All the Birds in the Sky

This was a major ethical dilemma. Not just the lying, but also the part where she would be keeping Laurence from an important experience his parents wanted him to have. She couldn’t know what would happen. Maybe Laurence would invent a new windmill that would power whole cities, after observing the wings of dragonflies. She pictured Laurence years from now, accepting a Nobel Prize and saying he owed it all to the Great Outdoors Adventure Weekends. On the other hand, maybe Laurence would go on one of those weekends, fall into a waterfall, and drown, and it would be partly Patricia’s fault. Plus, she could use thirty bucks.

Meanwhile, Patricia kept trying to make other friends. Dorothy Glass was a gymnast, like Patricia’s mom had been, and the mousy, freckled girl also wrote poetry on her phone when she thought nobody was looking. Patricia sat next to Dorothy at Convocation, when Mr. Dibbs, the vice principal, talked about the school’s “No Scooters” policy and explained why rote memorization was the best way to repair the short attention spans of kids who had been raised on Facebook and video games. The whole time, Patricia and Dorothy whispered about the webtoon everyone was watching, the one with the pipe-smoking horse. Patricia felt a stirring of hope — but then Dorothy sat with Macy Firestone and Carrie Danning at lunch and looked right past Patricia in the hallway afterward.

And so Patricia marched up to Laurence as he waited for the bus. “You’re on,” she said. “I’ll be your alibi.”

* * *

LAURENCE REALLY WAS building a supercomputer in his locked bedroom closet, behind a protective layer of action figures and paperbacks. The computer was cobbled together from tons of parts, including the GPUs from a dozen pQ game consoles, which had sported the most advanced vector graphics and complex narrative branching of any system ever, during the three months they were on the market. He’d also snuck into the offices of a defunct game developer two towns over and “rescued” some hard drives, a few motherboards, and some assorted routers. The result was bursting out of its metal corrugated rack space, LEDs blazing behind piles of junk. Laurence showed all of this to Patricia, while explaining his theories about neural networks, heuristic contextual mapping, and rules of interaction, and reminding her that she had promised to tell nobody about this.

At dinner with Laurence’s parents (super-garlicky pasta), Patricia talked a good game about how she and Laurence had gone rock climbing and they had even seen a fox, up close. She almost said the fox ate out of Laurence’s hand, but she didn’t want to oversell. Laurence’s parents were overjoyed and startled to hear how many trees Laurence had been up — neither of them looked like they’d hiked in years, but they had some hang-up about Laurence spending too much time sitting at his computer instead of filling his lungs. “So glad Laurence has a friend,” said his mom, who wore cat eye glasses and had her curls dyed an obscene shade of red. Laurence’s dad, who was morose and bald except for one brown tuft, nodded and offered Patricia more garlic bread with both hands. Laurence’s family lived in a dingy subdivision in an ugly cul-de-sac, and all the furniture and appliances were old. You could see through the carpet to the cinder floor.

Patricia and Laurence started spending time together, even when she wasn’t vouching for his outdoorsiness. They sat next to each other on the bus, on a field trip to the Cannery Museum, which was a whole facility devoted to cans. And every time they hung out, Laurence showed her another weird device — like, he had built a ray gun that would make you sleepy if he aimed it at you for half an hour. He hid it under the table at school and tested it on Mr. Knight, the Social Studies teacher, who did start yawning right before the bell.

One day in English class, Ms. Dodd asked Patricia to get up and talk about William Saroyan — no, wait, just to recite William Saroyan from memory. She stumbled over the gravel road of words about the insects who live in fruit, until she noticed a light shining in her eye, blinding her, but only on the right side. With her left eye, she saw the wall of bored faces, drawing not enough entertainment at her discomfort, and then she found the source of the dazzling blue-green beam: Laurence had something in his hand. Like a pointer.

“I–I have a headache,” Patricia said. She was excused.

In the hallway during Passing Period, she yanked Laurence away from the drinking fountain and demanded to know what the hell that had been.

“Retinal teleprompter,” Laurence gasped, looking actually scared of her. Nobody had ever been scared of Patricia. “Still not quite perfected. If it had worked, it would have projected the words directly onto your eye.”

Patricia felt actually scandalized at this. “Oh. But isn’t that cheating?”