Entanglements

by Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families

  There was a brief, familiar sting at his temple, and the world lurched forward a few seconds. There were suddenly two more windows open on the board, and the teacher had hopped a step to her left and was turning. Looking around the room at other puzzled faces, Jake wasn’t the only one who’d gotten zapped. The kids without minders were snickering, and Ana was laughing into her hand. Jake’s eyes met those of several other class-mates as they all focused on Danny’s desk, which now had a red light on it. “What?” Danny protested. “I don’t even know what I said!” His own minder had gotten him, too.

  “You said—,” Ana started, and then there was another jump, and the teacher was facing them, cross now, and pointing at Ana with her board wand.

  “Don’t start this, or we’ll never get through this lesson,” Ms. Lang said. “I remind folks to watch their language and pay attention. If the entire class passes the quiz and your group average is a C or better, I’ll bring in cookies next Monday. Okay? Now, back to the board . . .”

  For once, the rest of the class went without interruption.

  English was even more of a blur than usual, because Maya Angelou was apparently full of things his parents didn’t think he should hear, and unlike random conversation, which was keyword-based, the minder could match a flagged portion of text as it was being read aloud and zap the whole sequence. He hated the feeling of having lost nearly half an hour of his time and of knowing that all his classmates with the orange-covered Good Parenting Code Redacted Edition of the book were just as robbed and confused as he was.

  Last period was study hall, and he slunk down to the open lounge and sank into a chair, staring at nothing for a while.

  Some kids, when they hit eighteen, chose to keep their minders, or went back to them not long after. He’d once seen an elderly man, way too old to have ever had one in childhood, with the familiar black half-hemisphere clamped onto the side of his head over his thinning white hair. Jake’s father was always telling him he had to keep his as long as he lived under their roof, and his mom always stepped in to say of course he would, he was a good boy and raised properly.

  Being glum about it all took up about half of study hall; when the room teacher started giving him looks, he took out his orange-covered history book and got started on his homework for tomorrow. Some texts removed unapproved material seamlessly, reworking sentences so the absence was invisible, but this one was just a reprint of the original with black blocks where the offending text once was, and the longer the block the more he despaired about passing the class. Foolishly he’d thought Ancient Rome would be a pretty safe subject, going in.

  The end-of-school bell rang. He got up and packed up his stuff in his backpack and was being carried along with the great tide of students toward the buses when he remembered Riley. “Minder,” he said, “tell my mom I’ll be staying after school to do some volunteer cleanup for extra credit.”

  “This has now been communicated,” the minder said a few moments later. “Dinner tonight is spaghetti Alfredo, your favorite, so don’t tarry.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said. He turned and made his way down to the science wing, past the ninth-grade poster projects and into his classroom. Riley was there, leaning on a desk playing idly with the blackboard remote, saving and closing windows one by one. Her tight-knit crew was all there. Kitt, a short, blond girl with cat ears on her minder, was taking washed lab gear from the dish drainer beside the sink at the back of the room and sorting them one by one into the equipment drawers. Nate, who was one of the few black kids in the school and got ten times as much crap as the other nerds, was pushing a variety of spitballs and dust around the floor in a meandering path toward the center with an old yellow broom, his minder sporting a painted-on Jolly Roger that had come and gone a couple of times, no doubt as part of a battle of wills with his folks that sometimes, Jake had noticed, ended in bruises. Erin, whose minder had been coated in purple glitter, was carefully lowering the window blinds trying to make them perfectly even. And Jonathan, a large, happy kid with disheveled light brown hair who had no minder at all, was making a giant stack of metal disks and blocks and magnets.

  “Jake,” Riley said.

  “Hi,” he said. “Where’s Ms. Scott?”

  “She trusts us to get through the checklist and not cause trouble,” Riley said. “We’ve been doing this all year for her. She’ll come by after the late bell and lock up.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Come help me with the glassware?” Kitt said. “Unless you’re clumsy.”

