Page 50 of Ringer
Lyra shook her head. In her mind she had already passed through the party and returned home; Caelum would for sure have come home by now. She didn’t know whether he’d collected the brochure by chance. She didn’t know whether he’d even looked through it—surely he would have told her. And that meant thatshecould tellhim. She would give him this enormous gift, and he would understand that she had forgiven him and that they were still, after all, the same.
“You ever been to a party before?”
There had been a Christmas party at Haven every year, but only for the nurses and researchers and staff. For weeks, administrative staff bolted garlands of sweet-smellinggreenery to the walls and lumped colored tinsel across the security desks and strung big red ribbons in the entry hall. The night of the party only a skeleton staff remained, and they were blurry-eyed and rowdy, wearing crooked fur-trimmed red hats and strange bulky sweaters over their uniforms.
Then, the Choosing: a handful of male doctors who came staggering into the dorms sweating the smell of alcohol swabs.
“Not exactly,” Lyra said.
“Didn’t think so,” Raina said. “You’ll love it. Trust me.”
Raina put cream in Lyra’s hair—which was longer than she’d ever had it, feathery and thin, the color of new wood—and set a timer for fifteen minutes. By then the sting of chemicals made Lyra’s eyes water. Lyra bent over to rinse out the dye and afterward Raina finger-combed it and set it with gel.
“Don’t look,” she said, when Lyra started to turn. “Not yet.”
She sprayed Lyra down with something called Vixen. She reached into Lyra’s shirt, and hoisted her breasts in their borrowed bra, and laughed when Lyra didn’t even flinch. Then she spun Lyra around to face the mirror.
The girl looking back at her was a stranger, with white-blond hair and smoky eyes and a tank top thatbarely cleared the bottom of her breasts. Tight stomach, hips suctioned into their jeans.
“How do you like that, Pinocchio?” Raina slung an arm around her shoulders. “I knew I’d turn you into a real girl.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Gemma’s story.
FOUR
IT WAS NEARLY EIGHT O’CLOCK when they set out, and the sun was low. Lyra had always liked this time of day, when the light turned everything softer and edged it in gold. Even the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park looked beautiful at this time, all the slinky cats sunning their final hour and patchy gravel roads deep with shadows and everyone coming back from work but not drunk or angry yet. She felt new, walking with Raina, her friend, side by side, smelling like a stranger, in borrowed clothes. Shefeltlike a stranger, as if she’d put on not just someone else’s clothes but a whole identity.
All her life she’d been smoothed and blunted down to an object, had her body handled, touched, manipulated without her permission, until even she had come to see it as a kind of external thing, a stone or a piece of wood. For the first time she felt her breasts and legs and hips ashers,truly hers, a delicious inner secret like all of her belongings, tucked away for safekeeping in her room.
They stopped by lot 16 to see whether Caelum had come home yet, even though Raina made fun of her for having a kissing cousin. (“That’s some real hick shit,” she said. “Too hick even for us out here.”) But he hadn’t returned. His bed was still neatly made. Lyra didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed and was a bit of both.
Eagle Tire was a big factory on the other side of the weigh station. To get there, Lyra and Raina shimmied beneath a fence and skirted between enormous trucks, then had to pick their way over a trash-strewn lot.
Inside, and despite all the blown-out windows, it was hot. It smelled like smoke and urine, and the walls were soot-blackened from a decade’s worth of fire pits, since transients and homeless people squatted there when it started to get cold. Almost immediately, Lyra regretted coming. All the kids knew one another, and half of them snickered when they saw Lyra, as if they could also see 24, sticking out at awkward angles, underneath. Some of them were from Winston-Able, and a few girls asked her where hercousinwas, lingering on the word and making it sound like something bad Lyra had done.
“Ignore them,” Raina said, as if it were that easy. Lyra didn’t see how she could ignore them whentheywereeverywhere. There were more people massed into the empty rooms of Eagle Tire, more people crunching over broken glass and shouting through the cavernous halls, than she had ever seen outside the Stew Pot at Haven.
At Haven there had been rules, the explicit ones—rise at bell, listen to the nurses and doctors, stay out of all the doors marked with a circle and a red bar, don’t bother the guards—and hundreds of secret rules, too, that grew invisibly and were absorbed like mold spores through the skin. She’d thought it was because Haven was an institute, but out here there were just as many rules, as many codes and ways of behaving. And Raina’s explanations only made Lyra more confused.
“There are those bitches from East Wyatt; just because they got rezoned into PCT now they think they’re hot shit,” she said. “Oh. And check it out. Those are the McNab sisters; don’t talk to them, whole family’s cursed, their grandfather killed himself and that’s what got it started. You know, because of it being a sin and everything.” In the dark, Raina looked much paler, like one of the silvery fish that finned through the shallows near the beach at Haven. “Now every generation, someone dies in a freak accident. They lost their mom to a fluke at Formacine Plastics last year.”
What was rezoning? Or a bitch, for that matter? What did it mean to be cursed? She knew what sinswere—Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had often quoted from the Bible—but not why it would be a sin to commit suicide. At Haven, it was only a sin because the replicas were expensive to make.
But regular people came cheap. Didn’t they?
Before she could ask, Raina seized her arm. “Don’t look now,” she said. “Remember those Vasquez boys I was telling you about?” She got no further. Two boys shouldered through the crowd, one tall and skinny with the crowded eyes of a fish, the other shorter, more muscular, his arms dark with tattoos.
“Oh no,” one of the Vasquez brothers said to Raina. “Who let the dogs out?”
She crossed her arms. “Same person who let you out of your cage, I guess.”
Lyra found herself standing next to the other brother, the shorter one with the tattoos. “Cool hair,” he said. He lit a cigarette that didn’t smell like a cigarette. It was stronger and reminded her not unpleasantly of the smell of the marshes when the tide was low. “You know what they say about girls with short hair?”
“No,” she said.
“Freaks in bed.” He exhaled. It was so dark she could hardly see his face, just the wet glistening of his lips. “Is it true?”
“Go suck on a tailpipe, Leo,” Raina said, and put ahand on Lyra’s arm to steer her away. “Itoldyou they were retrogrades,” she said. “Their mom’s a boozehound. Must have dropped them one too many times on their heads, that’s what I think.”
