Gifted (3 page)

She sighs, weighty and sad.

Raj steps up. “Cover me,” he says through gritted teeth.

On cue, the whole group huddles close, blocking the circling 'razzi dragonfly drones from view while pressing ExoScreen cams against our thighs so no pix get out.

“Lookie what Papa Raj brought you,” he says and slips a slender silver bottle from his pocket. “My Plebe connection hooked me up with some fine black-market Juse.”

Without hesitation, everyone shoves a glass close to the bottle. Raj tops us all off, then we toast once again. “Down the hatch!” Raj says. In unison we toss back our drinks, smack our lips, and wait for the night to get much more interesting.

 

ZIMRI

On stage at
Nowhere, under one bright light, sweat pours into my eyes as the music pours out of me. My mother, Rainey, and Dorian's father, Marley, dug this place out of the riverbank before we were born. They made their own music here for years, then abandoned it to the frozards and squimonks when my mother disappeared. I rediscovered it a year ago and have been putting on concerts ever since, but tonight is the first time Dorian's played with me.

Although the space is small and cramped wall-to-wall with black-masked people, it feels like a cathedral to me. Dorian and I go from one song to the next, pushed forward by the backing tracks I prerecorded and his driving beats. When I sing, the crowd moves with me like beads of water drawn together to form a puddle. I tilt left. They tilt left. I bounce up and down and so do they. I lift my arms. Arms go up. They hang on my words, listening to me sing about working Plebes like us, perpetually treading water so we don't drown, a feat my father couldn't manage. The terror and thrill that we could all be caught at an illegal concert feeds the frenzy from first song to the last. And when the final note reverberates over the crowd, Dorian and I both yell, “Thank you!” then bolt offstage while everybody else streams out the door like floodwater spilling over the riverbank into the night, as black as the masks we all wear to protect our identities.

Dorian and I work quickly to dismantle any evidence of what went on here tonight. We haul the pallets out back. Take apart the lights. Carefully fold up the canvas curtain and put it, along with the ancient equipment, in an alcove my mother so cleverly constructed to hide all of her ramshackle instruments, mixing boards, turntables, laptops, and headphones back in the day. When we're done, the only things left of this evening are the audio and video recordings that I hold in my hands.

“What will you do with those?” Dorian asks. He slumps against the wall like he just worked a double at the warehouse, his dark skin sheened with sweat beneath bleached blond dreds. But in his shiny silver pants he's every ounce the rock star.

“I'll release the audio tomorrow,” I tell him, and stick the little digital recorder in my pocket. “If that's okay with you.”

“Far be it from me to stop a pirate,” he says with a laugh.

I grin. After my mother left, I took one of her old transmitters to Tati who helped me get it up and running with a few spare parts scavenged from the electronics dump. Tati showed me how to hook up an antenna so I could start my own pirate radio broadcasts. For the first year, I used it only to search for my mother. “Rainey, this is your daughter Zim, come in Rainey. Please come in.” Then I'd sing sad songs that she loved—Sarah Vaughn, Mavis Staples, Mary J. Blige, Trinity, Libellule—like a siren trying to lure a sailor back to the rocky shore.

One day Marley pulled me aside. He squatted down with his hands on his knees so we were eye to eye. “I heard you on the air,” he told me, which made my cheeks burn red. I hadn't thought about other people scanning the waves with the black-market receivers they bought from Tati and hid inside their PODs. “You have to stop. You don't have a license and you're broadcasting music you don't own the rights to.”

“I'm just trying to find her,” I told him.

“Honey.” He put his hand on my shoulder, which made me feel small. “If your mother wanted to be found…”

I squirmed away. I didn't need him to finish that sentence but right then and there I knew that the music I'd make had to be for someone other than my mother.

“I just hope we pulled in enough,” I say to Dorian. I never ask for money when I put on a show, but people leave it anyway and since I don't really need it, I give it to someone who does. “Levon's son, Luka, is coming home from the MediPlex tomorrow but Levon says the prosthetic leg is terrible. The kid can barely walk.”

