There was a delicate balance to getting the dishes done fast. Do it too quick, and a parent or a hexmate would make him do it over. Too slow, though, and . . . well, then you were still cleaning dishes. Nobody wanted to be in those shoes.
He picked up a plate from the eternal stack and scraped the food remnants into the compost bucket. Crumbs, flecks, whatever oil and sauce hadn’t been soaked up by quickbread. Kinda gross, but he supposed it could be worse. He remembered one time watching this crime-solving vid set on Titan – Murder on the Silver Sea – where some characters were at a fancy restaurant having this crazy smart conversation where the investigator and the informant both think the other one’s the killer and they were saying it but they’re not really saying it – and also they kind of wanted to bang each other? That scene had layers, seriously – and when the conversation was done, they just . . . left their food. Like, let the server come get it while they walked out of the place. The scene would’ve made sense if one of them wasn’t hungry or had a stomach ache or something, but if that were the case, then the other one would’ve reached over and eaten the leftovers. But no. Both of them left. They left half-plates of food on the table. It was the weirdest shit. He couldn’t imagine what cleaning dishes was like in a place like that. Dealing with half-eaten food sounded disgusting.
Scraps bucketed, he picked up the compressed air canister you could find in any kitchen and blasted away everything that wasn’t plate. He’d kind of liked that part when he was little. He remembered it being satisfying. But that had been about, oh, eleven billion dishes ago, and blasting away food bits had long since lost its charm. He looked over at Xia, who was helping him that night. She was seven, and hadn’t yet realised that getting to do grown-up things like dishes and pruning and floor cleaning was super boring. She stood attentively at his side, waiting for each plate he handed her, placing each one just so in the sanitiser. He had to admit, it was kind of cute.
He handed off the blasted dish to Xia, then picked up another dirty one, and scraped, and blasted, and handed off, and started again. Beyond the kitchen counter, everybody else from his hex was sitting in the same spots at the same tables, as they always did, having the same conversations they always had.
‘The new algae pumps everybody’s using, they’re no good,’ Grandma Ko said. ‘You can feel it on the ferry. Anytime we push past the slow zone, there’s this hum that starts up . . .’ Grandma Ko – Kip’s great-grandma, but that took too long to say – had been a freighter pilot back in the day and thought any tech that had been invented past, like, thirty standards ago was garbage.
‘I’m telling you, we’re going about the water budget all wrong,’ M Nguyen said, on a tear about some political thing like always. ‘If the other guilds got together and unanimously pushed for the growers to overhaul the farms, the growers would have to give in, and the council would have to fund it. But that’d mean the guilds doing something efficiently together, and we all know that’s not going to happen.’ Seriously, there was nothing more boring than politics.
‘Did you see that new planter they’ve set up over in 612?’ M Marino said. Kip took a wild guess that the next sentence would include the word imports or creds. ‘Imported seedlings, all of it.’ Bingo. ‘They’ve even got jorujola in there. It’s incredible – have you seen it? Those bio-luminescent leaves? But I don’t know where they get the creds—’ Double bingo.
‘I hear Sarah’s moved back in with the Zhangs,’ M Sousa said in an excited hush to Kip’s mom. ‘Now, it’s none of my business, but this isn’t exactly the first time she’s had things go south with a partner, and you have to wonder—’ Kip’s mom gave a nod that didn’t really confirm anything, and she threw in an ‘mmm’ here and there for good measure. Kip knew she didn’t care, and she didn’t even like M Sousa much, but she pretended to, because that’s how hexes worked.
‘That reminds me of the time me and Buster let a whole tank of hoppers out,’ laughed Kip’s dad, talking to the Mullers. ‘Have I told you this one before?’ Stars, Dad. Yes, everybody had heard this one before. Everybody had heard this story twelve thousand times.
Kip thought about Solan restaurants, where people talked about murder and sex and left dishes full of food for someone else to deal with. He thought about the university exams looming on the horizon. He thought about his score on the last practice exam. Ras had told him it was no worries, that he’d do better next time. But Kip knew what was what. He was going to fail, and he’d live here in the same hex forever, cleaning dishes and listening to his dad tell the same jokes over and over until one of them died.
Stars, he was stuck. He was so, so stuck.
Kip scraped and blasted faster now, knowing he’d left bits less than clean but hoping the heat of the sanitiser would burn away the evidence.
‘You missed some,’ Xia said, holding up the dish she’d been handed, pointing at a swatch of oily crumbs.
Kip sighed and took the plate back. ‘Guess I did,’ he said, giving the plate another scrape. How come lunch breaks never lasted this long?
At last, at fucking last, the stack of dishes ended. Xia looked satisfied; Kip was relieved. They both washed their hands. As they did so, a few bubbles appeared in the big clear cistern by the herb planters. Kip remembered one time when he was really little letting the water run and run because he liked the bubbles so much. His mom had given him a strong talking-to for that.
He looked at Xia, counting the seconds under her breath as she washed up, hurriedly turning off the faucet once she hit fifteen. Looked like somebody’d given her the same talking-to.
Kip started to head for home, but his mom stopped him, dead interrupting M Sousa. ‘Kip?’ she called, leaning away from the table. ‘Did you empty the bucket?’
Kip shut his eyes. ‘No.’
‘Well?’
Kip sighed again, trudged back to the kitchen, picked up the forgotten bucket of crumbs and bug husks and veggie stems, lugged it to the garden, and dumped it into the hot box. He could feel Mom watching him the whole way.
‘I don’t understand why he can’t come sit with us,’ he heard Dad mumble. Dad never mumbled as quiet as he thought.
‘He will when he wants to,’ Mom said.
Kip did not want to. He wanted to go home, so he did just that. The front door slid closed behind him, and he exhaled. He kicked off his shoes and headed to his room, letting that door close behind him, too. A double barrier. He flopped down on his bed and shut his eyes. Finally.
He heard the sound of his scrib dinging, muffled under . . . something. He sat up and looked around his bed. Nothing. He rolled over, found his satchel on the floor, and dug around. Nothing. He rolled over the other way. There it was – on the floor, sticking out from the jacket he’d been wearing earlier. He picked it up, and found a blinking alert from Ras.
Ras (17:20): do you have any tethering cable
Kip (18:68): uh no
Kip (18:68): why
Ras (18:69): I have something really cool for us to do
Kip (18:70): what
Ras (18:70): it’s a surprise
Kip (18:70): what kind of surprise
Ras (18:71): a tech project
Ras (18:71): trust me, it’s going to be awesome
Ras (18:71): I can get the parts in a few tendays
Ras (18:72): so long as you’re not studying
This was code. Kip’s parents didn’t read his scrib, as far as he knew, but Ras’ had once, and they’d found out he and Rosie Lee snuck a couple bottles of kick out of Bay Twelve and got shitfaced together, and it had been a ridiculous mess. Like, completely ballistic. So now, if there was something Ras wanted to talk about but didn’t want to put in writing, he said ‘so long as you’re not studying’ instead of ‘it’s a secret, I’ll tell you in person.’ Studying was the perfect cover for anything. What was that if not responsible? What parent would read that and worry?
Okay, maybe Ras’ parents. Ras never studied.