Pulse
Contents
Chapter 2: Grade School Break-in
Chapter 3: Great Story, Bro. Tell It Again.
Chapter 5: I’m Just Here to See the Monkeys and Eat the Candy
Chapter 6: How Do You Say Good-bye?
Chapter 9: Adrift in Skinny Jeans
Chapter 10: The Smallest Guy in the Room
Chapter 11: How Did You Get Me All the Way Up Here?
Chapter 12: It’s Not Just a Burger
Chapter 14: Let’s Not Tie Our Shoes
Chapter 15: Like a Pebble Hitting a Pond
Chapter 17: How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?
Chapter 18: I Brought This for You
People will give up their freedom for safety from a certain kind of threat.
—A.Q.
Faith Daniels was sleeping soundly when several things in her room began to move. She was a tall girl with long limbs that extended beyond the bed into the cool air of her bedroom. The first object to move was her blanket; it slowly covered her foot, which had wriggled its way free in the night. A dark hallway lay beyond her open door, and though no one was there, the door swung slowly closed. It made a soft sound, and Faith stirred but did not wake. A dark shadow fell over the bed, blocking the faint moonlight through the window.
On her nightstand, Faith’s standard-issue Tablet was thin, with a glossy surface the size of a sheet of typing paper. As she slept, its sleek form rose quietly up in the air and drifted over her body. It stopped abruptly over her face, then its movements became more jarring—sharp tilts back and forth—as it descended toward the sleeping girl, as if it were an animal sizing her up. Faith’s soft breath left a foggy mark on the glass.
And still she did not stir.
The Tablet flew with violent, lightning speed around the room. It stopped inches from the bedroom window, rotated, and faced the darkness outside. The screen turned on, and Faith Daniels kicked her foot free of the covers. She was not a girl who liked warm toes in the dead of night.
Faith had a password like everyone else, but whatever ghostly presence had made the Tablet move also had the power to unlock its contents. For the next hour something searched the Tablet. It looked at the songs Faith had chosen, the stories, the TV shows and movies, the words she’d written.
At 2:11 a.m. the Tablet turned off.
It returned to its home at the side of Faith’s bed.
The door to her room opened once more, just a little.
The blankets were left alone.
There was movement outside the window, quiet and careful.
A phantom or something else had found what it had come for and was gone in a flash.
On the first day of school at Old Park Hill, Faith walked past what was once an open-air mall. She turned in toward the rubble and made her way through a modern ruin of concrete and exposed rebar. It was not a place Faith had ever known as a destination for buying things. All her purchases were made on her Tablet, which sat snuggly in her back pocket. She pulled it out and held it by its bottom right corner and its top left corner with her thumbs and fingers. Applying slight pressure, she heard a familiar
snap
and pulled the Tablet on opposing ends, feeling it stretch like taffy. The Tablet snapped again, a much larger size now, rigid again and ready for some real input. Faith tapped away as she stood there, reading through a message from her mom, looking at her schedule for the day, and sending out a note to a friend. When she had purchased several shows she wanted to consume as she navigated her day, she snapped the Tablet back to its smaller size and returned it to her pocket.
For Faith, the very idea of shopping was contained in the digital world, where everything felt like the air she breathed: at once her own and everyone else’s, too. Songs, movies, shows, books—these were the things she paid for;
this
was shopping. These things were in her cloud of knowing. And there were jeans and tight T-shirts and makeup, just as there had always been—but real items were very expensive, and buying them was rare.
There were, it seemed to Faith, empty spaces everywhere, made emptier still by what they were filled
with
: a shameful regret; the scorching, un-American scent of failure. People had simply started moving away, most of them to one of the two States, and they weren’t coming back. This, Faith had long ago decided, suited her just fine. There was a striking aloneness in the leftover city, a vast openness that agreed with her personality. She liked the idea of being one of a few, not one of too many. And yet it did feel haunted at times, like the soul of something invisible was in the air all around her. Like something was trying to fill the empty space.
There were many other reasons for the fallen city around her, reasons adults talked about all the time that were not interesting to Faith. She had no nostalgia for a time before when the world was different, for she had no memory of those things. This was her time, her world; and for all its desolation, Faith Daniels loved it. She was not interested in how the world had come to be as it was or when it had changed. She was not interested in moving to one of the States, where a hundred million people lived on top of one another. She was interested in her Tablet, her music, her art, her height. Boys.
Faith liked to sit on the steps of what was once an Old Navy, as she did now, and buy a song. Songs were cheap; a single Coin paid for dozens of them. Faith had thousands of songs already. They made her feel things, and feeling was something she liked very much. And it always felt somehow right to make her purchases as she sat in the shadow of retail wreckage all around her. She had sat in the very same spot fifteen days before and purchased something expensive, something she’d saved a lot of Coin for. It was the shipping that cleaned her out. The distance between her and the nearest State, where what she wanted was manufactured, was so great, it was difficult to connect.
