“I’ll give you another minute to decide.” I turn away and hurry to the back of the store. In a spot where the kitchen steam makes it hard for Mr. One to spy on me, I pull out my e-frame and find Griffin’s feed.
He’s grimacing at the sun and the wind streaming into his face while he crouches on the Santa Monica pier. A couple of co-eds stand before him, naked from the waist up but for a thick layer of body paint that has transformed their torsos into suburban landscapes. Painted sparrows perch on their collarbones. Griffin looks cramped from all the crouching but otherwise happy.
Does he ever think about his dad toiling on cleanup crew to shave dollars off his debt? Does he ever think of me, working swing shifts alone?
I remember us at the lake together late at night. Tourists gone, locals calling to each other in the dark like birds. Griffin collecting empty beer bottles to balance on the rocks by the shore, making crazy silhouettes. Because Griffin never thinks of trash as trash. Sometimes I forget I’m stuck here, he would say on the roof of MyFuture or down in the empty pool, where we’d hide from our cleaning assignments. Sometimes I think we’re just hanging out. He’d pull me close, and I would smile, because rooftops and empty pools can be just like living rooms and back porches, depending on who you’re with.
My e-frame trills at me. Brandon’s calling.
“Hey, Brandon.”
His pale face and overlong hair come into view. I can tell he’s having a bad day. I mean, an especially bad one. The kind that can’t be fixed by hunting down the rec room’s missing Ping-Pong balls and bouncing them off the walls until they’re missing again—our favorite pastime.
“Hey,” he says. “Bad news.”
“Toilet’s clogged again? Brandon, I cannot share my bedroom with a bowl full of cess.”
“They’re moving me today. End of the day.”
“What?”
“We’re transferring to Debtors’ House.”
All the blood drains from my head. “That’s shit. They said we had until the end of the month.”
Brandon shrugs, but his brown eyes are full of despair. “What does it really matter, Brix? End of the month, end of the day. You have a secret inheritance I don’t know about?”
I rub a hand over my forehead. The smell of bananas and graham crackers makes me feel sick.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Brandon says quietly.
“I’m just going to leave you? Just let it get worse and worse for you?” Doesn’t he get that I’ve lost enough family already? Doesn’t he know that I look the other way every morning so he can put his stupid bacon on my plate? I don’t even like bacon. “You’re no heartthrob, Brandon, you’ll never be able to use your feed to get out.”
“I’ve got good hair,” he says, hurt. “Good when I cut it.”
“Your eyes are too close together.” And nobody watches nice guys like you on FeedBin. Nobody cares that you fold my laundry or that you line up all my origami foil on your windowsill.
“Get a place with Lola, work the night shift, and go back to school,” Brandon says. “That would be worth it to me, living in a colony. As long as I know you’re getting somewhere.”
“And I could come visit you on Thanksgiving so you could update me on your shuffleboard score and introduce me to your seven roommates. Great, Brandon. Great idea.” I choke back a sob. “How much do we need to prevent a transfer?”
“Ten thousand.”
My head feels as if it’s detaching from the rest of my body. It’s floating away. I can’t feel my teeth. Ten thousand dollars.
“There’s nothing we can do, Brix.” He’s full of sympathy, his brow creased with concern. For me, the idiot. He’s the one who can’t get out.
I think back to the day, the big day at the hospital. That black pit day when we said good-bye to our parents and took them off the machines. Brandon held my hand and I held Mom’s limp hand and we told Dad we’d never sell his big-screen or forget to feed the cat, and we said good-bye. Because there was nothing we could do.
Screw that.
“We have until the end of the day,” I tell Brandon. “Put some sunglasses over those beady eyes of yours and start playing to the camera.” Even as I say it, a Sunglass Shack icon pops up in the corner of my screen. Our drama is increasing the hits on Brandon’s feed. But that’s not going to last. Pity is entertaining for only so long.
I march out to Saint Professor’s table and press my hand over the camera mounted in the napkin dispenser. “You want ice-cream nuggets? You know what discontinued means? It means you’ll never see those nuggets again. Unless you’re willing to pay good.”
Saint Professor goes silent with shock. He fidgets with his cartoon tie the same way my dad fidgeted with his own tie when a salesman came to our door and offered to install cameras in our house so we could explore the exciting world of profitable family drama.