“I’m Bright,” I tell them. They like it. They laugh, but they’re not making fun of me. One has a smoke going, cupping it against the wind. The marijuana scent blows right over me. As it gets passed around, one tough asks if I want a toke. “I’m underage,” I answer, expecting mocking laughs this time.
But the woman, who I’ve been trying real hard not to just stare at, says, “That’s smart, Bright. You wouldn’t want to do it out here where anybody could see, right?” She takes the cigarette, sucks in the smoke, releases it and adds, “Maybe we’ll see you.”
It’s a dismissal, but she’s not gruff. More like she’s treating me like a grownup. I like that. Like it a lot.
I bring Dad his eyedrops. He’s pacing across the mouth of an alley, jaw clenched so tight it’s white. It isn’t just the ache from his eyes. The nimrod is trying not to pray out loud.
* * *
I know I should miss our home, but I don’t, really. I remember it, sort of. A familiar series of walls, a bed to sleep in every night. Before Mom got sick and while Dad still had his job, we ate regular meals and were warm, with a roof over our heads. I remember our TV.
But it wasn’t all fun. It was like we were in our own separate world, Dad, Mom, Adalia, me. Dad ran it. He told us what was right and wrong. He told these big, powerful, wild stories that were sometimes like nightmares. He said we were being watched, every second. I thought he meant the cops, because he told my sister and me that the government was looking for people like him. But what he really meant was somebody else. Somebody bigger.
Sometimes I got to watch cartoons on the TV, but mostly Dad had it tuned to a pirate broadcast. That’s something else you don’t get any more of today. A man with white hair raved and sweated before a bare concrete wall, and waved around a big black book. Sometimes the same program showed up again and again, an hour of the man shouting the same things. Dad kept us in front of the TV for hours. He watched, rapt, and repeated the parts he could remember.
He said I had to believe, so I did. I memorized what he told me to memorize. He wasn’t mean, he never hit me when I got something wrong, but he kept at me and at me. It was harder work than school.
Mom said I had to believe too, but it was easier, I think, to hear it from her. Sometimes it was even nice, all of us standing in the living room, heads bowed, holding hands. Like we were sharing something gentle and good.
* * *
Another time I get away from Dad is when he goes into the VR parlors. Not the sex ones, but the ones that have violent stuff. I’m too young for either, so I wait outside.
He’s not there for the entertainment. He does what he always does, mutters his words, tries to slip them in sideways into people’s ears. I know this is what he’s doing in there because twice I’ve seen him get chased out, with someone yelling “Faither!” at his back.
This time the waiting is different. Across the littered street I see the blond-haired woman.
My breath stops in my throat. She’s alone. She turns, sees me, is about to keep walking; then she stops and cuts across, right toward me. My stomach does this bounce thing.
“Hey, I know you. You’re Bright.”
Just like that. She remembers me. I expect I’ll barely be able to speak, but I say without any trouble, “Yeah. I saw you and your friends outside the pharmacy.” That pretty much covers our history, but I don’t want to stop talking to her, so I ask, “What’s your name?”
She smiles, a little tug at the corner of her mouth. “Brett.”
I love the way she says it-with a lot of breath, making the name sound exotic. I thought
Brett was a man’s name, but thankfully I don’t say so. Instead, “It’s nice to see you again, Brett.”
That sounds manly, grownup. I like it.
I guess she does too. She purrs a little laugh that makes the wispy hairs on my arms stand up. “You’re on your own, Bright?”
One of her pals asked me the same thing before. I like Brett, but I’ve been out on the streets a long while and know that bad stuff can happen to unattached people, especially young ones.
“I’m with my father. He’s inside.” A berserk holo dances over the sidewalk.
I can tell by the look in her eyes-soft, sweet blue eyes-that she thinks Dad’s a virch-head, a gore junkie. I let her think it. Why not? It’s better than the shit that’s for real.
Suddenly I’m aware that she’s looking me over, from head to foot. Appraising me. I don’t know how she’s doing the judging, what I could do better, what mistakes I should cover up. So I try to stand taller, and wish that I didn’t have zits on my face.
Finally she says, “I bet you don’t have a pinger, right?”
I’ve failed. I feel the crushing weight of that. I mutter, “No.”
“Well,” Brett says, sliding a piece of paper into my hand, “if you’re near a pinger sometime and tap that number, you’ll get me. And we’ll go do something. Okay?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, but strides on away.
I watch her as she goes, appreciating the curves of her body. I can’t think past the hot wonderful first shock of what’s happened. Only when Dad comes out of the parlor-no one chasing the butthead today-do I hurry to stuff the slip of paper into my coat pocket.
* * *
There are Handoutlets in this part of the city, which is different from the nicer, cleaner parts, like where we used to live before Mom started dying so expensively and Dad got so nuts his employers shitcanned him. Adalia, when she left us, said she was going to go get a job of her own, go straight, join “the system.” I remember being upset about it all, but mostly because I was too young to really understand what was happening. It seemed to me like the family was disappearing around me, one by one.
Once, Adalia told me what sex was. She was so worldly when she spoke about it, even though she was only a little older than I am now. Sex, according to Dad, is a sin-though that’s conditional. Married people can, and should, have sex. But that meant that Dad and Mom …
“That’s right, Ceddy,” Adalia told me on that occasion in her forthright way. She was, I think, always a little cold, though she tried to be sisterly to me. “Now, this is what people do.” And she explained it like it was mechanics. I blushed and blushed, and looked at my feet.
At the Handoutlet we get a free meal and, after, a five minute shower in one of the stalls. There are a lot fewer homeless than there used to be. Social services work better these days.
That’s what people say. But it doesn’t mean all that much if you’re one of the ones still on the street.
Dad’s got a sore on his left knee and asks if it can be looked at. The attendants take him behind a screen that’s printed with roses and thorns.