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“Hey, you! Luscious Melada! What’s going on up there?” Monkey shouted.
I ripped out of a dreamisode, and my mind fell back into the rickety house. Most people would have spit tacks if they were forced out of an artificial dream so quick. But I was used to it, living with Papa all my life. Mama had nicknamed him Monkey on account of the fact he couldn’t sit still for more than two seconds, and sometimes you had to react to him real quick too.
Monkey walked so light as he came upstairs and down the hallway toward me. I sat up on my mattress pad and pulled off my mobile ear stud before he could see it. As far as mobiles went, mine was awful simple. I knew the Elite peeps could pull up a gazillion more types of content on their souped-up models. But everyone in Pompey Hollow had one like mine.
Most people had no reason to feel guilty about using it for dreamisodes. Most people didn’t have a Monkey. His gangly form appeared in the doorway, red hair stuck out like a mad man’s halo. Two seconds later, Gram emerged.
“What in tarnation!” The old lady was breathing hard and looked even more like a big chicken than usual, rubbing at the arthritis in her wobbly arms. She was so plump and had such springy white hair. Plus, her skin tone was more golden than the average Chav, on account of her mother getting raped by a Yellarskin. That’s how Gram came into being.
I had inherited Gram’s bird-like head, along with her yellow eyes and skin color. But unlike her, I was twig thin, with a long jaw ending in a pointy chin and light brown hair that was thin and fuzzed. In other words, I sure wasn’t luscious to look at. There’d been all kinds of jokes about my fool-ass name, probably more than I knew about.
“‘What so proudly we hailed?” Gram’s sarcasm could curl toenails.
“Wha?” I coughed the sleep-fur out of my voice.
“You were singing the American Anthem,” Papa said.
“No I wasn’t.”
Monkey raised an eyebrow, and I suddenly remembered that there had been some kind of yowling song in the dreamisode.
Gram’s eyes watered up with an accusation. “Did you order that?”
“No. No! Geez,” I said.
“You goin’ all patriotic?” Papa asked.
“I don’t even know what you’re talkin’ ‘bout.”
Gram closed in on me. “Let me tell you somethin’, girly girl. Dreams are supposed to be natural. Not some piece-of-crap show you make up.”
“It’s not like I hurt anyone.”
“How you like that! Fifteen-year-old girl getting all huffy with me,” she said.
“But Gram. Everybody orders up dreamisodes.”
“Everybody’s as stupid as a bowl of oat paste.”
“My mind’s so twisted with boredom I can’t see straight.”
Papa sighed. “That’s enough. Get on up, Luscious. Now.”
Gram gathered up her lousy mood and banged away. You just had to take the good of Gram with the bad. That’s all there was to it.
Monkey was smiling at me with a slow, steady sadness. I never liked to disappoint him; it just made my gut ache. “I’m sorry, Papa. I just don’t know if I can stop doing dreamisodes.”
“Just cut back.”
I beamed. It was a big victory.
“Rise and shine in 15 minutes.”
“Yessir.”
As he disappeared, I decided to finish the dreamisode I’d started. Nobody needed to know about it. I put the mobile stud back in my right earlobe and swiped a finger to activate my air screen.
The deets for the space fantasy I’d ordered the night before were still there. It was my way-favorite world. The mobile had taken the raw info I gave it. (I had to be a famous space tumbler; my outfit had to look just so; certain rocket science music needed to play.) Then the mobile added little touches based on what it knew I loved.
And it sure knew a lot—not just the little stuff, like how I boinged straight up to heaven one time when I ate blueberry pancakes all spongy with maple syrup. (I’d had it with those pancake dreams, though.) It knew my hopes as well, like getting the hell out of Pompey Hollow, the place where we lived.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” definitely wasn’t something I’d ordered. But there was no way to control every aspect of fake dreams. That’s just the way it was.
When my dreamisodes weren’t about space, they almost always sank me into the world of a Treasure Zone. That’s how the great cities were known in United America, which made up nearly every single place in North, South, and Central America. There was the Santiago Zone down in the Southern Cone, Mexico City in El Central, Chicago in the Upper Midwest, or Toronto way up north.
Those were the places where I really wanted to be, not some dirt-poor town like Pompey, in the Upper East, about 100 miles outside the New York Zone. Someday if I was lucky, maybe I could just find a job as a maid in one of the Zones, working for some Yellarskin. It wasn’t worth wanting anything more than that, ‘cause that would just lead to some deep let-down.
I swiped a bar on the air screen, and the mobile’s hypnosis program began, sinking me down into a sleep so warm and pure, like bathing in a summer pond. Then my dreamisode from last night popped up. I was a space tumbler, the Daredevil Delilah, the most fearless person who ever danced in outer space.
