Follow-Ups

Often I tell a story to show a snapshot of an idea, but since these are all real people they have continued their lives. Here's what happened to a few of them:

My friend from Jump is in a happy relationship which has lasted over a year. He bought a house, and they happily live together in it.

The man from the fruit stand in Better People never even called me back to say he didn't want to hire me, but I did get a job with one of the better respected computer-related companies in the world. Go figure.

I did in fact almost fail my background check, but not because of all the moving, but because it was a little tough to prove I ever worked for the feds. Crash sorted me out, he's the man.

The bounty hunting team lost. We were carrying the robot live (long story) and the motherboard shorted literally as we placed it on the competition field. We lost the competition but wound up with lots of interested sponsors. Pippin and I lost track of the team after that, he's still being completely absurd and enjoying it.

I'm no longer homeless. My first housemate I lived with for a year. He has a little dog, but it's well trained and well mannered. Now I live in another crazy community, but thankfully I don't have to run it, so I never feel like I have to stop anything from happening.

Being barefoot at my new job is much better tolerated.

I did call Nexus once when I needed a hand. He hung up.

Scavenging never goes out of style, the Torii and my new home both have furniture from the adventures with the feds.

Joat had a baby.

Magpie and Gilby lived together for a whole year. Impressively, nobody wound up getting punched, though there were a few close calls.

Gadget is still the politician, and is happily doing grad research.

Mime got her life together and is now getting licensed to do real estate. She's still boy-crazy, but I feel her taste has improved significantly.

My new meds cause me to bruise all the time now. Hilarity ensues. Related: I did lose the weight again, but I never managed to get my little plant.

3Stack runs the program I ran with the feds now. He's grown a lot in some ways, but is still a little silly.

My grandmother from Rice is fairing poorly, and has trouble remembering a lot now. She's scared, and we're trying to be comforting. My other grandma is comfortable and as happy as she can be, given the circumstances.

I do less breaking and entering now, and mostly scheme about taking over the world with varied success.

The project from Up is put on hold more or less indefinitely but has been absurdly educational.

Drummer's geographical challenges haven't prevented him from getting an extraordinarily respectable series of software jobs.

My friend from Las Vegas and I realized the situation was a little impractical but we're both still good friends and remain in touch.

Vex runs his own company now, where he makes tools that suck less.

Arbor totally still is bitter about that damn burrito. He ran into PJ recently and brought it up.

Eric

My room was a funny toothpaste shade of green and the closet door was white. Inside the closet was a tupperware tote which my mother encouraged me to store various artifacts of places I had been: movie ticket stubs and the like.

I was balanced carefully on the edge of the tote, leaning out as far as my short arms would permit while still holding on to the closet rod and not knocking any of the coat hangers off it. One of my mother's shirts formed a dress with a tie from my dad's closet as a belt, and my little pink toes curled around the rim of the tote as I waved a stick like a magic wand.

"Onward!" I shouted, and then, holding my wand in my teeth jumped from the tote to a chair in the middle of the room. The chair lurched from my inertia then stood still. Mime jumped on my bed and ran from end to end of it.

"Come on!" I called, waving the stick, having now regained my balance, "We have to escape the lava before the bad guys come back!"

"I can't. I'm locked in the dungeon."

"Well then I'll save you."

"Prince Eric has to save me."

"I don't want to be a prince, princes are boys."

"Fine then, but I'm going to get saved by him."

"Why?"

"Because he is my true love."

"We don't have anybody to play Prince Eric."

"He's like the bad guys, we don't need anybody to play him."

I was thoroughly unconvinced and so we played in the same room with the same story but not together. While I hopped around from unstable furniture item to unstable furniture item battling henchmen and solving puzzles that the evil genius had trapped us in, Mime paced her cell anxiously awaiting her savior.

***

We were playing approximately the same game again downstairs with me jumping from place to place. Mime was jumping on a couch.

"Are you waiting for Eric still?"

"He is my true love, he's going to save me."

"That's a really stupid game, it is always the same."

"No, it is fun, you should try it."

"Fine."

So we stood on the couch and paced and fretted, and she called "Eric, come save me!" so I shouted "Eric, come save me!"

"Eric can't come and save you."

"Why not?"

"He's my boyfriend, you need your own."

"He can't free both of us? We're in the same cell."

