"Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch," Lil said as I stumbled in. She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall. "You wouldn't get up," I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it. "And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me -- the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping." "Can't." I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently. "Really?" she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw. "Yes. Really. It's your shift -- fucking work it or call in sick." Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. "What's wrong, honey?" she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall. "Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've got real work to do -- in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?" Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said. Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19 -- apparent and real -- and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember. Her parents -- Tom and Rita -- on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into sharp relief. They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over.