Schwartz Circuit #5: The Road

A common name for an uncommon short story?

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re doing well. This week I felt distracted and out of sorts. As you might be able to tell by its late arrival, this story was hard for me to finish. I feel like I rewrote it 25 times.

It was the first time I was writing from a teenager’s perspective (what are they even thinking anyway?). I also decided to write in the present tense, a tool I don’t use often (it’s pretty cool though!). Finally, the premise was challenging: I wanted to write about a society-wide change rather than a single piece of technology.

I think I bit off more than I could chew this time. But it’s funny because this story that gave me so much trouble is probably the most lighthearted story I’ve written so far.

I’m ready to be done with it, and I think Jordan’s ready for me to be done with it, but do I hope you enjoy it. If not, I hope you’ll stick around for the next one.

Yours,

PS

PS (I’ve always wanted to do that) - in case you are wondering why all the stories, I do plan to get back to essays soon. My intention is to do a mix of content for the newsletter, but then I set this goal to just stay home (because why not?) and write six stories in six weeks. Three more to go, and after that I’ll start mixing it up.

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The Road

When Briggs asked me to visit, I told my parents I’d pay for the carbon credits to get there.

“She lives on a farm,” I said. The idea was to plant the seed, no pun intended, that this weekend would be educational. But they frowned.

“How well do you know Briggs?” My mom said her name like she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. “How do you know Briggs won't be a repeat of what happened with Mia?”

I’m never going to escape the Mia incident. AKA Mia is a Man.

“Briggs was my best friend in remote summer school,” I said. “We saw each other every day on video. Verified, school video.”

Then my dad acted suspicious because her parents don’t have social media, even though he’s always saying he wishes social media was never invented.

“Please just call them,” I said.

So our parents talked, and mine said they could find no good reason I couldn't go, like the good reason was still out there but they were tired of looking.

I don’t actually have enough money to cover the round trip, not at the standard carbon emission settings. So I’m going super LE mode. People joke that the “LE” stands for “long excursion” and “lost enthusiasm.” For a while I watched the guy behind me eating noodles with a fork, badly. Also, I think the car thinks I’m my mom. The ads on the driver’s screen are all for aging cream and edibles. If you watch nothing else for a long time, the ads can feel like shows, but in the back of your mind you always know what they are.

I call Briggs as I’m getting close.

“Avery, what kind of eater are you?” she asks.

“You mean big or small?”

She laughs. “No, I mean what can you eat?”

“I eat everything,” I say, which isn’t untrue. I don’t have any allergies, as far as I know of, but the last time I had a glass of dairy milk was in Texas over Thanksgiving.

“Great.” She lowers her voice. “My parents thought you might have a lot of restrictions. They don’t know many people from the city. Just warning you, they will probably have some weird micro-bias about it.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Micro-bias is what we do best where I’m from.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“And you better not be a catfish. Because if you are, I’ll never be allowed to leave the house again.”

“I’m the one who should be worried,” she says. “I’m inviting you to my house. I’m putting my whole family in danger.”

Where Briggs lives, you can stop and get fresh fruit every couple of miles. In the LE lane you don’t even have to stop, they come up to you on scooters and flirt through the window. I now have four baskets of strawberries for the price of one.

When I pull up, her house reminds me of my cousin’s house in Texas. The property stretches your eyes out. A garden runs wild up a hill and in the back I see a big shed — maybe a barn?

The car does a good job parking, and I give it five stars. I got there only 2 minutes after the ETA. But Briggs doesn’t have location data enabled on her phone (of course she doesn’t) so I text her saying I’m here.

I’m a little nervous, watching the door. Not because of the Mia incident. But because you’re always wondering: will they have an unexpected smell? Will they be larger or smaller than you thought? Will it be a moment of recognition, or the opposite?

Briggs opens the door, and we both start laughing. I don’t know why we do that, but I know it means that she recognizes me, and I recognize her.

“So what did you come in,” she asks, “a scooter shaped like a car?”

When I explain my LE strategy to her, she looks at me like she does when I try to explain my favorite VR games.

“Let me show you our car,” she says, and takes me into the garage, which is full of twisty, rusted machines that might poke you if you put your foot in the wrong place. They’re like a colony of insects, grown up around this ancient truck in the middle.

“It’s been refurbed a couple of times. I think the body is a 2012 Ford F-150.” I’d have believed her if she’d said it was from the 1980s.

“Is it electric?”

Briggs laughs. “Most people don't know, but electric horsepower is really expensive. Only the big corporate farms can afford it.” Briggs does all remote school, year-round, and works for her parents. It makes her seem a lot older sometimes.