"That isn't how it works. My true love frees me, and yours frees you."

"That seems silly."

"It is how love works, now what is his name?"

"I don't know, I haven't met him yet."

"You are not doing this right."

"This is lame!"

"What is his name?"

"I don't know!"

"Fine then, his name is Ken."

"I don't want to date Barbie's boyfriend!"

"He's a different Ken."

"That's a name for an ugly boy!"

"You have a better name for him?"

"No."

"Fine then, now we wait in our cell and call for our true loves to rescue us. They are brothers you see... and they are battling valiantly to save us..." She paused for a moment and then added, "and mine is more handsome than yours!"

"This is STUPID."

So we paced back and forth on the top of the couch for a while until I got bored of it and saved myself by climbing from the arm of the couch to the doorknob of the closet to the top of the piano and over the banister, (but more importantly, out of the way of the lava). Mime was pretty irritated about it, and that was the last time we ever tried to play dress-up together.

***

Our mothers were always closer than we were, and so while Mime and I continued to grow apart over the years, we continued to hear about each other a lot, even when she moved a few states away.

We spoke once on 9/11. She wasn't doing a lot, and said that I always had been the one with the brains, and that she needed to find another path through her life. She also said that 9/11 wasn't a big deal and wanted to talk about clothes. We had a big fight, and we've never really had much of a real conversation since.

She ran though a large number of "Erics" in highschool, all of them far older than her, and most of them in college. A part of me is surprised her mother never separated them on statutory rape charges.

By the beginning of her senior year of high school she had selected a particular Eric and was obsessively attached to him. He was an engineer at Georgia Tech, and Mime would tell me about how much money he was going to make when he graduated. I asked her why she didn't just become an engineer herself, like I was, so she could have her own money, or, if she still wanted to marry her Eric, twice as much money. She got angry with me, and told me that wasn't how it worked.

Forgoing college, she moved to Atlanta and played house with her Eric, who, as it turned out, had a drinking problem and a nasty temper. He would beat her, and God knows how else he abused her. He finally tried to drown her in a pool at a party. Thankfully he was slow and drunk, and some of their mutual friends had time to intervene and save her life. That was when she finally realized it was time to leave him for good.

I saw her three years ago. She drove a nice car, had just come from the bar after a few drinks, and wore a little black dress. She reeked of cigarettes, and her face felt worn and dead. There seemed to be nothing genuine or alive left in her, and certainly nothing left of the little girl who had run around my green room playing dress up with me, who had been imprisoned by wicked sorcerers and escaped lava-filled traps with me, who had been one of my closest friends. Apparently, she still stops by her family's house if she thinks what they are serving for dinner is good enough.

"Pika!" she stumbled up in heels and hugged me, "oh look at you! You're all famous now, working for the feds..."

"I... I guess so."

"That's so good. You know, you always had a knack for making your own way..."

"Thanks."

"Come on," she gestured back to her car, "we have to get out of here before mom catches me smoking..."

"Have you been drinking?" her sister Plato cut in.

"Only a little..."

Plato nodded to me, "I'll drive."

***

Eventually I did meet an actual pair of brothers named Ken and Eric, and while I found great humor in this, I never shared it with them.

I still have a strong aversion to calling anybody in my age range Eric. All it reminds me of is the image of what is is left of my friend: drunk in broken heels, sucking down cigarettes, and still waiting someplace... waiting for him to save her.

My Brother's Keeper

The basement was where my mom did laundry. We could always hear her voice at the top of the stairs but normally she tried to shut the door so my brother wouldn't fall down the stairs.

I found my brother crawling on the edge of the stairway and my mother's voice and grabbed him by his overalls to drag him away. He looked bewildered to be sliding backwards, little baby knees sliding fruitlessly back and forth trying to crawl the other way. Issac looked up at me bewildered, but I didn't let go of the red little overalls.

"I saved him," I exclaimed to my mother when she returned up the stairs.

"Oh?"

"He was going to fall down the stairs and I saved him!"

It hadn't been that near a miss in reality but my mother was immensely pleased with me and wanted to encourage this behavior. She picked me up and hugged me, and presented me with a copy of "Babar and Father Christmas" as a reward. I would still pick up the tattered VHS box years later with pride and remember how I had nobly saved my brother.

"Issac will need a lot of protection and teaching," my mother said, "you will always have to be a good big sister and look out for him...keep him out of trouble."

