Where Futures End (7 page)

“How ironic,” I say, thinking back to Oprah's online tirade against Bad Dad's parenting methods.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.” I whisk the menu out of Saint Professor's hand.

He glares at me over the top of his glasses. “I'll have Blueberry Muffin flavor gel, young lady.”

I plod to the mold machine. My other manager, the one I call the Other One, is lounging behind the counter, nibbling melted cheese off an order of cheese fries. “Fries are fattening,” he explains when I give him a look. “Which mold you need?”

“Oprah.”

“Eyes Shining With Empowerment?”

“The other one, Other One.” I chuckle at my joke.

“Why do you call me that? You never call Jeffrey Mr. One to his face.” He uses a clicky pen to separate the cheese fries from those that have already been de-cheesed. He's the only one who still uses pens to write down orders instead of tapping pictures on a Flavor Foam app. “Why can't I at least be Mr. Two?”

“You don't really want to be that closely associated with Mr. One.”

He stops sorting cheese fries to use his pen to whisk hair back over his bald spot. “What if I told you the walk-in freezer is on the fritz again and the ice-cream nuggets are in mortal peril? Then can I be Mr. Two?”

I pause. I could indeed use a good handful of half-melted
ice-cream nuggets. And Mr. One would never miss them. We're not allowed to serve them to customers because even frozen solid they make the Flavor Foam Heads melt, which ruins the customer experience. We're also not allowed to throw them out because company policy dictates that any food thrown out before the expiration date be donated to a local nonprofit, but it also dictates that we not donate high-caloric food to people of insufficient means because, as Mr. One says, “That's the way to a slow genocide, a genocide of the lower class.”

“Better hurry,” chimes in my coworker Lola. “I already sold off two boxes of those ice-cream nuggets at a premium to table seven.”

“Uh, you're not really supposed to do that,” the Other One says, pointing his pen at her.

“
Uh,
too late.” Lola rolls her eyes.

Lola's what you'd call enterprising. She spends her entire shift orchestrating complicated lovers' quarrels with customers for the sake of Flavor Foam's cameras. Then she goes home and spends all her free time orchestrating complicated lovers' quarrels with her friends for whatever cameras might be mounted in shop windows or soda machines or her dining room ceiling fan. You'd think she'd be making enough in ad revenue now to quit working at Flavor Foam, but her ratings are all over the place. I think people sense that all those shrill fights with brooding boys are staged.

Right now she's using her e-frame to search the tables of college boys, looking for ones on scholarship who might be
willing to do desperate things for a cut of ad revenue.

“Darn, full ride,” she mutters. “That hardly helps me.”

She gives up to watch a feed of a guy trying to convince his girlfriend he's not cheating on her. “What girl would actually be attracted to me?” he says. “I mean besides you?” The feed is coming from one of our own cameras.

“Lola, they're right there at table twelve,” I say. “Why are you watching them on your e-frame?”

The big screen over our heads switches to the same feed she's watching. Now all of our customers can watch the guy ask the girls at the next table if they're attracted to him. “Like, would you ever ask me to take off my shirt or anything like that?” he asks. His girlfriend plunges his e-frame into a Flavor Foam Head. Some bot picks up on the fact that the ratings are soaring and plants an American Eagle Outfitters logo in the corner of the screen.

“Love 'em and leave 'em to keep the ratings high,” I mumble as I pour myself a pilfered soda, “to keep the ad revenue coming in, right?”

“Add a Cake Batter flavor gel into that Coke,” Lola tells me. “Sweeten it up. Your bitterness is poisoning the air for the rest of us.”

I take a swig of soda and eye the mold dispenser. I'm in a bit of a self-pitying mood. “Other One, give me Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town.”

“Not again,” Lola says.

But I'm already full speed ahead into moody territory. “Push the button, Other One.”

“Stop calling me that,” he says, but he pushes the button.

I inject flavor foam into Lover Boy With Big Plans. The giant TV screen quickly cuts to my feed. Mr. One always likes to get this on camera.

