“I mean, you can’t be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn’t we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn’t have to?”
“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—"about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years.”
I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn’t be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important.
“Really? Deadheading.” I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found yourself obsolete. He’d comforted me once, when my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we’d spent the day bounding around the countryside on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from cow’s milk and there’d been a thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I’d long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I’d remember forever. And it wasn’t so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the color of blood and the girl’s laugh.
“Have you talked to Lil about it?”
Rita shook her head. “It’s just a thought, really. We don’t want to worry her. She’s not good with hard decisions—it’s her generation.”
They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they’d intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little.
Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot item.
Lil didn’t deal well with her parents’ decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.
For God’s sake, Lil, don’t you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don’t you have any goddamned passion?