Blue Gold (8 page)

“Who emails?”

“We have a land line, too.”

Lacey's eyes went wide with a sudden vision of disaster. “This boob shot, did you send it from your cell or from your laptop?”

“My cell, but I erased it!” Fiona added quickly. She'd been over it a hundred times in her head since discovering the phone was missing. She was positive she'd deleted the shot immediately—just as she was positive she was never mixing vodka and rum coolers again.

“So don't worry about it then,” Lacey concluded.

But by now all Fiona could do was worry. How well did she know Ryan, and how much could she trust him?

Fiona spent the rest of the day looking for Ryan in the hallways between classes, and at lunch in the cafeteria. Since she didn't have her cell, she had to borrow Lacey's smartphone to check her Friendjam account, but by mid-afternoon study hall there were still no messages from him. The longer he went without contacting her, the more worried she became that maybe she had misjudged how much she could trust him. Then, at the end of the day, when Fiona was at her locker getting ready to go home, he at last appeared, sauntering up to her with gangsta cool.“Whassup?” he asked.

“Where have
you
been?” she replied, trying to match his apparent indifference.

“I been busy,” he said with a shrug.

“Doing what?”

“Stuff. So, what's going on?”

“Well, I lost my phone.”

“Yeah? That sucks.”

Ha! Fiona had him. “Obviously you didn't try to call me, or you would have known,” she said.

“Are you mad or something?” Ryan asked, at last clueing in to her mood.

“I just think you should have called me.”

“About what?”

“You know,” she said, prompting him. When he still didn't get it, she dropped her voice so that kids around them wouldn't hear. “After I sent you that picture and everything.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” Was that all he had to say? Ryan was being so annoying. “You think I do that all the time?” she said.

“You didn't have to do it.” Fiona noted that he was avoiding her eyes.

“You asked me to!”

“That didn't mean you had to.”

Fiona couldn't believe what she was hearing. She waited until the last of the kids around them had closed their lockers and headed away, and kept her voice low. “So now you think I'm a slut?”

He shrugged again. “No…”

Ryan was blushing, struggling for words. But his “no” definitely sounded more like a “yes.” Fiona felt her blood boil.

“That is
so
judgmental,” she said.

“I still like you,” Ryan offered, feebly.

“Don't do me any favors!”

“What are you getting so upset about?” he asked, annoyed now, like she was being some kind of drama queen.

“I don't know. Because you're a two-faced hypocrite?”

Ryan's face got pinched and angry, but Fiona didn't care. Suddenly she was wondering what she ever saw in him.

“So…what? Are we, like, breaking up?” he said.

Fiona wasn't sure if he was asking or threatening. Either way, she found herself jumping at the suggestion.

“Maybe we should,” she replied, and before he could respond, she slammed her locker shut and started away. She took two steps, then spun back to where he stood glued to the floor, gape-faced.

“Give me your phone,” she demanded.

“Why?”

“Just do it!”

He dug in his pocket and fished out his cell. Fiona grabbed it out of his hand and in three seconds flat had found the selfie—which, naturally, he had saved. With the tap of her finger, she deleted it.

“There,” she said, handing it back to him. “Just in case you get any ideas about spreading it around.”

As she headed down the front steps of the school, breathing in the fresh spring air, Fiona felt a surge of freedom. She also felt relief—she'd totally dodged a bullet with the boob shot. It had seemed like such a nothing thing on Saturday night, but the anxiety she had felt since then wasn't worth it. She'd learned her lesson—from now on, she was going to be more careful.

 

FIONA HAD TOLD HER MOM
about the lost phone on Sunday, but on Monday night after softball practice, she had to face telling her dad. The phone had been a Christmas present from him. Her dad was a super-conservative business guy, the vice president of communications for a mining company. Balding, glasses, polo shirt tucked neatly into chinos—there was no way she was going to avoid a lecture.

“Fiona, you were supposed to look after that cell phone,” he said.

They were sitting in his car outside her mom's place, the engine running because he had to get home to his other family in West Vancouver, across the bridge. Fiona's parents had been divorced since Fiona was three, time enough for her dad to produce another whole family with Wife #2, also known as Joanne. Brandon was eleven and Katie was seven. At first Fiona had been jealous of the competition from kids who were only half-related to her, especially when Katie, his second daughter, arrived, but the upside of her dad being super straight was that he was also super conscientious. He made the trip across the bridge twice a week to coach softball and he always included Fiona in family vacations to Whistler and Hawaii, which her mom could never have afforded.

“I'm sorry,” she said, duly regretful.

“I hope you don't think I'm just going to go out and replace it.”

She didn't expect that. On the other hand, her cell phone was her life.

“I was thinking I'd get a job this summer,” she replied, “and pay for it myself.”

“Good idea,” he nodded. She could tell that he was proud of her. “If you get a job,” he said, “I would be willing to get you a new phone, for your birthday.”

My birthday's in
September, and it's only June!
calculated Fiona. That was a long time to go without a phone.

“By that time,” he said with a wink, “the next generation of these babies is supposed to be out.” He slipped his smartphone out of his pocket—top of the line, the phone that people camped out overnight in front of electronics stores to buy. “I know a guy who can jump the queue.”

“That would be awesome!”
Beyond awesome!
Fiona hugged him. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Better not mention it to your mom,” he added.

He didn't need to say more. Fiona's mom had a tendency to flip out when she came home with expensive presents from her dad. Her mom was a writer for a consumer magazine. Fiona knew her rant by heart—“
For every electronic gadget we buy, somebody, somewhere is being exploited!”
But Fiona thought that her mom's mini-
meltdowns were really about the fact she didn't make much money, and she felt bad that she couldn't compete with Fiona's dad.

