[crow]

He didn't get to eat a lot of sweets or junk food at home, because his mother didn't like it, and his father ate at home so infrequently that he had negligible impact on what kind of food they had at any given time. When he could eat at home, and had the forethought to tell Henry's mother that he was coming in advance, she would make something she knew he liked, but most of the time it happened with little or no warning -- when it did happen at all, of course.

[crow]

But Henry's father wasn't a picky eater, and he would content himself with whatever it was they were having. He always complimented the cooking, and Henry's mother would always thank him for the compliments, but those compliments always sounded absent minded to Henry, and what he said was always the same. So whether he meant for them to or not, Henry felt that his father's compliments were empty. Maybe he couldn't even taste the food, so caught up was he with all his work.

[crow]

Henry's experiences with popsicles were mostly limited, therefore, to the kinds of just for fun things that teachers occasionally did for their students. There would be school sponsored ice cream days, or one time when the lab broke down in June, his chemistry teacher had decided that since they couldn't do what they were supposed to be doing that day anyway, they might as well all walk down to the local strip mall and get something from the convenience store.

[crow]

The students wheedled him into treating them, and after a while he had caved. By then Henry knew that he liked fruity popsicles, though at that point it was also getting harder to find them in convenience stores and the like. Ice creams were more and more becoming the fashion as Henry got older, which he thought of as sort of sad... But then, it wasn't as if he had many occasions to eat them anyway, so he wasn't sure how much his opinion mattered when it came down to it.

[crow]

He wondered if he could get away with freezing fruit juice at home. There were ice cube trays, and he knew bigger versions with little sticks attached existed for people to put juice in. Even the smoothies his mother liked, the kinds that were at least half vegetable by volume, would have been better than nothing, even though Henry didn't actually care much for their texture when they were in liquid form. But maybe if they were frozen, it would be harder to notice how thick they were.

[crow]

After all, ice cream was thick too, though it was a different kind of thickness that came from fat content rather than fibre and chunks.

Even regular ice, he lamented, would be something. He had none of that now, though, and thinking about it was only drawing his own attention to how hot he felt at the moment.

It really begged the question of what he was going to do about it. He didn't want to walk anywhere, that much was for sure.

[crow]

Just getting from the library to this patch of shade had already sapped a good deal of his energy. He was recovering, but he hadn't forgotten how unpleasant it had been. Walking to the nearest convenience store or anywhere else seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

A part of him reasoned that a store would be air conditioned... And if he bought something, he might be allowed to stay there, and use their wifi while he sat at a real small table or something.

[crow]

It wouldn't be as good as the library, and it wasn't like Henry had a lot of spending money, but he could buy something cheap and it wouldn't be a terrible idea. It wasn't the best form, and a few of the cashiers might give him a stink eye over stuff like this, but he wouldn't be thrown out or anything, right? He was clean, and unobtrusive, and he was as a general rule very very quiet, so he wouldn't bother anyone.

[crow]

But on the other hand, he had data on his phone, and he could read articles here, like he had been planning to... and it wouldn't cost money, and he wouldn't have to move at all.

Henry pulled out his phone, thinking that at least for a little while, reading something would take his mind off his personal discomfort. He was really glad for smartphones for precisely this reason. Now he could read things anywhere, and it was helping him stay calm and function better overall.

[crow]

Maybe he was a little too attached to his smartphone now. The idea of going anywhere without it, or it running out of batteries while he was out, was actually a little scary. He knew in his conscious mind that he would live, that he had lived many years without their existence, and many more in which he hadn't owned one himself, but having gotten used to having one, it felt strange to be without one.

And they were so convenient for so many things.

[crow]

He could look up the weather, he could look up how to get from one place to another... And if he didn't want to make eye contact with a stranger who was making him nervous in a public place, he could pretend to be real engrossed in something going on on his phone. It had never been easier to avoid interactions with people in a public space. He used to carry a book with him all the time, both to keep himself occupied and to use for that kind of purpose, but it just wasn't as convincing.

[crow]

Most people did not, whatever some movies might have to say on the topic, actually walk around with their noses stuck in a book. It made it pretty hard to walk, for one. As someone who had actually done it on occasion, he could attest to that.

But looking at your phone was perfectly normal and pretty widely acceptable in any context where you weren't expected to be actively being polite. And walking around in public, minding your own business, fit that bill.

[crow]

Right now though, he wasn't trying to avoid anyone, except maybe a part of his own brain that was trying to very helpfully inform him that this situation sucked. He knew it sucked, and he didn't have the energy to do anything about it, so he was just opting to ignore it for now. He brought up the news websites he generally used from his list of bookmarks, and had a flip through them to see if anything interesting was happening.

[crow]

There were plenty of articles, but most of them were pretty depressing. There were riots in this city, a politician had been ousted in a country on the other side of the world. He saw yet another think piece about how millennials weren't buying houses and here was the surprising reason why, and rolled his eyes.

He did like the news, and he did like staying informed, but sometimes it felt like... What did people call it? Hate scrolling? Doom scrolling, maybe?

[crow]

It had to have been something like that. He could look it up, but he really didn't care enough about getting the term right to bother with it. Maybe that wasn't what the word meant; he wasn't active on a lot of social media, and even though he was young he didn't really feel in the know about slang or anything like that. It made him feel kind of old. But it did sort of feel like he was punishing himself when he did this.