god stumper

[Cicada]

Salem was grimly satisfied when he finished running the numbers. It didn’t matter that they didn’t tell a story he didn’t like- downballot massacre, Latino/a/x Americans are not a monolith, other typical buzzwords- and it more mattered that he’d done it at all. A turnout model accurate enough that it could go on his portfolio. Not accurate enough that it would. He had another few months before his first-choices would come knocking.

He glanced out the living room window of the Fox household. Cars of every description littered their driveway and curb. No getting in or out without extensive bureaucracy. Their (white) chocolate box assortment of guests existed in the den and dining room, buried in a haze of weed and essential oils while admiring dad’s latest collection with indecipherable awe. Buzzwords of their own, of the sort Salem had far less experience with save via osmosis.

Salem abandoned his laptop, but not before hiding it in the television cabinet. Dad had that sort of business clientele that it never hurt to be too careful around. Salem’s life work that wasn’t meticulously backed up to Pastebin was tucked away with the remnants of a regrettable and quickly canceled subscription to Bloomberg nobody in the family had bothered to read, each for their own very different reasons. What could he say, it was a bit too anti-regulatory for his taste.

His sister was somewhere in the house. Upstairs, probably in her room, maybe she’d wandered around some to stimulate her brain into something hopefully approximating function. Maybe she’d somehow slipped out of the blockade with help from a friend.

His hope was that, whatever she’d elected to do, she’d finished her Government homework first. He checked on just that when he entered:

“You finished yet?”

Didn’t take long to eyeball what she was actually up to. Second nature for him to stare at anything she did if it involved things that looked like a pen.

“New chapter? Cutting it kind of close to your update day.”