The MaddAddam Trilogy (50 page)

On this particular day I started out with Bernice, but then we had a fight. We squabbled constantly, which I took as a sign of our friendship because no matter how viciously we fought we’d always make up afterwards. Some bond held us together: not hard like bone, but slippery, like cartilage. Most likely we both felt insecure among the Gardener kids; we were each afraid to be left without an ally.

This time our fight was over a beaded change purse with a starfish on it that we’d picked out of a trash pile. We coveted finds like that and were always looking for them. The pleeblanders threw a lot of stuff away, because – said the Adams and Eves – they had short attention spans and no morals.

“I saw it first,” I said.

“You saw it first last time,” said Bernice.

“So what? I still saw it first!”

“Your mother’s a skank,” said Bernice. That was unfair because I thought so myself and Bernice knew it.

“Yours is a vegetable!” I said. “Vegetable” shouldn’t have been an insult among the Gardeners, but it was. “Veena the Vegetable!” I added.

“Meat-breath!” said Bernice. She had the purse, and she was keeping it.

“Fine!” I said. I turned and walked away. I loitered, but I didn’t look around, and Bernice didn’t hurry after me.

This happened at the mallway, which was called Apple Corners. This was the official name of our pleeb, though everyone called it the Sinkhole because people vanished into it without a trace. We Gardener kids walked through the mallway whenever we could, just looking.

Like everything else in our pleeb, this mallway had once been classier. There was a broken fountain full of empty beer cans, there were built-in planters with a lot of Zizzy Froot cans and cigarette butts and used condoms covered (said Nuala) in festering germs. There was a holospinner booth that must once have spun out suns and moons, and rare animals, and your own image if you put money in, but it had been trashed some time ago and now stood empty-eyed. Sometimes we went inside it and pulled the tattered star-sprinkled curtain across, and read the messages left on the walls by the pleebrats.
Monica sucks. So does Darf only betr. UR $? 4 U free, baBc8s! Brad UR ded
. Those pleebrats were so daring, they’d write anywhere or anything. They didn’t care who saw it.

The Sinkhole pleebrats went into the holospinner to smoke dope – the booth reeked of it – and they had sex in there: we could tell because of the condoms and sometimes the panties they’d leave behind. Gardener kids weren’t supposed to do either one of those things – hallucinogenics were for religious purposes, and sex was for those who’d exchanged green leaves and jumped the bonfire – but the older Gardener kids said they’d done them anyway.

The shops that weren’t boarded up were twenty-dollar stores called Tinsel’s and Wild Side and Bong’s – names like that. They sold feather hats, and crayons for drawing on your body, and T-shirts with dragons and skulls and mean slogans. Also Joltbars, and chewing gum that made your tongue glow in the dark, and red-lipped ashtrays that said, Let Me Blow It For You, and In-Your-Skin Etcha-Tattoos the Eves said would burn your skin down to the veins. You could find expensive stuff at bargain prices that Shackie said were boosted from the SolarSpace boutiques.

Tawdry rubbish, all of it, the Eves would say. If you’re going to sell your soul, at least demand a higher price! Bernice and I paid no attention to that. Our souls didn’t interest us. We’d peer in the windows, giddy with wanting.
What would you get?
we’d say.
The LED-light wand? That’s
baby! The Blood and Roses video? Gross, that’s for boys! The Real Woman Stick-on Bimplants, with responsive nipples? Ren, you suck!

After Bernice had left that day, I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought maybe I should just go back, because I didn’t feel too safe, alone. Then I saw Amanda, standing on the other side of the mallway with a group of Tex-Mexican pleeb girls. I knew that group by sight, and Amanda had never been with them before.

Those girls were wearing the sort of clothes they usually wore: miniskirts and spangled tops, candyfloss boas around their necks, silver gloves, plasticized butterflies clipped into their hair. They had their Sea/H/Ear Candies and their burning-bright phones and their jellyfish bracelets, and they were showing off. They were playing the same tune on their Sea/H/Ear Candies and they were dancing to it, swivelling their bums, sticking out their chests. They looked as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it. I envied that look so much. I just stood there, envying.

