BSU: A Romance In Molly - Ch. 03

Chapter 3: Retro Film Day

Outside his home, Martin paused uncertainly, hand on his own door lever. Beyond were his mother and sister. His family. He tried his best to plaster the scents, sights, and sounds of his home over the rest of his day: The ringing of his mother's oven when a batch of cookies was done, the scratch of his sister's pencil as she worked on nested derivates of nested functions, and the steady tapping of thousands of rain droplets on the shingles above his window. He gathered them all up like a soft woollen security blanket, slightly scratchy but more tender and comforting than all the silken sheets in the world, praying that they would get him through what was to come.

The collage of homely memories that he had so painstakingly gathered over the course of eighteen years failed to shield him from the reality of his very first day of being a legal adult. If Carla and Celeste had not been working for the government... if he had given in to temptation however briefly, and had stepped outside the chain-link fence around the MAHAD complex... he wouldn't be standing here outside his home's door, agonizing over what to say to his mother and sister.

By the time he decided to enter, the shadows around him had shifted noticeably. The porch swing where he had once read old Superman comics to Amy while they were still small enough to sit cross-legged in it creaked invitingly. Martin gave it a little tap and listened to its joints squeal before stepping into his home.

POP!

Multicolored strands of ribbon flailed about from a spot just out of the corner of his eye. Silver-green confetti rained down around him.

"Happy birthday, Martin!"

"Molly! Amy! Mom!" Martin laughed, hugging each of them in turn. "Steve!" he said, with genuine joy, thumping the larger boy on the back. "Don't you have school today?"

"What're they going do? Expel me? A boy?" Steve made doe eyes at Martin.

"Maybe, if you try giving them that look."

"You're all heart, Martin."

"Come on. Your cake won't cut itself," Tara said.

"Maybe it will, now that he's legal," Amy said. Tara shot her a warning look. Amy rolled her eyes and turned back to Martin. "Well, what're we waiting for?"

Tara had refused the MAHAD's offer of a complimentary birthday cake, choosing instead to purchase and mix her own ingredients. The butterscotch cake she had baked for Martin's eighteenth birthday (probably the last she would ever celebrate with her son in the home he had grown up in) definitely did not meet the government-approved standards for fat and sugar content, but that was exactly the point.

"Just how much butter did you use for this?" Martin laughed when he laid his slice out on its side after blowing out the candles and cutting the cake, "And how did you manage to do all this without me noticing?" He counted a dozen layers of butterscotch cream between the layers of cake sponge.

"I had some help from Molly after her lessons, and I left work early to bake it at her mother's restaurant. Quadrupling the number of layers of butterscotch cream was Molly's idea."

"It's delicious," Martin said around a mouthful of cake. "Thanks, guys." He got up to hug his mother. She squeezes back silently.

"Any day, Martin," Molly said, smiling and spreading her arms when Martin turned to her. Her eyes did not quite meet Martin's, but her hug was heartfelt and lasted a few moments longer Tara's.

"It's the best I've ever tasted," Steve said.

"Well, then eat up," Tara said.

"You could have given me a smaller piece. This is going to go straight to my waist and thighs," Amy complained, poking at her paper-thin slice.

"There's always Photoshop," Martin said. Amy rolled her eyes and spooned a bite into her mouth. Molly giggled and swatted at Martin.

"Do you remember the time we once fought over my birthday cake?" Martin said. "We were nine back then."

"There was cake all over the place." Tara grinned and stage-whispered to Steve, "We never asked for chocolate cake ever again."

Amy pushed away from the table, her face turning pink. "Thanks for the cake. Happy birthday, Martin."

Tara opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. Amy's bare feet pitter-pattered up the stairs, laying down an auditory trail that ended in a slammed door.

"Well," Steve cleared his throat "speaking of old memories, do you remember the time Hector tried to tailgate the school bus?"

"Miss Lee almost knocked his lights out," Martin said, grinning.

"Hector Lopez?" Tara said, incredulous, fork halfway to her mouth.

"Yep." Martin said.

"Well... now the truth comes out, eh? Right when it doesn't matter anymore," Tara shakes her head. "Now I'm wondering if you have been keeping any secrets from me."

"I wonder too," Molly said, winking at Tara.

"Snitch," Martin said, pointing his fork at her.

