by Drew Magary
She felt a light wind. Lara was there on the dock. Leather jacket. Tight jeans with no back pockets. She was shivering in the raw autumn wind, grabbing at her lapels and wrapping them around herself like a swaddling blanket. The cormorants flew away to give the two girls time to themselves.
“I really need to check the weather before I go porting places,” Lara said. Then she ran over and hugged Anna tight, as tight as when she hugged Anna that first night. In Anna’s brain, there was a very small and angry man sitting in a director’s chair with a bullhorn shouting reminders to her:
Her mother is a monster! Her stepbrother killed your sister! She called you a liar and left you to twist! You two can’t happen!
It didn’t matter. Anna held onto Lara and felt the cold, worn-in leather of her jacket. She took in Lara’s sweet scent and heard gentle keyboards and 12-string guitars providing background music in her mind. Their hips were touching and Anna fought like hell to keep hers perfectly still.
“You found me,” Lara told her.
“Well, I mean, you kinda came back and found me.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re real again. You’re still wearing the bracelet.”
“I am.”
“Looks good on you. Anyway, I’m sorry,” Lara said. “I’m sorry for everything.” She meant it. Green eyes can’t lie.
Bamert was right. She said the right thing.
“I was wrong about you, Anna. I was wrong to say what I said to you that night. I should have believed you. I was right to need you.”
“Why did you leave school?” Anna asked her.
“Emilia freaked out. Emilia didn’t even want me to go here. That was all my idea. She said I wasn’t serious enough for it, but I enrolled anyway. Then that first night happened and that was just the excuse she needed to pull me out. Meanwhile, you got fucked over. They don’t have actual justice here. They just judge people however they please and they think that’s fine because they’re the grownups and every kid should fall in line. But it was me who left you in that office with that asshole. I left you to take the heat when I was the one who could afford to take it. That’s something Emilia would do and I’m not her. I’d drain every last ounce of blood out of my body to not be her, I swear to you. I feel like shit about what happened. I don’t expect you to have much sympathy.”
“I don’t, but I still like you.”
Lara smiled. “I’ll take that. I knew there was something true about you. I don’t deserve you.”
“It’s okay. We’re cool.”
“How are things otherwise, Roomie?”
“Not good.”
“I heard about your friend getting put up.”
“I was porting with him.”
“Get out. That’s wild. You broke out without me! I’m a little jealous.”
“Jealous? You broke out after less than twenty-four hours at this dump.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Well, you told me to find you,” Anna said, “I figured I would have to crack the Wall to do it.”
“How’d you pull it off?” Lara asked. “How’d you get past the wall?”
“If I told you, it would ruin the magic.”
Lara laughed. Oh, how Anna had missed the burst of unadulterated joy that came from cracking Lara up. Still never got old.
“I guess that’s fair,” Lara said. “Did you find out about your sister?”
Tell her.
“I found out some things. It’s not good, Lara.” She burst into tears. “It’s so bad I can’t stand it. It’s not right, what they can do to people now.”
Lara grabbed her tight. Her touch remained a universal cure-all. No one outside of Anna’s family had ever held her. It was such a simple, perfect thing to feel. If you two hold each other forever nothing can touch you.
“Do you wanna tell me?” Lara asked.
“I wanna tell everyone I see,” Anna said, “But saying it out loud makes me feel insane.”
“I know how that feels.”
“Do you?”
“I do. I can prove it,” Lara whispered. “You’re the only person I can prove it to.”
“Why me?”
“Because I trust your soul. You’ve got no right to trust mine, but I’ll earn it. I have a plan.”
“What is it?”
“Now it’s my turn not to spoil the magic.”
Anna busted out laughing and relented from their embrace to dry her eyes. “You fucker!”
“I have my reasons. So your friend got caught porting and you didn’t.”
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Survivor’s guilt.”
“I know about that. I feel guilty all the time because I know everyone else has it worse.”
“How exactly did you port here?” Anna asked.