Ninety-six Coin for the jeans she was wearing, the jeans that were long enough for her exceptionally long legs.
When she’d purchased her song and it was playing in her ears, Faith stood in her fifteen-day-old jeans and walked past a vacant store—Macy’s, the sign said—then turned sharply and walked out of the empty parking lot. Her old school, a mile in the opposite direction, had closed a month earlier as enrollment slipped below a hundred. She’d moved schools three times already in the past two years, so she was used to it; but this was the first time she’d been part of a merge between two dying schools so close to each other. Faith had also relocated twice from cities farther away, where the emptiness had pushed her family out. Her parents always stayed where they were as long as they could, but the end result was the same: they moved closer to the Western State, its shadow growing larger.
She forced herself to forget even the names of dead schools, the friends she’d lost, the feeling of not knowing who would be missing from one day to the next. This was her reality: things changed, people vanished, everything got smaller and emptier. And one day, when no one else remained, she, too, would be forced to join the State; and her way of life would come to a close. The end was near enough; she could almost reach out and touch it. This created in her not sadness, but a reckless sense of having to fit very much inside of a little time.
She could make out the school now, up on the hill, staring down at her through an early-morning mist that clung to the trees. She felt the tightness of her jeans and smiled at the prospect of more, not fewer, boys, because falling in love was high on her list of things having to get done in the space of a little time.
“When are we getting that car again? This has
got
to stop.”
Liz Brinn was coming down the sidewalk, alternately staring at Faith and at her Tablet, which was in its pocket size. She held it in one hand, tapping out a message on the small screen with her thumb.
“Unless you’ve got about a million Coin hidden in your Tablet, I think we’re on foot for the rest of our lives,” Faith said. “It’s not so bad. Beautiful day. And you should look up when you’re walking.”
Liz, who was a full head shorter than Faith, looked up from her Tablet and glanced behind her. “It was a long way over here, longer than the last place we went to school.”
“Maybe you should get a bike,” Faith suggested. Liz and Faith had been inseparable ever since Liz’s boyfriend, Noah, had vanished into the Western State. His departure devastated Liz, left her confused and fragile. After Noah it was just the two of them—Faith and Liz—holding on to each other and not letting go. As they watched more and more people leave, they’d renewed a promise:
We see this through until the end, and we don’t let anyone else in. Too risky, too painful. Better to gut it out and hold on to each other.
Looking at Liz, there in front of a new school full of people who would soon be leaving, Faith wondered if the day would come when she’d find herself without her only friend.
“You and me to the end, like we talked about,” Liz said, but then she smiled a sly smile and raised her dark eyebrows. “Maybe we’ll find you a short-term boyfriend, just for fun.”
Faith felt a rush of anticipation. She’d recently been obsessing over the idea of a boyfriend, something that had eluded her for a little too long. She was sure this was because she was tall and lanky like a stork, and no boy wanted to date a girl taller than he was. There was also the unfortunate matter of slim pickings: so few boys tall enough to count.
Liz leaned back and looked at Faith’s butt.
“Nice jeans, that’s going to help. Got any Coin left or did they clean you out?”
“Cleaned me out,” Faith admitted.
“It was worth it,” Liz said, and then she slapped Faith on the butt and laughed loudly enough to draw the attention of the principal, who was standing at the main door glad-handing new students as they went inside. Faith and Liz stopped in front of the sprawling high school campus. It had been built in 1975, which made it seventy-six years old, but it didn’t look a day under a hundred. There was a billboard at the top of a paint-chipped white pole with a message:
WELCOME, NEW STUDENTS.
WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE HERE.
Liz looked at the billboard, shaking her head. “I bet they are.”
They waved weakly as a few of the students from their old school entered the main building. The other students looked shell-shocked at the prospect of starting at a new school, including the fact that it would involve shaking the cold, clammy hand of the principal. When Faith arrived at the door, she got her first look at Mr. Reichert and was immediately concerned. His skin had the pale texture of someone who had been ravaged by acne as a teenager. He cut his own hair or had hired a lawn maintenance supervisor to do it for him. It sat like a black dome over his egg-shaped head, straight and speckled with dandruff. He smiled hugely with the bleached white teeth he was clearly proud of showing.
“Welcome, girls, we’re glad you’re here,” he said. He held the door open with his dandruff-speckled shoulder as he reached out his hand. Liz looked at Faith like she’d just smelled a glass of possibly sour milk. Faith nodded and smiled, then brushed past Mr. Reichert without saying anything or touching his clammy hand.