Bubble World Read online

  “It is.”

  “But how did I get here? And who’s Francine?”

  “I told you the choose-your-own-name feature was a bad idea,” not-Mummy grumbled to the man.

  “Well, you’re the one who pushed Bubble World in the first place.”

  Not-Mummy and not-Daddy put their heads together. Freesia heard him say, “Tech support said that as long as she’s down for less than three hours and we administer the STM blocker, she won’t remember a thing.”

  Not-Angel burst into tears. “You said you’d take me to the mall! You’re going back on your word! You don’t pay any attention to me!”

  “Fine,” not-Mummy said. “Let’s all go to the mall.”

  * * *

  Freesia didn’t know what to expect when, legs wobbly, she followed her not-parents out of the room with the plain white walls. Would she encounter a cave? A rooftop deck? A sparkly banquet room with a long table laden with sips and nibbles?

  But no: beyond the wall with the white walls were … more white walls, dotted here and there with framed pictures of ugly people. An open doorway revealed a clunky brown desk with a glowing box on top.

  “My office,” not-Mummy explained without being asked.

  They passed a few more doors, all white, all closed, and then reached a staircase.

  “Elbow,” not-Mummy said to not-Daddy. “You remember that Christmas when…”

  Not-Daddy squeezed Freesia’s elbow. “Hold the banister.”

  Freesia grabbed the railing that ran along the stairs. Her pulse quickened.

  Stairs meant danger.

  She couldn’t remember ever being in this place, yet she recognized it far back in her brain, like snippets from a fuzzy dream.

  Stairs meant pain.

  “Can I go home now?” she croaked. (What was wrong with her voice?)

  “You are home, Francine.” Not-Daddy held tight to her elbow.

  “Every time, we go through this,” not-Mummy muttered.

  She made it down the stairs without falling. At the bottom, a sitting room had white walls and tan furniture. Heavy shutters covered the windows. Down the hall was yet another white room, this one a kitchen with plain tan countertops.

  “Is there no color in your world?” Freesia asked.

  Without answering, not-Daddy opened a door at the far end of the kitchen, revealing a big black boxy car just like Freesia had seen in movies. From what Freesia had seen, these vehicles only did two things: speed and explode.

  “Get down!” Freesia dropped to the ground and buried her head in her arms.

  “What the—”

  “It’s going to blow!”

  “The Expedition?” not-Mummy said.

  “Can’t Dad just stay here and freaksit?” not-Angel begged. “And you can drive me?”

  “I need to buy shoe inserts at the mall,” not-Daddy said. “For the boots I bought for this summer’s Civil War reenactment.”

  Not-Mummy nudged Freesia’s shoulder. “Put your head up. Drink this.”

  Trembling, Freesia pushed herself off the cold floor and opened her mouth. The liquid was warm, the taste sweet and reassuring.

  “Is that happy juice?” Freesia whispered.

  “You got it,” not-Mummy said.

  10

  After a few minutes, Freesia was no longer afraid of the big boxy car. The people who looked like her parents said it wouldn’t blow up. Why should she doubt them? Freesia felt … not happy, exactly, but calm. Calm-ish. Calm enough.

  The vehicle backed out of the stuffy garage into a world quite unlike Agalinas. Spiky plants and spindly trees struggled for existence in front of a seemingly endless line of white and beige houses. Instead of lawns, the yards were strewn with gravel. The driveway was white, the road gray. Aside from the vast blue sky, there was, in fact, very little color here.

  “What do you call this place?” Freesia asked.

  “Phoenix, Arizona,” not-Mummy said.

  “Will you turn on the TV?” not-Angel said.

  A rectangle hanging from the car ceiling lit up and showed pretty, happy people on a beach not so different from the one in Agalinas.

  “Are those your friends?” Freesia asked not-Angel.

  The girl flared her nostrils. “Can we just not talk?”

  Something buzzed. The girl pulled her rectangle from a handbag that wasn’t even a little bit vicious.