Amanda was dancing too, except she was better. After a while she stopped and stood a little apart, texting on her purple phone. Then she stared straight at me and smiled, and waved her silver fingers. That meant
Come here
.

I checked that no one was looking. Then I crossed the mallway.

“You want to see my jellyfish bracelet?” Amanda said once I got there. I must have seemed pathetic to her, with my orphanish clothes and chalky fingers. She held up her wrist: there were the tiny jellyfish, opening and closing themselves like swimming flowers. They looked so perfect.

“Where did you get it?” I asked. I hardly knew what to say.

“Lifted,” said Amanda. That was how the pleebrat girls mostly got things.

“How do they stay alive in there?”

She pointed to the silver knob where the bracelet fastened. “This is an aerator,” she said. “It pumps in oxygen. You add the food twice a week.”

“What happens if you forget?”

“They eat each other,” said Amanda. She gave a little smile. “Some kids do that on purpose, they don’t add the food. Then it’s like a miniwar in there, and after a while there’s just one jellyfish left, and then it dies.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

Amanda kept the same smile. “Yeah. That’s why they do it.”

“They’re really pretty,” I said in a neutral voice. I wanted to please her, and I couldn’t tell whether she thought
horrible
was good or bad.

“Take it,” said Amanda. She held out her wrist. “I can lift another one.”

I wanted that bracelet so badly, but I wouldn’t know how to buy the food and the jellyfish would die. Or else the bracelet would be discovered,
no matter how well I hid it, and I’d be in trouble. “I can’t,” I said. I took a step back.

“You’re one of
them
, aren’t you?” said Amanda. She wasn’t taunting, she seemed merely curious. “The Goddies. The Godawfuls. They say there’s a bunch of them around here.”

“No,” I said, “I’m not.” The lie must have stood out all over me. There were a lot of shabby people in the Sinkhole pleeb, but they weren’t shabby on purpose the way the Gardeners were.

Amanda tilted her head a little to one side. “Funny,” she said. “You look like them.”

“I only live with them,” I said. “I’m just more or less visiting them. I’m not really like them at all.”

“Of course you aren’t,” said Amanda, smiling. She gave my arm a little pat. “Come over here. I want to show you something.”

Where she took me was the alleyway that led to the back of Scales and Tails. We Gardener kids weren’t supposed to go there, but we did anyway because when we were collecting you could get a lot of vinegar wine if you were early enough to beat out the winos.

That alleyway was dangerous. Scales and Tails was a dirt den, said the Eves. We should never, ever go into it, especially not girls. It said,
ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
in neon over the door, which was guarded at night by two enormous men in black suits who wore sunglasses even though it was dark. One of the older Gardener girls claimed these men had said to her, “Come back in a year and bring your sweet little ass.” But Bernice said she was just bragging.

Scales had pictures on either side of the entrance – light-up holo-photos. The pictures were of beautiful girls covered completely with shining green scales, like lizards, except for the hair. One of them was standing on a single leg with the other leg hooked around her neck. I thought that it must hurt to stand like that, but the girl in the picture was smiling.

Did the scales grow or were they were pasted on? Bernice and I disagreed about that. I said they were pasted, Bernice said they grew
because the girls had been operated on, like getting bimplants. I told Bernice that was nuts because nobody would have such an operation. But secretly I sort of believed her.

One day we’d seen a scaly girl running down the street in daytime, with a black-suited man chasing her. She sparkled a lot because of her shiny green scales; she’d kicked off her high heels and she was running in her bare feet, dodging in and out among the people, but then she hit a patch of broken glass and fell. The man caught up with her and scooped her up, and carried her back to Scales with her green snakeskin arms dangling down. Her feet were bleeding. Whenever I thought of that, a chill went all through me, like watching someone else cut their finger.

