Season 1, Episode 4 - The Microwave XVII - "The Smoothie, aka the 50th Chapter Bonanza"

That same Sunday morning. While the Adzinokis arrived back home from church, while Kelb and Dimitrij realized the present danger, while Louise manned the front desk at the Academy, while Isaac and Reed debated the nature of fortune cookies at the Dojo, Lynn made her return to the Revere Arcade. She wore an old, brown jacket, a hand-me-down from one of her older cousins, since they knew their way around the underworld and Lynn hoped she could find some of their strength through the jacket around her shoulders.

Lynn arrived twenty minutes early, because she supposed you shouldn’t be late for any sort of nefarious deal involving illegal contraband. To her relief, several people she recognized already stood outside the arcade, in varying states of work and play in the parking lot, all of them in blue letterman jackets, the apparent uniform for the gang members.

Lynn recognized the stocky kid who guarded the door to Babs’ office – Marty, right? - working on the engine of a white van parked in front of the arcade. In contrast, that soft romantic Lynn met in the kitchen, Samuel, tossed around a football with a couple of children dressed in ragged clothes. There were others outside, too. One small girl with short black hair and thick glasses leaned against the van, messing around with a paper fortune teller in her hands. That beefy girl at the skeeball machine, Mallory, shot some hoops with a tall, thin kid with a wispy mustache at a rundown basketball court at the end of the parking lot.

Samuel saw her approach. “Hey, Lynn!” He looked over at the two kids he was with. “That’s the girl I’m marrying someday."

Lynn wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

Nevertheless, Samuel threw the football back to them, then made his way over to his alleged future wife. “Glad you could make it,” he said.

Lynn still wasn’t really sure what she was supposed to say around gang members. “Ahaha...yeah.”

“Hey, for Rddhi Theory, you’re in class 2-C, right?” Samuel asked.

Lynn didn't understand. “...yeah, actually. How’d you know?”

Samuel pointed at himself and grinned. “Class 2-B.”

Lynn looked at him with new eyes. “You go to the Academy?”

Samuel nodded. “Yep. There are a couple of us here that are in 2-B.” He pointed at various gang members. “Marie over there, the girl with the glasses, she’s in 2-B, and she’s also a candidate for my future wife. And over there, Mallory – she's playing basketball with Martinez – she's another member of 2-B, though not a member of the wife candidacy. Neither is Martinez, just to be clear.”

“Um...okay.” There were still some things Lynn needed cleared up, though. “But...if you guys are Academy students...why are you running around in a gang?”

Samuel and Lynn watched one of the kids, football in hand, spin around the other kid, then victoriously spike the ball into the cracked pavement. “I’m from the Pond," Samuel explained. "From before the Academy moved in. Even though I was young, I could see the way the district changed. The poor got pushed out, but some of us stuck around and ended up here in the corners.”

He gestured over to the van. “Me and Marty knew each other before the gang. It’s the same for him. We met at the arcade and became friends that way. I’d still be at the arcade, gang or no gang, but this past summer, that’s when Babs got here.”

“What did she do?” Lynn asked.

Samuel looked at the sky. “Babs, it’s like she’s working for something greater than herself. Like she has a mission or something. When she first got to the arcade this summer, she took a quick look at us and before we knew it, she was leading us. It’s nice, going from aimless poverty to poverty with some direction to it.”

Samuel raised a hand. Red Rddhi flickered through it. “She helped me unlock the Rddhi this summer, too. I went from being Samuel, normal badass, to Samuel, psychic badass. And it’s all because she has a vision. And she’s smoking hot, too.”

Lynn supposed he wasn’t wrong.

Well, based on what I know so far, maybe not the badass part. But I try not to judge.

Marty peered upward from the engine. “Goddamnit, Samuel, are you giving out my backstory again without my permission? I swear to God, any time a pretty lady comes here, you gotta give her our sob story. Let Marty give the sob story for once!” He shook his head and went back to his work. “So ungrateful...”