I beamed. I felt important.

***

"Hugga hugga hugga squeeeeeeeeeeeze," my mother would say, holding my brother in her arms. On each hug she would give him a strong hug and on the word squeeze she would hold him as long as the word lasted and kiss him on the head. My brother found this comforting when the world became overwhelming, which was often. This was the age where firetruck sirens were terrifying and we couldn't play music on our speakers because it was all overwhelming.

Keeping my brother out of trouble had been a great game when I was five and he was two, but as I neared seven I began to understand that my friends did not need to do nearly as much protecting of their younger siblings as I did, and I grew tired of the game of being important because I looked out for him. It became a chore. He worshipped me, and he wanted to follow me everywhere. As time progressed I just wanted to get away from him.

***

Sunday school was difficult: not in an academic sense, but in a behavioral one. I had to wear a dress for one thing, and patent leather shoes which always seemed to come home with scuffs on them, much to my amazement and my mother's distain. I never cared much for my teachers, and I felt like they always taught the same things over and over, but at 8 I was really too young to have much in the way of religious opinions or disbelief in what figures of authority told me was true. Hell, I'm not sure if I had even sorted out Santa Claus yet.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth...

Genesis 4:9-11

"That's wrong!" I said. I didn't understand at the time that God was upset with Cain for killing his brother, I thought he was mad about Cain not looking out for his little brother. Its amazing how sanitized the world presented to me at that age was.

"What's wrong?" the Sunday school teacher asked.

"Abel wasn't Cain's problem! What if Cain had other stuff to do? Why did he have to be Abel's keeper?"

The Sunday school teacher shook her head, "we are all our brother's keepers, Pika."

I was cranky the whole way home. When I got home I threw my patent leather shoes in my closet and my littly frilly dress on the floor to put my normal clothes back on. Then I pulled my stuffed animals off the shelves and sulked. God seemed pretty demanding and pretty eager to take the fun out of most things.

My brother's head cracked in the doorway and a big pair of blue eyes looked at me.

"NO!" I shouted, "You can't come in here. This is mine. I'm playing by myself."

My brother looked baffled. I sat there for a moment. I knew this wasn't how I was suppose to behave.

"Alright...you can play with one." I presented him Blue Bunny. He grabbed one ear and a foot and started pulling. I could almost hear the little stitches pop.

"No!" I shouted, "stop that! Blue bunny doesn't like that!" I tugged at the animal in his hands and he held on harder. Eventually I extracted it from his hands and stormed back into my room, leaving my bewildered little brother outside the slammed door. There was a few second pause before he started bawling. I could hear my mother's voice outside the door comforting him, and I felt very bad. Mom said I had to be patient with him until he was older and he could learn better. I felt like I had, but apparently it wasn't enough time.

***

"Pika's little brother is weird," Carolyn said to the group, making a funny face. The bus rattled and clanked off to Girl Scout Camp with all of us bouncing along inside.

"So what?" I asked.

"He acts funny!" she said, "he rocks back and forth and he talks to himself."

"Oh yeah? Well my brother is smart. He can name all the fish in the aquarium. Can your brother do that?"

Carolyn was quiet for a moment.

"That's right," I said, "and your brother is annoying too."

***

"What..." Mime said, looking at my snowpants and big rubber boots.

"My mom made me wear them. She says I can't go sledding without them. I asked not to...I know they aren't cool..."

Mime rolled her eyes a little gesturing to where my little brother was running around a tree shaking snow off the lower branches. He wrung his hands and rocked and muttered to himself in delight. She sighed, "and you brought him?"

"He's ok. I told him he isn't allowed to talk to anybody."

Looking back on it you may fault me as cruel for making this rule for my brother, but sometimes I did not have the patience to explain the complexities of things and did not want to spend all afternoon justifying him to my friends. My brother lived for black and white rules, and this simple one made so much of my life easier.

Mime, her sister Plato, Issac and I all headed for the sledding hill, but when Mime saw that Laura and her cronies were already at the hill she nearly turned back.

"Whatever," I said, "there is room to share."

Things went fairly peacefully for the first hour. Laura and her friends from time to time would say rude things about my brother, but neither of us rose to the bait. After growing board of this she switched tactics.

"Nice snowpants, Pika," she grinned. None of them were wearing big bulky snowpants.

