John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

I’d known Sherman for a long time. We’d grown up as next-door neighbors, had gone to the same schools, had the same teachers. This year we were both taking Twenty-Five Places That Will Blow Your Mind (geography) and Six Equations You Won’t Believe (precollege math) and You’ll Have Itchy Eyes After Reading These Heartbreaking Stories (AP English). We did everything together, and even though he was a little higher stat than I was, he never made me feel weird about it.

“C’mon, Sherman. Don’t just stand there squirting in silent pain. Tell your pal Deni what’s wrong.”

He wheezed a while longer, really laboring. Then, like a miserable little volcano, he let it out: “My family lost stat yesterday.”

The cold hand of dread fondled my knee. “How much stat?”

“All of it. Every last little bit. We got zeroed out.”

Startled, I impulse squirted and missed the congealer entirely. Biscuit slew landed on the floor.

“My mom lost her job,” he explained. “And my dad gained nine pounds. My sister got more zits. The swimming pool water was yellow when the Stat Commission came to audit. It was a bunch of stuff. Just a perfect storm of bad stat presentation.” He rubbed his forearm across his nose. “I might as well be dead.”

I could only agree with him.

Stat was determined by a complicated algorithm that factored in wealth, race, genealogy, fat-to-muscle ratio, dentition, and dozens of other variables from femur length to facial symmetry to skull contours. It was determined by the attractiveness of one’s house. The suitability of one’s car. You could lose stat from a bad haircut. You could lose it by showing up to school with food slew on your blouse. I had done that once during freshman year and never gained it back.

Stat was the cornerstone of our great meritocracy.

In olden days, one of the worst punishments society could exact upon you was outlawing. It meant you were literally outside the law. You had no privileges, no protections, no rights. Anyone could just up and kill you without consequence. Being declared no-stat was a lot like that. Without stat, Sherman’s family would lose everything. Their house. The right to wear current fashions. To see the latest movies. To vote. And I could lose stat of my own just by being friends with a no-stat person.

My heart felt like a clammy potato. What was happening to my friend was worse than death. It was erasure.

I scraped congealed slew off the congealer, dumped it into various containers, and sent it down the slew chute to the drive-thru window.

“I just don’t know what to do,” Sherman said, squirting and wheezing.

I felt something surging within me like high-pressure burger slew through a lunch rush gun. This was a new feeling. A powerful feeling. The feeling that I could do something to break the patterns of my life and take Sherman along with me. The feeling that I could make a difference.

I was such an idiot.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” I declared. Sherman looked up from his station. Doubt and hope warred on his face. “We’re going to save your life.”

The next morning the alarm nagged me awake before dawn. It was early enough to hear the drones arrive, their rotors hurling morning birds from their paths. Delivery portals in the rooftops opened like flower petals and the drones dropped statpacks from their bomb bays. All over the division, people rushed to see what they’d been supplied with. I was usually in no hurry, but I needed to get an early start, so I gathered my share of my family’s package and brought it to my room.

My stat was pretty low, so as usual it was knockoff-brand shoes, last month’s cutoff jeans, and a shirt the exact same brown as my skin. I could already hear the kids in the school halls calling me Miss Monochrome. There were keys for the day’s new music releases from Top Three Radio, and some movies I didn’t really want to see and nobody else did either.

But I was lucky. It could have been worse. This morning, for the first time since he was born, Sherman would get nothing.

I said goodbye to my family: my mom and dad and sister, just noises and voices behind closed bathroom doors. Showers. Hair dryers. Giggles and high jinks from Morning Hard News. I wondered if I’d ever hear them again. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I went next door to collect Sherman.

He was something of a demoralized wreck. My clothes were low-stat fashion, but he was literally wearing the same thing he wore yesterday. His hair was literally the same old parrot yellow. Yesterday’s color. The sight of him only steeled my resolve. I could not let him live like this.

We loaded ourselves into my scuffed-up three-wheel grandma car and set out down the long, curving roads of our division.

We passed Cedar Grove Lane and Cedar Grove Court and Cedar Grove Place and Cedar Grove Way and made our way out to Cedar Grove Avenue.

We drove by Peevs Drugs, and Peevs Market, and Peevs Quik Oil and Tune-up, and Peevs 24-Hour Whatevers, and I didn’t even slow down at Peevs Burgers.

“Don’t you have breakfast shift in an hour?” Sherman said.

Sherman no longer worked at Peevs. They’d scrapped him when he lost his stat.

“I called in sick. This is more important.”

I grinned, thinking Sherman would thank me, but he only looked at me with something between wonder and disgust.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I continued past the little circle of bricks and the water feature and the grass you weren’t allowed to picnic on that marked the border of our division. “Taking a hit for a friend is never a mistake.” That was a line from Bomm and Gunn, the first movie Sherman and I ever saw together at the Peevs Cinnecle. Bomm says it to Gunn, and then they both get shot to death by a gang of mutant cool kids. They go down with their middle fingers raised. Slow motion and everything.

It’s pretty romantic.

Sherman just sighed from the passenger seat. “You’re a pal,” he said. Which were Gunn’s last words, spoken through a dazzling arterial mist.

What I remember more than the movie was the popcorn. I couldn’t afford any and Sherman could, so Sherman sprang for a big tub and shared it with me. That’s the kind of thing that makes friends for life.

Sherman inserted my stereo key into the stereo and futilely searched the Top Three stations for anything other than the top three hits. “So what’s the plan?”

“We’re going to go see Miss Spotty Pants.”

“Your… dog?”

“Miss Spotty Pants will know how to help us,” I said, ignoring Sherman’s tone of disbelief. There is little room for disbelief on a quest, I feel.

Sherman shook his head and made wheezy sounds of exasperation. “Then this isn’t really about me and my stat. This is about you and your dog.”

“It’s about both of us, okay?”

Sherman stayed quiet a long time, thinking it over. “Okay, Deni,” he said at last. “Okay. I fully support you in your misguided effort to redress injustices perpetrated against us.”

I glanced at him. “Really?”

He shrugged. “Sure, why not? I’m no-stat. What have I got to lose?”

And so, after going past another Peevs Drugs and Peevs 24-Hour Whatevers, we arrived at Miss Spotty Pants’s house.

She lived in a very nice house. There were eight bushes in the front yard, whereas my house had only four. Pillars supported a little roof thing over the door, which I suppose protected people from rain and birds. The fake stones in the lower outside walls were more three-dimensional than my house’s fake stones.

The doorbell played some Bach or Beethoven or Boston or one of those other classical guys whose name starts with a B, and Miss Spotty Pants’s new owner opened the door.