Hilary couldn’t help but seduce him. It wasn’t even that hard. She walked around the house in her underwear. She flirted with him. She laughed at all his jokes. She stole moments with him when her mother was out of the room. She made him feel like she was really impressed by him, that she liked how old he was, that she was dying to sleep with him, and that a connection like theirs was rare.
Two months she kept that act up, and one afternoon when her mother was in the basement folding laundry, he kissed Lucy in her room. She had a video camera set up, and she made sure he was facing the camera when he did it. She e-mailed him that video, and told him to never contact her mother again, or answer any of her calls, or Hilary would send the tape to the cops.
Week after week Hilary relished getting to ask her mother the same question over breakfast…
“Hey, what ever happened to Gary? I liked him a lot.”
Hilary smiled at the memory. In her peripheral vision Hilary saw ten white dresses moving across the polished gym floor. Pretty Ones settled on the bleacher rows below her. Linda, the tallest girl in the gang, climbed up to Hilary. She’d been giving Hilary the most attitude of all the girls, and now she stood in front of Hilary with a wide stance, her hip cocked, and her yellow hair over one eye. The other Pretty Ones watched, eager to see what was about to happen.
“We’ve been talking,” Linda said. “We don’t want to be expected to date Varsity anymore. We’re sick of it, we want to date Skaters, or passionate artist boys from the Geeks, or whoever we want. And it’s not up for discussion.”
Hilary narrowed her eyes at Linda. That was a threat. Hilary looked around the room. Every Pretty One was fixing her with slitty bitch eyes.
“Why don’t you go help Suzanne make the soap.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Do it.”
Linda held the stare. She was testing Hilary. The root of Hilary’s tooth ached in her gums. She had to shut Linda down right away. She needed something that would break her. Hilary reached down into the dark of her mind for something cold and sharp.
“Didn’t your last two boyfriends die?”
“Wh—what? What does that have to do with anything?”
Linda’s face sank. It was true, her last two boyfriends had died. The first, Dennis, got drunk and drowned in the pool over a year ago. The second, Antonio, the one she really liked, he was killed by the falling block of supplies at the parents’ first food drop.
“You really think you should be looking for another? How much blood do you want on your dress?”
Linda’s bit her lip. She cried.
“Linda,” Hilary whispered. Linda looked up at her like child who had just been spanked. “Soap.”
If Linda wanted to say something back to Hilary, the words weren’t coming. She shuffled off, confused. The other Pretty Ones drifted away, her leadership reasserted for another day.
Hilary had eagle eyes when it came to spotting someone’s weakness. She knew the brittle spot of every girl in her gang. Everyone had that thin part of them, where they were defenseless, a spot you only needed to push, and it would break them open. Cindy got a lazy eye when she was tired. Britt was dyslexic and was always trying to prove she wasn’t stupid. Megan’s father walked out on her family when she was ten. Maria had no waist.
Hilary tongued her tooth. It didn’t budge. The glue was holding. So far, no one knew that it had been knocked out, except David and Sam. But one was gone, and no one wanted anything to do with the other. In her drunken stupor she still had the awareness that night to grab the tooth and put it in her pocket. She’d spent the next hour, while Sam was having his fight in the quad, swaying drunk in front of a mirror, fingers fumbling to stick her tooth back into her gums. She’d worn layers of duct tape on the back of her top teeth in the beginning. She might have to start doing that again, because she was running out of superglue. Hilary lived in constant fear that the glue would snap. That she would smile too wide and the pressure of her lips stretching around her teeth would pop the tooth right onto her tongue. She could hear the click of it displacing in her mind. What if a boy kissed her aggressively? He might kiss her tooth out.
She needed a new boyfriend. Someone to raise her back up to her rightful position at the top. But no one could know her secret. The leader of the Pretty Ones was not missing a tooth.
13
WILL SUCKED ON A MUSTARD PACKET. THE traces of yellow he could get out would be the only meal he’d had in two days. He’d already traded everything that remained in the Stairs, and the only things he had left were items no one wanted. He had a belt buckle that was missing, the part that goes through the belt holes. He’d found some three-ring binders, but the paper-holding mechanisms had been ripped out. He had a plastic bag full of discarded sunflower seed shells. He’d already tried to get a Geek to buy it for an art project, but none of them went for it. His only hope was a half-full package of toilet seat covers he’d found the night before.
Will sat down on the elevator floor. He had moved back to the elevator after Lucy had left. He wanted to be where no one could find him. The elevator was secret. No one except for him and Lucy knew about it. It was where he spent all of his days, and he went scavenging for food at night.
If Will had been willing to show his face at the food drop or the market, he might have been able to get more to eat, but he couldn’t do it. He was far too ashamed. Everyone had seen his body give out on him in the quad. They’d seen Sam decimate him, humiliate him. They knew he had a glitch in his brain that could hit at any time, and when it did, you couldn’t depend on him, and he couldn’t defend himself. They’d seen his flaw, and now the flaw was all they would ever see.
Will laced up his black Converse high-tops. He’d inked in the white rubber toe caps with blue ballpoint pen scribbles forever ago. One shoe had dirty white laces. The other had the cord of a broken pair of earbud headphones woven through the aluminum eyelets. He had to quadruple knot it to make it hold. The shoes hugged his feet. They had good cushioning. It was a sad fact that the soles of his shoes were the only thing supporting Will anymore.
His sneakers were his only truly valuable item, and he didn’t want to lose them, but he couldn’t go another whole day without eating. If he didn’t scrounge up food tonight, he’d have to bear his shame and go sell his shoes at the market tomorrow. It made him sick. He’d be walking into the market as a Scrap again, back on the bottom. If Sam had failed to murder his reputation in the quad, then Will walking out of the market barefoot would be the killing blow.
Will pulled his backpack off a high hook and stepped onto an upside-down bucket on the floor. He hoisted himself out of the hatch in the ceiling, onto the roof of the elevator car. The shaft was dark, as usual, except for the dim glow of the maintenance light that escaped from the elevator. David’s laundry lines still crisscrossed their way all up and down the shaft. Nothing hung from them anymore, except for one magenta satin bra with a broken strap, dangling from the highest laundry lines, nearly thirty feet up.
Will approached the maintenance ladder on the wall of the shaft. Each rung was visible only as a single horizontal glint in the darkness. Will crouched to jump but hesitated. Hesitation was a new thing for Will, and he resented it bitterly. He’d jumped the gap from the elevator edge to the ladder a million times, but lately, each time he got here, it felt like the first. The threat of a seizure was ever-present. It could drop him at any moment, and he would plummet down the shaft. Death was everywhere, and he’d lost the urge to tempt it.