The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

Her friend Pili told Amelia she was an idiot. Pili had been snared in raids four or five times. All she did was pay the fine. But then, Pili did all kinds of crazy things. She sold her blood to old farts who paid for expensive transfusions, thinking the plasma could rejuvenate them.

‘Could be. Do you have her number?’ Amelia asked.

‘She’s in a great-super-cool women’s temazcal retreat right now in Peru. All-natural, no contact with the outside world. Just meditation. But she will be back for the art show. You should just show up. I know someone at the gallery. They can put you on the list.’

‘The temazcal is Nahua. What’s she doing in Peru?’

‘I don’t know, Amelia,’ Fernanda said, sounding annoyed. Amelia’s geographical objections were clearly pointless. She supposed people organized whatever retreats rich fuckers could afford. Tibetan samatha in Brazil, Santería ceremonies in Dublin. Who cared?

‘All right, put me on the list,’ Amelia said.

Fernanda seemed very pleased with herself and paid for the lunch after all. Amelia assumed she considered this her act of charity for the year. For her part, she felt stupidly proud for not mentioning anything about a loan, although she was going to have to figure something out soon.

Amelia picked her nieces up from school and, after ensuring they ate the food she had cooked, she made a quick escape from the apartment as soon as Marta arrived. This was Amelia’s strategy: to spend as little time as possible in the apartment when her sister was around. Marta made a room shrink in size and Amelia’s room already felt the size of a desk drawer.

Amelia hated sleeping in the same room she’d once shared with Marta, who’d moved to the master bedroom their mother had occupied. Each night, she looked at the walls she had looked at since she was a child. Stray stickers glued to her bed years before remained along the headboard. In a corner, there were smudged markings she’d made with crayons.

Not that it was an unusual set-up. Mexican youths, especially women, tended to live at home with their parents. These days, with the way the economy was going, even the most cosmopolitan people clustered together for long periods of time. At twenty-five, Amelia didn’t raise any eyebrows amongst her peers, but she still hated her living situation. Perhaps if they’d had a bigger apartment, it wouldn’t be so annoying, but the apartment was small, the building they inhabited in disrepair: a government-funded unit, modern at one point when a president had been trying to score popularity points in that sector of the city. They were in one of four identical towers, built in a Brutalist style with the emphasis on the brute. An interior courtyard joined them together. Bored teens liked to gather there, while others held court in the lobby.

She loathed the whole complex and fled it every day. Her hours were spent navigating through several coffee shops. There was an art to this. The franchises used kiosks to sell coffee and tasteless bread wrapped in plastic. You pushed a button and out came your food. These were terrible places for sitting down for long periods of time. Since everything was automated, the job of the one or two idiots on staff was to wipe the tables clean, and to get people in and out as quick as possible. They enforced the maximum one-hour-for-customers rule with militaristic abandon.

Amelia hopped between two spots, three blocks from each other. One was a café and the other a crêperie. They were on a decent street, meaning they both had an armed guard standing at the door. But who didn’t? Any Sanborns or Vips had at least one and similar cafes employed at least a part-time one for the busy times of the day. The guards kept the rabble out. Otherwise, the patrons would have been shooing away people offering to recharge cell phones by hooking them to a tiny generator, or shifty strangers who would top up phone cards for cheaper than the legit telecomm providers. Any other number of peddlers of services and products could also slip in, to the annoyance of licenciados in their suits and ties, trendy youths in designer huipiles, and mothers leaning against their deluxe, ultra-light strollers.

Amelia walked into the coffee shop, ordered a black coffee – cheapest thing on the menu – and, with the day’s Wi-Fi code in hand, logged on to the Internet and began reading. First, the news about Mars, then botany items. She drifted haphazardly after that. Anything from celebrity news to studying English or Mandarin. Those were the predominant languages on Mars, German a distant third. After an enthusiastic six months trying to grasp German, though, she’d given up on it. Much of the same happened with Mandarin. English she spoke well enough, as did any Mexican kid who’d gone to a good school.

She’d also given up on a job search. Once she had updated her CV, she had taken new headshots to go with it. Amelia, black hair pulled back, looking like a docile employee. But with her schooling interrupted, what should have been an impressive degree from a nice university was just bullshit. And every time she looked at the CV, it irritated her to see herself reduced to a pile of mediocrity:

Age: 25

Marital status: Unmarried

Current job: Freelancer

Freelancer. Euphemism for unemployed. Because her gigs didn’t count. You couldn’t put ‘professional friend’ on a CV, any more than you could ‘professional cuddler’. God knew there were people who did that gig too, hiring themselves out to embrace people. She remembered seeing an ad for that explaining ‘ninety-nine percent of clients are male’. Fuck, no.

Freelancer, then. Ex-university student, ex-someone. Her job applications disappeared into another dimension, swallowed by the computer until she simply stopped trying. She lived off gigs, first the marijuana operation, then odd jobs; for the past two years, the Friendrr bookings had constituted her sole income.

Freelancer. Fuck-up.

No more CV. Amelia focused on Mars,