  “Not too much,” he said. He shrugged off his backpack, dumped it on a stool, and went back to the sink. “You guys do this every week?”

  “Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Nate said. “We all need the extra credit to fill in gaps, you know?”

  “Not me,” Jonathan said, as his pile of magnets fell over. “My brain is my own, and my grades are, too. I’d just rather hang out with these losers than have to go home.”

  Ever since freshman year, the five of them—Riley, Jonathan, Kitt, Erin, and Nate—had been best friends, a perfectly self-contained, self-sufficient social circle. The oddness of them inviting him here struck him again, and he lost track of which drawer he’d last returned pipettes to. “Why me, though?” he asked.

  “A few months ago, Harris and Deke were bugging my little sister Lynne in the lunchroom, calling her fat and four-eyes and spaz,” Erin said. “You stepped in and threatened to beat their asses if they ever even spoke to her again.”

  “Oh yeah.” Jake hadn’t known the two of them were related, though now that he thought about it, the resemblance between the two dark-haired girls was obvious. “Harris and Deke are jerks. Anyone would have done the same.”

  “No,” Erin said. “No one had, all year, until you.”

  Jake shrugged. “I’m big. Everyone thinks that must mean I throw a hard punch and like to fight. Doesn’t matter that I’ve never hit someone in my life.” He almost had, once, and that had been close enough.

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad you were there,” Erin said.

  Behind them, Nate got up and shut the classroom door, and leaned against it.

  “What . . . ?” Jake started to ask, but Riley put a finger to her lips, then pointed at Jonathan.

  Jonathan scooped up a handful of the magnets he’d been playing with, and threw them one at a time to the others. Then he walked up, a big grin on his face, and slapped Jake on the side of the head.

  “Ow!” Jake said, taken by surprise. “What, you want to test me to see if I’ll actually hit someone? Because now I’m game.”

  Jonathan stepped back, and held up his hands in surrender. “Look around, my man,” he said, “look around and be free.”

  Jake curled his hand, trying to decide if he should hit this kid, when he caught Riley’s eyes. She pointed at her own head—no, to her minder, and the magnet now stuck right onto the side of it.

  The other three had done the same.

  “We’ve been keeping an eye on you since Lynne told Erin about the cafeteria,” Riley said. Jonathan began humming the Twilight Zone refrain. “You don’t go out of your way, but you’re pretty smart, too, and it’s your fucking minder that keeps you from being a top student.”

  “We shouldn’t be having this conversation. You know our minders record—” Jake stopped midsentence. Riley had just dropped a swear in his presence, and he’d heard it, and remembered it. There was no skip, no awful blink as his minder took the moment away. Carefully, he reached up and touched the magnet.

  Nate laughed. “Ooooh, you should see your face,” he said, then more seriously, “You caught on fast.”

  Jake’s eyes immediately went to the classroom monitor, whose light was off. Right, he thought. School hours are over.

  Jonathan whacked him hard on the shoulder. “Welcome to the club, Jake-o.”

  “Uh . . . okay,” Jake said, thinking it through. “The magnet scrambles the electronics, keeps it from w
orking. Keeps it from recording?” Otherwise it’d be a short-lived freedom at best, and it wouldn’t have a happy ending.

  “Yeah,” Erin said. “There are other things that disrupt the minders, so a little bit of static and missing timestamp on the recording doesn’t stand out. As long as no one says anything, or does the magnet trick anywhere outside this room and this group, we’re pretty safe. This is our secret, just us. Not even Lynne knows.”

  “You won’t say anything, right, Jake?” Riley asked. “Not to your parents, your brothers and sisters, other kids here in school? And not your friends?”

  “No,” Jake answered. “I’m an only kid, and I don’t have any friends. Not really.” Not anymore.

  “Well, you do now,” Kitt said. “Just don’t let us down. We’re taking a risk on you.”

  “Why, though? I mean, this is cool and all, but it’s a lot of risk just so we can have a Swearing in a Classroom Club.”

