Plus One (5 page)

Poppu had taught Ciel and me how to swing dance, which is how he danced as a teenager, and Ciel was great at it. He was one of those guys who wasn’t afraid to use body parts like hips and shoulders and wrists in fluid, graceful ways, and he had a lazy coolness to his syncopated steps. Since we only danced with each other, we got to be pretty good partners, and I was just a slip of a thing, so Ciel could toss me around in dips, flips, and jumps that had daring names like Waterfall and Cannonball and Shin Buster.

Whenever Poppu started plinking on his ukulele he’d eventually come around to a tune that a Smudge quartet called the Ink Spots covered in 1941. The song became hugely popular even with Rays, making the Ink Spots some of the first crossover musicians.

One time when I was twelve and the moon was full and Wooded Island was so magical the owls were calling, I led Poppu to a bench, and he started on his ukulele, and within minutes he launched into that song, his voice rich and gravelly:

“I don’t want to set the world on fire

I just want to start

A flame in your heart

In my heart I have but one desire

And that one is you

No other will do”

I swooped in on Ciel and grabbed his left hand with my right, leading him into a slow Lindy Hop. When he didn’t put his right hand around my waist, I took his arm and made him do it, and I started crooning the second verse:

“I’ve lost all AMBISHUN for worldly acCLAIM

I just wanna be the one you looove

And with your ADMISHUN that you feel the SAME

I’ll have reached the goal I’m dreaming of”

And Poppu finished:

“Believe me

I don’t want to set the world on fire

I just want to start

A flame in your heart.”

This was the point in the song where Ciel usually jumped in with a spoken solo, like the Ink Spots did, while Poppu and I hummed the tune in the background. It was corny, but Ciel was good at it. He’d extemporize some heartfelt thought on why the only important thing in life was winning someone’s love, not being famous or saving the world. Or he’d go totally off-topic and chant dirty things about how hot the girl was whose heart he wanted to set aflame. Sometimes he made it so outrageous that Poppu and I couldn’t keep humming in the background because we were laughing so hard, and I’d lose my step and crash into Ciel or trip over his feet. This time, he was barely moving with me and refused to open his mouth. I’d never seen him look uncomfortable dancing, like his body weighed more than he wanted to bother lifting.

“I can’t stand this song,” he groaned.

“Oh, please!” twelve-year-old me begged. Poppu gamely kept humming, in case Ciel decided by some miracle not to be a killjoy.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Ciel said, dropping his arms, motionless now with conviction. “That song is simplistic bullshit.”

Poppu stopped strumming. His face had gone limp. Ciel was moody lately, and it wobbled our family orbit in a way I didn’t understand. He sometimes stayed out of the apartment all night with no warning or explanation. When he was home he worked in his room with the door closed well into the day, when he should have been sleeping.

On the path to the south I could see dark figures approaching us. The moonlight wasn’t bright enough to identify them, so I took my flashlight from its holster and shone it on the ground near their feet, which was the polite way to assess strangers among Smudges.

I took a breath when I saw in the halo of my beam the black clothes and red shoes of a pack of Noma. And now I saw that their body language was Noma, too: even in silhouette they had a distinct swagger, a willingness—maybe an eagerness—to hurt you.

The Noma were an itinerant population of thugs. Physically, they looked part clown, part goth, part serial killer. The girls always chewed gum; their hair was black and spiky, with a mullet in the back; they wore pancake makeup so that you could only see skin-color differences in their extremities, and red rouge circles on their cheeks, plus red lipstick. The men had crew cuts so short their heads were nearly shaved, and they all bleached themselves blond. Piercings and tattoos abounded. Noma clothing was as varied as the outfits ordinary people wore, but it was all black, with occasional red accents, and always red shoes. No one understood their social structure, but they were at least loosely formed into tribes, and there was a rumor that Noma barely trusted Noma—that they’d just as easily kill each other as other Smudges and Rays. The Noma were supposedly all Smudges; at least that’s the way it was when I was twelve.