“Did they ever catch the person who ran him over?” Dorian asks.

I scoff. “Of course not. Just some Plute plowing down the road out by the river where Levon's son was riding his bike. At least the guy had the decency to drop the kid at the MediPlex, but then he took off like he'd dumped a half-dead dog.”

Dorian shakes his head, disgusted by the same old story of Plute versus Plebe. “Do we take the money to Levon then?”

“It's already gone,” I tell him and he frowns. “Hey,” I say. “The less you know about it…”

“I get it,” he says. “If we never touch the money, no one can say we profited, right?”

I nod. “But don't fool yourself. Even if we don't have cash in hand, what we're doing isn't exactly legal.”

He shrugs as if he doesn't care, then points to the video cam in my hand. “What about that?”

I toss it up and down, catching the little orb in my palm where it fits so well. “It didn't work. I checked the laptop but there's nothing on it. I'll ask Tati to look at it the next time I see her.”

I look over the empty room. What felt like a sacred space when we were on stage has returned to a small, cramped dugout with a low ceiling and musty dank air. “Want to get out of here?” I ask.

“Let's go,” says Dorian.

*   *   *

Outside by the river, it's a good fifteen degrees cooler, which is nice after the stuffy air of Nowhere. And it smells good, too. Like moss on damp rocks. The moon has come up bright, making the path along the river glow soft yellow. I miss Brie then. She usually waits for me beneath the big willow tree after a show so we can walk home together, but she got demoted back to nights at the warehouse after missing three days of work with the flu last week. Now, I can't even ping her because they block our HandHeld signals while we're on the clock. That's the hardest part of being on opposite shifts. I've barely talked to my best friend all week!

Dorian picks up his bike, hidden in the reeds. “Want a ride?”

I climb on behind him and balance with my hands on his hips. He's gotten tall and solid, like a sturdy tree. And there's something about the way he holds his shoulders, back and down with his chin up, that hits me in the belly like a pebble in a puddle, sending ripples to the edges of my skin. I shake off that feeling because it's stupid. We've known each other since we were born.

As we ride along the river path, I listen to the squee and squonk of his bike chain, then make those the backbeat to a rhythm I tap on Dorian's hipbones. He keeps the pedals going, perfectly in time to the click of delivery drones taking off every other second from the mammoth Corp X warehouse roof. Squee and squonk and squee and squonk and zoom and zoom. Squee and squonk and squee and squonk and zoom and zoom. Dor adds his bike bell at the end, ting ting. I shoosh my feet in the gravel—shup shup—and he finds a bright screech on his brakes. I match the note, A#, sing a riff of nonsense as we ride along until he hits the brakes hard and I slam into his back.

“What the…!” I peel myself away from his sweaty shirt.

“Look at that!” He straddles the bike and points to the sky where a giant bird lifts off from the top of a tree. It glides out over the willows standing along the bank like tired women hanging their heads after a long day at work.

I slide off the back of the bike and hurry to the edge of the path. “Come on!” Dorian drops his bike and we scamper down a slope to see where the bird has landed. Halfway down, Dorian loses his footing and ends up on his rear, hollering, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” as he grasps for tree roots to slow himself down. I catch him by the back of the shirt. His arms windmill as he teeters on the edge of the bank.

“Whew, thanks, I almost took the plunge!” He stiffens. “Oh, god, sorry … I…”

“There!” I point, not interested in his apology for my family history. In the center of the river, the heron tiptoes through the water, silently hunting for its supper. “I haven't seen one of those in years,” I whisper and plop down on a soft tuft of grass to take off my shoes. I slide my feet into the river. The cool water swirls around my legs and carries away the aches and pains of a full day running in the warehouse plus all that stomping on stage. Curious little frozards nibble on the ends of my wriggling toes, like tiny kisses from my father sending his love up from the depths.
Hi, Papa,
I say inside my head, but I don't cry anymore when I'm here. It's been five years since he took the plunge.

