Brood (18 page)

“I do?” But she has a feeling Polly has just offered to keep her secret and not tell anyone about her private weight-control program. It was insane, she thought. Even though these kids were living like animals, and selling their own blood, and sexing it up all over the place, and stealing, and some of them disappearing and some of them dying, Alice still didn't want anyone to know she sent most of her meals straight to the sewer.

A couple of minutes later, Alice, Polly, and Dylan are waiting for the elevator. The common hallway is tiled black and white, gloomily lit. The old elevator slowly rises, its cables shaking and rattling like shackles. Dylan cannot keep still. He is shrugging his shoulders, knocking his knees together, and the next moment, he somehow produces a hacky sack and is lifting it up with the toe of his sneaker and catching it on his forehead, humming tunelessly all the while. He basically makes most kids diagnosed with ADHD seem catatonic.

At last, the elevator doors open. The on-again, off-again elevator operator is at the controls, much to Polly's disappointment. (The rule of the house is to keep as low a profile as possible.) The elevator operates by push button, and Polly does not see why an elevator operator would ever be necessary, but here he is, old Dominick, with his basset-hound eyes and shiny shoes, and a blue-and-yellow uniform that looks like it came out of the 1980s or some other era of the past, an impossibly long time ago.

“Here we are,” Dominick says as always, holding the door as if without his strength, it would cut Polly and her friends in half.

“Thanks, Dominick,” Polly murmurs.

“Sort of late to be going out,” Dominick observes.

“Not really,” she says.

“So…is your mother back in town yet?” Dominick asks, as he has on so many other occasions.

“She called tonight, actually,” Polly says, her voice confident, convincing. “Thanks for asking.”

Alice and Dylan stare straight ahead, trying hard not to laugh.

“You take care of yourself,” Dominick says as the elevator reaches the ground floor.

“You too!” Polly cheerfully calls out as the three of them clatter quickly over the lobby's marble floor. There is no doorman—an automated ID system has been installed—and now nothing separates the kids from the night. They enter it like fish poured from a bucket back into a lake.

They head east toward Broadway. Only Edible Broadway, which never closes, is open. The proprietor, a portly, pale greenish man whom everyone calls the Greek but who insists that he is, in fact, Portuguese, sits on a folding chair overseeing his display of grapes and plums, strawberries and oranges, as if without his constant vigilance, he would be bankrupted by marauding bands of fruit thieves. “Yo, Greek,” Polly says as Dylan pockets a couple of plums without breaking stride. As for the Greek himself, he is mainly relieved the three kids didn't go into his store, where truffled olive oil and Kalamata figs and other pricey items are on display—he does not know what makes these kids special, but he can recognize these feral teenagers from twenty paces. He knows that until someone gets them under control, there is not a shopkeeper in the city who can consider his business safe.

They move east across Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, go past the twinkling monoliths of Central Park West, and then scamper over the stone wall bordering New York's great green space, Central Park.

The three walk quickly, oblivious to sidewalks, tunnels, and the various paths ordinary citizens use when traversing the park. They have their own routes, direct and unmanicured. Dylan leads the way—he knows exactly where his pack will be, and he is also wired more tightly than the two girls and is constitutionally unable to proceed at anything resembling a leisurely pace. He jumps, skips, zigs, and zags.

“Me's wishing I's staying with Rodolfo!” he calls back to them, ten paces in front. “All's well when Rodolfo is here.”

He lifts his hands in the air. In his excitement, his fingertips glow dark red.

“Look at him,” Alice whispers to Polly.

“He's not the only one. All kinds of things are happening.”

“It's sort of pretty,” says Alice.

“I guess. We've got evolution on the run.”

She suddenly stops, and Alice stops too. A look of concern crosses Polly's face. She tilts her head. She rests her finger on her lips, beseeching Alice's silence.

“Come on, you two!” Dylan cries out.

“I heard something,” Polly says to Alice.

“Where?”

“In there.” Polly points to a tangle of honeysuckle bushes thirty feet to the left.

