He reached to pull his guitar out from under his seat. “Never mind.” He started strumming, and that was the end of that.
We ordered hot dogs and a case of designer candy that made smoke pour out of our mouths. Cole riffed on his guitar despite protests from the other shelves. “I’ve tasted sorrow, salt, and sickly sweets,” he sang. “Hate it all, but a boy’s gotta eat.”
I passed in and out of sleep for the remainder of the movie. I kept seeing my kitchen wallpaper in the Girl Queen’s palace, faded and curling. Cole’s hens scrambling for the fence line. In the dark nighttime scenes when blue light washed over us, I pretended the world was flooding and I was safe up on a high shelf with Cole and candy, and pretended that was enough.
“Will they buy it?” Cole asked, his thumb hitting an errant note that jolted me out of dreaming.
He meant the girls, the tweens with their lust for high-con. Would they buy that I was an alien? That he was in love with me? That was what he cared about. What kept his mind occupied even while he kissed me, so that he could hardly remember to enjoy it. His shrill tone set my teeth on edge. “They’ll eat you up.”
We stayed at the movieplex all night and into the following day. Just watched movie after movie and dozed during the boring parts and tried to remember if we existed beyond our shelf. I came to the conclusion that we kind of didn’t. The context for every moment of our lives was gone, underwater. Me with no profile, like some mythical creature exiled from Atlantis.
After they’d finished the track, they had us come down and listen to it, and I forgot it was me singing and got goose bumps from the shimmering synths and the bass notes like a heartbeat. Cole’s voice was a prepubescent version of itself and so sweet I could almost cry. Effing ethereal, after all.
The plan was that when the single hit the airwaves, every flexi-screen within range of a signal would light up with an image of Cole’s haunted expression. Anyone who clicked through to the webpage would discover a forlorn Cole reaching for me as I faded away. Below the image, a single line of text: “They won’t understand this.”
It was almost the exact pose from that most viral of ancient feeds, the moment Michael faded away from Brixney. Despite what the lyric said, everyone would understand it.
I was wheedling the guy at the grocery counter to let me take some tomatoes and a head of lettuce when the single dropped. His flexi-screen lit up. He tapped on it in a way he thought was discreet, arm below the counter. His gaze went to my wrists and found no screen or red bracelet. Wide-eyed, he waved me on. I thought, See? Who needs credits?
On my way home, past house-fronts painted white against the early summer heat, it hit me: I was an alien now.
I started running.
Cole was fidgeting in the entryway of my family’s premier town house, his boots smearing dirt on the new white premier tiles. I pointed at the brand-new flexi-screen on his arm, which was spouting our single. “Take it off, what are you thinking? Before they get here.”
He jolted. Tugged it off. Then paused, the music echoing, his screen still lit up with the image of his own face. “Wait, who’s they?”
“I don’t know, they, people. Fans. Turn it off, they can track your location.”
Cole swiped at the screen and our singing stopped. We looked around. We waited. I kept staring at the door. “Should we barricade it?” Cole asked. He cracked a smile. I chucked the lettuce at him.
“Turn it back on.” I nodded at his screen.
He made a swipe, tapped through to our website. “Six hundred eighty-seven subscribers.” His face went premier white.
The tomatoes slipped out of my grip. “Turn it back off.”
A sound of thunder on the stairs and then my sisters barreled into the room. “Come see—you’re on CelebriFeed!”
I stamped up after them on shaky legs.
“Stop running!” my dad called from the kitchen. “It’s hot enough in here and the a/c won’t turn up.”
“Dad!” I said.
“Did you get the groceries?” he called.
“Dad!”
“What?” He poked his head in. The wall monitor caught his eye. There was the image from our website, large as life on the screen. “Well, what in the world? I never saw a boy’s hair look like that.” He turned his gaze to Cole’s yellow thatch, nothing like the gelled nest of hair on-screen.
“Are you going to get in trouble?” my younger sister asked.
“For what?” Cole said.
She sidled up to him, as eager to bask in his annoyance as in any other form of his attention. “For interfering with an alien.”
“She’s not an alien, she’s your sister,” Dad said, and slumped back to the kitchen.
“Besides, she doesn’t have a red bracelet,” my other sister said. “She’s supposed to have ditched it. How will they know anyone’s interfering with her?”
“They’ll know from CelebriFeed!”
Cole scooted away to leave them to their shrill bickering.
“Are we going to get in trouble for this?” I murmured to him.
“In trouble with who?”