Ciel said, “Put the flashlight away.”

Poppu’s eyesight was already too diminished to see anything without bright lighting, but he sensed something was wrong. “Come sit by me, Sol,” he said. I obeyed. He found my hand with his and held it down against the bench.

A girl Noma said, with no preamble, “Gimme the little guitar, old man.”

“I … Do you really—” Poppu stammered, obviously trying to think his way out of giving up the instrument.

“C’mon, guys,” Ciel spoke up, making his voice friendly but confident. “He’s had that since he was a kid.”

I wasn’t prepared for the suddenness of their attack. The girl slammed into Ciel and knocked him over, the boy fell on him and began punching him. The girl turned her attention to ripping the ukulele from Poppu’s grasp while the others hung back and laughed. Stealing a ukulele from a senior citizen was apparently just a two-man job.

It turned out there was a reason Poppu was holding my hand down. It was to prevent me from doing what I did next. I wrenched away from him and leaped onto the back of the boy who was beating Ciel. I clawed at him like a cat, pummeled his stupid shaved head, and finally resorted to biting his shoulder so hard that I felt something sinewy crackle between my teeth.

Until that bite, I was an annoying fly, not even worthy of shooing. After the bite, I was a violent menace, and I saw with a little flash of regret that the searing pain of the wound had flipped a switch in him. He lashed backward with his arm, grabbing my shirt, and in one motion threw me to the ground. He climbed off Ciel and onto me, punching my face, shouting, “You little Smudge bitch!” The weight of him was crushing me, and the blows to my face made my teeth cut into my cheek until I tasted blood. I closed my eyes and felt a massive slam against my nose, causing a burst of brilliant red behind my eyelids that turned into a bloom of stars.

And I was dazed enough not to care. Somehow, each blow came to represent exactly what I would do for Poppu and Ciel. Each blow turned the confusion of my world into a pain that I could suffer on my body instead of in my brain, trapped, where it had no way of getting out.

“Sol!” Poppu cried. “Ciel!” He heard the commotion but couldn’t see what was happening.

Someone pulled the boy off me, and he grabbed at me so hard, wanting to finish the job, that I was lifted for a moment, suspended in space and time. When I returned to earth, I felt him being peeled away from me like a dead layer of my own skin.

I opened my already-swelling eyelids to see that it was his compatriots who had stopped him from killing me, and that both Poppu and Ciel had been restrained during my beating.

“What the hell are you doing, Dice?”

“She’s a kid!”

“She’s just a kid, you psycho!”

The guy holding Ciel said, “Gimme your phone.” He was hoping for some liquid assets to steal—something to make the inconvenience of our fight worth their while. Another boy with a tattoo of a crucifix on his forehead frisked Ciel, took his phone from his pocket, tapped it on, and in a moment said, “Holy shit!”

We were so poor, almost none of our money was stored as cash. I personally had enough to buy two banana chew candies at school.

But that’s not what he meant.

“Listen, my bitches!” Crucifix said. “This little prick is none other than Ciel Le Coeur.”

The girl stopped plinking a non-tune on the ukulele and said, “Who the hell is that?”

“He’s the hacking genius Dice’s brother has been looking for.”

Ciel shouted, “Give it back!”

Crucifix entered something on Ciel’s screen, hit one final tap distinctly like a “send” command, and said, “Let them go.”

Ciel lunged for his phone. Crucifix gave it up willingly. I was on the ground, unable to get up on my own. The euphoric emotional release of Dice’s blows had morphed into a throbbing, nauseating agony that my body desperately wanted to escape with unconsciousness.

Crucifix pulled out his own phone and it pinged with a new text message, which spiked a disgusting grin on his face.

“Sweet. I have his contact info. I bet Dice’s brother will pay a pretty penny for it.” He barked at the girl, “Say thank you to the geezer for your new toy and let’s roll.”

“Fuck you, geezer,” the girl said sweetly.

