“I could eat.”
Marisa blinked back to Olaya while she buttoned her shirt, looking at her family list: her parents were both at the restaurant, and her three younger siblings were all at school. Or at least they were checked in at school; Marisa had learned how to spoof the GPS on her djinni when she was thirteen, and her siblings might have figured out the same trick. None of them really seemed like the type, though. Sandro, maybe—he was a genius with hardware, but he’d never dare to actually do it.
Marisa finished with her clothes and looked at the bottle of Lift. “I haven’t had anything today but a few sips of soda. Meet me for an early lunch?”
“Give me twenty minutes,” said Bao.
“I’ll need at least that long to wrestle with this hair before giving up and shaving it off.”
“Your mom’d kill you.”
“My dad’d kill me first.”
“Thirty minutes, then,” said Bao. “Saint Johnny?”
“Exactamente,” said Marisa. “See you there.” She ended the call and attacked her hair again, with a brush this time, grumbling curse words in three languages as she pulled on the knots. She slipped her feet into a pair of flats as she brushed, and took a last look at the room. Did she need anything else? The boy’s ID from the club was somewhere in this mess, if she could remember which pants she’d been wearing. Or had she been wearing a skirt? She tried to recall, and realized she couldn’t even think of the boy’s name. She shrugged and opened the door, laughing as the Arora laundry nuli burst in and started picking up clothes, rushing from pile to pile like an overstimulated robot puppy. She didn’t need the boy’s ID anyway. If he didn’t even know how to keep adware off his djinni, how interesting could he really be?
The wheeled nuli almost looked like it could think for itself: picking up each shirt and bra and pair of tights, considering it, and sorting it efficiently into one of several onboard baskets. But it was all an illusion of efficient programming. Each piece of clothing in the house was marked with an RF chip, and it was these the drone was reading; they carried instructions on exactly how to wash the clothes, how to fold them, and where to put them away. It was a good system, when it worked. Last year their cat, Tigre, had clawed a sweater to pieces, getting the tiny RF chip stuck in her fur. They didn’t have a cat anymore.
Marisa worked on her hair for another five minutes, linking her djinni to the bathroom mirror so she could read the Overworld forums in HD. People were already talking about the drone launch, including a video clip the Salted Batteries had posted, but it was still a relatively minor story. Much bigger news was the regional championship that had just wrapped in Oceana, with Xx_Scorcho_xX taking the cup. No surprise there. Apparently Flankers were ruling the meta, which Fang had been saying for a couple of weeks now, so that was something to think about. The American championships were coming up in just two weeks, but the Cherry Dogs weren’t on that level yet; someday, she told herself, but not yet. They had, however, landed a slot in the Jackrabbit Tourney, a kind of minor-league invitational showcase. If they did well there, they’d have a shot at a major tournament in the second half of the year. Marisa scanned through the Oceana tourney results until her hair was more or less fit for public display, and then blinked the forum back from the mirror to her djinni so she could read while she walked.
The hallway smelled like fresh tortillas and cigarette smoke, a combination of fair and foul so familiar Marisa couldn’t help but smile. It was her abuela, who hadn’t appeared on the house computer because she didn’t have a djinni; that was just as well, Marisa supposed, because she never left the house. They always knew exactly where she was: cooking in the kitchen. Marisa longed to slip in and grab a hot tortilla, fresh off the griddle, but she knew her abue would slap her with a chore or three if she saw her. Marisa slid out the back door instead—the old woman could barely see, and her hearing was worse. Marisa got away clean and stepped outside.