Let All the Children Boogie Read online

  I got off the bike.

  Fell couldn’t see it, what a sad little creature their mother was. How absurd it was, that someone as magnificent as Fell could be made miserable by someone so weak.

  Someone so small.

  I knocked again.

  She said nothing when she opened the door. Just smiled, like, come on, little girl, hit me with your best shot. And I had nothing. No practiced witty wise one-liners. Fell would have, for anyone but her.

  “You’re only hurting yourself, you know.”

  Her eyebrows rose. Her smile deepened.

  “You might have the power to hurt Fell now, but that power won’t last long. As soon as Fell realizes what a useless angry pitiful person you are, you’ll lose that power.” I wanted my words to be better. But I was done letting wishing I was better stop me from being what I was. “And Fell will leave you here, drowning in cat shit and bills, while they go conquer the world.”

  She said something. I didn’t hear what it was.

  * * *

  That night I heard the star man again. Somehow I knew it was just me this time. Like our minds were already beginning to overlap, and I could see Fell lying in silence in that dirty trailer, shivering under a blanket, no radio, listening to pine trees shush overhead, while I heard the star man whisper:

  “…Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines…”

  * * *

  I stayed late after school, in the computer lab. In the library. Reading the science and the science fiction Fell had rhapsodized about. All the impossible things that could save us from ourselves. Solar power; a post-petroleum future; superfoods. Cold fusion. Brain uploading. Digital immortality. Transcending the limits of the human.

  Each time I shut a book, it was the pain of waking up from blissful dream to wretched reality.

  But then, blissful dream: Fell was on my front steps when I got home. Alone in the deep black-blue of late twilight. Snow fell in half-hearted flurries.

  “Sorry,” they said when I ran straight at them. My hug took all the air out of them.

  “Never disappear again,” I whispered.

  Fell nodded. A crumpled map in one raised fist. “Are we gonna do this?”

  “We are.”

  A cassette blasted when Fell started up the car. David Bowie. We drove, heading for where our lines crossed. The gulf between us was still so wide. Maybe I believed, now—that we could work, that what we added up to could survive in this world—but Fell did not. Fell still believed what Mrs. Tanzillo believed: that Fell was hell-bound, disgusting, deserving of nothing good. The miles inched past my window, closing in on the X on the map, and I had no words, no weapons to breach the wall between us.

  And then: Fell did.

  “Whatever you said to my mom? It really pissed her the fuck off.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “It was selfish. I didn’t think it through. What it might mean for you.”

  “No,” Fell said, and turned onto Route 9. “I never saw her like that before. I went home and she didn’t say a word to me. Like, at all. Except to say you stopped by. That never, ever happens. I don’t know how, but what you said messed her up really bad.”

  “She—”

  “No fucking way,” Fell said, turning off the main road. “This can’t be it.”

  We’d reached the spot on the map. We were stopped outside the Salvation Army. Where we’d met, a mere two weeks before.

  “Nobody’s broadcasting from here,” they said.

  We rolled down our windows. Snow fell harder now. Science fiction scenarios blurred in my brain. Time travel. Brain uploading.

  “They’d need so much equipment,” Fell said. “If we heard it on the other side of the river? They’d need a massive antenna, but there’s nothing. And—”

  Fell trailed off.

  I looked up at the sky. Snow tap-tap-tapped at my forehead. I remembered what the star man said, the night before, to me and me alone. Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines.

  It was talking to me and Fell.

  “The equipment’s not here,” I said. “Or, it’s here, but it’s not now.”

  Fell got out of the car. I turned up the radio and got out after them.

  “I get it,” I said, laughing, crying, comprehending. One wobbly crooked magnificent voice. “You were right, Fell. It’s coming from the future.”

  We stood. Snow slowly outlined us.

  “It’s us,” I said. Fell had finally infected me. The audacious, the impossible, was not only easy—it was our only way forward. “That machine voice? That’s … you and me. Our two voices together, somehow. A consciousness made up of both of our minds.”

  Fell turned their head, hard, like they weren’t listening, or were listening and not understanding, or understanding and not believing.

  “Plural singular,” I said. “We are the passenger.”

  “Plural singular,” Fell said, snow falling into their perfect face, while David Bowie told us let all the children boogie.

  They still didn’t see, but that was okay. There would be time to tell Fell all of it. To say that there was so much to be afraid of—nuclear winter, ecological devastation, the death spasms of patriarchy. That the next fifty years would see unspeakable suffering. But we could survive it. Overcome it. Surmount the limits of our flesh and our mortality and our separateness. Combine into some new kind of thing, some wobbly magnificent machine who could crack the very fabric of time and space. We could send a signal back, into the past, a lonely sad staticky voice in the night, to tell the beautiful damaged kids we had been that the future would be as good as they had the courage to be.

  About the Author

  Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more—and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Magazine). A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s short stories have been nominated for numerous awards and been reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com. Or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2021 by Sam J. Miller

  Art copyright © 2021 J Yang