"Yeah, my mom made me wear them."

"Hah, you always do whatever your parents say?"

"Invariably," my brother nodded, "Pika always honors our father and mother. She is the best."

There we go. In one line my brother had demonstrated his habit of reading the dictionary and saying words no eight year old knew, and also quoted the black and white rules of the Bible to win an arguement. It was very noble of him to stick up for me, it just happened to be the last thing we needed.

First she was mocking, then her cronies were mocking, and then my brother was shouting, and then they were pushing him. I ran up and joined the crowd, but couldn't think of anything better to say than "Knock it off!"

Laura was sneering. My brother was theatening that I would beat her up, just like I fought other kids who pushed him around. I was petrified.

Somehow it was agreed that I would fight Laura in a snowball fight. I asked for a moment to build a fort, but I knew it was in vain. Laura would run up, tackle me, and jam snow down my clothing, and then beat the shit out of me. I was weaker than her, smaller than her, and far slower in these God-awful snow pants. The fort was important though because it kept my brother occupied to build it while I tried to figure out a plan.

"I hope you appreciate," Mime said a few hours later when we were wrapped in blankets and drinking hot cocoa, "everything I did to get you out of that."

"You didn't do anything! You sat around with Laura's cronies and you were going to let them pummel me. Plato saved us because she's the only one who threw a fit to stop the fight."

"Plato lay on the ground and cried."

"Yeah! And it worked! And it was a lot more than you did!"

"You are so ungrateful," Mime said.

"Pika, is not! Pika is the best!" my brother shouted.

"Oh will you shut up!" I snapped. "This is how we got into trouble in the first place."

My brother looked upset to hear me shout at him like that for giving me a compliment. He didn't understand.

***

"Is this a bad time?" I'm sitting in a bar with some coworkers in Arizona after another equipment test."

"Uh, no" I said, hastly making my way out with my phone in hand, "What's up?"

"Well I wanted to apologise. We found a lot when we were teenagers, and I... want to make it better. I blamed you for a lot of things which aren't your fault."

"Oh."

"And... I never really thanked you for everything you did for me when we were really little. You tried really hard, and I appreciate that a whole lot, and I never thanked you."

"Forget it," I said.

"What?" he asked, taking me literally, "but it was really..."

"I mean... don't worry about it. Its what a good big sister should do... keep her brother out of trouble. I'm sorry too that I didn't do better sometimes..."

"Its ok Pika," I could hear the innocent smile through the phone line, "You're still the best."

Grown Up Grown Ups

Nothing has so thoroughly impressed upon me how severely pathetic humankind is as the experience of working in a cube farm.

I worked in IT. This meant that I was in a unique position. On the one hand I was removed from the food chain of status symbols, and on the other I was frequently the personal bitch of whoever called the help line.

I worked in basically a three cube by four cube space that had become the IT office. This was my first "real" job where I was paid by somebody else, wasn't a camp counselor, and wasn't selling things door to door. Calling me naive was an understatement.

There was a woman who was lurking near my peripheral vision as I worked my first day. After five minutes or so I felt nervous, and after about ten I started thinking I must be doing something wrong.

"Um, can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Rob."

"Well he's not here right now, but I'm the new intern, can I help?"

"Well, I was wondering if you could move me up the list."

"The list?"

"Of who gets a new monitor. I really need one, it would help increase my productivity."

If there even was such a list I was pretty skeptical that begging moved you anywhere you wanted to go on it, but mostly I was skeptical why a woman so invested in her workplace productivity was lurking for prolonged periods outside my office.

As spring break progressed I became increasingly aware of the hierarchy of the approximately 400 person office. The best thing was to have a big office, followed by a small office, followed by a window cube, followed by a large cube, followed by a phone with caller ID, followed by an LCD monitor, followed by a big CRT. There were subrankings of various sizes of monitors. All higher rankings automatically got the stuff the lower rankings had. Accounting seemed to be the people everybody else looked down on to feel better. It was probably the only place I knew where people in 2007 would fight over the size of their CRTs.

***

"So, what can I do?"

"We need to replace some phones." My boss pointed gave me a box of nice new phones with all the gadgets you would never really need to use and a list of persons to deliver them to. All of them were delivered to large offices where important old men sat. Oddly enough these old phones seemed rather nice, and an odd thing to be replacing when I had seen far rattier phones while walking around accounting. It was not long before I had filled the box with the replaced phones, which I brought back to my boss.

