M. T. Anderson (3 page)

I followed her when I could.

She was sitting in the snack bar now, with her back to the valve. She was all clipped into the seat so she wouldn’t float away if she jerked. I bought a snack. It was chocolate mousse in a tube. I hung on to the counter with one hand.

I watched her through my underarm. She was sitting there, with her slamsuit off now and in a bundle. Her helmet was on a hook next to her. I took a slug of tube mousse. I looked back over at her.

She was wearing a dress of gray wool. It wasn’t plastic, and the light didn’t reflect off it. Wool. Gray wool. Black stockings.

Her shoulders were like, all bent in, as if she didn’t want anyone to be looking at her. She was just sitting, clipped in.

The others came through the valve behind me. I kept my head low. I didn’t want them to be like,
Hey, unit, hey, hey, Titus, what’s doin?
and then she’d look at me. She would be disturbed. Luckily, they came in and immediately Link and Marty started doing these gymnastics, and they got in trouble, so I could stay watching her without them being a mob on me. This guy, he was from the club, he was yelling at them because they kept bouncing in the snack bar, which was off-bounds for still bouncing.

Behind the girl in gray was a big window and you could see we were in a bubble way high up over the moon. Down on the ground, tourists were riding big proteins across the craters. All the stars were out.

The guy was still yelling at the others over by the valve. He was all,
da da da be removed from the premises, da da da, express instructions, da da.

I lowered my head, and turned it toward the girl in gray.

When she thought no one was looking, she opened her mouth. Something trembled there. Juice. She had filled her mouth with juice.

Da da da, liability, da da da, think you’re doing.

I shifted. I watched the juice. For her own amusement, she was letting it go, gentle and sexy.

She just opened her mouth and pushed it out with her tongue. The juice came out of her lips as if it was being extracted real careful by a rock-star dentist who she loved. Her eyes were barely open, and it came out in lo-grav/no-grav as a beautiful purple wobble.

It hung in front of her, her juice. It stayed inches from her face. Her tongue was close behind it, perched in the air like a pink slug gargoyle.

With her eyes almost shut, she watched traces on the drink’s round surface swirl.

Link whispered at my side, “This so big sucks.”

“This place doesn’t suck,” said Marty. “It’s good.”

“Maybe,” said Calista, “if there were certain people who didn’t go jumping on people’s heads near the snack bar, if there weren’t those people, then maybe we wouldn’t all be standing here having a big shame banquet.”

Marty was getting angry that everyone was like turding on his recommendation, and I just wanted them all to shut up somehow, I mean nicely, because suddenly I realized that we didn’t really sound too smart. If someone overheard us, like that girl, they might think we were dumb.

I was playing with the magnets on my boots and trying not to look at her. I didn’t want her to feel my eyes before I made my move. I was careful. Quendy and Loga went off to the bathroom because hairstyles had changed.

Marty drifted around and made slit-eyes at Link. Link and I were chatting about the girl, like I was going,
She is meg youch,
and he was going,
What the hell’s she wearing?,
and I was going,
Wool. It’s wool. Like from an animal,
and then Calista did her own chat to us, which was,
If you want to hear about an animal, what about two guys staring with their mouths wide open so they look completely Cro-Magnon?

That shut us up, and we stared out the window. Wrappers were turning through space like birds.

Quendy came back from the bathroom and said, “Omigod! Like big thanks to everyone for not telling me that my lesion is like meg completely spreading.”

“Hon,” said Calista, “it’s not spreading.”

“Omigod! It is going to be like larger than my whole head! I am going to need a hat just to have all this lesion. It will like go onto the brim.”

“Exercise the breath,” said Link. “Nobody cares about a stupid lesion.”

“How can you not?” said Quendy. “It’s huge, and it’s right on my forehead. It’s like
bonnnng!
” She trembled her hands around the lesion like it was a kind of lesion gong.

Loga went, “No one will notice.”

“If they don’t know you,” Marty said, “they’re not going to know what you normally look like.”