  “Because one of us can get through the checklist with time to spare. Five—six of us gives us a lot of extra time,” Kitt said. “Jonathan?”

  Jonathan reached for his own backpack, and pulled out all the class textbooks, not a single one of them with an orange cover. “You get tested on the full coursework, even the parts you can’t hear because your mommy and daddy don’t want you learning about communism and atheists and art boobies,” Jonathan said. “If you’re heavily minded, you’re lucky if you can pull a just-passing grade average out of working your ass as hard as you can being perfect at everything else. Maybe you don’t even graduate. This isn’t a swearing club, it’s Study Club. We take turns doing the cleaning and catching up on whatever reading we need to do, thanks to my lovely collection of uncensored textbooks.”

  “And what’s in it for you?” Jake asked.

  Jonathan dropped down onto a stool and thumped the top of the stack of books with his fist. “You all help me study, too, because I’m not as good at some of this stuff. Especially math. You good at math, Jake?”

  “Math, yeah,” he said. “Just don’t ask me what the last month of science has been about.”

  Jonathan slung a book across the lab table at him. “Welcome to the sordid underworld of climate science, my man.”

  Riley’s crew, Jake reflected as he walked from the bus stop back toward his house, had things pretty solidly figured out. Since the minders could only record or respond to audio, normally they’d only “static up” for a few minutes at a time, when they needed to discuss things. Otherwise they took turns studying and cleaning, the cleaners making small talk and a constant soundtrack of noises. “In movies,” Kitt had told him, “the people who make all the background noises for a scene are called Foley artists.”

  The school’s American history teacher was named Mr. Foley, and he hated any noises at all in his classroom while he was lecturing—he once threw a smart pen at a girl for chewing gum too loudly—and when Jake pointed this out, they’d all laughed.

  It was like he suddenly had friends again, out of the blue, and the knowledge that the minder could be circumvented seemed trivial in comparison.

  When he got home, his mother greeted him at the door with her usual hug and kiss, then unlocked the minder and gently tugged it free from his head. “You’ve got a bit of chafing and redness around your implant again,” she said. “You’re just growing too fast. We’ll get you a larger model next fall, okay?”

  “Sure. Thanks, Mom,” he said, hanging his backpack up on the coat-rack behind the door as she plugged his minder into its dock to charge and upload its day’s recordings to his parents’ cloudpod. In a brief flash of daring, he added. “Maybe I could just not wear it tomorrow, to give my head a chance to heal?”

  His mother shook her head. “You’ve got a perfect attendance record. I’d hate to see you miss a day if you don’t need to.”

  “I wouldn’t have to stay home,” he said.

  She hmmmm’d, an affectionate sound, and gave him a sad half-smile. “I know school must seem like a good and safe place, but that’s because your minder keeps you away from the bad language, the wrongheaded ideas meant to confuse and lead you astray. If only we could afford private school for you, like Connor’s parents . . .”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Jake said, quickly. He didn’t want to talk about his former best friend. Ever. “I like school, even with my minder. It’s just hard sometimes, feeling like I’m missing things and I don’t even know what they are.”

  “Poison,” his father said from the kitchen doorway. “You’re missing poison. Be grateful and go wash up for dinner.”

  By the third Study Club he had the routine down, including Riley and Jonathan’s system of hand signals, and there was very little chatting necessary, which also meant less static on the minder’s recording to raise suspicion. During one of the blackouts, he handed off Jonathan’s history text to Nate. “I might actually ace this test, for once,” he said.

  “Be careful about that,” Riley cautioned. “If you do too well, or there’s a sudden jump in your grades, your parents might start wondering why.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Jake admitted. The idea that he might have to deliberately flub some of the questions bothered him immensely. But how much should he actually know about things like the Tulsa Massacre, completely absent from his own orange-bound, censored text?

  “You’ll get used to it,” Kitt said. “You just gotta graduate or get to eighteen, whichever comes first.”

  “I don’t think it’s gonna be that easy,” he grumbled. “Not if my dad has any say in it.”

