Platformed: A Novel, page 11
30
The morning’s torrential downpour had faded into a light rain, so subtle it could only be seen in the streetlights. Sara’s hair twinkled with a thousand tiny water droplets.
Groups of people converged on a restaurant that was set up far fancier than she remembered. Tables were draped with white tablecloths, glasses sparkled in artificial candlelight, and throngs of people in cheap black clothes mingled. The lights were dimmed low and the place settings shone.
“Look, I think she got some mascara,” Alexa whispered, nodding to a dark-haired woman as she passed.
“Her eyelashes might just be like that,” Sara replied.
Alexa inclined her head in thought. “That’s why I got red lipstick,” she replied. “So no one could possibly say that about me.”
“If that’s your goal, you should probably have gone for black.”
Alexa laughed. “But I also wanted to look good!”
Just then, Drew materialized out of the crowd with two other women Sara recognized from the group that morning, all in the same black dresses as Sara and Alexa.
“You guys look awesome!” said the tall Asian girl who Sara had given a hair tie that morning.
Sara indicated Alexa. “All her doing.”
“So lucky,” said the other woman, the redhead from their intro group. Sara would have pegged her for a counter-culture type based on her statement haircut and the telltale hole in her nose where a piercing once was. “My roommate is so—and I can’t believe I’m about to say this—straight edge.”
They all laughed, though Sara wasn’t totally sure why.
“See what I mean?” Alexa said, voice low so only Sara heard. “Just like high school.”
“You remember May and Lacey, right?” Drew said. The tall girl and the nose ring woman, respectively.
Sara nodded. “And this is my roommate, Alexa.”
Everyone exchanged pleasantries, then Drew asked, “Did you get caught in that storm this morning? You have to walk a long way.”
Sara shrugged. “It was refreshing.”
“Not my idea of refreshing,” Lacey said. “I want a fucking spa day.”
Laughter again. Sara joined in.
“Did you think this place was a luxury resort or something?” May asked.
“It is though,” Drew insisted. “Free food, free bed. Basically Disney World.”
“Last I checked Disney cost a couple hundred a day,” Lacey said.
“My point exactly,” Drew went on. “Maybe they have spas, but none of it’s free.”
“Right?” Alexa said. “I always heard there was no free lunch, but, well…”
Everyone laughed, including Sara, who didn’t even have to pretend that time. Though it was a bit of a sardonic laugh, all things considered—she’d lived a very free-lunch life for years working at startups and knew that there were always hidden costs.
Like slipping into dating the boss. This realization made her laugh even harder. She’d sublimated the weirdness there for so many years that it felt exhilarating to admit how weird it was, even to herself.
At the thought of him, she self-consciously glanced around for Zach. But she no longer really expected to see him. She’d come to the conclusion that he, like Bea, was not the kind of person the company would let in. Too much of a planner, too wedded to the idea of steering his own life, Zach would never be happy with all the strangeness within the Community, not like all of her new friends who seemed so grateful. Sara wondered what it said about her that she had been admitted.
Emily, though. If Sara belonged, then so did Emily.
Lacey announced that she was going to go get them drinks.
Sara wondered if she knew they were nonalcoholic but figured it didn’t matter. She’d read somewhere that if people thought they were getting drunk they would act as if they were. It was certainly cheaper that way.
“Did you ever go to Disney?” May was asking. “It was kind of a shit show, honestly.”
“How so? Crowds, fakeness?” Drew asked.
“Sounds familiar,” Sara said, gesturing around at the room.
Drew shook her head, still laughing. “I’m all for fakeness, I guess.”
Lacey returned, impossibly quickly, and distributed five identical glasses of amber liquid.
“How’d you carry so much?” Sara asked.
“Waitress for fifteen years, baby!” Lacey said. “Free at last, thank God.”
“What is it?” Alexa asked, sniffing.
“No idea,” Lacey said, sipping hers. “Tastes like sour honey, so basically, delicious.”
Sara rolled her eyes and tipped the glass back and forth. She’d had it thoroughly ingrained in her not to ever drink something she couldn’t identify, but knowing the Community, this was a safe time to start. An ice cube clinked in the glass.
“So, you were saying something about fakeness?” Lacey asked.
Laughter, then Drew saying, “Just comparing our lovely new home to Disneyland.”
Sara couldn’t tell if there was any sarcasm in her voice.
“I just love fake things,” Lacey said. When the group laughed, she held up a hand. “You think I’m kidding? I’m not even kidding. Listen.”
“Listening,” Alexa said.
This prompted even Lacey to laugh. “You got that joke a lot growing up?”
Alexa rolled her eyes. “No, seriously, I want to hear your paean to fakeness.”
“Paean?” Drew said.
“Right, you’re an English teacher,” Sara said, laughing at her.
“I know what it means!” Drew protested. “I’m just surprised she does! No offense.”
Alexa laughed loudly. Almost obnoxiously. “You don’t have to go to college to know things!”