“Oh, so they think that usually my like forehead is like weeping?”

“Ask her,” said Link. He pointed to the girl in gray.

He said, “Miss, I wonder if you would, could you look at this girl and tell me if you notice anything?”

The girl turned around and looked at Quendy. She said, “The lesion isn’t bad.”

Quendy’s hands were out in a
please.
“You saw it! See? Like, how far is the air lock?”

“Hon,” said Calista. “Listen to the girl.”

The girl said, “I’ve been thinking, because of my neck.”

The girl’s lesion was beautiful. It was like a necklace. A red choker.

“The face,” said the girl, “is a grid. The two big imaginary lines are one down the center of the face and one just across the top of the cheeks. This is my theory, anyway. The nose is where those lines intersect. The more a lesion interferes with those lines, the more noticeable it is. See, the hardest lesion to carry off is one on the nose itself. In your case, you have this lesion which is entirely on the edge of this one quadrant. That’s not going to matter. It’s not on a line.” She unclipped herself and reached up with both her hands and touched her thumbs together, and made football goalposts around Quendy’s face. “Framing. See? Your lesion, it’s on the
edge
of your face, so it
frames
your face. It draws attention to your face. The good grid. See, you have this great grid. I’m probably saying way too much.”

We were all kind of stunned.

“Yeah,” said Calista, sounding confused. “She’s right. It just frames your face.”

The girl in gray touched her own lesion with a napkin. She said, “I want mine to go all the way around. I want it to be like a necklace, but right now, it’s just a torque.”

We were all just kind of staring at her like she was an alien. She smiled. We kept staring at her.

“There are times you just want to sink through the floor,” she said, “but then you realize there’s no air out there.”

“Hey,” said Marty. “I got a lesion on my foot. You want to see it?”

She smiled sweetly. “No, not really,” she said.

Link pointed at his face and was like, “Hey, what about my lesion? Look at this puppy. It bleeds sometimes. You like this?”

She smirked. “Oh, mmm-hm,” she said. “You put the ‘supper’ back in ‘suppuration.’”

Link thought that was hilarious. Of course, he didn’t have any idea what the hell she was talking about either, but he started laughing while the rest of us were still looking up “suppuration” on the feed English-to-English wordbook.

She was now completely youch on all of our meters, except with the girls, who I could tell had started to chat each other like some ants after someone’s buried a missionary alive in the middle of their hill. On the one hand, I thought she was the most amazing person I had ever seen in my life, even if she was weird as shit. On the other hand, I was pretty disappointed she was skeezing this sexy talk with Link Arwaker, who women for some reason always go for, in spite of the fact that he’s a meg asshole to them, for example a slurpy question about, “Oh, what about
my
lesion? Let’s talk more about
me
and
my
open sores.”

Marty was trying to make up lost ground by saying, “Maybe you could change the bandages on my foot,” but that was clearly just disgusting to everyone. We were all like, “Unit, no one wants to see your damn foot,” and, “Jesus, Marty unit, stow the mess-hole.”

Link was asking her, “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

And then she looked at me. Just at me, and I knew she was wondering what I thought about the guys and seductiveness and skeeze and all. She was waiting for me to say something, to see if I was going to skeeze like Marty and Link. I wondered whether she wanted me to skeeze. She seemed really smart from what she said, and she was pretty, and I was still thinking about that globe of juice floating in front of her face. I was still thinking about the beauty of how that juice had been born delicately from her lips, how it had been born whole, and how her tongue stood there afterward to see the juice make its trembling progress into the world.

But I had nothing to say.

She and the girls spent the rest of the hour fixing Quendy’s hair to like showcase the lesion. Usually, Quendy is just like a kind of broken, little economy model of Calista, and she knows that, and feels real bad about it. But when this girl helped her, it wasn’t like that. Quendy was the center of everyone for a long time.

That was why I kept looking at the girl in gray, and started to want, more than anything else that night, to be with her.