“You know what’s going on, right?” Tucker Number One said. He sat slouched in one of the Kiplinger living room’s red leather club chairs, his legs splayed wide, with one hand attached to a can of Bud Light perched just above his crotch. “It’s a glitch in the simulation.”
“What does that even mean?” Tess Blackwell asked. She was on her third raspberry Smirnoff Ice, coupled with several hits of indica, and her words were starting to get slurry.
“You don’t know about the simulation?” Tucker Number Two looked incredulous.
Or is that one Parker?
Chloe wasn’t sure. Parker and the two Tuckers all went to Lincolnwood Academy and seemed to be more or less the same person, which was making it difficult for her to keep them straight.
“It’s totally badass!” Probably Tucker Two sat up and leaned forward over the massive mahogany coffee table, energized by the simulation topic.
“Sooooo badass,” echoed Brody, without looking up from the joint he was constructing on the opposite side of the coffee table.
“Okay, so, it’s like: reality isn’t real. ’Cause we’re—”
“Dude!” Tucker One barked. “Let me tell it.”
“Sorry.” Tucker Two shrank back, acknowledging his place in the hierarchy of Tuckers.
“It’s like this.” Tucker One pulled himself ever so slightly up out of his bro slouch so he could properly address his lecture to the couch that contained Tess, Cressida Cohen, and some Academy girl named Alexis. “Did you see The Matrix?”
“No.”
“Aww!” Josh chimed in. He was sitting with Chloe and Emma on the other couch. “You gotta! It’s fire.”
“So, The Matrix is, like . . .” Tucker One paused for a moment, daunted by the task of coming up with an adequate plot summary. Then he shrugged it off. “Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Basically, the deal is: the whole fuckin’ world is, like, one big computer simulation. That’s being run by, like, superior beings.”
“Like we’re all just characters in their video game or some shit,” Brody added as he unscrewed the cap on his weed grinder.
“Right. So when weird shit like this happens—” Tucker One made a sweeping gesture with his beer can, taking in the entirety of the cavernous living room, the natural light from its eight-foot windows not quite strong enough to banish the gloom in its corners. “It’s not real. It’s just, like . . . a glitch in the simulation.”
“Like, reality’s an app, and it got hung up or some shit,” Tucker Two added.
“Huh.” Tess’s mouth hung open.
Cressida slowly nodded. “Wow . . . That’s trippy.”
“It’s complete bullshit,” Emma declared. She crossed her arms against her chest as she fixed Tucker One with a look of disdain.
“No, it’s not!” Tucker One insisted. “It’s, like, probably true.”
“Yah,” said Brody. “Like, one of the smartest guys on Earth said we’re almost definitely in a simulation. Like, the odds are.”
“Really? Who was that?” Other than Chloe, Emma was the only one in the room who was sober. But unlike Chloe, who was abstaining due to her impending tennis practice, Emma seemed to be doing it to prove a point, to herself if not to the rest of the group.
“I forget his name. He’s, like, a computer guy. There’s this YouTube video—” Tucker One picked up his phone to search for the video, then realized he couldn’t. “Shit! I did it again.”
This had been a chronic occurrence, and not just for the Tuckers. All of the kids still had their phones within arm’s reach, and every few minutes, one of them would compulsively check it like an amputee trying to scratch an itch in a limb that no longer existed.
Emma gave Tucker One a smug grin. “Persuasive argument.”
With the exception of Chloe and Josh, the rest of the room scowled at her.
“It’s fuckin’ true!” Tucker One snarled. “Like, the guy who came up with it’s a lot smarter than you.”
“Or maybe he just smokes a ton of weed,” Emma replied as a distant cheer erupted from the Beer-Pong-by-candlelight game being played in the basement rec room below them.
“Actually, I think that dude does smoke a ton of weed,” Brody admitted.
“Doesn’t mean he’s wrong.” Tucker One relaxed back into his entitled slouch. “And it makes sense. I mean, what the hell? How often does the power go out and fuckin’ cars don’t even work?”
“So fuckin’ weird.” Tucker Two shook his head in wonder.
An awkward silence fell over the room. There had been almost as many of these silences as there had been reflexive phone checks. Chloe couldn’t tell if all the conversational dead spots were a side effect of involuntary technological withdrawal, or if Brody Kiplinger and his friends were just fundamentally boring.
Then again, she wasn’t exactly being chatty herself. She kept trying to think of something clever or flirty to say to Josh, without much success. And he wasn’t giving her a whole lot to work with. He was almost as quiet as that girl Alexis, who literally hadn’t said a word all afternoon.
Or was it still morning?
She gave Josh a nudge with her elbow.
“Do you know what time it is?”
He reached for his phone, then stopped himself.
She grinned. “Made you look!”
He chuckled as they held eye contact for a moment. He had a great smile. And those awesome eyes.
Plus a little bit of a horse face. But that didn’t bother her. There was a name for that kind of profile. A much nicer one than “horse face.”
