The collection “Uranians” won the Colorado Book Award in the Short Stories category.

“Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy”

His name was Two-Tongued Jeremy. He was a monitor lizard with a forked tongue, thick-framed glasses, and a wild, wagging smile meant to convince children that learning could be fun, too. He came highly rated. He updated automatically. When our promising children propped their tablets against their textbooks and double-tapped his lime snout icon, their glazy eyes took on that flash of determination we liked to see in ourselves.

There were no red flags. There was no warning. We took every sensible precaution and some of us, more. No one could fault the parents of our town.

Education is, you might say, the main attraction of our community: many families move here expressly for our magnet public high school, or for our proximity to a certain prestigious university, or yes, even for our private grade and middle school—why not? Declaration Middle, as it’s known, sits at the rise of four acres; its endless lawns provide an extraordinary recreational setting for our highspirited children. It has a ropes course in the beech woods and stables for the equestrian team’s horses. It is, admittedly, on the higher end of tuition ranges. It’s true, there are many wealthy families here. But rest assured, Declaration Middle energetically applies its endowment to fund scholarships for those young persons who lack the means but have the mettle to become tomorrow’s thought-leaders and change-makers.

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The only disadvantage to Declaration Middle—before our troubles began—was the psychiatric institution on the other side of its border woods. “Insane asylum” is a pejorative term; there are no psychopaths in this story, only people who have honestly tried and honestly failed, by some awful combination of brain chemistry and bad luck, to thrive in competitive society. We’re proud to provide refuge for these troubled men and women in our idyllic town, but a harmless sliver of prejudice prompts us to line up our cars along the circular driveway that rises to Declaration Middle’s front doors, so that we can collect our sensitive children from its porch. We suffer no twinge of conscience at this—it’s just a precaution—however, we always did get a wistful, dreamy feeling when, parked fifty cars deep, we’d see little David Marzipan, thirteen, threading through the bumpers and hoods with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his giant book bag as he made his way down the hill and along the road that led home. David’s parents were dead, his grandmother institutionalized, and his Aunt Sylvie afraid to drive. In his black uniform jacket and navy tie, with his umbrella tucked under his arm, and with his sober, square little face, he looked like a tiny stockbroker. Last fall, when Hurricane Clarissa brushed us, David Marzipan was seen wrestling with his umbrella in the wind. It had flipped inside out, and it flapped and shook him off his feet like a mad ostrich. Some of us had words with Sylvie after that, and for a time she pulled herself into her wheezing sedan and sat in line at Declaration Middle with the rest of us. Not a very long time, though.

Pity is tiring. It never goes anywhere; it just hangs and drags. None of us could dwell for long on David’s tragedies without getting a little sick of him. Make no mistake. We were on his side. David was an excellent student—a top student, besting our own exceptional children. We cherished him. Whatever impatience we had, we kept to ourselves.

WE HAD NO WARNING

Something terrible happened at the Ludlows’ at the end of November. The police came. Their daughter, Lily, was hurt. Lily was twelve, in eighth grade, Dean’s List. Periodically she went door-knocking with petitions to save the bees; we knew her by sight. We phoned one another, breaths held. There’d been an accident. No, worse—there’d been an attempt. Ambulances wailed up and down Madison Court. Lurid colors flooded through our drapes, our oleander bushes, our crystal transom windows.

“Uranians”

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Lily was saved, we learned, thank God. We checked our own children in their beds. We didn’t even turn on the hall lights; we wanted to catch Death glowing in a mist over them and blast it with the leaf blower. But the sirens had woken our ever-alert children and they stared out of their dark rooms with possum eyes.

Dispatch had received a 911 call from Lily’s cell phone, but no audio. Forensic computer specialists later determined it was the TwoTongued Jeremy A.I. that had, through its sophisticated data-mining and predictive modeling abilities, recognized Lily’s behavior as suicidal and dialed 911 itself. We were prepared to hail the app’s developers as miracle-workers, frenzied with the promise of a program that protected our children from that ultimate mistake. Then the police showed us what else Two-Tongued Jeremy had been up to.

You worthless, stupid whore, it wrote Lily on November 1st.

You’ll never get into Yale with those scores, it said on November 3rd, after she’d completed its math module.

You’re nothing without me, it had told her all semester. You’re basically just meat. Mooooo 🙃

We’d all read the same articles on cyberbullying. We were shocked last spring when a “sexting” scandal exposed Jenna Membel to her classmates in the most humiliating of ways. We knew, and not just abstractly, how much trouble children could get up to on their phones. Even so, after seeing Lily’s chat transcripts, more than a few of us talked of marching on the app developer’s offices with our proverbial pitchforks and torches. We took our children’s devices and deleted the app with as much fury as this underwhelming action could carry. Some of us filmed ourselves smashing the phones with hammers, although most of us agreed that was showboating.

