Day 0, 06:50
Hi, My Name Is Mike Aracter, and Yes, I Know
We'll get the name out of the way first, because you're going to do it anyway, and I'd rather be in the room when it happens.
Mike Aracter. Say it out loud and fast, the way a teacher does at the end of a long roll call when they've stopped reading the names properly and started just making the noises. You'll hear it on the second go, if not the first. Most people's faces do a little thing when it lands, a sort of twitch at the corner of the mouth as they try to work out whether they're allowed to laugh.
You're allowed. Everybody else did.
I have heard that joke from every teacher who ever took attendance, every manager who ever read my name off a schedule, and every bored guy behind a counter who read an order back to me, then looked up to check I was a real person. One substitute teacher got halfway through it, stopped, then stared at me over the top of his glasses, as though I'd filled in my own birth certificate as a bit and was deciding whether to report it. I'd been a baby at the time, with other things going on, like learning to hold my own head up. You'd be surprised how much of that doesn't come across in a roll call.
So yes, my name sounds like "my character," and I've had seventeen years to find it funny. Some days I even manage it.
My alarm went off at 06:50, which is a stupid time that nobody would choose on purpose. The Buzzworks app chose it for me. It learns when the breakfast orders start stacking up in your area, then pushes a notification ten minutes before that, with a little lightning bolt next to it so that you feel like part of a movement rather than a guy in a red T-shirt who's about to carry things up stairs for money.
That morning it said HIGH DEMAND IN YOUR AREA. SURGE PAY ACTIVE. LET'S GET IT.
I lay there and looked at the ceiling for a while, because that's part of my process. The ceiling had a water stain on it shaped a bit like the outline of a man doing a flying kick, one I'd been looking at every morning for about a year without ever getting bored of it.
Since you're new here, I should probably give you a bit of background.
I was seventeen. I lived on my own in a second-floor apartment in Driftwood Heights, which is the big sprawl of stepped-up housing and apartment towers on the inland side of Halcyon Shores, as far from the sea as you can get without leaving the city. It's the part of town the brochures never photographed. The buildings go up the hill in steps, and every wall has something painted on it. The one opposite my window had a mural of a woman with a huge afro holding a sunrise in her hands like a basketball. It had been there longer than I had, and it was, in my opinion, the best thing in the whole city. Everybody hung their laundry between the buildings. On a good day it looked like the whole neighborhood was flying flags for countries that didn't exist.
I'm scared of heights. I mention this now because I live in a place with "Heights" in the name, because the universe had clearly made that joke about me without asking, the same way my parents had with the name. I dealt with it by never going on the balcony except to fetch my board, which I kept out there on purpose, so the trip to the edge lasted about a second and a half and I could get it over with before my body noticed what I was doing.
You're going to ask about my family next, because people always do, usually just after the name joke and just before they've decided whether they like me. So I'll do it once, here, and then we won't be doing it again.
They died. It isn't a secret and it isn't a mystery, and I'm not saving it up for a big emotional chapter near the end where I finally open up by a campfire. It's just not the part of my life I talk about, in the same way you probably don't talk about your teeth.
Unfortunately they weren't Wayne rich, so where some people get a mansion, a butler and a secret cave full of gadgets, I got a second-floor apartment, a fridge that hummed in B flat, and a very firm opinion that anybody who calls it "a tragic origin" has never had to call the water company and pretend to be his own dad. If you came here for me to cry about it, you've picked up the wrong book. I'm sorry you paid for it. I hope the rest of it makes up the difference.
Now, the job. I delivered for Buzzworks. If you're from Halcyon Shores you know exactly who Buzzworks are, because the whole city was more or less built around them. Buzzworks Nutrition Co. makes Voltage, the protein powder, which comes in a tub the size of a small dog with a lightning bolt on the label that has, for reasons nobody has ever explained to me, biceps. The ads were everywhere: on the buses, on the benches, on the side of the stadium, on a blimp once, which lost power and drifted into the bay. They promised "clean gains" and "engineered calm," which as far as I could tell meant being extremely jacked without shouting about it. They were aimed squarely at the kind of guy who says "bro" as punctuation and owns more than one shaker bottle.
They also owned the delivery app, which meant that on a normal morning I was paid by a protein company to carry tubs of its own powder to guys who were too sore from leg day to go and pick it up themselves. I'm not saying it was a scam. I'm saying that if it was a scam, I was very much part of it. It was paying me, and at seventeen those two things didn't feel like they were in any kind of conflict.
The week before, to launch the new Voltage Performance Formula, Buzzworks had driven a tanker to the end of the pier, emptying the whole thing into the bay as a publicity stunt, so the entire waterfront could be, quoting the press release here, "a free sample." People filmed it on their phones and put it online with laughing emojis. The bay went a sort of glowing blue for most of an afternoon; the boardwalk smelled like artificial raspberry for three days. A guy from the city council went on the local news in a Buzzworks polo shirt to say it was completely safe, and actually quite good for the fish. I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen a company do, which, for the record, is a list I've kept for years, one that's extremely competitive.
When you sign up to deliver for them, the app asks what vehicle you'll be using, then gives you a dropdown: car, scooter, motorbike, bicycle. I don't drive. Please don't ask me why; it's a long story, and not a very good one. I ticked "bicycle." Then, for the next eight months, I did every delivery on a skateboard, and nobody ever checked. That's the kind of company Buzzworks was. They could fill a bay with protein powder in an afternoon, but they couldn't tell the difference between a bike and a plank of wood with wheels on.