I step closer to the truck and look in. Worn leather seats. No driver’s screen. No emission controls. No ads. I’m trying to picture the carbon bill for this thing. Are the emissions on it even legal? Or have my parents been lying to me about how much they pay for carbon credits and how strict the laws are?

Briggs watches me. “It’s like you’ve never seen an old car,” she says.

“I have. Like, at the fair.”

She’s still laughing at that as we go inside to meet everyone. I feel like I already know Briggs’s dog, who often appeared on-screen during class, but the recognition is not mutual. Briggs pulls him off me before I spill the strawberries everywhere. I got a good deal in the end: the strawberries are a hit.

“We’ll have to make a pie tomorrow,” says Briggs's mom, which is something I don’t think I’ve heard someone say, outside of a story, maybe.

While her parents are getting dinner ready, we sit at the table with her older sister, who looks bored writing a paper for college. “I feel like your generation is better at making friends remotely,” she tells us.

“We’re the same generation,” Briggs says. “We’re only 4 years younger than you.”

“Nah,” her sister says. “I’m on the cusp. Mom and Dad are millenials, I’m gen-demic, and they’re calling you guys, what, Gen Carbon?”

Briggs’s dad is a man of few words, loudly spoken. “Gen Carbon, that's some kind of generation,” he booms, sticking his head out of the kitchen to give us a classic dad look, the one that’s like “get it?” I don’t get it.

Then her dad comes out with a platter. “Fried quails.” He winks at me. They remind me of naked dolls with the heads off, which is something I can picture even though I don’t know why. I guess that’ll stick in your brain even if you just saw it once.

“Got these from my friend. Carbon negative birds.” Her dad directs this comment at me with another wink.

“What he means is they were hunted in a sustainable way,” her sister says.

Her mom asks me if I’ve ever been hunting before. As I try not to laugh at that question, and try to cut into my quail, my knife hits something that doesn’t give. Of course: bones. It’s hard to see where they are from the outside.

“Here.” Briggs trades me her plate, where she’s already divided the quail into neat pieces, almost like the culture-grown stuff I’m used to.

I feel everyone watching me eat like something magic is about to happen to me. “Now that’s real meat,” her dad says.

“The last time I had a meal like this, it was at a fancy restaurant,” I say. It’s true. They even have dairy butter to go with the corn.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s the carbon generation. Kids growing up without real food —”

“Dad,” Briggs and her sister say almost in unison.

He puts his hands up. “I’m just saying, it’s what happens when you let big government decide what’s good for the environment.” Briggs is looking down at her food, her face flushed.

“There, you’ve said your piece,” her mom says. “Now let’s enjoy the meal.”

After dinner Briggs tells me she wants to get out, go down to the river. She takes some beers from the fridge in the garage and hands me a flashlight with a strap around it. She has to explain that it goes on my head.

“This is a genius invention,” I tell her.

“You’re adorable,” she says.

The air is fresh and damp by the water, my jacket pockets are full of beer and my fingers are cold. It looks like the river used to run higher. Most rivers I’ve seen in real life look shrunken like this, even though everywhere else in the world is flooding.

“I hate when my dad talks politics,” Briggs says.

“I thought it was kind of interesting.” I sit on a rock taking tiny sips of beer. Briggs is building something with tree branches. I don’t really get what it is until she takes out a lighter.

“You guys are allowed to have fires on your property?” I ask.

“This isn’t our property,” Briggs says, laughing. “As long as you’re being safe and not doing it, like, all the time, then people don’t care.”

Briggs says the fire is probably so beautiful to us because of evolution. We learned to love to stare at it, because if you looked away, you could get burned. But I think there’s some inherent quality to it, like watching running water, or a waving field of grass. Those are all just things we just evolved to like, Briggs says.

“In the future,” I ask, “Do you think people will love to go watch the cultured meat growing? And they won’t know why?”

I am so warm. I think about different kinds of warm: sun, bath, fire. Hot stones.

“Hot towels,” Briggs says. “Have you ever had a hot towel on your forehead?”

“What about saunas, have you ever been in a sauna?”

Briggs is looking past me up the hill, at the road. “Cops,” she says, tapping her headlamp off.

I follow her lead, and fling my beer can into the river for good measure, where it gets stuck in some rocks.

“Relax,” Briggs says. “They’ll go right on by.” She kicks sand all over the fire while keeping an eye on the car. She reminds me of a dog on a leash, watching another dog in the distance. The car does drive past, just like she said. And then it turns off the main road.

“Isn’t that the turn for your house?” I ask.