"What should I do with these?"

My boss presented me with another list. "Give these people those phones." This list consisted of people in smaller offices with the odd window cube thrown in. Their rejected phones went to the double cubes, which went to the single cubes, all the way down the poor man in accounting who grinned at his new ratty 1980's attrosity like a five year old at christmas.

This was my life: monitors, cube moves, new phones, all had to be brought down the food chain item by item to preserve the hiarchy of power. My primary purpose was to push the little cart around delivering the goodies nobody in their right mind should actually care about from place to place.

***

I dimly remember the pre-hippy days. I remember that my daycare was called "Mother's Day Out," and that I use to beg to spend as much time there as possible. I remember that there was a small slide in the corner, and under the slide was a box-like structure with round holes in each side. This was my fort, and from this place I would sometimes quietly curl up and watch the goings on in the play area with my toy squirrel.

"What are you doing?" some girl called. I remember that she wore a white flowered shirt, and that she was a lot bigger than me.

"This is my space, and I like it."

"Oh yeah?" The girl stomped up the slide adjacent to the box and sat atop my hideaway, swinging her feet across my vision, "Well this is my spot, and its better."

***

"And," the old man asked as I ran cords and adjusted the computer system, "is this a good phone?"

"Same one I have in my office, I think its pretty nice."

"Hrm..."

The man leaned back in his chair, "Well, I suppose IT knows how to get the good things don't they?" I chuckled politely. He watched me for a moment before leaning forward to ask, "Is this better than my old phone?"

I had no idea what the factual answer was but I knew what I was suppose to say, "Oh yes, its one of the nicest phones in the building."

***

"Uggggggggggh," Playlist rolled his eyes.

"What?"

"So my brother bought some new shades using my ebay account. They were Oakley brand, but when we got them we found out they were in fact 'Oakey' brand and he didn't really like them...so he went to resell them. The new buyer also got upset that they're 'Oakey' brand but it turns out they really are Oakleys its just they write the official logo funny..."

***

We're obsessed with stupid status symbols we have invented to make ourselves feel superior to others. I guess I'm not shocked by that, but I am impressed that we don't even know what the symbols are suppose to be anymore.

***

"Shit!"

Michael grins at Mandela and leans over and says the word as loud as he dares, which isn't very loud in fourth grade.

"You can't SAY that."

"Yes I can."

"Teacher's going to hear you!"

"Not unless you rat, are you a rat?"

Mandela crossed her arms and hugged them to herself, "Bet you don't even know what it means!"

Michael scowls at her. Its evident she's right and that he's lost face for it.

***

"Alright so if we leverage rapid prototyping with our available resources for sensor fusion..."

"Which sensors?"

"What?"

"I...can we try that again in plain English? I'm not understanding what you intend to do."

"So...if we..." the voice trails off and I'm faced with an eerily familiar scowl.

***

"Mmmm mmmm," the lady next to me at the lunch table in the cafeteria says, "that woman is a BITCH."

"Oh you can't talk like that," says the other stranger, "Do you know who she is?"

"Girl, I don't CARE who she is, and I don't care who her friends are. I got higher friends than her. I ain't afraid of her."

***

Everybody always seemed big to me, but Laura was big to everybody. She towered over Mime and me. I was too foolish to be afraid of her, but Mime was quite busy with alternately being terrified and adoring this girl.

"She has an older brother," I remember Mime telling me, "He's very old, like 12. He shows her the movie Batman and has lots of teenager friends."

I remember not being adiquately impressed by these attributes in Mime's mind, much to her dismay. "Look, she's the coolest kid, you'd better be nice."

Now the three of us were standing talking, Laura leering over us as usual, "You don't have an older brother," she said to me, "who makes you cool?"

***

I'm texting back and forth with my sister. She just got in another fight with mom.

"Yeah sometimes that happens. Try to stay cool."
"I cant i ask her one thing and then she starts telling me CRAP about wat i said along time ago and it pisses me off :("
"Don't blame you. Still just stay cool or you'll give her some ammo to throw back at you later."
"Ok i will try its just that she talks about herself ALOT."
"Yeah. You will kinda notice very few grown ups ever actually grew up."
"Hahahaha you got that right :)"