England right now—and then we have to get smuggled in—”
Where Futures End Page 11