That Kelly might have wanted a child with Dad never crossed Vanessa’s mind. After discovering they mixed like water and sodium, Vanessa thought about Kelly as little as she could.
She flicked the light switch by the door as soon as she walked into her apartment. When nothing happened, she said, “Shit!” Then she said something filthier in Serbo-Croatian. Then she said something filthier yet in English. She needed some mental floss to clean Bronislav out from between her ears.
Her nose wrinkled. That had nothing to do with the thieving Serb. The dishes were piled high in the sink. She’d let them slide for a while. Now they were telling her she couldn’t get away with it any more.
“Shit!” she said again. If the power was out, the hot water would go in a hurry, too—as soon as whatever was in the heaters now ran out, it would be cold all the time. Doing dishes—especially dishes that had spent some time sitting around—with cold water was a pain in the ass.
Well, so was living in a smelly apartment. She plunged in. Anything would come clean with enough soap and water and cleanser and steel wool and elbow grease. For sufficiently large values of “enough,” she thought as she scrubbed away at an extra-dirty frying pan.
She swore again a moment later. Bronislav wasn’t the one who’d come out with foolishness like that. No, it could only have come from Bryce. People you’d known and loved (or thought you loved) once upon a time didn’t want to get out of your head, no matter how much you wished they would. No. They stayed in there like unwelcome guests, and every so often one of them would pop up and yell Boo!
The place did smell fresher once the dishes were out of the sink and in the drainer next to it. But that was a fight you couldn’t win, not permanently. They’d start piling up again all too soon. And she’d start ignoring them again, till she couldn’t ignore them any more.
Monday morning meant a return to the widget works, and all the joy that went with it. The atmosphere was tense. There’d been waves of strikes back East and in the Silicon Valley because wages weren’t coming close to keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Nick Gorczany hadn’t given anybody a raise in quite a while. Everyone knew it.
Everyone also knew that doing anything about it would put you out on the street. Plenty of unemployed programmers and engineers and bookkeepers would figure low wages whaled the snot out of no wages at all.
And so people at the widget works grumbled and muttered and met in small groups for lunch. But that was all they did. Vanessa had always grumbled and muttered. She hadn’t always bothered to keep her voice down when she did it, either. That made her more popular with the other hired peons than she’d ever been when things looked better.
There had been times when she’d wanted to be popular but wasn’t. Now that she was, she discovered she didn’t care. All she cared about was the electric jolt she seemed to feel—regardless of whether the power was on—when she put her key in the lock to her apartment mailbox. Every day she didn’t hear back from the magazine to which she’d submitted was another day with a letdown in it.
She understood the mails were slow. She understood editors had to find time to sift through their slush. Intellectually, she understood all that. As far as she was concerned, intellectual understanding was for dweebs like Bryce. She wanted that acceptance letter now, dammit! She wanted the check that would come with it, too.
Some of her coworkers tried to draft her to tell Nick Gorczany they all needed more money. As politely as she could—and as rudely as she needed to—she declined the honor. She felt more than she thought, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t think. The messenger who brought the king bad news was the one who got it in the neck, not the people who’d sent him (or even her).
Mr. Gorczany did give people a raise: about a quarter of what they thought they were entitled to. In a note, he said I wish this could be more, but the economy is tough on everybody, I included. Vanessa curled her lip. That sounded just like him, all right. And, tough economy or not, he still drove his BMW from Palos Verdes Estates almost every day.
She started getting righteously pissed at the numbnuts editor who was sitting on her story. What did he think he was gonna do, hatch it? Only a small sense of self-preservation kept her from firing off a snotty query. If you made an editor mad, he’d reject you, not your story. The bastard.
Then, when she was starting to do her best to pretend to herself she’d never submitted in the first place, the return envelope showed up in her mailbox. Seeing it was such a rush, she forgot something Marshall had said. His words of wisdom were It’s the opposite of applying to college. Big envelopes are bad. Small ones are good.
Vanessa tore the envelope open, right there in the lobby. Inside sat her story, with a sheet from the magazine paper-clipped to it. She pulled it out. It was a Screw you very much for submitting form rejection. Under the printed crap, somebody’d scribbled Way too emo for us. Try the women’s mags.
“Emo? Emo?” The word tasted even worse the second time she spat it out. She’d sweated blood to show emotions honestly, and this was what she got for it? “Fucking emo?”
She stomped up the stairs. She slammed the door to her apartment hard enough to rattle half the building. Then she tore the rejection into a million pieces and flung them in the wastebasket. After a moment, the SASE and the printout of her story went in, too.
If she’d had the laptop on the kitchen table, it might have followed the papers into the trash. “Emo!” she snarled one more time. “Women’s mags!” She made that sound filthier than any porn on the Net. “Cocksucking sexist shithead!”
She didn’t usually drink by herself. Today, she poured a stiff shot of slivovitz—another leftover from Bronislav—and chugged it. It went off in her belly like a bomb. In minutes, the alcohol built a wall against the slings and arrows of outrageous editors.
All the same, she doubted she’d submit again. Certainly not any time soon. She wasn’t going to try to deal with the cretins in New York City. She had to deal with too goddamn many closer to home. At least they paid her regularly—none too well, but regularly. The jerks who got paid for bouncing stories that were perfectly good…
“To hell with ’em! To hell with all of ’em!” she said, and she unscrewed the cap on the slivovitz bottle again.
It was pouring rain when Louise Ferguson walked into the Van Slyke Pharmacy. No lights were on inside. Well, the power was out at her condo, too. She’d do what she could do by hand, and she’d have things organized so she could quickly get the data into the computer if and when electrons started chasing themselves through wires.
“Good morning, Louise,” Jared Watt said from behind the counter.
“Good morning, Jared,” Louise answered, shrugging off her rain slicker. “Good and wet.”
“It is. It is.” The pharmacist nodded. Even in the indoor gloom, the lenses of his glasses made his eyes look almost as big as eggs sunny side up. “Back before the eruption, either we would have said the rain killed a drought or we would have complained because half of L.A. was washing into the Pacific.”
“Well, we don’t need to worry about it so much any more,” Louise said. “Everything that could wash into the Pacific has gone and done it by now.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jared said.
You could always complain about the weather. They spent another few minutes doing it. Then a customer came in with a prescription. Jared filled it for her. He rang it up on a massive brass cash register that was almost certainly older than he was. The receipt book with carbons was new, but it was an old way of doing things making a comeback because the newer, niftier ways had turned unreliable.