  “Is that your bubble?” Freesia asked.

  The girl tapped at the screen and ignored her.

  Freesia peered out the window. White house. White house. Tan house. White house. She yawned, her calm-ishness turning to the sleepies.

  Big white car. Big silver car. Huge white car. Big white car. Medium tan car.

  Spindly plants.

  More houses.

  At last—color! A column of lights hung from a wire above the road. As they approached, a green circle flickered out as, above it, a yellow one flickered on, only to be replaced by a bright red circle on top.

  The car stopped.

  A long, low building lay beyond the intersection. Freesia knew that place, and not just from a dream. Heart racing, her sleepies ran away.

  “That building. In front of us. I think I’ve been there before.”

  “That was your elementary school,” not-Daddy said.

  “But how…?”

  “We’ll talk about it when we get to the mall.”

  * * *

  Big, ugly cars surrounded the big, ugly mall. But none of that prepared Freesia for the sight of the people who got out of the cars. A very tall, very skinny boy walked past Freesia’s car window.

  “Oh my Todd. What’s wrong with his face?”

  “What do you mean?” not-Mummy asked.

  “He’s … disfigured.”

  “He is not disfigured. He just has acne,” not-Mummy said. “All teenagers get it.”

  “I don’t.” Angel opened her door. “Give me a thirty-second lead.” She slammed the door and ran across the parking lot. Her blond hair shone under the harsh sun.

  Two enormous people passed the car. Freesia recoiled. “Those creatures are grotesque!”

  Not-Mummy spun around. “You have to stop doing that, Francine! There is nothing wrong with those people. They are just fat. This is America, which means that when we go inside, you will see more fat people. Also people with pimples and people with bad hair and people in wheelchairs—and you can’t stare at any of them.”

  “I would never stare at someone in a wheelchair.”

  Not-Daddy opened his door. “Thirty seconds are up.”

  The parking lot was very, very warm.

  “Is this summer?” Freesia asked.

  Not-Mummy shook her head. “It’s only March. Summer’s twenty degrees hotter, sometimes more.”

  Funny how Freesia hadn’t even noticed what she was wearing until now, but her black stretch pants and T-shirt, while comfortable in the white-walled house, stuck to her in the heat. Plus: black stretch pants and a black T-shirt? With squeaky white sneakers? Hideosity!

  “I need to find a dress shop,” Freesia said. “Or a skirt and top shop. Do you have those things on the mainland?”

  Not-Daddy pulled open a glass door to the big building. A blast of cold air hit Freesia, and she shivered. But that was okay because just like that, a rack of blouses stood next to a rack of sweaters stood next to a wall of dresses stood next to a display of pants.

  “Perfect!” Freesia reached for a fluffy red cardigan. “This sweater will look de-vicious with my houndstooth minidress and my patent-leather pumps.”

  Not-Mummy snatched the sweater away from her. “I am not buying you cashmere, and besides, you can’t wear something from here with your minidress from there because—”

  “Because why?”

  “Let’s get coffee,” not-Daddy said.

  * * *

  Walking through the cold mall with her not-parents, Freesia felt as though she were surrounded by fun-house-mirror people: too
fat, too thin, big noses, small chins … who knew there were so many ways to be ugly?

  “Don’t stare,” not-Mummy hissed.

  Freesia looked at the ground. Good Todd, her sneakers were ick. How could she have ever chosen them? And why didn’t she remember doing so?

  “Here we are.” Not-Daddy’s voice was flat. “Tracey’s Famous Coffee. Nothing like a coffee cloud to start your day the Tracey way.”

  “I hate those commercials,” not-Mummy said.

  Freesia stared—first at her not-parents and then at the sign over the coffee shop. “We have Tracey’s coffee in Agalinas.”

  “Product placement,” not-Mummy said. “Darren, get us lattes, will you?”

  Not-Mummy chose a mirrored table in the back and told Freesia to face the wall so she’d stop staring at people. Freesia’s chair made a painful squeaking noise when she pulled it out.

