“You okay?”
I blinked furiously, trying to stop the tears. “Yeah.”
With every step I willed myself back to that place where missing Ginnie was almost bearable. By the time we got to Wei’s building, I’d succeeded.
There was a regular security panel on the front, but Wei didn’t use it. She pressed a series of numbers into a keypad hidden behind the brass house numbers. A light beam shone into her eye and a moment later the door clicked open.
“What’s that?”
“Retinal scan. Dad installed it. He loves gadgets.”
The foyer of the brownstone was like a museum. The pink marble steps leading upstairs had deep depressions worn from centuries of people’s feet climbing up and down. The brass rail was burnished to a shine by countless hands that had gripped it. A huge crystal chandelier illuminated the whole area, throwing shadows and shimmers everywhere.
“Wow!” My breath caught in my throat. “This is beautiful. I love it!”
“Me, too. Some people don’t because it’s so old. My sister, Angie, hates it. She couldn’t wait to move out to some neo-mod in Grand Isle. Her husband’s a tier-seven. She can be a real snob sometimes.” She shook her head. “They could’ve lived here, on the first floor, but she didn’t want to. So Dad put his office down here.” She pointed to the right. “And that’s a guest apartment.” She pointed left. “You wanna see?”
“Sure.”
Wei tried her father’s office. “Locked.” She shrugged. “We’ll try the apartment.” She turned the knob, and we walked in.
“Everything in here’s kind of old,” Wei said. “It’s mostly furnished with things we don’t use anymore.”
Old things? Everything I saw was ten times nicer than anything I’d ever had, or ever hoped to have. Even when we were tier five, our furniture wasn’t this nice. I supposed high-tiers, like Wei, didn’t think about things like that. I reddened as I imagined what she must have thought of where I lived now.
“Our whole house is safe, you know.” Wei smiled. “You can say anything here and no surveillance will pick it up.”
As she gestured, I noticed her tattoo. I wondered if she’d had sex.”Can I ask you something?”
“Anything. I’m an unlocked text chip.” She grinned at me. “Dad says people used to say, ‘I’m an open book.’ But hardly anyone reads books anymore, since they’re all on chips or downloads.”
“Ginnie did,” I said. “Read real books, I mean. After she died, B.O.S.S. came to our house and confiscated most of them.”
“No kidding? That’s weird. I wonder if they go looking at everyone’s stuff after they die.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. Her XVI caught my eye again and I decided I’d better ask while I had the nerve. “Have you ever had, you know… sex?”
“No way.” She put her hands on her hips. “And I won’t until I’m ready. No guy better try to force himself on me, or he’ll be sorry. I’m not a Cliste Galad student for nothing.”
“Cliste what?” Her flashing eyes were evidence enough for me that any guy would’ve been a fool to mess with her.
“Cliste Galad. It’s a kind of martial arts I’m learning. It’s a combination of Eastern mysticism and Celtic warrior fighting.”
“Is it hard to learn?”
“Not for me,” she said. “But I guess it could be. I think it will come in real handy for keeping guys in their place.” She laughed. “I bet you don’t want to have sex yet either, do you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen—” I started to say something about Ed’s sex vids, but stopped myself. I wasn’t sure how much I should or shouldn’t say to Wei. I didn’t want to ruin what could be a good friendship by telling her how typical my low-tier life had been.
“Mom has drilled into my head that women are not sex objects, and that sixteen-year-old girls are not walking sex-bots, like Media portrays them. And those vids in Health class? If some guy tried that stuff with me, I’d send him on a one-way trip to the moon. We’re supposed to like guys talking us into having sex? I don’t think so. Not this girl.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. The how-to sex vids that we watched in school were pretty ridiculous.
“We should get upstairs,” Wei said, walking toward the apartment door. “They’re probably waiting for us.” She shut the door carefully, and we climbed the stairs.
I had the strangest sensation as my hand glided up the brass banister. “Do you ever feel like you are somehow touching all those people from the past who used to live here?”
“Uh-huh. It’s like this continual connection with history. Mom says that people carry the wisdom of the ages inside them. But mostly no one wants to look that closely at themselves. Mom practices ancient healing methods and uses herbs and charms and all kinds of things that the world has forgotten. She’s got all kinds of strange stuff up on the third floor. She’d show you sometime, if you wanted to see.”
We stopped in front of a pair of dark wooden doors that had huge ornate brass doorknobs. A U-shaped object hung in the middle of one.
“What’s that?” I pointed to it.
“A door knocker.” She demonstrated its purpose by lifting and then dropping it. There was a sharp retort that echoed down the hallway. “Before viewers and buzzers, there were these. I live in an antique. See that?” She pointed to a little brass circle with a thick glass lens in the middle, right above the knocker. “It’s a peephole, a primitive viewer. You look through it and can see whoever’s on the other side.”
I leaned in close to try it out. Just then the door opened, jerking me off balance, and I fell inside. A man caught me on the other side.
“This must be Nina.” He didn’t let go until he was sure I had my feet under me.
“Hi, Dad. Yep, she’d never seen a peephole before.”
“Didn’t bother to tell her they work much better from the other side, did you?”
She grinned at me. “Sorry.”
“No biggie.” I blushed.
Wei’s father surveyed my face. “You look like your father… but those dimples. They’re your mother’s. She used to blush all the time, too.” He winked at me.
That was news to me. Ginnie’d always been so self-assured, nothing ever seemed to rattle her. Maybe there was hope for me yet.
“Jade,” he called out, “Nina’s here.”
Wei’s mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her straight dark hair swung across her cheeks as she put her arms around me and hugged me tight the way mothers do. It felt so good, my heart ached. I could almost imagine she was Ginnie.
After a moment, she held me at arm’s length and, like her husband, studied my face. “You are your father’s daughter.” She ran a perfectly manicured finger by the corners of my mouth. “And I see Ginnie here.” Her eyes clouded. “Your mother was the best friend I ever had.”
“Really?” I choked back tears. “I didn’t know that. She never—” I stopped, thinking it would be rude to say Ginnie’d never mentioned her.
“Of course you wouldn’t have known. We hadn’t seen each other since… well, the last time we were together, you were this big.” She held her hands about a foot or so apart.
“I was a baby?”
“Yes. It was a wonderful time and also very sad, after your father…” She paused, and looked at Wei’s dad, who gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “But tonight we’re going to talk about good times. Shall we have dinner now? You girls must be starving.”
I was so afraid of making some kind of stupid low-tier mistake during dinner that I kept quiet and mostly picked at my food. Later, in the living room, I perched on the edge of the sofa, determined not to miss a single word about my father and Ginnie.