“I once found a dog hiding in the bushes around here,” says Alice. “A little white dog, he was so cute. When I was young.” The memory of that time, the school she and Adam used to attend, their mother walking with them up Madison, the teacher, the other kids. It's been a long time since she's allowed herself to think about those days, and remembering them now feels ghostly and sad.

Polly looks at her, and her expression clearly states that whatever little white dog Alice is remembering is a hundred miles beside the point, and for her to even mention something so stupid and juvenile is proof that she has no idea what is happening.

Somebody is following us.
Polly mouths the words silently.

Dylan has finally stopped twirling about and looks at them questioningly now, his glowing fingers darkening to a dull, dirty rust. Polly waves for him to come back.

The three of them, with utmost stealth, approach the bushes. They all have extraordinary hearing and they lean forward, turning their heads slightly to the left and then the right, aiming their auditory nerves the way you'd point a flashlight into a dark corner.

Polly lifts one finger. Then the second, and the third. On three, they converge on the bushes, plunging in through the resistant green maze without the slightest hesitation, as if they are starving canines who sense a helpless quivering chipmunk there, marinating in its own fear.

Rooting around in the dirt, they find nothing but condom wrappers and empty Snapple bottles.

Yet the rest of their journey is a nervous one. Polly is used to being constantly on guard, fearing the park police, who can be on bicycles, on horseback, in squad cars, or on foot. Dylan has also learned how to be basically invisible when he roams the park, though the lessons in caution he has been taught have to contend with the counterweight of his upbringing. His time in Gracie Mansion, his tenure as the mayor's son, in which he absorbed a kind of cellular certainty that he is privileged and protected, often interferes with the basic things the other feral kids have taught him about survival. (In fact, whenever Rodolfo thinks about the future of this new race of human over which he presides, that future does not normally include Dylan; he takes too many chances, and he is all over the map, and, worst of all, Dylan Morris is an extreme case of mutation—the ones who glow tend to be the craziest. One day, maybe next week, Rodolfo guesses, or maybe next year, Dylan Morris will be one of the Remembered.)

They head north past the reservoir, which tonight is full of sleeping ducks whose feathery frames bob up and down as they doze in the gently rippling water. With the approach of the three kids, a sense of alarm suddenly sweeps through the flock—there is first a rumble of nervous quacks, and then, like a crash of cymbals, the ducks explode into flight, racing over the threshold of moonlight into the dark palace of night.

“They hate us,” Alice whispers.

“Who?” asks Dylan, who springs from his handstand back onto his feet.

“The ducks,” says Alice. “When I was young we used to come here and feed them. The thing they liked best was Wheat Thins. They really liked them.”

“Oh, me's memorying eating mad Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. 'Member them?”

“Cheddar-flavored,” Polly says over her shoulder.

“Oh!” cries Dylan. “Me's want. From the yum to the tum to the gimme some more.” He lifts his arms, and now the red glow extends from his fingertips to his palms to his wrists.

“Hands down, Dyl,” Polly says, leading them away from the reservoir and into a thicket of trees.

They move in silence. Their steps are light, graceful, almost soundless. A park police cruiser goes by, its emergency light slowly revolving. It's not going anywhere in particular. It's just showing its colors.

At one point, Polly says to Alice, “So what do you think of Rodolfo? You think he likes you?”

“I don't know. I guess.” Alice knows she must be careful around Polly, but she is not certain what being careful entails—should she tell the truth or refuse to talk? What does Polly want from her?

“You guess you like him?”

“I mean him liking me,” says Alice. “I mean, it's not a big deal or anything. We're friends.”

“How can you be friends? You've been away for a really insanely long time.”

“I don't know. We just are.”

Polly's laugh is not a real laugh—it's more a quick, toxic exhale.

“So what about you?” Polly asks. “You like him?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don't know what I'm supposed to say,” says Alice, but with very little pleading in her voice. She says it as a statement of fact.