“Ah,” Lara said. She took out her phone and opened up a golden app icon. “That’s a bit of magic I can show you: VIP status. Gets you past any portwall undetected. Gotta be a Kirsch to have it though.”
A Kirsch with VIP status could go anywhere they pleased. Like into Sarah’s bedroom.
“How does it work?” she asked Lara.
“It just does. You feel like a spy when you use it.”
“Or like something else.”
Lara traded out her phone for her vape pen. “I know you don’t, but I gotta offer. You’ll feel like an astronaut.”
“Sure, what the hell.” Can’t be worse than that joint that made you barf. “How long does the high last?”
“Until you want more.” Lara took a hit and handed the pen over. “Breathe smooth.”
The pen was long and surprisingly weighty, capped with a stainless steel mouthpiece that had Lara’s lip gloss still imprinted around it. Anna liked holding the pen. She brought it to her mouth and inhaled too fast. Just like her to somehow breathe wrong. The vapor hacked away at her throat and sent her on a coughing jag that echoed across the river and back. Lara giggled, a step away from laughing at Anna outright.
“I should have warned you,” Lara told Anna, taking the pen back and tucking it into her inside pocket. “That’s a strong cart I use.”
“It’s okay,” she wheezed. The smoke left her throat stripped and burning, but then the weed took hold in a way that the first joint she smoked never had. Anna felt light, like she was on a porch swing and someone was gently rocking her back and forth. She looked over to the twinkling apartment lights and they went soft in the growing cold, tiny stars of light that she wanted to reach out and hold in her hand. She wiggled her happy fingers. This wasn’t Lily Beach. This was still Druskin, but this quiet, dark part of campus was good enough for her high. Her joints felt motorized. She stretched her hand out in front of the river and stared at it. Her bones felt ready to shine out of her skin. She could feel all the levers and pulleys inside her body doing their precision busywork with good cheer. Her heart felt like it was going to float out of her chest. Her muscles relaxed and stretched like taffy. Self-traction. When she looked at Lara, she saw an aura of pure neon.
“Where’d you port?” Lara asked her. The question dulled Anna’s newfound high, her neuroses giving the porch swing a rude jostle.
“I dunno,” she told Lara. “Nowhere as cool as where you’ve been.”
“I doubt that,” Lara said.
“I dunno, I’ve seen your WorldGram.”
“You have? You stalking me?” laughed Lara.
“Only a small amount.”
“You follow me on it?”
Anna thought about all the times she lingered over that stupid FOLLOW button, hemming and hawing over whether or not to click it. “Follow you? I, uh, I don’t.”
“You didn’t give me a follow?” It was impossible to tell if Lara was seriously aggrieved or if she was just playing around.
“Okay, here’s the truth. I have a hard time looking at everyone else freely porting around when I’m stuck at Druskin.” And who was that piece of shit she was kissing in Sassari?
“But you ported out!”
“It’s not the same,” said Anna. “And I didn’t want you to think I was some psycho following you after you left.”
“So you just lurked instead.”
“Like a totally normal person, yeah.”
“I don’t blame you for not following me. That account is all horseshit,” Lara told Anna. “It’s not like your page. Your WorldGram rules.”
She saw your WorldGram. On her dormant WorldGram account, Anna posted only the most unremarkable photos of places: weeds, shoes, old wads of gum on the sidewalk. She never included herself in her own WorldGram photos but always added a sarcastically cheery caption like, “Seeing all the BEST sights in Vienna!” under a picture of an Austrian trash can. Sometimes she’d get a like from a stranger and Anna enjoyed that feeling more than she ever cared to admit.
“You really liked it?” she asked Lara. The porch swing began rocking smoothly once more. “You never followed me, though.”
“Well I didn’t want you to think I was stalking you now, did I?” Lara joked. “But I am gonna steal your bit and post photos of dry cleaning bags from hotels.”
“I’ll sue,” Anna joked.
“You won’t win.”