  “Yeah, well, my dad talks with a cane,” Riley said, and the others all looked down at their books, uncomfortable and quiet, until she dramatically groaned and got up from her chair. “My turn to sort the stupid beakers,” she said. “Your turn with social studies, Erin.”

  It was odd not dreading being at school every day, but getting out of the house in the morning had become torturous as he worried about not seeming too happy, for fear his parents would note the change and become suspicious.

  Proof he’d overacted his misery came when his mother stopped him on his way out the door a few days before the holiday break. “You miss Connor, don’t you?” she said. “You two used to be best of friends until he went to Angel Valley.”

  “I don’t miss him at all,” he said, more forcefully than he intended, and his mother frowned at him.

  “I was thinking I could invite his family over for dinner, maybe over break,” she continued. “Would you like that?”

  “They won’t come,” Jake said, grabbing his bag, as she pushed the minder down onto his head and it clicked into place. “Don’t you get that? We’re not good enough for them anymore, because I still go to the public school and even though I have a minder I’m not one of them, and I won’t ever be good or pure enough anymore. So thanks, I get to be looked down on by both the Angel Valley kids and the regular kids because instead of being brainwashed the old-fashioned, socially acceptable, rich kid way like precious Connor, I’ve got this Frankenstein thing stuck in my head deciding what I’m allowed to think.”

  “Jake!” His mother was shocked and visibly upset.

  “I’m gonna be late,” he said, and slammed the door behind him before he could hear her counterargument, or worse, crying. He’d get more than enough yelling when he got home anyway.

  “You okay?” Kitt asked when he came into the science lab just after the last bell and threw himself down at one of the lab benches. She slid a magnet to him across its hard black top.

  “Parents,” he said, after he put it on. He looked around the room, Erin and Riley both leaning over the same history text as Jonathan doodled chickens all over the smartboard. “Where’s Nate?”

  “Volunteered to vacuum the library,” Erin said. “Ms. Carrie says they don’t pay her enough to monitor what kids are reading once school hours are over, as long as they have a legit reason to be there. I think he cares more about reading for fun than actually studying. He’s
been working his way through The Two Towers since sometime last spring.”

  “The what?” Jake asked.

  Jonathan whistled. “You haven’t heard of it? At all? Man, you have a sad-ass life.”

  Jake stood up so quickly he knocked a beaker off the lab bench, and it shattered all over the floor. “You wanna say that to me again?” he demanded.

  Riley got between them. “Hang on, hang on. We’re on the same side here. Jonathan, you want us to call you out on stuff you got no choice in?”

  “I didn’t mean anything. It was a joke, okay?” Jonathan said.

  “Say sorry,” Riley said.

  Jonathan rolled his eyes and let out a deep, melodramatic sigh. “Sorry, Jake,” he said.

  Riley turned around and whacked Jake on the shoulder. “Say you’re good now,” she said.

  “Am I?” Jake asked.

  “You better off without us?” Riley asked.

  “No,” Jake said. He sat down, then immediately stood up again to get the broom. He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes as he swept up the broken glass into a small pile, then an even smaller one, before finally swatting it into the dustpan. “Don’t say that ever again, Jonathan, and then I guess we’ll be good.”

  “I really didn’t mean anything,” Jonathan said again, more sincerely this time, and Jake sat back down and picked up the math textbook.

  He slung it over onto Jonathan’s desk, where it landed with a loud thump and nearly slid off the far side before Jonathan slapped his hand down on it. “Chapter fourteen,” Jake said. “Log, Sine, and Cosine. Try the first ten exercises and then if you still don’t get it, I’ll try to explain.”

  Two weeks later, Jake burst into the science lab, waving his grade slip. “I got an A!” he shouted.

  No one leapt up to high-five him. “What subject?” Kitt asked warily, handing him his magnet.

  “Science,” Jake said, feeling a sudden pang of anxiety deep in his gut as he put the magnet on. “The astronomy unit. Can’t be anything—”