“Girl,” Polly says. She puts her hand on her hip and juts it out. “I think you like him. You should just say.” She tosses her head and then mutters, “Bitch,” under her breath but certainly loud enough for Alice to hear it.

“Hey, guys! Guys! Me's here!” Dylan shouts as they reach 110th Street and he sees two members of his old pack. His hands are flashing and he is hopping up and down with excitement. His cohorts are pretending to fence, using skateboards as their swords. From a distance, it's difficult to determine their gender. They both have long hair, rising up in a frizzy nimbus on one, tied back in a ponytail on the other.

With a grateful glance over his shoulder, Dylan runs quickly toward his friends, pulsating with light.

“Yo, yo, yo, yo,” calls out the one with the frizzy hair. He drops his skateboard to the ground and opens his arms wide.

Others emerge, as if from nowhere. There are ten altogether. Polly notices they are all wearing dark green T-shirts, as if they are a team, or a gang. Rodolfo stresses that it is not a good idea for packs living together to wear matching clothes. You want to be able to disperse quickly, blend in. As much as possible. But, really, no one on Riverside expects the 110th Street crew to last. They take too many chances; they're too exposed. They've already lost two members to whoever is snatching the wild kids—and they don't even seem to know when someone goes missing, or maybe they don't care. They never look for the missing ones—they don't even mention it to anyone. When everyone meets at the Diana Ross, there's simply one or two less in the pack. Sooner or later, they'll all be gone; at least, that's what Rodolfo says, and Polly is inclined to agree with him.

“Let's go,” Polly says.

Alice yawns, rubs her eye with the heel of her hand. A wave of hunger goes through her, sharp and urgent, but she has become expert in ignoring hunger pangs. When her body calls for food, she knows how to tell her body to shut up. And shut down.

They start back, but after a minute or so Polly stops, raises her hand. She looks worried, a little scared.

Alice tilts her head, knits her brow, as if to say,
What is it?

Polly is looking intently at a cluster of bushes between the benches and the boundary wall. She takes a step toward them, stops, listens, and after a few moments, she shrugs and indicates with a wave that they might as well continue on their way home.

“Can you read?” Polly asks. Without talking it over, they are taking the sidewalk heading south, as if they were just two normal kids out for a very late stroll in Central Park.

“Yes.”

“You don't have to say it like that.”

“I'm just saying yes.”

“A lot of us can't, you know,” Polly says.

“I know. I guess it's not such a big deal.”

“How about your brother?”

“He can read. We both can read. We go to school.”

“But do you? Do you ever just, you know, start reading, just to do it? Not in school. Just for fun?”

Alice shrugs. She cannot say two words to Polly without feeling she has said the wrong thing or is about to and that she might even be letting herself be lured into a trap.

Polly slings her arm around Alice's shoulder. Her eyes widen. “Wow, you're really bony.”

Alice wishes she could move away from Polly but worries that it would make everything worse. All she wants right now is to get back to the apartment, go to sleep. She knows that Polly is mad that Alice has shared Rodolfo's bed, and she knows that Polly thinks something sexy happened, which it did not. If it will make matters easier, Alice will gladly sleep on a sofa, or find where Adam is and sleep there, or sleep on the floor. She doesn't care.

“We have to put some meat on those bones, girl,” Polly says. Her fingers creep down Alice's back and grab hold of her shoulder blade. “Is this what Rodolfo likes? Skin and bones?”

“I don't know and I don't care,” Alice answers.

“You don't?” Polly is silent for a moment. When she speaks again, her tone has changed. It is no longer teasing and sharp, but soft and confiding. “We're a lot alike, you know, you and me.”

“I guess.”

“You guess? You do a lot of guessing.”

“I'm pretty tired.”

“We're not as messed up as a lot of them,” Polly says. “We've got some of whatever that shit is our parents took, but not as much. Some of them are really bad. Some of them are like our parents, or worse.”

“My mother says we didn't ask for this,” Alice says.

“Your mother? I heard your mother killed herself.”

“I'm adopted now. She's actually my aunt.”