Plus One (24 page)

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“What’s it to you?”

I shrugged. “I just like to know who’s raping me.”

D’Arcy sighed, as if he’d forgotten what a loose cannon I could be and had just been reminded.

“Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” the girl said. “When I’m raping someone I like to whisper my name in their ear.” She stepped over and put her cheek next to mine, on the side away from D’Arcy. It was eerily like the tactic I had used in the emergency room. Her hot breath smelled like mint and rancid smoke. Her lips reached for my lobe, which she took in her mouth for a second and sucked, making me shiver. She stuck her tongue in my ear, wet and alive, so that I heard her disconcertingly inside me, and whispered, “It’s Gigi, and after I rape you I think I’ll do your boyfriend.”

I was an amateur, she was right.

“Please stop,” D’Arcy said, ridiculously calmly. “I’m sure we have something else.” I knew that he was about to trade away Premie Gort.

“You can have my necklace,” I said to Gigi, before he could continue. She already had about a dozen of them on, and I wondered whether they were like shrunken heads, or notches on a spear: a physical tally of her victims.

D’Arcy narrowed his eyes. Gigi said, “Let’s see it.”

I reached into my shirt and pulled out Ciel’s gift. I had always thought I was a sap for wearing it; I’d nearly chucked it in the trash a hundred times. But maybe years of being spineless were about to pay off.

Gigi reached out to hold the charms, deftly flipping each piece over to examine it. I almost expected her to pull out a jeweler’s loupe. She paused midinspection to study my face, her eyes darting over my features and my hair like minnows in a moonlit pond.

I said, “They’re white gold and eighteen karat gold, and the stars are—”

“I’ll take it,” she said, like a businesswoman and not a thug. She knew her stuff. And then she grinned at the charms, chewing her gum madly. Something about the sun and moon seemed to please her.

“Sol,” D’Arcy said, obviously thinking it was important to me.

I shook my head at him.
It doesn’t matter.
I reached behind my neck and unclasped it. Gigi put her hand out.

I glared at her, holding the necklace tightly in my fist, not relinquishing it yet. “This is worth a lot of money.” In fact, Poppu suspected that it had cost over a thousand dollars, and we both knew that Ciel had come by the money illegally. I felt a little naked without it around my neck, and that surprised me.

“Sol—” D’Arcy started, again.

I stood up straight, so that I was looking down on her. “I want more than a tank of gas.”

“Or how about this? I stab you in the gut and take it from you,” she said, rubbing her hand on the bulge near her groin, which I now assumed was a switchblade.

“No, you won’t,” D’Arcy said, taking a protective step toward me.

“You think I can’t take you both?”

I was pretty sure she could.

“I don’t think you will,” he said diplomatically.

I said, slowly, so she couldn’t misunderstand me, “On top of the gas, I want you to make me over.”

“What the fuck,” she said, like I was out of my mind, which I probably was.

“Make me look like you.”

Friday
5:30 p.m.

Gigi brought the fuel back in three bright red, twenty-liter gas cans, loaded in the back seat of her car. She made D’Arcy take each one out and pour it into our tank, while she smoked a cigarette.

When he was done she stood in front of me with her hand out.

“What about my disguise,” I said.

“I wouldn’t skip out on that part of the deal for anything, Red.”

I fished the necklace out of my pocket and dropped it in her hand. She grinned, smacking her gum, and found the two ends of the chain. She turned her back to D’Arcy and said over her shoulder with a fake pouty voice, “Will you help me with this, honey?”

I saw that D’Arcy wasn’t pleased, but he took the ends of the chain from her, moved the black mullet away from the nape of her neck with his wrist, and put his clinical concentration toward the task of securing the necklace. I had a sudden vision of the inevitable: D’Arcy as a settled adult; D’Arcy without me; D’Arcy clasping a necklace around the warm, pretty neck of the woman he would eventually love in my place. I had to lean against the car. It was like I had been shot in the chest.

“You okay, Sol?” he said with forced casualness, still fastening the clasp. Observant as ever, he could only have been watching me in his peripheral vision.