I ignore the screen and consider Lover Boy's sad smile. It's been two months since Griffin left. He joined this street art movement in L.A. We still talk some. In fact, we talked just last week. He said he misses me; I asked him why he never calls. There was this long pause during which he was either breathing really loudly or the wind was hitting the mic on his e-frame, and then he said,
I always answer when
you
call
me, like that makes up for it. Then he told me I should come out to Santa Monica, and I told him he should ask his dad to. I admit that was a mean thing to say. We both know his dad can't leave MyFuture until he pays off his debt. But I also think it's mean to abandon your own dad when his only wrongdoing was that he lived off his credit card too long when his unemployment ran out.

I can still hear Griffin's voice, low and sad and mixed in with the sound of the ocean:
Brix . . . It's hard here. It's hard without you.

It always kills me, that voice.

Then come back,
I told him.

I lean down close to Flavor Foam's counter. I return Lover Boy's sad smile, and for a moment it's almost like we're apologizing to each other for everything that's happened. Then I pour my Coke on top of Lover Boy's foam head. It eats through his face and comes bubbling back out of the mold. Fun fact: There's a little bit of baking soda mixed in with the flavor foam. Keeps it foamy. Also turns
molds into mini-volcanoes.

A caption on the screen lets our customers—and any viewers—know that they can order Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town plus a third-tier flavor gel for $12.99. And that Brixney herself will bring it to your table and would probably even pour her soda on it if you asked her real nice. Mr. One must be typing furiously up in the control booth.

Then the old replay starts. Even though I've specifically asked Mr. One not to play it ever. It's me and Griffin in our Flavor Foam uniforms, the old ones without the slimming panels we have now and you can really tell the difference. We're making our Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town. The old Chevron Gas icon shines in the corner of the screen. I just made ten cents. Thanks a bunch, Mr. One.

I decide to take my break early and head out to the patio overlooking the lake. I find a guy sitting on a marble statue of a soda can, very lifelike and squirting some type of brown liquid. The marble soda can, I mean. The guy isn't lifelike. He's sitting too still and when I hold up my e-frame, it can't identify him. The screen shows a little clock icon and then, instead of displaying his name and online profile, just says,
NOT FOR HUMAN CO
NSUMPTION
.

My food scanner app is a little hyper, always jumping in before I ask it to.

So he has no profile. Very interesting. Means he's either a criminal who's found a way to scrub himself from the Internet (except he's too clean for that), an e-free who
shuns social media (expect he's also too clean for that), or a richie-rich tourist with some outdated idea of discretion (of which we get plenty around here). His hair is shaggy, skin luminescent. I recognize his clothes from a boutique at the other end of the plaza. Definitely a richie-rich tourist.

He gazes out across the plaza, ignoring the notebook in his hand and curiously watching preteens buzz about the pavilion where a Feed-Con expo is going on. In about an hour, all of those kids will be buzzing over to Flavor Foam for a snack break. Probably sans tip money. My calves ache at the thought.

The truth is, I'm not making nearly enough money at this job to put a dent in Brandon's debt. And contrary to what collection agencies think, no relative is going to take interest in our sad plight and come up with the cash to spring us from MyFuture. All we have left is an uncle who subscribes to the idea that throwing money at a problem never solves it, which usually I would agree with.

Also, with Brandon's interest piling up the way it is, he's on track to be transferred to a colony thirty miles south where they sleep eight to a room and get one bathroom for an entire floor.

So a good-looking, richie-rich tourist is just what I need right now. He can either add some pretty to my feed and get me some ad revenue, or he can give me cash directly once I become his temporary townie girlfriend.

I try again with my e-frame. It still can't get a read on him. It also tells me the plume of brown liquid coming from
the marble straw is not for human consumption. Way to advertise a soda, right? I try to think of something to say to him, something Lola might say to lure him into the choppy waters of our shop and moor him in a booth with a good camera angle.

I can get you a flavor foam Girl With Pleasing Anatomy four hours before the evening shift.

