The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Angie giggled and licked her lips. She has a really dirty mind. Carter, who’s sort of a goody-goody even though he’s on the football team, said, “It’s none of our business. And she was just a little kid.”

“So?” Angie smirked. “You never heard of pedophiles?”

Hannah said, “Pedophile aliens? Grow up, Angie.”

Jack said, “She’s kind of cute.”

“I thought you wanted a virgin, Jack,” Angie said, still smirking.

Carter said, “Oh, give her a break. She just moved here, after all.”

I watched Kyra walk uncertainly toward the cafeteria tables. The monitors were keeping a close eye on everybody. We have monitors everywhere, just like the street has National Guard everywhere. Clean up America, my ass. Kyra squinted; she’s near-sighted and doesn’t like to wear her contacts because she says they itch. I ducked lower over my milk.

Angie said, “Somebody told me Kyra Lunden is your cousin.”

Everybody’s head jerked to look at me. Damn that bitch Angie! Where had she heard that? Mom had promised me that nobody in school would know and Kyra wouldn’t say anything! She and Aunt Julie had to move, Mom and Dad said, because Aunt Julie was having a rough time since the divorce and she needed to be close to her sister, and I should understand that. Well, I did, I guess, but not if Kyra blasted in and ruined everything for me. This was my school, not hers, I spent a lot of time getting into the good groups, the ones I was never part of in junior high, and no pathetic famous cousin was going to wreck that. She couldn’t even dance.

Jack said, “Kyra Lunden is your cousin, Amy? Really?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Angie said, “That’s not what I heard.”

Carter said, “So it’s just gossip? You can hurt people that way, Angie.”

“God, Carter, don’t you ever let up? Holier-than-thou!”

Carter mottled red. Hannah, who likes him even though Carter doesn’t know it, said, “It’s nice that some people at least try to be kind to others.”

“Spit it in your soup, Hannah,” Angie said.

Jack and Hannah exchanged a look. They really make the decisions for the group, and for a bunch of other groups, too. Angie’s too stupid to realize that, or to realize that she’s going to be oozed out. I don’t feel sorry for her. She deserves it, even if being oozed is really horrible. You walk through the halls alone, and nobody looks directly at you, and people laugh at you behind your back because you can’t even keep your own friends. Still, Angie deserves it.

Hannah looked at me straight, with that look Jack calls her “police interrogation gaze.” “Amy… is Kyra Lunden your cousin?”

Kyra sat alone at one end of a table. A bunch of kids, the really cobra ones that run the V-R lab, sat at the other end, kind of laughing at her without laughing. I saw Eleanor Murphy, who was elected Queen of V-R Gala even though she’s only a junior, give Kyra a long cool level look and then turn disdainfully away.

“No,” I said, “I already told you. She’s not my cousin. In fact, I never even met her.”

2018

I stared at the villa with disbelief. Not at the guards-everywhere rich is guarded now, we’re a nation of paranoids, perhaps not without reason. There seems no containing the lunatic terrorists, home-grown patriotic militias, White Supremacists and Black Equalizers, not to mention the run-of-the-mill gangs and petty drug lords and black-market smugglers. Plus, of course, the government’s response to these, which sometimes seems to involve putting every single nineteen-year-old in the country out on the streets in camouflage-except, of course, those nineteen-year-olds who are already bespoken as lunatic terrorists, home-grown militia, White Supremacists, et al. The rest of us get on with our normal lives.

So the guards didn’t surprise me-the villa did. It was a miniaturized replica of a Forbidden City palace-in Minnesota.

The chief guard caught me gaping at the swooping curved roof, the gilded archways, the octagonal pagoda. “Papers, please?”

I pulled myself together and looked professional, which is to say, not desperate. I was desperate, of course. But not even Kyra was going to know that.

“I am Madame Lunden’s cousin,” I said formally, “Amy Parker. Madame Lunden is expecting me.”

Forget inscrutable Chinese-the guard looked as suspicious as if I’d said I was a Muslim Turkic Uighur. He examined me, he examined my identity card, he ran the computer match on my retina scan. I walked through metal detectors, explosive residue detectors, detector detectors. I was patted down thoroughly but not obscenely. Finally he let me through the inner gate, watching me all the way through the arch carved with incongruous peacocks and dragons.