“Kinda hungry,” I mumbled.

“You’re bottomless,” he said, finished with his job.

Gigi said, “You look like a concentration camp victim.”

*   *   *

We followed Gigi’s car, eating the dinner that we had stolen from the Smudge campers, as if we were on an ordinary road trip and not wanted criminals trailing after a possibly homicidal Noma who liked to stick her tongue in people’s ears. Gigi had said we’d be driving for almost an hour, which would bring us uncomfortably close to curfew while we were on the road. But there was no point in my sitting in the back, pretending to be ill; the police were looking for me, and if we were pulled over, breaking curfew would be the least of our worries.

We were driving roughly southeast, judging from the setting sun. Gigi was taking back roads, and the current one was dirt and only one lane wide. Who knew what would happen when we arrived at our destination. Who knew where she was taking us, and whether she would slash our throats somewhere in rural Iowa. Even if she didn’t kill us, I suddenly realized, we could easily get stopped on the way to Chicago, and I might never learn all the things I wanted to know about D’Arcy.

“Were you,” I said, all at once shy, “were you really conceived in a cave?”

D’Arcy guffawed, that beautiful belly laugh. A bubble of a smile started in my chest and burst open on my face.

“At least in a town with caves,” he answered. “I’ve only suspected that it happened inside an actual cave, but I don’t think I want to know the answer badly enough to ask.”

“Which cave?”

He glanced at me. “I’m lucky not to be named Lascaux or Chauvet, I guess. My parents had their honeymoon in Arcy-sur-Cure, in Burgundy, in north-central France. The cave paintings there are the second oldest in the world.”

“D’Arcy,” I said, understanding.
“From Arcy.”

“Did you think French scientists would name their son after the love interest of a nineteenth-century British novel?”

“I didn’t think that was it, not with the apostrophe.”

We were quiet for a moment and then he said, “It’s pretty great that they explored caves on their honeymoon.”

I thought about how compatible they must have been. How in love. How in
lust
, to grab a moment in a cave, if his suspicion was true.

Gigi slowed down ahead of us, tapping her brake lights hesitantly so that they blinked through the cloud of dust her car had kicked up. We passed a stand of trees and my stomach tightened: out of the corner of my eye I saw the orange flash of an Hour Guard vehicle nested inside.

“Oh, shit,” D’Arcy said.

The pulse of a siren sounded. I glanced back, and the SUV had pulled out of its hiding place.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Every bad thing was my fault. I took credit for it all.

D’Arcy slowed to a stop. The Guard pulled up behind us. There was no escaping. We had an old sedan and the Guard had four-wheel drive. Not to mention a firearm.

Gigi backed up, gunning so hard that her wheels spun impatiently on the gravel. D’Arcy rolled down his window. He looked at me with his lips tight. “The odds were against us, huh?”

The Guard took his time approaching. He wasn’t as put-together as the city Guards were: his helmet was unstrapped; he was unshaven, with the puffy skin of someone who drank too much; his black jacket was unzipped; he had a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Gigi marched toward him. His body language told me he was hyper-aware of her, like he could draw his gun and shoot, but he chose to pretend he didn’t notice her. He removed his mirrored sunglasses, took a drag from his cigarette, leaned toward D’Arcy’s window, and drawled, loud enough for Gigi to hear, “Destination?”

D’Arcy was required by law to respond, but when he opened his mouth, Gigi spoke first, venom in her voice.

“You’re lying in wait for me now, asshole?”

“Gigi, you little skank, what’s up?”

“You know they’re with me, Brad. It’s a cheap trick, stopping them.”

He smiled, but it was creepy. He said to her, pointedly, “Destination?”

“Fuck you.”

His doughy face went dark. “Your ID, please, Noma slut? Oh, wait. It’s daytime, isn’t it? Lemme guess … your phone says you’re a
Ray
.”

She closed her eyes for a beat, trying to resist stabbing him maybe. I could see sinewy muscles roll in her clenched jaw.

