Brandon did everything he could to play up our own hardships for the camera—Isn’t It Sad That A Couple Of Orphans Are Stuck In A Mold-Infested Motel With Former Gamblers And Alcoholics? We got a week’s worth of advertising by drawing out an argument about me quitting school to get a job.
And people really tuned in to see my relationship with Griffin build.
The first time Griffin saw me, I was crying in the stairwell at MyFuture. It was my first day there and I’d just found out Brandon and I had to share a room with another person and discretion dictated that I sleep on a cot in the bathroom.
Griffin tried to cheer me up by telling me that at least the place had a pool.
But there’s no water in it, I said.
You have to bring your own, Griffin said.
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and peered up at him from the dingy carpet of the stairwell landing. I figured this was the best he could do at being funny, so I played along. No one told me, I said.
He considered for a moment and then said, I could let you borrow mine. He took my hand and pulled me up while I was still trying to figure out if he was joking. Then he led me outside and down into the empty pool, where an entire sloping wall was covered with 3-D chalk art of a whale swimming in sun-lit water. It was so beautiful that the only thing I could think of to say was, This is better than the water I would have brought from home. And Griffin shrugged and said, It’s the only water you can’t get wet.
He had tons of ideas, all the time. Once he used his chalk to add a footnote to the slogan MyFuture had painted on a giant sign on the roof:
MyFuture
where my future belongs to me*
*once I obtain a release of lien
He always told me not to take it all so seriously. Stop staring at the sidewalk, he would say at the plaza. It’s not like you’re in debt to these specific people. And I’d try to shake the feeling that tourists were going to walk up to me and demand that I pay them for the toothpaste I’d used that morning.
With Griffin, it was easier not to wallow in self-pity. So I spent all my time with him, at work and at MyFuture. In the mornings when the food truck delivered breakfast, the cost of which was added to our debts, we’d peel the foil off our plates and fashion it into ninja stars. In the evenings, we’d browse FeedBin, watching families watch TV together, and spying on old friends from schools we’d never again attend. On clear nights, when the stars were white on black instead of smoggy gray, we’d lie on the roof together and say cheesy things like, At least they can’t charge us for moonlight. Although later they did, by way of imposing a curfew and fining those of us who broke it.
Then Griffin started talking about us leaving the colony together and sorry if that meant not helping alleviate our families’ debts but didn’t I want a future? A real future without a lien on it? Our sobby love story got decent ratings, enough to pull in ad revenue, even. Customers came into Flavor Foam to watch me argue with Griffin in person. Mr. One had our supplier make a mold in the shape of Griffin’s head. You can still order Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town, although nobody does. Nobody except me.
The day Griffin turned eighteen, he took his share of the revenue we’d gotten from companies who had advertised on our feeds and he bought us Tickets To The Big City. But I wouldn’t leave Brandon alone in a debtors’ colony with no way to get out. So Griffin left and I had to do (terrible, disproportionate) chalk art on my own. And I stopped going on the roof to look at stars. And I stopped watching feeds of happy families in real living rooms. And foil was just foil.
My Tuesday afternoon regular is a guy I think of as Saint Professor, a brand-new English teacher who comes in after school. His cheap suit and cartoon character tie prove he’s straddling the line between determined and defeated. He must be finding it hard to meet his classroom objectives, because he likes to lecture me on how to do my job.
“What have you got in the way of historical heroes in government?” he asks.
I use my e-frame to scan his tie. An old Bad Dad cartoon episode pops up. “Honestly, I wouldn’t count on that being a demand we cater to.” Bad Dad always reminds me of junior high—watching episodes after school with Brandon while we ate maple syrup straight from the bottle. We would have inhaled flavor foam if it had existed back then. Sometimes I bring it to him from the restaurant, but I can tell he only eats it to humor me.
He’s obsessed with staying healthy now that he’s all I’ve got.
Saint Professor gives his patient sigh and slowly unfolds a menu. “When I ask for a certain type of mold, you hold open the menu like this.” He spreads it in front of me and pushes my e-frame out of my eye-line. “See here where the categories are listed? See how they’re color-coded?”
I try to decide which pointy objects I’d most like to hide in his flavor foam.
“Want to guess what color historical figures get, or do you already know?” Saint Professor says in his slow, deliberate voice. “Hmm?”