After they were done with their cake, Martin tried to help his mother load the dishwasher, but she refused.

"It's your birthday, Martin," she said, "I'm not letting you lift a finger."

Tara retreated into the kitchen with the dirty plates. "Oh Molly," she called, "I'm going to need some help with the roast."

"Anything you'd like me to help with?" Steve offered.

"You'd just get underfoot. Molly and I can manage just fine in the kitchen. Now shoo, shoo!" Tara said, "we have girl things to discuss."

Steve followed Martin up to his room. As they walked down the corridor, Martin paused outside his sister's door and motioned for Steve to go on.

"I'll get Uncharted 5 started," Steve said. He pointedly avoided looking at the door to Amy's room.

There was a sign on Amy's door that read, in thick block letters:

MAD SCIENTIST AT WORK

DO NOT DISTURB!

Martin flipped it over to the side that said Abandon All Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here, and knocked.

"Go away," a slightly stuffy voice replied.

"I just want to talk," Martin said.

Silence.

"Amy?" Martin said.

"Wait. Wait. Come in."

Amy did not bother hiding her swollen red eyes and used Kleenex wipes at the foot of her bed. Martin sat down on her bed beside her. She leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder and staring at a gold-star sticker on her bedroom wall. She had received that star in first grade for a particularly well-written essay, and though she had several other awards, trophies and certificates, this was the only one she felt comfortable displaying.

"So it's finally happening," she mumbled.

"Yep."

"Well?" Amy turned her head and, by the mild telepathy that came with living with her for sixteen of his eighteen years, Martin turned his head at almost the same time, so that they were looking right into each other's eyes.

Martin shrugged. "That's all there is to it, I guess."

Amy's gaze did not waver. "What happened to not becoming just another cog in the machine?"

"Believe me, I tried." Martin put his arm around her shoulder. She felt warm and good against him. Soft and small too. "But Amy, mom can barely keep up with our mortgage payments. Also-"

"Yes, yes, I know." Amy said. "The new TotalMed payment scheme will come into effect a few months from now."

"Yeah, and even full scholarships won't cover all your living expenses."

"Don't." Amy sat up, pushing away from him. "Don't you dare."

"But Amy, you can't just throw away your --"

Amy punched Martin's shoulder. "Don't you fucking dare."

"I'll be fine," Martin said after casting about for something to say and rubbing at his shoulder. "Really."

"Like hell you will be."

"I know you're finding it hard to believe me, but imagine that I've made it to Boston, or maybe even New York or Shanghai."

"Stop right there. I don't care if you've found a loophole in the law that makes you fucking untouchable, or if you've found that underground community of men that everyone keeps saying might exist. Have you ever heard of a man calling home after six months anywhere outside the PG zone?" Amy grabbed his hand. "As long as we stick together, we can make it. We'll figure it out."

Martin found himself shaking his head. "Amy, I swear I'll call. I'll get them to issue a pass for you and Mom, and I'll ask them to book a room in a restaurant so you can come and visit me any time you want."

"Oh sure. That'll work just fine for about the first three months."

Martin felt himself coloring at her tone. He stood, breathing heavily, and barely managed to refrain from shouting at her to grow the fuck up.

"Jeez, I'm glad you think of me that way."

Amy went red too. Her lip quivered, and her eyes brimmed with tears. "Sure I do. Get out. Now."

"I'm gone." Martin marched over to the door. Amy covered her face with her hands.

"Wait." She sniffled. "Please."

Martin paused with his hand on the doorknob, already regretting what he had said.

"Amy, I --"

Amy slammed into him like a linebacker, burying her face in his shirt and not bothering to hold back her tears and near-hysterical cries. Something clattered down below in the kitchen. Footsteps raced up the stairs.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Amy wailed. Martin walked her back towards her bed. Tara all but tore Amy's room's door off its hinges.

"What's going on?" Tara said.

"It's going to be okay, Amy, it's going to be okay," Martin said.

"Please, please, please just stay here. Don't go," Amy's mouth twisted up at its corners. Her cheeks and upper lip were wet with tears and snot. "Please, Martin, just ... please. I can take on another part-time job. I'll get money from some of my friends. I'll start a GoFundMe page. I'll do whatever it takes. Just... please."