I got up, put on yesterday's jeans and yesterday's shirt, because they'd been fine yesterday and I respect consistency. The shirt is red, with a big white crosshairs printed across the front of it, the kind you'd see through the scope of a rifle in a movie. I bought it at a thrift store on Sixth when I was fifteen because I thought it was funny to walk around dressed as a target. I've since come to think it was less of a joke than a warning. I've worn it most days anyway. I ate cereal standing over the sink, which is how you eat cereal when there's nobody around to tell you to sit down. I looked at the stack of long boxes against the wall where my comics lived, all of them bagged, boarded and filed in order, because I might have been bad at a lot of things but I was very good at that. Then I checked my phone, then checked it again, because the app had sent four more notifications in the time it had taken me to finish a bowl of cereal.
SURGE PAY: 2.5x.
SURGE PAY: 3x.
WE NEED YOU, MIKE. ⚡
Seriously, where is everyone?
That last one should have tipped me off. Apps don't say "seriously." Apps are meant to sound like a cheerful robot that's quietly logging how long you spend in the bathroom, and when one starts sounding like a manager who's been left on his own on a Saturday with three people out sick, it usually means something, somewhere, has gone wrong. But three times surge pay is three times surge pay. I was seventeen with a water bill, so I didn't think about it anywhere near as hard as I should have.
Before we go any further, there's something you should know going in. This is the story of the year I saved Halcyon Shores.
Okay, "saved" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A more accurate version would be that this is the story of the year I was in Halcyon Shores, did a lot of things, some of which were heroic if you squint, and some of which I will be retelling in a slightly better light than they strictly deserve. That's allowed. It's my book. If you want the unbiased version, you're welcome to go and find another seventeen-year-old who was there and see how you get on, but I'd warn you that most of them won't have kept notes.
Outside, the sirens were already going. That isn't unusual in Driftwood Heights, where you hear sirens the way other neighborhoods hear birds, and after a while you stop hearing them at all. But these weren't going past on their way to somewhere else. They were stacking up: one far off toward the ocean, then another somewhere downtown, then a third that seemed to be going round and round in circles, as if the driver had been given an address and then changed his mind about going there.
I stood at the window with my spoon, listening for a bit longer than I normally would have. Then the app pinged again and I stopped listening, because above everything else I'm a professional, and a professional doesn't let a few sirens get between him and triple pay.
I should also tell you, since it's going to come up, that I'm a tagger. Not a good one. Not one of the ones whose pieces cover a whole wall on Tidewater Pier in six colors. I do a crosshairs, the same one as on my shirt, a circle with a cross through it and my initials small in the corner, M.A., in whatever I've got, marker or a can or a bit of chalk, and I've been putting it on things around Driftwood Heights since I was about thirteen. The back of the laundromat. The top of the wall behind the pharmacy. The underside of the footbridge, from below, which is as close to that footbridge as I'd ever got. If you know where to look, you can follow my crosshairs across the whole neighborhood, like a trail of breadcrumbs, which, I've since realized, is exactly what they are.
I should tell you about the board, since it's going to matter later. It wasn't the Chrome Deck, because I didn't have the Chrome Deck yet, and I'm not going to tell you where it came from until we get there, so you can stop flipping ahead. This one was a secondhand deck I'd bought for twenty bucks off a kid who told me he was "getting into cycling" in the tone of voice people use when they're joining a cult. It had a crack near the back truck that I'd decided was cosmetic, grip tape I'd drawn on in marker during a slow shift, and a sticker of a cartoon cat giving the finger, which came with it and which I will defend to the death.
I opened the balcony door, did not look down, grabbed the board, stepped back in, and closed the door behind me. Then I put my hand flat against the wall, waiting for the apartment to stop feeling like it was tilting toward the window, which took the usual second and a half. I'm aware of how this looks, a guy who's scared of heights living in a place called the Heights and fetching his skateboard off a balcony every morning like an idiot. I'd like it noted that I'm aware of it, so you don't have to point it out.
I put on the bag last. It isn't a real courier bag. Real couriers had proper ones, big square insulated things with straps. What I had was the Buzzworks tote bag, the big canvas one they gave every new Partner in the welcome pack, with the flexing lightning bolt printed on the side. I'd covered half of the bolt with duct tape a few months earlier, because walking around as a billboard for a powder I'd never even tried felt like one humiliation too many before breakfast. My helmet lived in the bag, which meant it was technically with me at all times, and I've always felt that counts.
The first job was already at the top of the screen when I picked my phone up, with the address, the drop-off notes, and the little map pin bouncing up and down as if it couldn't wait to meet me.
2 x VOLTAGE PERFORMANCE FORMULA (NEW!), 10LB TUB. DRIFTWOOD HEIGHTS, BLOCK C, #14.
Customer note: please hurry. not feeling great.
He wasn't feeling great. The fix he'd gone for was twenty pounds of protein powder at seven in the morning, which was bold. I respected it in a way. I've made worse decisions on less sleep. Block C was only two streets over, so I tapped ACCEPT, and the app gave me a thumbs-up and a small burst of confetti, as though I'd done something brave.
If I could go back now to say one thing to that version of me, standing in the kitchen in yesterday's crosshairs shirt with a cat-sticker board under his arm and triple pay on his mind, I don't think it would be anything useful. It wouldn't be "don't go," or "fill the bathtub with water while you still can," or "learn to drive, you absolute idiot." It would probably just be to take a bit longer over the cereal, because it was the last time anything was going to be normal for a very long time. Nobody tells you when that's happening.
But I couldn't, so I went out. The door locked behind me with the same click it always made. The sirens carried on stacking up somewhere past the rooftops, and two streets over, in Block C, a customer who wasn't feeling great was waiting for his protein.
I was not, at that point, a hero. Give it a chapter.
End of Chapter 1. The rest of Book 1 is coming to Kindle.