Lacey took control of the conversation again. “Anyway, as I was saying,” she said, trying to sound annoyed and authoritative but barely containing her laughter. “I fucking love fakeness. Fake fur? Superior. Fake wood? Love that damn rain forest, leave it alone. Fake people? Hilarious!”
“You had me there until the end,” Drew said.
“To fakeness!” said May, lifting her drink in a toast.
To all that’s left, thought Sara, clinking her untouched drink against May’s.
She looked over May’s shoulder, deeper into the crowd, and the face she saw staring back made her forget to breathe.
Bea, decked out like one of the rejected girls in a glittery dress and full face of makeup, a plastic smile on her painted lips. Their eyes met and Sara’s jaw dropped.
31
Sara awoke early and could immediately tell that she wasn’t hungover in the least: confirmation that the alcohol was as fake as she had guessed.
At least no alarm had pulled her abruptly from sleep this time, so she snuggled back into her blankets and let them comfort her. Nothing like a bed in the morning to make everything feel perfect. When embraced by fabric and cushions, the haze of sleep still hovering around her, the rest of the world didn’t matter.
She couldn’t remember her dreams at all, which was unusual. Something about awakening without an alarm, she guessed. Her most recent dream taunted her, just outside her reach, its emotions—anticipation, mostly, but also joy—making her ache for the details. Probably it was something ridiculous, but still she wished to know.
If she could properly remember her dreams, she would understand herself better.
Eyes closed, she sent her mind off to wander, searching for what it conjured while she was out. Something about wood, its texture when you ran your hand along the grain. She felt like she should remember the smell of it—cedar? Fresh-cut bark? So many ways it might have smelled. Like a Christmas tree inside by the fire or like the wood in the fire itself. The healthy wash of broken boughs after a storm or the freshness of sawdust in her high school woodshop class.
But did dreams ever have aromas? Suddenly she found she didn’t know. This one hadn’t, and that made her sad.
The night before was a bit of a blur, melted into a montage even without the help of wine. She knew she’d spent hours laughing with that same group, but none of their conversation felt solid or real. All of it might have been a dream. Eventually Alexa’s friends walked past and for a while they were there, too, before Alexa wandered off with them.
Flashbacks to high school again, when the cool kids temporarily deemed her worth an interaction.
But why did she think that? There was nothing about Alexa and her friends that divided them from Sara. Everyone here had been equally selected.
They were, she decided, equally useless and bland. Not like some people.
After catching Bea’s eye during the toast, Sara had dashed off across the room in pursuit. She left the conversation in the middle without excusing herself, dodging laughing clusters of black-clad people, stepping carefully around untucked chairs and unattended tables. Practically climbing over a deadlock of wooden furniture and well-dressed human legs.
She figured Bea would wait for her, but when Sara reached the place where her friend had stood, she was gone.
Sara had felt like the party spun around her, nondescript music that she had just noticed drifting through the throng of sameness, voices just loud enough to be annoying but not so loud that she would ever be moved to complain. All of it swirled together into something utterly familiar and forgettable and real.
Had she actually seen Bea? She wanted to be sure, but she wasn’t at all.
32
Four years before the Community
The music that had been playing through her earbuds cut off when Sara answered the phone, replaced by her mother’s voice.
“You doing okay, sweetie?”
“Let’s just cut straight to it, then?”
She could practically hear her mother rolling her eyes. “You can’t blame me for worrying.”
Sara looked up from the cutting board and out the window. The smoke was so thick that she couldn’t even see across the courtyard outside her apartment. “I guess I can’t.”
“So?”
She laughed a little and resumed mincing garlic. The whole apartment smelled comfortingly of tomato sauce and onions, simmering in the pan. “I’m fine, Mom. I have an air purifier running in every room.”
“Are the filters fresh?”
“I’d hope so,” Sara replied. She pulled a pot out of the cabinet and started filling it with water for pasta. “I just bought them this week.”
Her mother sighed. “I wish you were here.” The air wasn’t much better there, but her mom just wanted her close.
Sara smiled and leaned against the counter, gazing across the open-plan apartment to the window. The smoke outside didn’t curl prettily like she would have imagined; it just hung there, chokingly, hiding the world. She’d lived with this for her entire life, so it was familiar in a broken way, but somehow it still managed to surprise her how dead it looked every time. “I know, Mom. I wish I were there too. I saw on an air quality map that you guys had breathable air yesterday!”
“You say that like it’s funny, Sara,” her mom chided her. “It’s not funny.”
“I know,” she said. “I get it. But it is a little funny—I live in the richest county in America and can’t even breathe the air! What the hell are we paying for, anyway?”
“Not to mention the air quality laws,” her mom said. “Did you see the mayor of San Francisco’s trying to ban cars in the city?”
Sara snorted. “Like that’ll help.”
She stirred the sauce and listened to her mother breathe. Something about talking to her mom always calmed her down, like she was still a child and all it took to make everything okay was her mother’s word. The truth was, she had been freaking out before her mom called—this air had made her new apartment a prison cell.
As if she could read her mind, her mom asked, “How are you liking the new place otherwise?”