“So let me see,” he went on. “Why might you care if I check your friends out? And more important,
how much
do you care?”

“I said they were with me. I didn’t say they were my friends.”

“Twenty-six minutes till curfew. Yes or no.”

There was a subtext of some sort that I didn’t understand. D’Arcy was more focused than I’d ever seen him. I wanted to be restrained and analytical like him, but I had an urge to say something, to get out, to run … anything but sit there, helpless.

Gigi finally took a step toward Brad and snatched the cigarette from his mouth. He let it go, grinning like the bastard he was. She took a deep drag and blew smoke out with the words “Six months, no stops.”

“Two.”

“Six months.”

“You can have three if you act like you want it, and now it’s time to ante up.”

She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “Your car or mine, dickwad.”

“Something new. The bushes.”

“Wait a minute—” D’Arcy said. He understood the deal before I did.

“Shut the fuck up, you
fucking
City Ray,” Gigi exploded, shoving her finger in his face. “Sit in the car and keep an eye on your
fucking bitch
. Don’t let her
move
from that spot, or I swear I’ll
kill you both
.” She reached through the window past him and flipped on the radio, loud. It was set to Independent News Radio.

… and sisters, warriors of the hours. Fourscore and fifteen years ago the government worked to heal the nation of a physical illness, a cataclysmic pandemic.

My mind registered Grady Hastings’s voice, speaking like a preacher in a pulpit, his words passionate and drawn, echoing slightly with the reverb of outdoor speakers.

Gigi stormed off toward the tree blind where the Guard vehicle had been hiding.

The Curfew March on Washington,
I thought disjointedly.
It’s today. Or it was today, and this is a repeat broadcast, because D.C. is an hour ahead.

Brad followed Gigi, lifting off his helmet and dropping it through the SUV window on the way.

But in doing so our leaders inadvertently introduced a moral pestilence—a virus that infects the declaration that “all men are created equal”—a cancer on the Bill of Rights and the fourteenth amendment, which promised freedom and equal protection of the law. You, gathered here, are the doctors who will excise the tumors of lies.

It is fitting that we stand before the memorial of this great American who once said, “Let the people know the truth, and the country is safe.” Let the people know the truth! We are here to reject the proposition that time can be shared fairly. We are here to declare that our fundamental rights to travel, to sojourn, and to assemble are violated by the division of hours. We declare that arbitrary distinctions between citizens are odious to all people, to this great nation, whose institutions are founded on the doctrine of liberty, and justice for all.

I craned my head back and saw Brad unbuckling his belt before he disappeared into the trees, and I whispered, “Oh god.”

D’Arcy reached for my hand without looking at me.

The dark nights of the Smudge’s righteous grievance will not pass until he feels the warmth of the sun on his face. The prison of the Ray’s day will not be unlocked until she knows the magnificence of stars on a country night.

“The truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.” And you, my brothers and sisters in resistance, are on the peaceful front line of the formation. Your presence—oh, you beautiful sea of faces!—is a thundering cry of urgency—it is a testimony to the human thirst for what is right.

Why had Gigi agreed to such a horrific bargain? Why hadn’t she just ditched us? And why was she doing it if her phone said she was Day, if she thought
we
were Day?

Seneca said, “What is true belongs to me.” It belongs to you … and to you … and to you. The truth is inside you. “Re-examine all that you have been told … dismiss whatever insults your soul.”

“What is true belongs to me.” Look around you. Smudges and Rays, side by side, veterans of suffering. You are men and women who accept these verities: “You can only be free if I am free”; and your children will reap the blessings of justice only if
you
are strong enough to fight for it. Look at the Smudges being arrested as I speak! The gratitude of generations goes with you, brothers and sisters! Our spirits will soar together someday, unshackled from clocks and alarms!

My heart pounded, urging me to get out of the car, to help Gigi, to stop Brad. I reached for the door latch, but D’Arcy’s hand squeezed mine powerfully and held me back.

“What is true belongs to me.” Every moment of light and dark is a miracle. Every child is entitled to both.