They loped off, pushing and shoving, as loud as Rays, arguing over who deserved the reward.

Through my good eye I saw that Ciel had squatted down over me, with his arms folded on his knees and his face buried in his elbow. His shoulders rose up and down in quiet sobs. But he wasn’t crying from the beating. It looked more like … grief. As if he’d lost something he loved. I closed my eyes, suddenly afraid of how much I depended on Ciel’s strength.

Wednesday
2:30 p.m.

The Hour Guard took me from lockup to the hospital in a squad car. Day Boy sat up front with him and I was in the back, where it was ridiculously hot. There was a partition between the front and the back, with two clear bullet-resistant sheets and a metal screen in the middle. Aside from the heat, and a gas pain in my stomach that was stabbing me, I was just as glad not to have to talk to either of them. Their windows were open, and the rushing breeze was enough to dull the sound of their conversation but not enough to refresh the air in the back seat. I took off my hoodie and shook my T-shirt away from my chest.

The sun was blazing, and I had never traveled the city in daylight. It was like a different world—laid out like my world, pretending to be my world, but with an explosion of detail and colors and an overexposure of light that made me dizzy and a little queasy. There were millions of individual bricks in the buildings, limestone lintels above doors, and terra-cotta flourishes; there were flowers in garish colors planted in pots and in parks and in the median strips, and billions of leaves in dappled greens on the trees. The newer buildings were made of glass that twinkled blindingly in the sunlight. The skyscrapers thrust boldly into a crisp sky, surrounded by puffy white clouds, instead of being the hulking, lurking giants of my world. Lake Michigan was a giant sapphire, with an achingly beautiful green band closer to shore. These were all sights that were usually muted or cloaked in shadows for me, illuminated only by the moon, dim streetlights, or my government-issued flashlight. At a stoplight I noticed that the mood was different, too: vibrant and carelessly loud instead of hidden and furtive. Even though the Smudge population had grown larger than the Ray population, we were supposed to keep quiet at night when we were out and about. But apparently birds and cicadas were allowed to sing at full volume during the day, and Rays could shout to each other at will. The sun stung my skin through the window. It always surprised me that its rays could hurt.

“The fact that we used your Plus One patient-transport perk unfortunately means you have some responsibility for her while she’s in the hospital,” I heard the Guard say as the light turned green.

Plus One patient-transport perk.

The white noise of the wind kicked in as the car sped up. I leaned forward and cocked my ear to the metal screen. “But it would have taken hours to fill out the paperwork for a government Day pass, so I’m glad you had it.”

“Great,” Day Boy muttered. “I have responsibility for a loose cannon.”

The Guard snorted.

No, really,
I thought,
have a laugh at my expense.

After a second the Guard said, “So. How long do you think she’ll need?”

Day Boy looked sharply at him. “To do what?”

“To get that finger fixed.”

“Oh! Uh. Not too long, provided the ER isn’t crammed with patients.” Day Boy sounded suddenly flustered, exactly like he was lying. The dummy.

“I’ll talk to triage and get her check-in expedited,” the Guard said. “I can’t have a juvie out of lockup for more than three or four hours or my sergeant will flip a shit.”

So I didn’t have much time. And of course I had no plan. I had to quash a feeling of panic. Maybe the Guard wouldn’t let me out of his sight? And if he did, how would I sneak off to the maternity ward, past security and receptionists? I was suddenly nauseated. I could feel sweat beading on my forehead and upper lip, and my hands started shaking.

“Guys,” I said. Either they ignored me or they didn’t hear me.

“Guys,”
I said louder. “I think I have to puke.” Day Boy turned around at this.

“Are you sick?”

I nodded. I really was.

“We’re almost there,” the Guard said. I saw the circular emergency room driveway ahead. Too far away.

“No, pull over,” I said. My mouth was already watering, which for me was the end.

“You’d better pull over,” Day Boy said.

“Just hold it in a few more seconds,” the Guard ordered, looking at me through the rearview mirror.