Please be advised this is not a public drinking fountain but a flawed attempt at advertising soda with something resembling soda but completely unsafe for consumption.

I'm covered in my own skin!

That last one is a line from a feed that was popular last week, but maybe it's too old to reference? Maybe he's heard it so many times it's not funny anymore? He'll have to force a laugh and then wonder why he wastes his vacation hanging out on the plaza meeting desperate locals.

I get so flustered thinking about it that I finally just say, “The seating is located inside. Where the chairs are.” It comes off a little snarky. I'm not having the best of days.

Saint Professor, my Tuesday regular, is not happy that I abandoned him.

“I've been watching your feed on my e-frame here,” he says. An image of me through one of Flavor Foam's cameras shows on his clunky, school-prescribed e-frame. “I saw you loitering on the patio. When I place my order, you fill it right away.”

I'm guessing he had a particularly bad day at school.

“And you don't shove it onto the table like you just did,”
he continues. “You approach from right here near my elbow and gracefully slide it in front of me. Like a seal gliding over butter.”

As Saint Professor leans over the table, I notice a little notebook in his shirt pocket on which he has scrawled
T. S. Eliot
. I almost grunt in frustration. If you're going to lecture me on something, how about poetry? How about ultra-dense symbolism that I'd never be able to decode on my own?

“I come here every Tuesday,” Saint Professor says. “I know how these things are supposed to work.”

“I'm also here every Tuesday,” I say. “Also, pretty much every other day of the week.”

Saint Professor's frustrated scowl turns into a smile of genuine warmth. “Don't worry, you'll catch on,” he says, and gives me an encouraging chuck on the shoulder.

I grit my teeth. I make no further delay in searching out those imperiled ice-cream nuggets.

And, goodie, there's still some boxes left. I squat in the frosty air of the walk-in fridge and consider ways to prevent Brandon's transfer to Debtors' House, which I've heard serves only one large meal a day and encourages residents to scour the surrounding neighborhood for cans to recycle in order to make some “snack money.” Brandon's skinny enough as it is. He thinks I don't know he sneaks his bacon onto my plate every morning like I'm a little kid.

I could call Griffin and ask him to send us some of the cash he's made apprenticing with a guy who does body art. Something I could split with his dad. I toy with my e-frame,
considering the idea. Calling Griffin would mean hearing his voice, hoarse with salt air and sadness, and trying to keep my heart from breaking to pieces all over again:
Remember the times on the roof, under the stars?
They don't have stars here, you can hardly see the streetlights for all the smog.
It would mean trying (failing) not to get angry at him for leaving.

How can I ask him for money? I haven't exactly been his biggest supporter lately.

Or I guess the better question is—how much does he really owe me?

“Brixney? You know what, Brixney?”

I turn to find Mr. One red-faced with disapproval, hands pressed together under his chin.

“Did you pay for those ice-cream nuggets?” He's pleading with God that it be true.

“They're melting. They're making a mess of the walk-in.” I point at an ice-cream puddle leaking onto the refrigerated floor.

“And you're taking initiative, and that's great.” He hunches his shoulders. He's practically bowing to me. “But eating food that belongs to the store and not to you? That's a fast ticket to scraping the seat of your pants on the pavement outside the door. Know what I mean? I mean, when I fire you.”

“Okay, well, don't fire me.” I go into a hot sweat. My stomach rejects the aesthetics of cold ice cream mixed with fiery panic. “I'm just eating ice-cream nuggets that we're allowed to neither sell nor toss. Basically what I'm eating
is trash.”

“Except that if you were eating trash?” He winces in an exaggerated way, as if pained on my behalf. “It'd be because you were on the streets without a job. Without
this
job, specifically.”

My face muscles spasm a little. I bend down on pretense of examining the leaking box. “I think I can staunch this. I'll staunch this mess and then the nuggets can stay here in the box. Yeah, I'll get on that.” I nod vigorously, partly to underscore my initiative and partly to shake out the muscle tics.