  “Ow!” She put her hands over her ears.

  “Noise sensitivity,” not-Mummy said.

  “What?”

  “Sit down, Francine.”

  Not-Mummy retrieved something that looked like not-Angel’s not-bubble. She tapped and pulled and poked at the little screen. Finally, she dropped it back into her purse.

  Not-Daddy placed a paper bag on the table along with three brown cardboard cups with plastic lids. “Three pastries and three coffee clouds.”

  “I prefer my hot beverages in a mug,” Freesia said. No one responded. Fine: she’d drink out of cardboard, but the plastic lid had to go. Carefully, she peeled it off. And then she glanced at the mirrored tabletop.

  “Aaaaaarghhh!”

  “Francine, Francine, FRANCINE!”

  “It’s her! It’s the girl!” Her chair shrieked against the tile as she pushed away from the table and stood up.

  “Stop it, Francine. Everyone is looking at us.”

  Freesia squeezed her eyes shut and covered her face with her hands. Maybe it was just her imagination. Maybe she just thought she had seen the stocky, bumpy-skinned, frizzy-haired girl who’d once looked back from her closet mirror in Agalinas.

  She opened her eyes for a peek, but her not-parents had covered the table with paper napkins.

  “Sit down, Francine. We have something to tell you.”

  11

  “Francine, I am your father.”

  “You look like my father, but—”

  “It’s true, Francine,” the woman said.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “It’s your name,” the woman said.

  “If he’s my father, then you’re—”

  “Obviously.”

  “But I already have a Mummy. She’s in Agalinas—waiting for me, probably wondering where I’ve gone. I’d bubble her, but—”

  “I’m Mummy. Mummy is me. We’re the same … Mummy. Though I’d actually prefer you call me Mother.”

  “So when I’m in Agalinas and I talk to Mummy and she answers back, it’s really you?”

  “Yes. No. Sometimes. I have the option of logging in as … Mummy. But my schedule—it’s hard to coordinate. Some of the time Mummy is actually computer generated.”

  “Most of the time,” not-Daddy said. “Pretty much always.”

  “I’m a strong believer in consistency,” not-Mummy—Mother—said.

  “Should we start at the start?” the man—Father—asked.

  Freesia nodded.

  * * *

  It all began sixteen years, six months, and nine days earlier, when Donna Somers gave birth to a furry, wrinkly baby girl, who bawled at her first sight of the world and didn’t stop for a good eighteen months, when her parents discovered that educational videos could buy them forty minutes’ peace at a stretch. Donna and her husband, Darren, tried to convince themselves that their daughter’s crankiness was within the range of normal, but when their second daughter was born, two years after Francine, her placid, pleasant temperament stood in such contrast to her older sister’s that her parents considered the baby a gift from the heavens. And so they called her Angel.

  “She’s not so angelic now,” Freesia interrupted.

  “She’s a teenager,” the man said. “All teenagers are selfish and rude.”

  “And he should know,” Mother said. “He teaches high school.”

  By the time Freesia was three, she’d moved on from videos to interactive electronic games to educational computer programs: early spelling, early addition, early French. By the time she was four, she’d mastered basic reading programs and had begun to tackle subtraction.

  Away from the computer, things didn’t go so well. Her mother arranged play dates; Francine hid under her bed. Her mother took her to a little kids’ gym; Francine buried her head in her mother’s lap and refused to participate in the parachute exercises.

  And then came school. She cried on the first day. She cried on the second day. She cried on the … well, every day. All day long until Donna picked her up, gave her a snack, and parked her in front of the computer.

  At first, the teachers assured Donna and Darren that things would get better. But things didn’t get better, not really. True, Francine learned to control her crying, at least some of the time, but she refused to interact with the other children, refused to participate in playground games, failed to make eye contact.

  “Shy is one thing, but you didn’t even try,” Mother said.

  “The kids were so mean to me!” Freesia blurted.

