oOo

Chango remembered the last hour of the last day of her senior year in high school. She’d sat in the humid, crowded classroom, her eyes on the clock. Five more minutes and she’d be free, but Ms. Hinkie, the english teacher, droned on, oblivious to her own irrelevance. What could you learn in the last five minutes of four years spent skipping and smoking and passing on the curve? It was a vat school. Chango and her classmates regarded it as four years of vacation prior to diving in the vats for the rest of their lives. The minute hand on the clock moved a notch — four more minutes. Behind her Vonda Peterby kicked Chango's chair leg and slid a folded piece of paper past her shoulder. Chango palmed it smoothly and opened it on her lap. A smoking joint was rendered in finest number two pencil, and beside it the words,

"behind Hannah's." Chango pocketed the note, and gave Vonda a quick nod. The last three minutes of her high school career ticked by with excruciating slowness. When the bell rang, Chango was swept along by a surging wave of students which poured out of the school onto the streets of Vattown. After a block the crowd thinned, and Chango slowed to a walk, ambling lightly down the cracked concrete sidewalk, heading west and south, towards Hannah's Eclectic Homestyle Restaurant. It was a major hangout for vat divers, and in the alley behind it, high school burnouts like herself and Vonda congregated to smoke pot and drink beer. When she got to Hannah’s, Vonda and their friends Coral, Val and Tashi were already there, clustered around stacks of milk crates and cardboard boxes.

"Hey Chango, what happened, you get caught in the stampede?" shouted Coral as she approached.

"Here," Vonda handed her a big fat joint.

Chango toked it, drawing the dense, sweet smoke deep into her lungs. "Dang," she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, "I thought that last class would never end."

"Yeah," said Vonda, "can you believe that Hinkie, trying to cram one more lesson into us, on the last day."

"Like we're gonna need to know the imagery of T. S. Eliot, where we're going," said Coral.

"At least Mr. Beaudet let us talk amongst ourselves," said Val, "He knew better than to try and make us sit through another hour of chemistry."

"At least chemistry has something to do with vat diving," said Coral, "look at your sister, Chango, she's putting it to good use."

"Yeah." Ada was taking night courses in chemistry and biopolymer engineering, so she could train divers to do their own safety monitoring on the vats. It was part of her unionizing efforts. Divers couldn't rely on the safety standards GeneSys provided. The company considered three fatalities a year an acceptable margin of error.

Tashi fastened an alligator clip to the joint and passed it to Vonda. "Are you really going to take the clerical entrance exam, Chango?"

She shook her head, "Not if I can help it. Ada's dead set on it, but can you imagine me spending the rest of my life shuffling papers for some goon in a suit?"

"At least you'd have more of the rest of your life," said Tashi.

"Yeah, if the boredom didn't kill me."

"Then what are you going to do?" said Vonda, passing the now minuscule roach to her. Chango hit it, grimacing as she burned her lips. "I don't know. What the rest of you are doing, I guess. Get sterilized and dive in the vats."

"You think Ada will let you?" asked Val.

Chango shrugged. "I'm out of school now, I'm an adult. She doesn't rule my life." The others nodded vaguely. Since their parents died, Ada had taken it upon herself to raise Chango, and she was determined to keep her little sister out of the vats. Watching them, Chango bristled. They didn't believe her, they thought she'd eventually do just what Ada said. But there was no way she was going for an office job. Even if she could get it, she'd hate it, she'd rather do what her parents did, what her friends would do, dive; and die at thirty-five.

"So when do you guys have your appointments with Dr. Snip?" asked Coral smugly.

"Not until August," said Val.

"July twenty-third," said Vonda.

"July thirtieth," said Tashi.

Coral smiled. "I'm getting done June 6. I am going to have a great summer."

"You bitch," said Tashi, "how did you get yours so soon?"

"’Cause my daddy's a foreman, silly girl."

Everyone groaned. Val spoke up again, "So when are they hiring new divers?"

"Not until September," said Coral. "Word is that vats 22-31 need fresh blood."

"Hey, wouldn't it be great if we all got the same assignment?" said Vonda.

"It won't happen," said Coral, "they'll only take three or four new people at a time, so they can learn from veteran divers."

"I hope I get in that Gordon's vat. He is so hot," said Tashi. Chango snorted. "You're hopeless."

Sunlight slid in patches across the cracked and stained concrete of the alley. Occasionally the back door of Hannah's swung open abruptly, and DiDi, the dishwasher, came out hauling a trash can brimming with garbage to hoist it into the black maw of the dumpster. She didn't acknowledge them, her face closed in a busy frown.

Chango leaned against the pitted brick wall of the restaurant, lifting her eyes to the blue and cloud spotted sky. The conversation of her peers washed over her, their concerns seeming distant and unrelated to hers, even though she'd known them her whole life.

Ada would never let her go to the vats. She'd lock her up first. And truth be told, Chango wasn't all that keen on it anyway. She'd seen her mother and father die within two years of each other, neither of them more than forty years of age, bedridden for the last two months of their lives, their bodies riddled with cancerous tumors suddenly come to bloom. What little she'd seen of life, she liked it, she wanted to keep on doing it. She wanted more than forty years of it.

But she wasn't about to take some clerical job for GeneSys. How could she type letters and file reports for a bunch of white-collar geeks whose decisions determined whether or not her friends lived or died? It was like the choice between picking cotton in the fields, or working in the big house. Sure, it was better to work in the big house, but Chango wanted off the plantation all together. The shadows in the alley lengthened, the sunlight turned to mellow amber. The conversation had turned from the graduates' prospects to the more immediate concern of where the parties were that night.

"Claudia's having a house party," said Val.

"That bitch?" said Coral, "I hate her fucking guts."

"Oh yeah?" said Tashi with a smirk, "How come?"

"’Cause Coral's got it bad for Jerome," taunted Vonda, "and she has since before Claudia nabbed him." Coral's face turned red, and she glared at them, but she didn't deny it.

"Forget that anyway," said Chango. "Josa's is giving free pitchers to graduates."

"Yeah, and the Ply-Tones are playing," said Val.

"Yes!" said Vonda.

“I am staying out all night, tonight,” said Chango.

"You'll do nothing of the kind, kiddo." The voice came from the kitchen door. Chango turned to see her sister standing there, tall and strong, her blond hair short and neatly combed. Looking at her standing there in the late afternoon sunshine, Chango's jaw clenched unwittingly. She’d never seen anyone so fucking perfect in her life. Certainly she would never be like that, no matter what she did. For one thing, she wasn't tall, Ada had strength and weight on her, and she wasn't beyond using them to her advantage, even in front of Chango's friends.