“What?” Seth sat up straighter, looked belligerent. Toronto’s subways, like most subways, were places of civil inattention. It took a lot to get other people to overtly acknowledge you. Seth had done it. People stared.
Natalie leaned over and cupped her hand to Seth’s ear, hissed something. He clamped his mouth shut and glared, then looked at his feet. She gave Hubert, Etc a half-smile.
“Where are we going?” she said. Hubert, Etc was cheered by that “we.” They’d been comrades-in-arms for the night and he had her contact details, but he’d been half-expecting her to say that she was going home and leaving him with Seth.
“Fran’s?” he said.
She made a face.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s twenty-four hours, it’s warm, they don’t throw you out—”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a pit, though.”
He shrugged. He remembered when the last Fran’s had shut, when he was a teenager, and when the chain was rebooted as a hobby business by a lesser Weston, amid fanfare about the family and its connection to the city’s institutions. The new Fran’s felt haunted, and the feeling was, ironically, most intense during special events with live servers instead of automats. Live humans bearing trays of food highlighted the fact that the restaurant was designed for free-ranging, dumb robots and a minimum of human oversight. But it was cheap, and you could sit there a long time.
He wished he’d suggested somewhere cool. When he’d cared about this stuff, he’d had a continuous list of places where he would go if he had the money and someone to go with. Seth had that kind of list on tap, but he didn’t want to talk to Seth. He wished Seth would volunteer to go home and sleep off his trauma and drug residue. Which wasn’t going to happen, because this was Seth.
“Fine,” she said.
Her eyes glazed over and she looked at her lap, cupped her hand over the interaction surface on her thigh, checking her messages. This reminded Hubert, Etc to light up, and his own interface surfaces buzzed, letting him know about the things he should be doing. He dewormed his inboxes, flushing the junk and spum. He snooze-barred messages to bug him again later – something from his parents, an old girlfriend, some work he’d chased at a caterer’s.
They were almost at St Clair station now, and as they stood, one of the morning-shift people got into Seth’s space. He was a big guy, fair-skinned, freckled with a large, beaky nose and a conservative collar-length haircut. He wore a cheap overcoat with some kind of uniform under it, maybe medical. “You,” he said, leaning in, “are a mouthy little fuck, for someone who’s sponging welfare and partying all night. Why don’t you go get a fucking job?”
Seth leaned away, but the guy followed him, everyone swaying with the motion of the slowing train. Hubert, Etc’s adrenals found an unsuspected reservoir and goosed. His heart thundered. Someone was going to get hit. The guy was big, smelled of soap. There were cameras on the people and on the train, but he didn’t look like he gave a shit.
Natalie put a hand on the guy’s chest and pushed. He looked down in surprise at the slim, female hand on his chest, clamped his huge hand over her wrist. She whipped her free hand around, bashing him in the chest with her purse, which sprang open and sloshed cold vomit down his chest. She looked as disgusted as he did, but when he let go and stumbled back, she leaped through the closing subway doors, Hubert, Etc and Seth on her heels. They turned in time to see the guy sniffing his hand incredulously, his body-language telegraphing I can’t believe you dumped a bag full of barf on me –
“Natalie,” Seth said on the escalators – the other passengers who’d gotten off gave them a wide berth. “Why was your purse full of sick?”
She shook her head. “I’d forgotten about it. I got sick when I saw—” She closed her eyes. “When I saw Billiam.”
“I’d forgotten it, too,” Hubert, Etc said.
“I hope nothing important fell out when I hit the guy,” she said. Her purse – medium-sized with a gitchy abstract pattern printed on its exterior vinyl – was slung across her body. She gingerly opened it, made a face, peered at its revolting depths. “I don’t know how the hell you start to clean this up. I’d throw it away except it’s got some stuff that should be washable.”
Seth wrinkled his nose. “Gloves and a mask. And someone else’s sink. Dude, what did you eat?”
She glared at him, but a little grin played at her lips. “Came in handy, didn’t it? Steve, we’ve had a shitty night. Do you think you could keep it low-key? Not picking fights?”
He had the grace to look ashamed. Hubert, Etc felt a spurt of jealousy jet from asshole to appetite, wanted to shove Seth down the escalator. He said, “None of us’re in the best shape. Some food will help. And coffium.”
Seth and Natalie both jolted at the mention of coffium. “Yesss,” Natalie said. “Come on.” She vaulted up, two big steps at a time. They cleared the turnstiles, stepped out into a blinking-bright morning, bustling with turned-out people doing Saturday-morning shopping in turned-out showrooms. The rebuilt Fran’s had a narrow glass frontage between a bathroom remodeler’s salon and a place that sold giant concrete sculptures.
“Remember the Fran’s neon?” Hubert, Etc said. “It was such an amazing color, wild red.” He pointed to the LED-lit tube. “Never looks right to me. Makes me want to tweak reality’s gamma-slider.”
Natalie gave him a funny look. They found a booth, the table lighting up with menus as they sat. The menus in front of each of them grew speech-bubbles as the automat’s biometrics recognized them and highlit their last orders, welcoming them back. Hubert, Etc saw Natalie had ordered lasagna with double garlic bread the last time, and it had been four years since she’d placed that order. “You don’t eat here often?”
“Just once,” she said. “Opening day.” She tapped the menu for a while, ordering a double chocolate malt, corned beef hash, hash-browns, extra HP sauce and mayo, and a half-grapefruit with brown sugar. “I was a guest of the Westons. It was a family thing.” She looked him square in the eye, daring him to make a deal out of her privilege. “The neon sign? My dad bought it. It’s hanging in our cottage in the Muskokas.”
Hubert, Etc kept his face still. “I’d like to see it someday,” he said, evenly. He waited for Seth to say something.
“My name’s Seth, not Steve.” The shit-eating grin was unmistakable. He reached across the table and twiddled Natalie’s order, dragging a copy of it over to his place-setting.
“What the hell.” Hubert, Etc grabbed Seth’s order and copied it to his place-setting, too. He tapped the large-sized coffium-pot and Natalie smacked her palm down on the submit.
“Come on,” Natalie said. “Say it.”
Hubert, Etc said, “Nothing to say. Your family knows the Westons.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We do. We’re foofs.”
Hubert, Etc nodded as if he knew what that meant, but Seth had no shame. “What’s a foof?”
“Fine old Ontario family,” she said.
“Never heard the term,” Seth said.
“Me either.”
She shrugged. “You probably have to be a foof to know what a foof is. I got a lot of it at summer camp.”
The food arrived then, atop a trundling robot that docked with their table. They cleared its top layer, and it rotated its carousel for the next tray, then a third. The fourth had the coffium. Natalie set it on their table, and Hubert, Etc couldn’t help but admire her arm muscles as she set it down. He noticed she didn’t shave her armpits and felt unaccountably intimate in that knowledge. They sorted out the dishes and poured the coffee.