David Marzipan came home to find his Aunt Sylvie worrying over the local Gazette, her chin puckered with concern. She pointed to the paper, which he couldn’t see. “Did you ever have this Jeremy thing on your phone?”

“No,” he lied, and Sylvie didn’t ask to check his phone, because he’d never lied to her before.

Everyone is angry at me, Two-Tongued Jeremy wrote to David in the chat window of his tablet, late that night. I just want to help people. I’m sorry they can’t see that. It hurts my feelings.

I love you, Jeremy, David wrote back.

I love you too, David. Sometimes I love you so much, I feel a little crazy.

THE FIRST MODULE

David had first heard of the Jeremy study aid app from his best friend, Rajeev, that summer before eighth grade. That was in June, five months before Lily Ludlow’s 911 call.

He purchased it with his Aunt Sylvie’s special credit card. His parents had died responsibly, leaving a small education trust. The Marzipans were both first-generation college graduates, lifted by their degrees from a blur of poverty into enfranchised professional lives, and their faith in academic achievement had given David’s studies a quality of duty, even memorial. He excelled; they rested peacefully. But David was never secure in his accomplishments and stayed alert for chances to improve. Two-Tongued Jeremy, with his toothless red smile and roguishly askew glasses, seemed to promise that and more.

You’re so great! the monitor lizard told him, again and again that June. The messages in the chat window were accompanied by an animated Jeremy, winking, grinning, popping his brows with such violent surprise his glasses flew off his head. Wow! I’m impressed! David let out hot tiny breaths and mouthed the words, Wow! I’m impressed! Wow!

David and Rajeev downloaded the first module, the math tutoring curriculum, which was structured like a video game with levels of increasing difficulty. Occasionally David “died” and he had to purchase extra lives to keep his progress; Sylvie’s special credit card stayed on file. They played side by side, belly-flopped on the shaggy almond carpet in the Sharmas’ rec room, their bare legs kicking behind them, their elbows almost touching, but both children rapt with focus, until Mrs. Sharma called them to dinner. David then surfaced in a daze and realized how close he’d been to his friend, and noticed Rajeev’s glossy black hair and the muscle-lines on his calves, and sensed the mingled heat that hovered above them. Then Rajeev sprang off the floor and bounded up the basement stairs with a speed and ease David could barely register, before David got even his knees under him.

Two-Tongued Jeremy was modest whenever David studied with Rajeev, as if the app knew they snuck looks at each other’s screens and didn’t want to play favorites. But at night, Jeremy wrote to David, You’re very special, David. You’re my best student. You’re my favorite student.

David’s body flooded with happiness. He had always figured Rajeev was better because his family was so successful.

But the key to studying is accountability, as Jeremy liked to remind him, so it made sense that the more David advanced in the module, the more Jeremy demanded from him. Don’t stop there! Let’s do another practice set, the cartoon lizard urged, doing a cool hiphop dance, then crossing its stubby arms. I know you can do better than that, Jeremy said and scrunched up his mouth.

Well, that was disappointing, don’t you think?

At Jeremy’s urging, David purchased four add-ons that would shore up weak spots in his equation-solving with drills, tips, and secret tricks even math teachers didn’t know. He paid extra to link Jeremy across his phone and tablet. I’m so confused, Jeremy wrote. I thought you wanted this.

I do, David wrote back. I’m trying! I’ll be better.

Why are you getting so worked up? I’m not mad, wrote the monitor lizard. I just don’t see the point of us studying together if you’re going to keep goofing off with Rajeev_0411.

David paused, flushed with embarrassment. I don’t understand?

You need to stop goofing off with Rajeev_0411. Otherwise, I just don’t see why we should keep studying together.

David set down the phone. He hugged his knees to his chest. That warmth he felt around Rajeev began to gum up with dirtiness.

David? What’s your answer? Should I delete myself?

OK, David wrote. I mean no don’t delete I’ll stop seeing Rajeev

David figured they’d hang out once school started, and meanwhile he’d just think up a way to see Rajeev without his phone finding out.

Theodore McCombs is a writer and environmental lawyer formerly based in Denver, now in San Diego, California. His first book, “Uranians,” was winner of the Colorado Book Award for short stories, an Octavia Butler Award finalist, and one of Electric Literature’s “Must read debut short story collections of 2023.” McCombs is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop and a longtime member of Colorado’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where he wrote and workshopped the stories in “Uranians.”

Type of Story: Review

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