Briggs takes off up to the road, yelling at me to follow. I realize I still have a beer in my pocket, think about throwing it, but instead set it down upright in the sand and hurry to catch up. My eyes can’t follow her far in the dark.

“Maybe they’re just turning around or something,” I pant at her. She doesn’t answer and goes past the outlet to the house.

“Where are you going?”

“Back way.”

We push through a small wooded area and break out into tomatoes. Past the garden, Briggs stops by the shed, so I stop too. With my eyes pretty adjusted now, I can see she’s checking that the doors are locked. She looks up at the small windows with their drawn shades, then disappears around the corner, circling the building. When she comes back, she’s in a panic.

“Did we shut the garage?”

I have no idea what she’s talking about. I’m busy wondering what the fine is for a fire. A hundred dollars? A thousand?

“When we left,” she says, “do you remember if I shut the garage door?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” I don’t know why it matters.

Briggs makes an anguished sound. I try to see the garage, but I can just make out the sleek black and white cop car parked in front, right behind my mom’s little blue one. I hear the dog, strings of three barks in a row, his signature.

“Well, we can’t stay here,” Briggs says. She runs down around the side of the house, looking back at me with a finger to her lips. I follow and crouch by some shrubs, and I can hear us both breathing, mine loud, hers soft. Will we have to become fugitives? Maybe we already are fugitives. Then I hear bodies shifting, and realize that we’ve got an open channel of sound from the front door.

“Thanks very much for the help, folks,” one of the police officers says, as clear as if he was next to me. “Keep an eye out for that license plate and give us a call if you see anything.”

“We definitely will,” Briggs’s mom says. The door shuts. I hear two sets of footsteps thud down the stairs, then the slam of car doors, then the police car whirring and the wheels crunching dirt down the road.

We both slump onto the ground like meat with no bones.

“What was that about?” I ask.

“I guess a missing person or something,” Briggs says.

“I know, but with the shed and the garage. What were you so worried about?”

Briggs sits flicking her headlamp on and off, on and off, looking away from me. I don’t really know her very well. Just as I’m hearing those words in my head, my phone lights up with a text from my mom. I ignore it.

“It’s complicated.” Briggs makes the kind of pause where you know something big is going to get thrown at you and you’re going to have to try to catch it, no matter what it’s shaped like. “Some of the stuff my family does isn’t exactly above ground. My dad is part of The Road.” She drops that name and waits a beat, but I haven’t heard of it before.

“They trade stuff outside of the carbon credit market,” she says. “Machine parts, gas, sometimes food. It’s only to help other small farmers like us.”

“But it’s not legal.”

“Not exactly. They don’t agree with the laws.”

I hate being lied to. But I can’t figure out if this was a lie. I end up just nodding. Maybe if I keep nodding, I’ll decide how I feel.

“If you want to leave, I would understand,” Briggs says.

“I’m just cold,” I decide. “Can we go inside?”

We find her parents and sister radiating nervousness, trying to put on a normal act for my benefit. Briggs tells them before it goes on too long. She doesn’t say, “she knows.” She says, “she’s in on it.” I smile at everyone and then I ask if the garage door was closed after all, because I’m not sure what to do. I can feel them turn towards me, bring me in.

“Yeah, I closed it after you guys left,” her dad says. He even gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Just a bit of Friday night excitement.”

“It’s our way of life, sweetie,” says her mom, like she’s been trying to work out how to phrase it. “It’s another way of doing things.”

“A better way of doing things.”

“Dad,” Briggs and her sister yell.

“It’s fine,” I say.

I was probably ten, sharing a pull-out with my little brother on vacation, the last time I slept in the same bed with someone else. Yes, I get what that says about me. You can infer all you want.

It’s weird how solid and heavy Briggs is next to me. The first time I accidentally brushed against her side with my arm, I recoiled. But while we talked, I relaxed my arm there and let it get warm.

Briggs is getting sleepy and I take out my phone. “Who are you texting?” she asks me.

The cops, I think about joking. I think better of it.

“My mom. She’s just checking in.”

Actually, the message from my mom is: “I got a notification of a missing person report in your area. Hoping you are ok.” Followed by another text, twenty minutes later: “Also, can you share exact location data with me? Just while you’re gone, so I don’t worry! Thanks!”

Part of me had really wanted to tell my mom everything that happened. Now I start to write a long reply about why I will not be enabling said location data. But then I think about my secret. The Road. I picture it winding through the garden, down to the river, all these secret places my mom can’t go, even if she tries to follow me. For now I’ll tell her I love her, and I’m having a good time.