Positive Reconstruction
Keeping it Personal - Bobby and Allison
Younger brother Bobby starts 2025 as he does every new year since his father’s death; young, dumb, drunk and in love. Or at least in some approximation of it. The lessons he took from his father’s funeral five years earlier have only been reinforced over the years; drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. At least in adulthood, Bobby found a stability and joy which eluded him as a child.
The youngest of Marty’s kids, Bobby barely remembers his as a happy, healthy man. After the big box store closed, his father spent the next twelve years working himself to death. Quite literally. The loss of health insurance and the lackluster coverage available through Bobby’s mother’s employer, left him with untreated diabetes barely treated. And working. Always covering shifts at the burger joint he co-owned with an old friend. Bobby would pretend to be asleep when his dad would finally get home, or when he would leave early in the morning. After high school graduation, Bobby stayed at home, working odd jobs and temp jobs and jobs neighbors didn’t want to do. In the back of his mind, he suspected that if he left his mother alone for any length of time, she might disappear too. Then Covid hit, and he stopped pretending. Indeed, he rarely slept. The realization he’d squandered what little time his father had to give him kept him up at night.
When his older brother sold the house to cover their father’s medical bills, Bobby moved in with a pair of high school buddies working in Detroit. Bobby sees the same set of friends, or interacts with them through online avatars. And he manages his love life through an online dating app. Everything in his life resides on his phone, but an event in early 2025 plants more than a seed of doubt in his head.
Marty Junior visited him in Detroit, and left a USB with Bobby. On it, Junior had catalogued and categorized the entirety of Bobby’s online presence for the past year. And around the thumb drive, he’d wrapped a note, asking Bobby if dad would have expected more from his favorite son.
The incident was almost enough for Bobby to pick up the phone and actually call his older brother. To call him out. But before he can work up the courage, as he scrolls through the online footprint of his life, an IP address catches his eye. Bobby begins digging, and discovers that his brother’s data collection routed through a server farm in Utah, and that the only data storage facility anywhere nearby, is operated by the NSA. Bobby always knew his brother worked in cybersecurity, but this revelation starts him down a rabbithole, kindling in him a sense of paranoia he didn’t know he had.
Far to the south, in Memphis, Tennessee, Jenny’s granddaughter Allison starts 2025 in a much different place. Not just geographically, but much lower down the class structure from even perpetually-feels-broke Bobby. At 17, Allison spends this year twiddling her thumbs, biding her time until graduation in May. But after graduation, she has no prospects, no hope, no vision for any kind of future for herself beyond staring at the screen of a smart phone until she dies. Her mother Ruby lords the phone bill over her, demanding good grades and quiet from her daughter whenever she’s home. Allison cannot think of it as home, as the landlord vacuums up whatever spare money the family can scrape together. Grandma Jenny jokes that the man must live between their couch cushions, because he always seems to know when the three have any extra money in their pockets.
Allison graduates with decent grades, and toys with the idea of attending community college, but tuition keeps rising, and the idea of going into debt to pay for an education seems darkly funny to her. When her two friends ask why she doesn’t enroll too, Allison jokes that if she’d had to pay for the first twelve years of school, she’d be suing the shit out of the school district to get her money back. Then the trio get drawn back into endless scrolling.
On the longest day of the year, something snaps inside the young woman. The AC hasn’t worked at their apartment in weeks, and Allison hasn’t felt good all summer, and at once realizes why. Every summer, Grandma Jenny used to take her to a pool at least once. Allison hasn’t gotten to glide through the water in five years, and she’s sick of feeling hot and sweaty every day. So she dares her friends to follow her into the fountain at the park. The other two girls refuse, so to prove nothing bad will happen, Allison tosses her little backpack at them and jumps in. She gets in ten minutes of splashing around before a cop pulls her out of the lukewarm water.
After a perfunctory dressing down, the cop informs her that he’s not going to ticket her for being a dumbass. He says it in a way that implies Allison should be grateful, but instead it pisses her off, and she starts shouting insults at the man. Before he can decide if he’s going to arrest her after all, her friends drag Allison home, all the while chastising her for acting like a little girl. When she gets home and changes, Allison discovers that her phone was still in her back pocket for the swim, not in her backpack as she thought.
With no money to replace it, Allison realizes she will have to find something to do with her time, so she walks down the street and takes a job as a waitress at a fried-chicken restaurant. As the months go by, she saves up enough money to buy a new phone, but when faced with the price tag she balks. Something deeper in her changed since that day in the fountain. The lack of a smart phone gave her something she didn’t know she’d lacked - free time. When she walks to work, she can think instead of streaming a podcast. When she’s at home, she can read a magazine or, heaven forbid, crack open one of Grandma Jenny’s harlequin romance novels. Most of all, Jenny finds herself actually talking to people: people at the bus stop, customers at work, her friends, even, most embarrassingly, her own family. As 2025 draws to a close, Allison plans to take a road trip with her friends Dora and Tasha, down to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. But the day after Christmas, she shows up at Dora’s house to find the half of the family missing. Dora and her two younger siblings are on their own, made orphans by zealous ICE agents. Allison and Tasha cancel their plans and help their friend try to locate her parents.