Pedro, the Lamadoo fantasy pet I’d created on my mobile a few years back, was there too. He was the pilot of the spacecraft—half bird, half giraffe, with speckled brown and white feathers ruffling down his long neck.
We were at cruising altitude. The Earth was just a dot, popping in and out of view. I was really living now.
Pedro’s high voice twittered out to me: “It’s showtime, Chiquita.” He looked at me from the cockpit, his long caramel-colored eyes mottled like a reptile’s skin.
“Just a minute.” I flipped my helmet into position and sealed up my tangerine and raspberry spacesuit. A shiver ran through me as a tingling blanket of 65º air pumped between the fabric and my skin, colder than the spacecraft’s innards but a helluva lot warmer than where I was going.
Pedro adjusted his headset and let out a squawk. “Shitola! Girl, you’re not gonna believe it. Houston’s telling me that 50 million people are watching, and 500 Yellarskin birds are outside.”
“Wowza.” Through the window, I watched tiny lights between the stars and planets: space limos full of tight-assed Yellarskins in “orchestra seat” positions, winking their encouragement in the near distance. There were clusters of satellites too, ready to transmit my performance to millions of people on Earth.
In the mirror, my own skin was even more golden than usual. My piss-colored eyes looked a helluva lot better, too. I threw on my backpack with the fin blasters that would help me move through space. “Okay. Let’s get crazy.”
Pedro flipped open the air door, and I stepped through, waiting until it was sealed shut before I opened a second door and tumbled out of the spacecraft without any cables, relying on the fin blasters to keep me within range of my ship.
The faint hiss of the oxygen pumping from the tank on my back into my helmet was the only sound in the starry black. The readout before my eyes put the temperature at 105º below zero beyond my suit.
It was amaz that I could feel such serenity and be thrilled enough to scream all at the same time. Thousands of people had died trying to space tumble over the years. Now, the bravest of the brave could do it. Like Hans Larssen. He was by far my very favorite space tumbler. Not that there was time to think about him now.
“Throw me a tune!” I called to Pedro through my mouthpiece. And immediately, my favorite rocket science song from the Viper Vixens flooded into the helmet. Nife-Edg Nawna, the lead singer, cawed above the raucous brass and splintering glass percussion.
I spun to it, hurtling toward the limits of my safety zone beyond the spacecraft. Then I danced back toward the ship in tight twists, cartwheeling into arabesques and backflips. The moves were so quick I knew the orange and red of my suit was blending together in the eyes of everybody watching.
Nife-Edg’s voice transformed into some old broad singing “What so proudly we hailed ...” Must be the American Anthem. “Fuck a goddamned duck!” I cried.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Pedro called. “But you gotta sing, girl. Your mic is live in three, two ...”
Really? Really?
“...one.”
“Whose broad stripes and bright stars –” Everyone in the space limos, everyone watching my hologram down on Earth, seemed to be joining in. Pedro was piping their collective roar right into my ears.
My chest got all big with a prideful feeling, and I belted out, “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air.” I’d never known the words before. It was pretty damned exciting.
Ping! Ping!
Damnit! The alarm. My mind fell out of the dreamisode hypnosis session back to my tiny bedroom with banged-up furniture and peeling walls. I only had half an hour to get to school.
A gnawing hunger took hold, and I felt light-headed sitting up. The potato I’d had for dinner hadn’t been nearly enough, and I knew there was only one slice of bread left for my breakfast. Gram, Mama, and Papa had probably already eaten theirs. If only there was some jam to make the bread seem like more. But that wasn’t going to happen.
My bare feet hit the freezing floor. But it just made me laugh. Somehow, after space tumbling, I felt like I could bear anything.
# # #
THE SHATTERING BLAST was so loud it made my ears ring. My whole class was busy trying to solve some math problems at the time, and we all stampeded outside. The whole school full of kids and teachers was out there. We raced around the corner of the building. Everybody nearly crumbled at the sight of a black hole where a classroom had been a minute before.
Most of the kids around me screamed, but I was too busy trying to figure out if Monkey’s room was hit. He was in charge of the third grade sometimes. And I knew he was busy teaching them with some kind of science kit.
“The second grade! That’s what got it!” somebody yelled. There wasn’t time to feel relieved. I stared into the hell hole, angry as spit as I imagined the little kids all blasted up. No way was I going to give in to fear. I tied an old scarf around my mouth so I wouldn’t breathe in all the smoke and started toward the hole.