“You should keep posting photos of yourself, or Emilia’s marketing team should. I like seeing you there.” Whoa hey. Easy, Cheesy.
“Emilia claims I’m not a thinker, so she decided to use me in other ways. I don’t even write the captions on those posts. They had a rum company sponsor one of them. Meanwhile, I just turned 17.”
“But you went to all those places, right?”
“Everywhere gets old if you’re alone. It’s like you’re on tour. But you’re not on tour for, like, a reason. You’re just a package being shipped around. It’s beautiful world, but I know it too well now. I’d rather stay home, if only I had someone worth staying home for. You know where my favorite place to port is?”
“The place you wouldn’t tell me?”
“That one, yeah. The place I go more than Lily Beach.”
Paris? Lucerne? Kyoto? Sassari? The top of the Burj Khalifa?
“It’s fucking Cleveland,” Lara confessed.
“You’re shitting me.”
“No one’s there. No one expects me to go there. Finding a place to be alone is easy when you port somewhere shitty, you know. And I love how shitty Cleveland is. It’s gorgeous to me. I can port to Cleveland, by myself, and not have to pretend I’m having a wild time in Mallorca or wherever.”
“That’s out in the free zones though,” said Anna.
“I don’t care. It’s deserted anyway. And it’s dark. I like to move in the dark, Anna Huff. The world zigs, I zag. Emilia got me a place there and it’s mine. I can treat the joint like shit if I want to. I can leave empty beer cans around and not do my laundry and just be however the fuck I wanna be. You feel me? You ever been to Cleveland?”
“Maybe once.” Anna felt all that hot blood rush to her cheeks and hoped that the chilly darkness was enough to mask it.
“I’ll take you,” Lara promised. “I’ll show you my place. We can eat top ramen there together.”
“I do love top ramen.”
“I wanna be part of the world. I don’t wanna act like I’m too good for it, because I’m not. If it rains when I go to Ohio, then all the better because it’ll be even more deserted. No one uses the Burke Lakefront Airport anymore, so I can port alone, stand on a big fat tarmac in front of the lake, get high, feel the rain, and be still. One night I was standing out there and I saw a star and got to have a moment with it. Just me and that star. That’s what’s beautiful to me.”
“I saw a bunch of friends with you in all those other places you went though.”
“Fuck my friends. They mean nothing. Get high and everyone is your friend. They’ll get you a beer. They’ll give you a kiss. They’ll treat you like Queen Shit for a night. Then it wears off and you’re right back where you were.”
“What about me?” Anna asked Lara. “Does the high of my friendship wear off, too?”
Lara dismissed her with a fierceness. “Never. You’re different. You’re not them.”
“Then come back,” Anna said to her. Oh my God, shut up already. Keep your mind to yourself.
“I’ve thought about it. I miss being surrounded by smart people. Actual smart people, not people acting like they are. You save my room for me?”
“I took it over. I started cooking meth in it.”
Lara squealed with laughter. “How dare you.”
Anna smiled hard. Could feel the smile forming: her eyes crinkling and the corners of her mouth drawing upward and her cheeks dimpling and her face going red in the whipsaw November air. She felt, for the first time in her small existence, adorable. Flirtatious, even.
“Actually, another girl took your place.”
“Is she cool?” Lara asked.
“Yeah. She’s cool.”
“How cool? You guys an item?”
“No! No no no. She’s into guys. I mean, she hates guys, but she’s into them. I don’t quite get how all that works.”
“Ha! Neither do I. Guys all want things, but they don’t wanna understand them. That’s their whole deal. I go to these MyClubs and walled-off resorts and it’s usually a bunch of gross older guys, or it’s some dumbass hanging with me to angle for a job with my half-brother.”
“Your brother seems like dick.” That came out of her mouth quicker than she anticipated. That was the weed’s fault. She didn’t want to kill the moment. Sometimes the moment grows so profound that nothing else before or beyond it matters. Anna was in the moment now. Her grief was on the mat. Lara sat at the foot of the dock and let her legs dangle over the peaceful waters. Anna sat down next to her but kept a respectful distance.