At the back of the alleyway beside Scales there was a small square yard where the trash bins were kept – the ones for the carbon garboil trash and the other kind. Then there was a board fence, and on the other side of it there was a vacant lot where a building had burned down. Now it was just hard earth with pieces of cement and charred wood and broken glass, and weeds growing on it.

Sometimes the pleebrats hung out around there, and they’d jump us when we were emptying the wine bottles. They’d yell, “Goddie, goddie, stinky body” and snatch the pails and run off with them or empty them onto us. That happened to Bernice once and she reeked of wine for days.

Sometimes we went into that vacant lot with Zeb on our Outdoor Classroom days: he said it was the closest thing to a meadow we’d ever find in our pleeb. When he was with us, the pleebland kids didn’t bother us. Zeb was like having your own private tiger: tame to you, savage to everyone else.

Once, we found a dead girl there. She didn’t have any hair or clothes: she only had a few green scales left clinging to her.
Pasted on
, I thought.
Or something. Anyway, not growing. So I was right
.

“Maybe she’s sunbathing,” said one of the older boys, and the rest of them snickered.

“Don’t touch her,” said Zeb. “Have some respect! We’ll have our lesson on the Rooftop Garden today.” When we came back for our next Outdoor Classroom, she was gone.

“I bet she’s carbon garboil,” Bernice whispered to me. Carbon garboil was made from any sort of carbon garbage – slaughterhouse refuse, old vegetables, restaurant tossout, even plastic bottles. The carbs went into a boiler, and oil and water came out, plus anything metal. Officially you couldn’t put in human corpses, but the kids made jokes about that. Oil, water, and shirt buttons. Oil, water, and gold pen nibs.

“Oil, water, and green scales,” I whispered to Bernice.

At first glance the vacant lot was empty. No winos, no pleebrats, no dead naked women. Amanda led me over to the far corner, where there was a flat slab of concrete. A syrup bottle was leaning against it, the squeeze kind.

“Look at this,” she said. She’d written her name in syrup on the slab, and a stream of ants was feeding on the letters, so that each letter had an edging of black ants. That was how I first learned Amanda’s name – I saw it written in ants. Amanda Payne.

“Cool, huh?” she said. “Want to write your own name?”

“Why are you doing that?” I said.

“It’s neat,” said Amanda. “You write things, then they eat your writing. So you appear, then you disappear. That way no one can find you.”

Why did this make sense to me? I don’t know, but it did. “Where do you live?” I asked.

“Oh, around,” said Amanda carelessly. That meant she didn’t really live anywhere: she was sleeping in a squat somewhere, or worse. “I used to live in Texas,” she added.

So she was a refugee. A lot of Texas refugees had turned up after the hurricanes and then the droughts. They were mostly illegal. Now I could see why Amanda would be so interested in disappearing.

“You can come and live with me,” I said. I hadn’t planned that, it just came out of my mouth.

At that moment Bernice squeezed through the gap in the fence. She’d relented, she’d returned to collect me, except now I didn’t want her.

“Ren! What’re you
doing!”
she yelled. She came clomping across the vacant lot in that purposeful way she had. I found myself thinking she had big feet, and her body was too square and her nose too small, and her neck ought to be longer and thinner. More like Amanda’s.

“Here comes a friend of yours, I guess,” said Amanda, smiling. I felt like saying,
She’s not my friend
, but I wasn’t brave enough to be that treacherous.

Bernice came up to us, red-faced. She always got red when she was mad. “Come on, Ren,” she said. “You’re not supposed to talk to her.” She spotted Amanda’s jellyfish bracelet, and I could tell she wanted it as much as I did. “You’re evil,” she said to Amanda. “Pleebrat!” She stuck her arm through mine.

“This is Amanda,” I said. “She’s coming to live with me.”

I thought Bernice would fly into one of her rages. But I was giving her my stony-eyed stare, the one that said I wasn’t going to give in. She’d risk losing face in front of a stranger if she pushed too hard, so instead she gave me a silent, calculating look. “Okay then,” she said. “She can help carry the vinegar wine.”