“Oh, I love it,” she gushed. “The carpet in the bedroom is so plush and the water pressure is amazing. I feel like I’m living in the nicest hotel I’ve ever been to.”
“I suppose you haven’t tried the pool yet, if you can’t go outside.”
The pool had been a major point in the apartment’s favor. She didn’t strictly need such a nice place, and there were plenty of apartments just as close to work that cost several hundred dollars per month less. But the pool looked amazing and made her think back fondly to her childhood on the swim team. She told herself, when she signed the lease, that if she had a pool right outside her door she would actually exercise regularly.
“No, but the smoke will clear up soon enough,” she said. She hoped, anyway.
“I can’t wait to visit,” her mom said.
“Give me some time to set it up properly first!” Sara protested, dumping pasta into the pot.
The apartment was still mostly empty; she’d only lived with her parents or roommates before and didn’t have much of her own furniture. She’d considered buying it all online but was trying to use fewer resources. Buying things in a store was better for that, she figured, with last mile problems and such.
“Well, just let me know when and we’ll drive down,” her mom said. “And, honey, you know you can come up anytime, too. Are they making you go into the office when it’s this bad?”
The conversation hadn’t stayed away from the smoke for long, Sara thought wryly. It made its presence unavoidable. No one could really talk about—or even think about—anything else. What might the world look like if important things were so omnipresent?
“Nah, I’m working from home. Good thing my internet is fast here.”
“So you could come home!”
Sara pulled a noodle from the boiling water and tasted it. While she chewed, she said, “I guess.”
“You don’t want to?” Her mom sounded more surprised than insulted, which was a relief.
“It just seems like an overreaction.”
“This is a natural disaster, Sara!” her mom protested. “If it was a hurricane, wouldn’t you run?”
Sara laughed. “It’s not nearly as bad as a hurricane.”
Her mom sighed, knowing she wasn’t going to win this one. “Anyway, honey, I have to go—the dog’s losing his mind about something.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Come here if you want to!”
“I said I love you!”
Her mom laughed, finally. “Love you too.”
When she hung up the phone, the music did not resume. Her wireless earbuds suddenly felt ridiculous, hanging uselessly from her ears. The silence came rushing in like smoke.
She turned away from the window and took a deep breath of the stale indoors air. It would smell like tomato sauce until the smoke cleared and she could open a window. And who knew how long that would be?
With a sigh, she served herself a bowl of spaghetti and sauce, forking some chicken out of a can into the warm food. Pathetic, boring, eating alone kind of dinner. She hadn’t even bought cheese.
She thought about pouring herself a glass of wine—red was good with tomato sauce, right?—but decided that would be silly. Even the nice bottle of wine she’d gotten for graduation and not drunk in the two years since couldn’t dress up such a lame dinner. Better to save it for an occasion that deserved it.
She carried her meal around the counter and into the living room, which had only a bookshelf, a rug, and a coffee table, and sat cross-legged on the floor facing the window. The evening light filtering through the toxic smoke was oddly beautiful—a rich purplish color that she might have liked if she hadn’t known what it was.
The weather alert on her phone that morning said the fires reached some kind of manufacturing facility and that the air was even worse than it seemed, which prompted Zach to tell people to stay home. But she imagined the chemicals in the air weren’t any worse than after flames devoured a neighborhood, gulping down paint and bathroom cleaner and synthetic fabric.
If a fire consumed her apartment, how many toxins would it release into the air? More than she wanted to think about. The rug she sat on was plastic and so was the fake wood of the floor. Now that she thought about it, so was the veneer of the coffee table where she sat.
She was suddenly repulsed by the things around her, so much fakeness, artificial coatings and carefully engineered designs that she was supposed to love. Who decided petroleum should reach into everything she touched?
But she was lucky, even if everything was flammable. She should stop thinking about depressing things that she couldn’t do anything about.
She took a deep breath again, relishing that the air didn’t burn at her lungs or taste terrible in her mouth. Some people had lost their homes this summer, like every summer for the last twenty years. The seasonal lottery that no one ever thought they’d lose.
If only it would rain. She willed the smoke to morph into clouds, wished she could make such a thing happen. The fires, like each one before, would only end when the rains came and washed the world clean. Wind might blow the smoke away, but only rain could actually cleanse it from the air. Otherwise, it would always become someone else’s problem.
If she’d believed praying would do any good, she would have prayed. Instead, she just ate her spaghetti and hoped a storm would roll in soon.
33
“Brunch?” Alexa asked.
Sara blinked a few times, clearing her bleary morning eyes, and sat up. She’d fallen asleep again, apparently. “What?”
Alexa was already dressed—in the black dress from the night before—and had her hair in a high ponytail as if going to the gym. “I’m thinking omelets. You in?”
Sara almost said no, but then considered how stupid that would be and nodded instead. If she didn’t go with Alexa, she’d just have to go by herself later. “Give me a sec.”
The clock in her peripheral vision said it was past ten in the morning, which she probably would have guessed by the brilliance of the sun coming in the window. How had she slept through that?