“I’m sorry,” she told Lara. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Jason is a demon,” Lara said, not looking up. “Your thing with Vick isn’t the first time I’ve heard about our company torturing people. That you agreed to let Vick experiment on you for my sake makes me wanna throw up. Jason is in charge of all that testing. He’s a horrible person.”
“He’s there in the lab when they torture me.”
“You know he likes to hunt, right?”
“Seems the type.”
“He poaches, like the rest of them. He doesn’t care. He’s why there are no more rhinos. He ports over to Africa to hunt all the time. There are a lot of posers out there who port to Africa and take their selfies and act like they just cured racism, but he goes there to kill.”
She told Anna about an elephant hunt Jason forced her to go on once in Tanzania. He hired a full team: guides, five-star chefs, porters. He brought crates of guns from a gun locker he kept in Cape Town, and he dragged Lara along even though she despised hunting and despised him in even greater measure.
“Why’d you go?”
“You have to understand: Jason has this way of making you do things you don’t wanna do. He’s very scary when he bosses people around, like if you don’t do what he says, then something awful will happen. I know I warned you about Emilia, but her I can deal with. Jason scares me to death.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, so he takes us out into the bush with enough guns to start World War III. We see this elephant mom and her baby and I’m sitting in the jeep, about to burst into tears. You should have seen these animals, Anna. I mean, it’s a pair of fucking elephants! They’re these big beautiful, unspoiled creatures. It’s like seeing love. That sounds so…”
“Trite?” Anna asked.
“Yeah. Trite. God, you know just how to put things the way they are.” Another line from Lara that went directly into Anna’s memory bank.
“It’s not trite, though. You saw love.” You said love to her. You still love her. Tell her you’re into her. She’s so close to you. It would be perfect if you two kissed, wouldn’t it? Okay, maybe now is not the time. But God, she looks shit hot right now.
“Yeah. I was so happy to be looking at these an
imals. I wanted to be them. Just love, without any of the bullshit.”
“You wanted to protect them,” Anna said.
“I did.” Lara started to cry. “But I couldn’t. All of sudden the gun goes off and the mom and the baby, they go to the dirt. I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t save you. I’m so sorry.”
They scooted closer to one another. Anna put her arm around Lara and Lara leaned her head on Anna’s shoulder to sob. She was dying to tell Lara I love you. The mere idea of saying it felt wondrous on its own. The weed wasn’t helping beat back her temptations. Lara’s touches were lingering. Faint portclaps coming from Druskin proper went off like fireworks in the distance.
“That wasn’t even the worst part,” Lara whispered to Anna, wiping tears away from her pink eyelids. The worst part was afterward, she said. Jason had brought local tribesmen with him, and his accompanying film crew shot a video about how the elephant meat would feed the tribe for a month. Jason shook hands with the chief at the end. It was all bullshit. Those locals were paid to be on camera. The chief wasn’t a chief at all, just a member of the tribe named Ed. Lara told Anna that the natives sat in the truck and waited while Jason took out this machete and hacked away at the elephants’ bodies, alone. Their hides bled out and deflated in the baking sun.
“All this blood and it’s making him hack away even harder. He called to me and held up the machete, like I was supposed to join in. I said no and I swear, when I did, he looked at me like he was gonna hack me up next. It’s not the first time he’s looked at me like that either.”
Anna’s high turned to vinegar. She felt extraordinary and awful all at once. This was a very Druskin feeling, every day. But with the weed, the dichotomy was pulling her brain apart.
“I’m gonna go back Tanzania and see those elephants again,” Lara said. “I’ll protect them this time around. All their lives they’ll be free to be. And I won’t go with Jason. I’ll go with you. Port out of here again and we can do it.”
“Lara,” Anna told her, “there are things I have to tell you.”