Daydream Nation Today

Inside, it was not a sphere. It was a city. An infinite, ruined city made of the detritus of American dreams. Skyscrapers built from stacked cathode-ray tube televisions, their screens all showing the same static snow. Streets paved with vinyl records that cracked like ice underfoot. And the people—or what used to be people—stood frozen mid-stride. They were mannequins, but not plastic. They were made of hardened ash and melted cassette tapes, their faces locked in expressions of teenage longing: the pout of a girl waiting for a call, the slack-jawed awe of a boy watching a rocket launch on a black-and-white set.

"Don't," Eli said, his voice tight.

"Give us your fantasy," they whispered in a chorus of distorted voices. "Give us the boy you'll never kiss. Give us the song you'll never write. Give us the future you surrendered for a passing grade." Daydream Nation

Eli looked at his sister, his face a map of awe and relief. "You just killed a metaphysical graveyard with a thought."

For Jade Morrow, seventeen and feral with boredom, Verona was a cage. But tonight, the cage had a loose hinge. Inside, it was not a sphere

"Thank you," she whispered, and dissolved into a pile of autumn leaves.

The landfill hadn’t buried everything. Time had a way of spitting things back up. First, a row of school bus skeletons, their yellow paint blistered into a leprous orange. Then, the sphere. It was half-sunk in a hill of compacted trash, thirty feet in diameter, made of hammered copper and stainless steel. It wasn't corroded. It gleamed. They were mannequins, but not plastic

"This is where everything that gets thrown away goes," a voice said. It was a girl, maybe sixteen, sitting on a throne of crushed beer cans. She wore a tattered prom dress from 1985. Her hair was bleached white, and her eyes were two different colors: one blue, one a dead, reflective chrome.

Jenny screamed, but her scream became a sigh. Her prom dress faded into a simple nightgown. Her chrome eye wept a single tear of mercury, then turned blue. She was just a lost girl again. She fell to her knees.