Tara put her arms around her children. They rocked back and forth on Amy's bed. Nothing more apart from Amy's cries were heard for a long time. After that, reassuring promises were whispered and affirmed, not because they could be kept, but simply because they had to be made. There was no other choice.

In Martin's room, Steve put on his own noise-cancelling headphones and turned the volume up as far as it would go. Martin's PlayStation Ultima whirred lazily as 120 Gigabytes of data per second rushed into the 8K, 240Hz screen, bringing the photorealistic world of Uncharted 5 Remastered to life. After a few minutes of getting killed by stock henchmen, he turned off the console and went for a walk.

"I guess it was that time of the month," Amy said at the dining table, smiling wanly.

Molly had put her unbaked Mac & Cheese casserole under a food cover and made a mug of hot chocolate for Amy. She sat in front of the younger girl, nursing her own I <3 This World mug and nodding sympathetically at almost anything that Amy said.

"Hey! Period jokes are not cool," Molly said.

"Today's my monthly retro film day. I was upset because I watched Leo die in Titanic." Amy deadpanned. Molly threw up her hands in mock surrender and got up to resume work on her casserole, only to find the oven already preheated and Tara stirring in the remaining cheese.

"Miss Emerson, you really shouldn't have."

"You've already done more than enough for the day," Tara said, tilting her head meaningfully at the living room as she put on her oven gloves. Molly hugged her and went straight upstairs to Martin's room.

"She's a good kid. Don't take everything she says to heart," Martin said as Molly closed his room's door behind her.

"Siblings." Molly smiled ruefully. She sat down on his bed as he paused his game and turned in his swivel chair to face her. Her eyes went to his wrist, where his tracker bracelet had previously been. Now it was gone, and so was the government's all-watchful presence.

"You should have seen her when she was ten." Martin laughed, but there was a sort of brokenness to it, a kind of pathetic helplessness that made Molly sit up straighter and frown. "Guess I've done all that I can for her."

"Hey. Martin. Look at me." Molly said. "Look at me. I'll take care of her, okay? I know what it's like to... well... lose someone that way."

"Ouch," Martin grimaced. "You make it sound like I'm about to die."

"Maybe you are." Molly did not crack a grin. "I never told you that I was conceived the old-fashioned way." She touched Martin's left wrist, where his bracelet had once been attached. Martin's jaw dropped.

"Holy shit."

"Yep. He married my mom the moment he turned eighteen, right when she entered college. He took up a job as a plumber because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to trust himself in college."

"But what makes college worse than any other place outside the PG zone?" Martin shivered, recalling the hungry gazes of the shifters just outside the MAHAD complex. Though any sexual contact or propositioning of humans was prohibited within all government premises on the pain of summary liquidation for any shifter (or shifters) involved, All Human Affairs Departments were located within R zones -- buffer regions of sorts where Shifters who were not government employees could offer to have sex with men elsewhere, but were still not allowed to deploy their pheromones.

Even that was a step below the default zoning of X for the rest of the world: everything was permissible, from coy innuendo to public orgies. The stipulation that the male participants had to consent was nothing more than a bad joke, as most Shifters were allowed to deploy their pheromones there.

"I can't really say for sure, but from what he told my mom, the government assigns three live-in Shifter caretakers to each human male. Add that to the fact that men must live on-campus to take advantage of their comprehensive scholarship policies, and you have an almost foolproof method for turning men into...."

Molly shuddered. Martin put his hand over hers and squeezed. Molly shook her head.

"You're not supposed to be comforting me."

"I'm not the one who had a father and then lost him. What was he like, though?" Martin's voice was soft and careful.

"He was... nice. Like a mother, but different, somehow. He used to run around with me on his back, and sometimes, he would secretly buy me ice cream after I had exceeded my weekly limit." Molly leaned in and whispered, clutching tighter at Martin's wrist as though to reassure herself that his tracker bracelet was really gone. "He used to tell me stories about the Uprisings, and of the time Before."

"What did he tell you?" Martin's eyes were alight with excitement. The Uprisings. The time Before... before the Shifters appeared. He had always gotten the impression that the girls and some of the boys at school knew more than they were letting on, but he had been too afraid to ask. There was a rumor that dipping your arm with the bracelet in a mix of water and uncooked beans would make it impossible for the government to hear anything, but Martin had decided not to try it.

