Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Dray’s already loped past us into the reefhouse, crowing about throwing some ball on the wall screens, about cracking the 18-and-up thumblock on the minibar.

Me and Wyatt follow him in, backs of our hands not quite touching.

We decide to swim while there’s still sun, so the three of us grab trunks and dart off through the backdoor of the house, which shutters shut behind us, and out to the pale gray beach.

There’s a rusty booth for skinspray, because the water’s not so user friendly anymore, even though it’s not as bad as that webdoc where they pull that pilot whale out the Pacific and its hide is all bubbling and falling off in chunks.

Wyatt strips down as pasty as ever and me and Dray bust him on it like always, like whoa, polar bear , and it feels like a standard scene except Wyatt doesn’t go red and squirm like usual, instead just smiles this new kind of smile I can’t quite find the word for.

Dray molds a handful of the gritty orange skinspray to his crotch while the gel is setting, so he comes out of the booth with this wobbly skinspray cock hanging off him. We splash around in the waves, dunking each other and pretending to drown to fuck with the little paddlebot lifeguard, until Dray’s fake dick dissolves and the water gets chilly enough to slice under the sunshine and turn my toes all thick and cold.

Then we slosh out back to the sand and camp down, talking shit about the NBA draft and that seven-footer from Chad who doesn’t want to get a nerve mesh for like, religious reasons. Then about the two girls a little ways off who are cam-chatting someone in a foreign language. They’re both wearing black bikinis and one has an animated tattoo of a flowering vine slithering up and down her leg, which makes Dray pantomime humping his towel.

Wyatt is laughing and seems fully normal, even though I wikied all this shit about post-Edit malaise, how people feel like they lost their phone, but in their head, and they’re patting every part of their brain trying to find it. And his mom, when she chatted me, she said that he might be sad. Might be distant.

But everything seems alright. We talk shit. We laugh. We pick skinspray off ourselves and flick it at each other.

Eventually Dray can take the tattoo no more, and he pressgangs Wyatt and me to go mack on the girls with him. They turn out to be Finnish, holidaying for the summer, and also sisters. Both of them speak airtight English, but that doesn’t stop Dray from pulling up Finnish-English babel apps so he can goof on them with some butchered phrases like “your smile gives me butterflies” and “are you into four-ways.”

Normally Wyatt would just be basing him, but this time he dives right in, touching the tattoo girl’s arm, winking, getting both of them to laugh. Like he’s just realizing for the first time that he’s tall and rich and handsome.

Eventually I get bored and slide off back to the water. From a distance I can tell the Finnish girls are still digging Wyatt, but the one who was giving me looks before points over to me and I hear:

“Your friend? What of your friend?”

Dray looks back and throws me a salute, then says, “Not his thing, yo. Pink is not his favorite color.”

Him and Wyatt come join me a minute later with Finns in phone.

“They’re not twins, but whatever, right?” Dray says, shrugging. “Still sexy.”

Somehow, nonverbally, it is cement that Wyatt gets the girl with the tat, whose name is Viivi, and Dray gets the younger sister, whose name is Heli.

“Viivi’s got a tight little ass on her,” Wyatt says, looking at me when he says it with an edge I am not used to hearing. “Can’t wait to plow that shit.” He thumps my shoulder, like I’m in on it, and lies back in the sand. He stays eyes shut and smiling until his parents skype to check in on him, then he knocks us fists and heads down the beach with his phone.

For a while me and Dray talk about a Bulls-Satellites final, how brag it would be for Thon Maker to finally get a ring. Before we knew Wyatt, me and Dray were best friends. Same shitty burb, same shitty elementary, playing pick up on the big cement block behind the school with its one rusty hoop.

“His shoulders are different,” Dray breaks out. “Used to slouch them when he asked a question, like, trying to suck it back in.”

Dray’s smart. A lot of people don’t know that.

“Smiles different, sometimes,” I say. “You ask what all they did?”

“No, bru. You should ask.” He pauses. “If you could get Edited, what would you change? Like, if you could Edit anything you wanted.”

I watch Wyatt dragging his feet in the wet surf, shoulders thrust back. I think about my cramped shitty house that he still treats like a museum, like, afraid to touch shit, peering out of the corner of his eye at the mold bloom on my ceiling and the bare wiring on the walls. I would want to make it so I didn’t notice that. Or notice how his parents look at me sideways sometimes, or how he talks so different with his rich boys.

“I’d be funny,” Dray says. “Like, really funny. Really sharp. Always say the smart thing. That’d be brag.”

“You are funny, shithead.”

“But, like, really funny,” Dray insists. “What would you get?”

“Nothing, bru,” I say, tucking my hands under my head. “Don’t be fucking with perfection.”

We go back to the reefhouse once Wyatt’s done his skype. Then we dig the other Coronas out of the fridge, which is one of those sexy gel fridges where the stuff hangs suspended in little air bubbles, and fire up the hot tub.

The scaldy hot water and the glacial beer do their thing, and the steam cloud makes it feel easier to ask questions. When Dray heads off to take a piss, I turn to Wyatt and tap my temple.

“What all did they change when they went in there, Y?”

Wyatt’s head lolls back on the edge. “Just a basic Edit, mostly,” he says. “Chemo plug for anti-anxiety. Some body language modulation. Bigger memory retention, better spatial reasoning.” He goes quiet for a second. “And I don’t feel things as hard. Like, the shitty things. Bad memories. I remember feeling bad, but I don’t feel bad remembering. Yeah?”

Our legs brush together under the water, hairs all swirling up on each other.

“And the good ones?” I say.

“Success, boys,” Dray announces, back with a shit-eating grin and a frosty bottle of Jäger. “Thought I was going to have to go chop someone’s thumb off.” Wyatt shifts over to make room, and Dray ends up between us.

He throws his chats with the Finnish girls up on the wallscreen, so we all get to witness the slow erosion of their plan to sneak out and meet us. By this time we are all tranqed enough to not care, not that I ever did.

“Still a brag first night,” Wyatt says. “Like old times, yeah?”

“Brag,” Dray says. “I’m going to have a place like this when I’m rich, yo. And I’ll fly them Finns over on sub-orbital.”

Wyatt does that new smile again, and I lock down the word for it: permissive. It rubs me so wrong I take two chugs in a row trying to get the happy feeling back.

It works: soon we’re all laughing, all blurred, and it feels almost like we’re drinking for the first time again. I remember Wyatt slipped his parents some bullshit about a midnight pick-up game and instead we all got pulped at this party, and Wyatt finally admitted he never invited us over after ball because he was ashamed of his big swanky house, and I almost hit him then, but by the end of the night we were all level.

That’s when I started liking him, I think. Not just for setting screens tight but also for his slow-mo straight face jokes and the way he flopped his arm around me to slur secrets. I slurred some back, and in a week it got so my hands had a particular zone on his hipbones and kissing him was easy. When my sister got fucked up bad on pills and had to go to emerg, for some reason I told Wyatt first. He came over to the hospital still digging the crusts out of his eyes.