Roman? Is that it? A Roman nose?
Something like that.
Emma, sitting on the opposite side of Chloe from Josh, leaned in to whisper in her ear.
“I can’t believe how boring this is.”
As she said it, they heard the sound of the heavy front door opening, its creak sending an echo through the high-ceilinged entrance hall. Evidently, Brett Mazursky was back from his mission to liberate a twelve-pack of beer from the fridge in Mr. Mazursky’s basement man cave.
Still hunched over his joint-in-progress, Brody called out, “Yo, Berserksky! Gimme one of them beers!”
To everyone’s surprise, the person who entered the room wasn’t Brett Mazursky. It was Tess’s father, Mr. Blackwell—the richest man in town and a legit billionaire, according to the rumors. Sweaty, flushed, and moving with a painful-looking limp, he scanned the group of kids until his eye fell on his daughter.
“Tess, honey? We need to go.”
At the sight of her dad, Tess’s eyes grew as wide as they could get, given the constraints of indica and Smirnoff Ice. She got to her feet, quickly but unsteadily, and started toward him at the threshold of the entrance hall.
“Mr. Blackwell?” Brody’s eyes were even wider than Tess’s. He’d hurriedly shoved the half-made joint, grinder, and baggie of weed under the coffee table.
“Yeah?” As his daughter passed him on her way to the door, Pete Blackwell paused to look back at Brody.
“Please don’t tell my parents.”
“Where are they?”
“London.”
“When are they supposed to come back?”
“Tomorrow.”
Mr. Blackwell considered this, then nodded. “Good. That’s good.” He started to follow his daughter out, then seemed to realize Brody was in need of more explicit reassurance. He paused again.
“Don’t sweat it, Brody. Just don’t do anything stupid. Okay?”
Brody nodded vigorously. “We won’t! I promise.”
“Cool. We’ll see you.”
Then both of the Blackwells were gone, followed by the sound of the front door opening and closing again.
“Jeeeeesus,” Brody said, his head briefly disappearing as he retrieved his weed from under the coffee table.
“Don’t trip,” Tucker One told Brody. “Tess’s dad is super chill.”
Cressida shook her head. “You don’t know him. Like, he seems chill? But he’s a total control freak.”
“Whose dad isn’t?”
“No, but, like—have you ever been to their weekend place? In Pennsylvania?”
“No.”
“Ohmygod.” Cressida rolled her eyes. “First of all, it’s amazing. Like, it’s huge. Right on this lake. And I think they, like, own the lake? But the thing is—her dad turned the whole basement into this, like, bunker. With, like, food and guns and all kinds of shit.”
“So he’s like a whaddayacallit?”
“Survivalist.”
“Yeah.”
“Basically. Tess said it’s, like, in case of the apocalypse or whatever. Like, he’s totally paranoid.”
“Having a bunker is pretty badass,” Brody pointed out.
“We have guns,” Parker piped up. “My dad has a shitload of them.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Like, hunting rifles. Two shotguns. A Glock—”
“Can we not talk about this?” Cressida asked. “It’s freaking me out.”
“You started it.”
“No, I didn’t! I just said—”
Emma leaned in to whisper to Chloe again. “I am so fucking out of here.”
Chloe followed Emma to the front door. “Why are you leaving?”
“Are you kidding? They’re idiots! And now they’re talking about their daddies’ guns?” Emma screwed up her face in disgust.
“They’re not that bad.”
“They are, though. Tess was the only one who was even halfway nice. And she was barely out the door when Cressida started talking shit about her family. Plus, do you notice how none of the girls ever call the boys on their bullshit? They’re like fucking geishas.”
Josh came out of the living room. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. We’re just, um . . .”
“I gotta jet,” Emma explained. “It was cool hanging out, though. Thanks.”
“Yeah. Totally. You need a ride or something?”
The girls looked at him quizzically.
“Oh! Right. Duh.” He turned to Chloe. “Are you going, too?”
Chloe thought about it. “I don’t know. I kind of need to eat before tennis.”
“Eat here,” Josh said. “They’ve got tons of food. We can raid the fridge.”
Chloe looked at Emma, who granted her approval. “You should stay.”
“You sure?”
“Totally. I’m just going to go home.”
“How?”
“I’ll walk. It’s not that far.”
“What about your car?”
Emma shrugged. “It’s not like they’re going to tow it.”
“Okay.” They hugged. “Love you!”
“Love you, too, Frenchie. Bye, Josh!”
“Take it easy!”
Emma shut the heavy front door behind her. A portentous thunk echoed through the big entrance hall. Chloe looked at Josh. He gave her a lopsided smile under that Roman nose and those killer eyes.
“Eats?”
“Yeah. Where’s the kitchen again?”
“This way.”
She followed him, watching with thirsty approval as his swimmer’s body strode down the corridor into the shadows.