A hand gripped my arm. “No, Luscious. You go on home. Let the grown-ups do this,” said old Mr. Smith, the janitor. But I wouldn’t have none of it.
The tiny blackened children were so still, scattered all through the rubble. They were so light when I picked them up and barely held together as I carried them out. All us rescuers lined them up in the grass.
When I went in the third time, I made out a big body under a pile of half-burnt-up desks and chairs. Mrs. Dinkson, the second-grade teacher. It was awful she’d ended up that way. She’d been a favorite of mine. Her legs came off as I tugged at the top part of her, and a huge stinking blast of smoke shot up, making me cough like hell. The scarf wasn’t doing a good goddamn.
Mrs. Dinkson’s arms were nowhere to be found in the haze, so I carried out the pieces I had of her, coughing like crazy. My eyes were stinging real bad too, but I started back in.
Someone grabbed my arm. I looked up and started trembling at the sight of Mrs. Dinkson, standing there. Or was it her ghost?
“Go home, honey,” she said. “You shouldn’t be seeing him that way.”
“Let me go!”
I tried to get away, but Mrs. Dinkson hardened her hold. It hurt like a son a’ bitch. And it was then that I finally understood: they thought I’d just carried my dead Papa out of the building. If that was true, then the black of him was all over my shirt and pants. It just couldn’t be.
I stormed back into the destruction and came back out with the charred legs. I set them next to the head and middle. That’s when I saw a little piece of fabric on the charred corpse, couldn’t have been more than an inch of it. It looked just like the old plaid shirt Papa wore all the time.
Everybody was looking at me like people stare when they want you to get some joke, but they were all done-up in pity now.
Cold hate came over me. Before I could tell them that they were all crazy and that sure as hell wasn’t my Papa, Gram charged toward me. She hardly paid attention to the line of dead children. There was shocked thunder in her eyebrows as she looked over the remains at my feet. Something inside her collapsed.
Mrs. Dinkson said, “I’m so sorry, Gladys.”
“Don’t be.” Gram spit on the ground to punctuate the point that she didn’t want no pity. Then she walked away.
“He’s dead. He’s dead,” was on everybody’s face as they stared at me. Papa and 21 third graders, all gone.
I ran down Center Street, past all the trees and houses I’d known all my life. When I got to our house, I hid under the front porch balled up in the dirt. What was I supposed to do with the unbelievable? My mother’s thin voice quavered out my name, calling from a bedroom window, and that’s what finally got me out of there.
Mama’s face crumbled with the shakes against the white bed pillow. And after we held each other a long while, she said, “That accident wasn’t Monkey’s fault, honey. Don’t you go thinking that.”
“Why would I?”
“Because that’s what people will say.” Mama had a fierce knowingness about her. She’d been sick for two years, but she always seemed to figure out more things than most people did. “You got to help your Gram get through this now. You go.”
Down in the sitting room, the old woman was on the worn-out couch, which was weird. She never sat anywhere in that room except the old recliner that nobody else was allowed to use. There were more wrinkles on her than ever, like she was 100 years old. I sat down and held her hand. After a while, we found the truth together.
Mama left the world six months later, lost without her Monkey and surrendering to the diabetes that had dogged her. Gram and I found a weird harmony together as the years passed—an angry woman in her 70s and a skinny, dreamy girl.
Gram’s eyes misted when she thought back on her son, the underside of her big arms quivering like jelly. She oiled her Smith & Wesson as if it would keep back the anger. That gun was so ancient.
The old lady was so ruthless about any public display of weakness. She taught me to press a huge flat stone down on my emotions with all the force I could muster.
On the negative side, I pretty much lost all sense of hope. On the positive, I learned how to ignore the people that gave me cow stares. Mama was right; the fools thought Papa murdered those kids.
I never learned exactly what he was doing with the science kit. But it had been donated by some Yellarskin org. They tended to give out defective educational stuff they never would have used themselves.
One day when I was scrounging around a field for kindling wood to feed Gram’s stove, I realized that the stick in my mitten was actually a frozen bone. I was so close to the school. I had to wonder if it was one of Papa’s arms; they’d never found them.
I fell to the ground, into the heavy wet-crystal snow, dazed-out for so long that the white melted into cold swampy grass underneath my old yellow slicker. The smell of the earth’s broth worked on me something fierce. It brought me back to feeling more like myself than I had in a way long time.
My old dream of getting the hell out of Pompey came back like a shot. And I realized that in order to do that, I had to be smarter and stronger and more fearless than ever before, just like the Daredevil Delilah. I was gonna get myself up to one big-ass Treasure Zone adventure. How that would happen hadn’t come to me yet. It was just a matter of figuring the damned thing out.