"Yeah, strump, okay, strump," I say, but when I climb in and see the chiller bar and the curved screen and the plush upholstery and all, I sort of have to agree. Me and Aline swap kisses. Her Face looks total wattage, as usual, wearing a high concept summer dress that is entirely foaming water, and keeping with the theme our Venice vacay snaps are ribboning off her in big graceful arcs.
Which I think is like, whoa, spinal cringe, because Vera’s parents bought us the sub-orbital tickets, and Vera had been wanting to dive Venice for-fucking-ever, and I felt somewhat Judas doing it without her.
"Are you sure you want to be, like, shouting those vacay snaps at her?" I say. "She might be suicidal enough already."
"Bessandra. We are going to be there to support her." Aline’s facial is painful pretty—between you and me, I think it’s a full model blend, like, none of her in it at all—and her Naufrage Blue TM eyes are full of sympathy. "But we are not responsible for her highbrowsing on deep webs and getting fucked up by some grody-odd virus. That was just straight-up unclutch of her to do right before we were supposed to go to Venice."
But Aline wasn’t chatting her that night, so she doesn’t really know the extent of this grody-odd virus shit. I was.
The reefhouse is made of slick purple coral and looks like a big twisty conch, grown from a designer geneprint and way way chic, but me and Aline are both a bit quiet when we get out of the cab. Instead of, you know, being watted out of our minds to be weekending in a reefhouse with our dearly missed best/second-best friend.
I met Vera when we were ten, meaning we already had Faces, and neither of us knew Aline until high school. Although apparently her and Vera did kindergarten together—they can’t remember each other, so whatever. Basically, none of us have ever seen each other without a Face. The only people I have seen without a Face are those small, dim, barely there people who dive the trash or rap loco religious tracts outside 7–11.
Then Vera steps out onto the porch, holding a Bacardi Slush, and waves a familiar wave. "Hey, strumpets, you coming in or what now?"
My heart seriously lozenges in my throat, partly because of how good it is to hear her voice in actual airtalk and partly because she is so, so brave to strut outside like everything’s glacial when it is so obviously not.
I mean, her facial, or I guess her small f face, looks like her, because she’s pretty enough to never toy with it much anyway. But now it’s all wan and colorless and loaded with pores, and I think her nose is bigger, too. Her eyes seem smaller and not so shiny, and they’re brown, which they haven’t been for at least a few years.
Her hair is also brown, and totally lank, hanging off her like something dead instead of style-shifting or turning into digital snakes or even just doing a standard Pantene Ripple TM. And her swimsuit body is like, oh no. Hip-to-waist ratio’s all fucked up and there are little rolls of flab under her arms and around her middle.
But the worst thing is that she has no update cloud. As in none. The space around her shoulders and her head is totally empty of Trottr notifications, food snaps, Whispas, party-streams, profile taps, purchases, and everything else. I can’t even see my reassuring BFFF status that always pops up over her head. There is no way of knowing where Vera has been for the past month, if she has been drinking Bacardi Slushes the whole time or mixing it up with Lemogrenades, what she’s been buying, what she’s been wearing, who she’s been chatting. It’s all this horrible gaspy void.
It looks like she’s been dead for a month, and I can’t think what to say. Fortunately, Aline takes the pressure off me by doing a shatter-glass squeal and bounding up the steps to hug her, Face spouting these big cartoon tears. "You are an inspiration, Vera. An inspiration. And as soon as they fix you up, I am going to get you so synched, and we are going to party so hard, and we’re all going to look so fucking wattage, okay, love?"
There’s a glimmer in Vera’s brown eyes, and it takes me one to realize they are actual tears, like the saline kind. "Oh, Aline," she says. "I missed the shit out of you." She smiles, then catches my eye through Aline’s cascade of updates. "Hey, strump. How’s you?"
"Hey, V," I say, coming up the steps. "You know, um, minimalism may or may not be back. So there’s that?"
Vera laughs, which sounds really good in my ears. We airkiss, but for some reason I don’t quite manage to actually hug her, maybe because I’m not sure what it’s going to feel like. Aline’s already bounced past us into the reefhouse, gushing about organic architecture and the fact that there is a minibar.
Me and Vera follow her in, and as long as I keep her in the periphs I figure I can make an effort at pretending everything’s normal.
Vera says we should do the beach while there’s still sun, so we head out the back door, which shutters shut behind us, and down to the pale gray sand. Me and Aline are justifiably worried about people seeing her. Not everyone digisigned a no-snaps waiver in sight of her lawyer parents, and some asshole taking snaps of her without her Face would be, obviously, disastrous.
"I’ve been here since yesterday," Vera says, resettling the strap of her swimsuit. "It’s absolutely zero tremor. Like, there’s one Finnish family with little kids and then an old man who does maintenance shit."
"Oh, good," Aline says, but she looks somewhat disappointed and drops a cup size when my head is turned.
We pick a spot on the smoothest stretch of beach and camp it, unrolling our mats and stretching out. Me and Aline do our best to get Vera synched the old-fashioned way, like, telling her about how Dalia is now dating Sedge Vandermeer, and she’s rigged her Face to project his facial beside hers when they’re not actually together so she looks like some kind of two-headed monster but it’s love so whatever. We do not mention Venice, and Vera does not bring it up, so it will probably stay submarined until everyone’s drunk.
Eventually Vera wants to swim, so she sloshes out into the waves while me and Aline elect lifeguarding instead. Vera doesn’t seem to mind going solo. In fact, she looks really fucking blissy just dashing around out there, laughing through a mouthful of water when the tide bowls her over. Her skin has this ruddy thing going on, which actually looks sort of hot, and her smile is not as white, but seems bigger somehow.
"She’s medded," Aline concludes. "Like, sky-high."
"You think so?" I say, because I’ve seen Vera medded and usually she’s more sluggish.
"Um, has to be?" Aline shakes her perfect head. "Nobody just, like, bounces that kind of trauma."
Vera wades back up to the beach, wringing water out of her hair, and it reminds me of something I can’t quite stick a finger on. "Come on," she calls. "The water’s warm, you imps. And you owe me for Venice!"
Me and Aline swap looks.
"It smelled really bad," I say. "The whole time. There was a heatwave."
"Serves you right," Vera says, but grinning.
Then we all go splash around for a bit, and it is sort of funtime, even for Aline, at least until her hair, which was doing this big wind-tunnel look, freezes up trying to interact with the water physics. And I get my finger on what Vera reminds me of: ancient clips of yours truly as a little kid, before I got my Face, running around wild with an ugly gappy smile big as the Moon.