"You can ask your mother about everything," Molly said. "I just had a chat with her in the kitchen. She knows much more than I do. Her mother fought in the Uprisings"

Martin almost stood up and ran downstairs. There was suddenly not enough air in the room. He wanted to rage, scream, and hit something. All this time, he had sensed that there had been something wrong about the history they taught at school. He could not really put his finger on it, but what he heard from them not quite match what he actually saw.

Women had historically sought to control, dominate, and oppress men? Sure, his mother could be hard on him, but she was also fair and knew when to ease up when it counted - that was hardly oppression.

Shifters only had the best interests of the human race at heart, and wanted to grant all men and women their freedom once they were of age? True, he was free... but then all the good jobs were outside the PG zone, in the much-whispered-about X zones that few men had ever returned from. Those were the ONLY jobs that really paid enough to cover most households' mortgages, compulsory TotalMed payments, and extortionate school fees. What was the point of a choice if one of the options came with a cost that was too high to bear?

Women had been responsible for all the wars of the past? Then how come almost every last human leader or commander had been male? Was it even possible for them to wield such influence covertly?

Shifters had brokered a fair and just peace that had erased warfare from the face of the earth? Men were better off with the Shifters? See the above arguments.

All this while, he had been living right beside a woman who could have given him the answers to all the questions he had ever had about the past, and all it had taken to keep her lips sealed was a little silver bracelet. That, and the fear that came along with it that he could be transferred, torn from his family the very next day.

Martin took a deep, long breath and forced himself to look Molly in the eyes. He felt as though there was a current running through them into him. Her fingers felt too hot on his wrist.

"You were telling me about your father." Martin concentrated on the spot between her eyes, but could not help falling again and again into her deep emerald irises.

"Yes. One day, when I was... five, I think, he came back home, looking really guilty when I jumped on him. He kissed me on the crown of my head, put me down, and asked for mom. They spent the next hour yelling at each other in their room. I could hear her crying and screaming 'why'." Molly shook her head, rustling her locks of red hair.

"I guess that was the first time he had sex with his Shifter assistants. He was short on hands, and they were offering their services for practically nothing: minimum wage, no benefits. That, or sex. A week later, he didn't come home, and that was when Mom knew we'd lost him."

"I'm really sorry about that."

"Meh. Don't be." Molly shrugged. "I cried. A lot. I even made plans to go on an expedition to look for him. I thought the scissors, duct tape and flashlight I had stuffed into my backpack would be the most important items in my arsenal." Molly smiled. "But here I am, still in one piece. When life throws you to the ground, you just have to pick yourself up. Not much in the way of choice there."

"Yeah."

"Let's talk about something else. Something that you weren't previously allowed to talk about." Her voice lowered conspiratorially.

"Let me guess: sex."

"S-E-X, sex. Coitus. Intercourse. Fucking. Boning. Screwing. Getting it on. Bumping uglies. Making the two-backed beast. That's all we talk about, all day, just out of earshot of all the boys and their bracelets."

"I didn't know you girls were that dirty," Martin snorted with suppressed laughter.

"I know, right?" Molly squeezed the spot where his bracelet had been again. "We girls had to make sure you weren't around before whispering about it. But seriously, we don't talk about sex all day. What do you think we are -- Shifters?"

"Maybe."

"Oh, no! I've gone ahead and corrupted you!"

"I'm just following the example my elders have set for me -- ow!" Molly swatted at Martin, who cringed and rubbed at the spot her hand had landed. The spot where she had hit tingled pleasantly.

"I was born one stinking month before you were, doofus. One. Month."

"One month's worth of additional wrinkles and liver spots -- ow! Ow! Ow!"

Molly had stood up to rain blows down on Martin. He stood as well, laughing, and caught her wrists in his arms. A trick of gravity caused them to stumble, tumble, and totter onto Martin's bed, though whether it was Molly or Martin who had pulled the other along, neither could say.

Martin ended up on top. Up so close, he became conscious of her scent, which he had previously gotten so used to that he had stopped perceiving it: Eau De Toilette. Her skin felt soft and warm and good, like an invitation that begged him to slide it out of its envelope. The vitality animating her limbs and making her laugh spread to Martin's own body.