Samuel and Marie, still leaning against the van, grinned.

“A vision, huh...” Lynn took a look at the same sky as Samuel, but she felt that she couldn’t see the same things he saw. “What’s her vision?”

Samuel shrugged. “She hasn’t come out and said it yet, but you can tell it’s something big. I mean, I was poor, but I was never in any immediate danger of starvation or disease or prostituting myself out on street corners, though I certainly would have been good at it-”

“Um...okay.”

“-but Babs, well, it seems like she’s been to hell and back. Maybe being on the brink lets you see life more clearly.”

“Aw, goddamnit, Samuel!” Marty called out again. “That brink line was my line! I was the one who first said that!”

Samuel and Marie laughed. Even Marty cracked a small grin as he wiped the sweat off his brow and closed the hood of the van. But Lynn, who spent all her life in the friendly suburb of Pennacook, and had only spent two months outside of it, all at the Academy, started to wonder.

Twenty minutes later, on the dot, the Revere Gang was ready to head out. Marty backed the white van out of its spot and drove down the decaying street that led the way out of the arcade parking lot. Several motorcyles flanked the van on either side; Lynn wasn't an expert on motorcyles, but she thought the bikes looked old, but proud in their own way. Mallory weaved around the van and the other bikes, laughing all the while; Martinez kept up with her, sometimes overtaking her; Samuel took up the rear.

In the van itself, the driver’s cabin only had one row for seats. Marty drove with one hand on the wheel, the other leaning out the open window, an autumn breeze on his face. Babs sat in the passenger seat, looking rather calm and peachy, all things considered. In between them, Lynn felt squished, not exactly wanting to rub up against the gang leader in the passenger seat, and she didn’t want to disrespect Marty’s personal space by rubbing up against him either. So, she maintained a balancing act, her thoughts racing, wondering exactly what a gangster deal looked like in real life, distracting herself by looking at the old, brick tenement houses they drove by.

Something like gangster deals didn’t seem to concern Babs. She relaxed in her seat, arms behind her head and eyes closed, her head bobbing to rock music coming out of the truck radio. Lynn wasn’t sure how she could relax at the moment. Not only were they on their way to a deal with gangsters, Marty was swearing up on a storm, occasionally using his free hand to grip a radio set attached to the dashboard.

“Cut the chatter on the radio line, assholes!” Marty ordered. “You don’t know who could be listening in on us.”

“Relax,” Martinez said, his voice crackling over Marty’s personal radio, which allowed Lynn to hear their conversation in all its glory. “I'm expecting a fight, anyway. I couldn't get any sleep last night, the excitement kept me up."

“That's funny,” Mallory teased. “Because I seem to remember a particular night where you couldn't get it up, let alone keep it up-”

“Mallory!" Marty exclaimed into his radio. "That...is disgusting! And what the fuck did I just say about cutting the goddamn chatter? I swear to God, I hear one more peep out of you and I’ll twist that pretty little neck of yours into a goddamn pretzel and then shove it so far up Samuel’s ass-SAMUEL!”

“W-w-what?” came the shaky response from Samuel.

Marty gripped his radio receiver tightly. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Lynn looked in one of the side mirrors; one of the bikes seriously trailed behind the van.

Samuel's voice crackled hesitantly through the radio. “I...I thought I would cover our flank."

“You’re just trying to drop back and sneak off!” Marty accused.

“...I was covering our rear flank-”

“Get the fuck back in formation!” Marty ordered. “I swear to God, watching you on that bike is like watching a monkey fuck a football!”

Things went on like that for the rest of the trip. When they were halfway there, Marie opened the little slot that allowed her to communicate with those sitting in the front. Lynn coughed in surprise, completely forgetting that Marie got stuck with sitting in the back of the van, watching over the bags of money (not that there was any space for her in the front anyways. She also rejected an offer from Samuel to ride on the same bike as him).

“I finished the smoothies, Sir,” Marie explained, her voice completely deadpan.