“Nonda told me that when she was a kid, there were creatures out here that we don't have anymore,” I say to Dorian. “Things like foxes and beavers. Or separate species, like there were coyotes and wolves or squirrels and chipmunks. Those were all different things before Corp X came along and everything got squished together.”

“I think your Nonda makes things up.” Dorian squats beside me. In the dusky light, with a stick in his hands, he looks more like the kid I remember from when we were little and everybody played together in the Youth Activity & Recreation Domain, not the person he's become, tall and lanky, all arms and legs, his face rearranging itself into an adult version of himself. When he turned fifteen, he got a job on the warehouse box-packing line because he tested high for spatial reasoning skills.

I sing a song about an old man river and kick arcs of water in the air. I'm still jacked up from the show and can't quite settle my brain or stop the adrenaline pumping through my body. I feel like grabbing the heron and twirling around, singing at the top of my lungs, dancing across the riverbank, climbing trees, swinging on the moon. “I wish I could perform every night!” I say.

“Every night?” says Dorian. “Sounds exhausting.”

“Not to me.” I stare out at the swirling water below, always moving forward, and I imagine a life on the road like the old-time musicians on tour—going from town to town, a different venue every night. “Making music makes me happier than anything else in life,” I say, my dreams clouding up my voice. “You can't touch it or live inside of it. Music can't protect you from the wind or rain. It's not like we can eat it or drink it. But if I suddenly had no music in my life, I think that I might die.”

“You'd die?” Dorian teases.

“Shut up,” I say and bump his shoulder with mine.

“Yeah, well, you better be careful, Zimri Robinson,” Dorian warns. “If you get caught, you know what happens.” He presses his fingers into my temples. “Bzzzt!” he says. “They'll zap your brain!”

I knock his hand away. “Nonda says I was born in the wrong era. Just like my mom.”

“Or maybe we were born on the wrong side of the river.” Dorian tosses his stick. It makes a gentle splash that scares the heron into flight.

Bye bye birdie,
I sing inside my head as we both look out across the wide, dark expanse of water to the road on the other side. The road that leads out. My father hated being a warehouse picker. Sucked his soul clean dry. It gets to some people—packing up boxes of things we'll never own to send off to the Plutes in the City who expect everything dropped into their delivery chutes at the push of a button. Geographically, we aren't far from the City, but the distance between here and there is enormous for Plebes like us, which is why my father only made it to the middle of the river. My mother, though, got out.

“I still can't believe you asked me to play tonight,” Dorian says. “What if I'd been terrible?”

“Are you kidding?” I pull my legs out of the water and dry them with my socks. “You've been playing drums since you could walk.” I reach up for his hand. “You're Marley's son, after all.”

Our parents taught us a history of the world in music. From blues to jazz to rock to hip-hop and rap, from trance to dance and dub, from calypso to ska to reggae, through punk and emo and tech, from blather to echo and Sparkle Jam. They claimed music went bad after the 2065 pay-for-play technology went into effect. And who could blame them? I think people of their generation lost the most. One minute nearly all music was at their fingertips; the next, listeners couldn't own any recordings. Music lovers like them must have felt bereft.

Dorian pulls me to stand and leans in closer so our heads nearly touch. I can smell the river on his skin and see the moisture above his top lip. “Why'd you ask me to play tonight? Why now?”

I swallow hard because I don't have a good answer. I've been watching him at the warehouse lately, curious about who he's become. “I just thought it would be more fun with another person.” I hear my voice go shaky, which seems odd—not to mention embarrassing. My palm is sweaty in his grip and my body tingles and feels warm at the same time.

Then his arm is around my shoulder. Resting there like it belongs, and I feel something shift inside of me. Like a switch gets flipped and suddenly I'm not standing here with somebody I grew up beside but with someone new and undiscovered.

The peepers and crickets and whippoorwills are in full chorus. A breeze kicks up, bringing along the smells of mucky water, green leaves, and sweet blossoms. “Have you ever heard anything so beautiful?” I whisper.

Dorian inhales deeply. I feel the heat coming off of his body, wrapping itself around my skin. “Yes,” he says. I hear him swallow, lick his lips. Then he says, “You singing.”