  Why did she say that? How did she know that? These people who called themselves her parents were speaking utter nonsense about some other child who did or didn’t exist, and yet …

  The playground. Sharp gray stones glittered in the sun. Children threw them at her legs, at her back. Their laughter was sharp, too. Their voices were high and cruel as they twisted her name. “Freak-cine.” “Franken-cine.”

  Mother said, “It broke my heart, Francine.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “We just wanted to protect you,” Father said.

  She got older, but things got no better. She complained of headaches. Sore throats. Stomach cramps. Anything that would allow her to stay home with her computer. She begged her mother to homeschool her, but Donna was just launching her career as a vlogger, plus she didn’t have the right temperament to educate her child.

  “Teaching sucks the life out of you,” Father said.

  “What is a vlogger?” Freesia asked.

  “A vlogger is a person who vlogs,” Mother said.

  Father explained. “A vlog is a video log. Like a newscast, only the vlogger controls her own site—the content, presentation, everything. And sometimes other websites pick up her videos.”

  “Often,” Mother said. “Other sites often pick me up. That’s in addition to my links on a wide variety of social networking sites. I am a leading web expert on emerging family-centric technologies.”

  “She does a lot of stories on smartphone apps.”

  “And I vlog about Bubble World. Though to maintain our privacy, I don’t use my real name. I call myself Donna Flash. The vlog is called Flash Drive.”

  Donna and Darren investigated online schools and were about to try one when Donna attended a technology convention in Texas. There she met a video game designer and educational software developer named Todd Piloski, who was on the verge of launching a program that would revolutionize education.

  Todd Piloski had created a virtual-reality teen utopia, which he called Bubble World. The program would employ all the senses to make participants feel like they were really there, eating, sleeping, talking, and learning. Especially learning.

  “Bubble World is a total educational immersion,” Mother said. “Where else could there be an English class taught by Shakespeare? Or a biology class that takes you inside a thirty-foot-tall model of the human body?”

  “Ew.” Freesia shuddered, too repulsed by the thought of slogging through a giant body to ask about that Shakespeare guy.

  “We’re sorry about your memory issues,” F
ather said. “You weren’t supposed to forget everything about your life before Bubble World. The memory blockers were just supposed to wipe out a week or two. To make the transition easier.”

  “How long have I been gone?”

  “Three and a half years.”

  “Have I been back before?”

  “Of course!” Mother said. “We bring you home every birthday and every Christmas.”

  “Except for the last one,” Father said.

  Mother shrugged. “We got a phenomenal deal on plane tickets to Maui. And the truth is, your transitions out of Bubble World, even the scheduled ones, have always been a bit traumatic.”

  Happy juice beginning to wear off, Freesia felt the fingers of panic creeping up her spine. “So you’re saying that Agalinas doesn’t exist?”

  “Of course it exists!” Mother said. “It exists in Todd’s imagination and in yours and in simulations across the world. Just because you can’t touch something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  “Agalinas doesn’t exist,” Father said.

  Freesia said, “But I have a house there. And a family and friends and clothes. Lots and lots of clothes.”

  “Your friends exist,” Mother said. “Most of them, anyway. They don’t look like their Bubble World avatars, of course, any more than you do. But they are real kids with real bubble stations, just like yours.”

  “And they don’t know that the island is virtual?”

  “Well … no. The memory blockers were only supposed to erase the previous week or so. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical company had failed to test the medications on teenagers. We knew more extensive memory loss was a possibility. Still, it was jarring the first time you came home and didn’t recognize us. At Todd’s request, I haven’t dwelled on that angle in my vlog reports.”

  Suddenly, Freesia was so tired she thought she’d fall asleep on the napkin-covered table.

  “Can I go back now?”

  “To the house?”

  “No, to Agalinas.”

  “Yes! Of course. Not right this minute—your father needs his shoe inserts, and anyway, the upgrades aren’t complete—but soon. We were worried that you might want to stay. Not that we wouldn’t enjoy having you around, of course. But you’ve been so happy in Bubble World, and academically—well, your progress just blows us away.”