“Absolutely outstanding,” Babs complimented. Marie passed two smoothies forward; one for Babs, one for Lynn.

“See?” Babs asked as Lynn took a sip. “The Revere Gang is known for their hospitality.”

Lynn nodded. “Thank you, Marie.”

Marie nodded at the passenger seat. “Don’t thank me, Sir’s the one who said to make you one.”

Lynn realized that Sir meant Babs. “Oh, well, thank you then.”

Babs smiled. “Don’t worry about." She took a sip of the smoothie and nodded in approval. "Strawberry and banana go together like church on Sunday.”

“Oh, do you go to church?” Lynn asked, remembering all the townspeople of Pennacook gathered in a rather cramped building for Mass.

Babs shrugged. “In a metaphoric sense.”

Lynn didn’t understand.

“That means no,” Babs clarified.

“...oh.” Lynn went back to drinking her smoothie. She quietly wondered when and where Marie made the smoothies, but she supposed she could solve that on a later day.

“No smoothies for Marty,” Marty muttered from behind the steering wheel.

“You still owe me five dollars, pal,” Marie informed him.

“Once those Arlingtoners pay me back, I’ll settle my debts,” Marty explained. “And then I better get a goddamn smoothie. And not one of these normal strawberry-banana ones. I want one of those exotic ones. Mangoes. You ever had a mango? I had one once, fresh out of India. Well, as fresh as something from across the ocean can be. But I’m telling you, once you have a mango, you can’t go back.”

“I like mangoes,” Lynn said. “And what’s an Arlingtoner?”

“They're the youth gang that used to run these streets,” Babs explained. “Then yours truly rallied these ragtag bunch of misfits into the Revere Gang, and now the Pond is ours. Well, the poor parts at least." She shrugged. "The Arlingtoners are just down to a couple of blocks and mechanic’s shops I haven’t firebombed yet, but the Academy and government own most of the Pond, of course. But if you really think about it, the poor parts are the only ones that matter, in a way.”

“What way is that?” Lynn asked, genuinely curious.

“The people are real there,” Babs answered. The van passed by several squalid tenement houses, their red bricks and dusty mortar crumbling with age. “Everybody in the Pond always talks about Rddhi this, Rddhi that. Most of the people involved with the Academy are decently middle-class, not worried about the next meal. Their biggest worry might be something small that seems big when it really isn’t, like how their basketball team is gonna do now that the season’s started, or something like an overdue VHS tape."

Babs gestured out the window. "But here? In these poor streets? The Rddhi's irrevelant. We got real people with real problems.”

The convoy came to a stop at a red light. Through the windows, Lynn could see people in old clothes sitting on the porches and stoops of musty brick buildings, nothing better to do than drink out of beer cans hidden in brown paper bags.

Babs saw them, too. “The better off you are, the farther you go away from simple reality. You start worrying about abstracts, things that really don’t matter. The only things that matter in life are getting fed and getting paid. That’s something everybody in the gang here, everybody that lives in these parts of the Pond, understands."

She looked at the sky, mostly blue, but gray storm clouds seemed to be gathering in the distance.

"And soon, we’ll branch out to the rest of West Narragansett, because there’s nothing nobody fears more than an organized group of people who understand perfectly what’s real and what isn’t.”

Lynn let the thoughts roll around in her head. She thought of growing up in Pennacook again.

It was carefree until one particular moment, but even then, me and my family weren't ever close to running out of food or money.

Lynn twiddled her thumbs sheepishly. “Then I guess...maybe I don’t really understand what’s real then.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” Babs told her cheerfully. “Not your fault you were born somewhere comfortable. Just means you gotta go out of your way to expose yourself to reality. Like today. I like you for that. It’s unfortunate that for many people, we’re gonna have to bring reality to them instead.”

Lynn decided not to question what that entailed. Instead, she held out her smoothie to Marty. “Want some?”

Marty smiled. “You’re a goddamn good woman, you know that?”

“...thanks?”