“Don't worry,” Fiona agreed.

She climbed out of the car and waved while he drove away in the late-evening light, feeling that all was right with the world once more. She could hear kids playing at a nearby park, their voices ringing out last shouts of freedom before their parents packed them off home. Soon the summer holidays would be here, two whole months of freedom. As she turned her key in the gate, Fiona wondered what kind of job she would be able to find, considering she wasn't quite fifteen.

“Ryan called,” her mom told her when she walked into the apartment. She was at the kitchen table, working at her laptop. Fiona's expression must have betrayed her, because her mom peered over her glasses at her. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“We broke up,” Fiona told her.

“Oh, Fee, I'm sorry,” she replied.

“
I'm
not,” said Fiona.

Fiona could see her mom willing herself not to ask what happened, knowing that Fiona hated to be interro­gated. She leaned back in her chair and ran her hand through the mass of brown-gray curls that covered her head. “Are you going to call him back?” she asked.

“I'm pretty tired. I'll see him tomorrow at school. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, hon.”

As she headed to her room, Fiona was curious about why Ryan had called. But whatever the reason, he was the last person she wanted to talk to. She was amazed by how quickly she was over him.
I guess that's how you know what you feel
, she realized. Now that she understood she'd never really had feelings for him, something else was dawning on her. She'd sent a nude photo of herself to a guy it turned out she didn't even like that much. Thinking about it made her burn with embarrassment. No, she really didn't want to talk to Ryan—ever. If she was lucky, she'd get through the last couple of weeks of school avoiding him. After that, she would put the whole business behind her, like it never happened at all.

LAIPING AND FEN
inhaled a breakfast of rice and vegetables in the cafeteria, then hurried along the sidewalk to the Training Center. As they walked, they chatted about how they would spend their first paychecks, even though they wouldn't be paid until they'd finished their training and been on the job for two weeks.

“I want to buy my own phone,” said Laiping as they rounded the walkway to the broad boulevard where the busses ran. The air was stinky with exhaust, and a gray, humid haze hung over the campus.

“I'm saving my money to take a computer course,” countered Fen.

“Why bother?”

“A computer course will allow me to move up to an office job,” she replied. “Do you think I want to be stuck on the assembly line forever, going numb, like my mother?”

To Laiping, Fen was getting ahead of herself. “I just want to become good at this job,” she said.

“Laiping,” lectured Fen, “in order to be successful, you have to have a plan to improve yourself.”

Laiping was discovering that Fen had a talent for making her feel ignorant, even though Fen was a year younger. “I do have a plan,” she said. “I plan to make lots of money.”

“That's what everybody says when they come out from their villages. But do you know how many wind up going back after a couple of years, worn out and just as poor as when they arrived?”

“How many?” Laiping asked, challenging her a little.

“Lots,” replied Fen vaguely. “That isn't going to happen to me.”

It sounded to Laiping as though Fen was making things up again. But as they walked through the shadow of a white-tiled factory building, she did start to think.
What plan do I have, other than to work and send money home?
Even her plan to buy a mobile phone would have to wait, she realized, until she had wired money to her parents—and until she had paid back Older Cousin Min. Someone in Min's dorm had told on Min about Laiping sleeping there. Min was fined one hundred yuan—almost a day's pay! When they saw each other at breakfast, Min shouted at Laiping that she would have to pay her back, plus the ten yuan for the fake birth certificate—only to then be fined another twenty-five yuan by the cafeteria guard for causing a disturbance!

“That's another twenty-five yuan you owe me!” Min had snapped at Laiping, keeping her voice low.

Fen, who was sitting with them, had butted in with, “It isn't Laiping's fault you have a temper like a sow in heat!”—which made Min even more cross.

Now Min wasn't speaking to Laiping. Laiping felt sick when she thought about it, first because her cousin was angry with her, but mostly because she had planned to put her first one hundred yuan toward buying a mobile phone so that she could call her parents whenever she wanted. Her money was disappearing before she even earned it!

 

FOR THREE MORE DAYS
, Laiping and Fen reported to the Training Center to practice soldering capacitors to circuit boards.
Circuit board-capacitor-solder; circuit board-
capacitor-solder
—once Laiping had mastered this rhythm, the work became as monotonous as planting rice. But at least, she reflected, her feet were dry, not being sucked into the mud of a farm field.

By the end of the fourth day, Mr. Huang pronounced Laiping and Fen ready to move onto the factory floor. The next morning, they found their way to Building 4, which turned out to be even bigger than the white-tiled factories they passed every day on their way to the Training Center, a squat but massive concrete structure of six storeys that took up two campus blocks. They showed their ID tags to a security guard at the entrance. Inside, they were given smocks to wear over their street clothes, caps to put over their hair, and booties to cover their shoes, the last of which they were required to put on before entering the factory floor in order to prevent dust and dirt from outside from getting into the electronics. Laiping felt a thrill as she pulled on her smock and cap—just like the girl in the poster! Except that Laiping's smock and cap were blue, not white.

Laiping and Fen climbed a wide staircase alongside hundreds of other workers up to the fourth floor, where they had been assigned. They went through a broad doorway and found a vast factory, bigger than two cafeterias put together, divided by long rows of work stations, and lit by glaring fluorescent tubing that hung down from the high ceiling. The floors were spotless concrete, and there was a slight chemical smell—perhaps from whatever was used to clean the floors. Laiping looked up and saw sealed windows placed up high along the walls. They provided a little daylight, but no fresh air.