FIVE
“Our house is a very very very fine house”
“Hungry?” Dancer says as I bang in the door and throw my backpack and MacHalo on the couch.
“Starving.”
“Cool. Went shopping today.”
Me and Dancer love to go “shopping,” aka looting. When I was a kid, I used to dream that I got forgotten inside a department store after it closed with nobody around, which meant I could have anything I wanted.
That’s the world now. If you’re tough enough to brave the streets, and got balls enough to go into the dark stores, anything you can carry out is yours. First thing I did when the walls went down was hit a sporting goods store and cram a duffel bag full of high-top sneakers. I burn through them quick.
“Found some canned fruit,” he says.
“Dude!” It’s getting harder to find. Plenty of the ick-stuff on the shelves. “Peaches?” I say hopefully.
“Those weird little oranges.”
“Mandarin.” Not my favorite but better than nothing.
“Found some ice cream toppings, too.”
My mouth instantly waters.
One of the things I miss most is milk and all the things it made possible. A while back, a couple of counties to the west, some folks had three milk cows that the Shades didn’t get, but then other people tried to steal them and they all shot each other. And the cows. I never did get that part of it. Why shoot the cows? All that milk and butter and ice cream re-moo-ved from our world forever! I snicker, cracking myself up. Then I see the table and the spread of food and it cracks me up more. “You expecting an army?”
“Of one. I know how you eat.”
And he’s fascinated by it. Sometimes he just sits and watches me. Used to freak me out but not so much anymore.
I decimate the feast, then we sack out on the couch and watch movies. Dancer’s got everything wired for power, with the quietest generators I’ve ever seen. He’s smart. He survived the fall without a single superpower, no family, and no friends. He’s seventeen and all alone in the world. Well, technically he has family but they’re somewhere in Australia. With splinters of Faery reality slicing everything up, no planes flying and nobody about to take a boat out, they may as well be dead.
If they aren’t.
Nearly half the world is. I know he thinks they’re dead. We don’t talk about it. I know it from the things he doesn’t say.
Dancer was in Dublin checking out Trinity College’s Physics Department, trying to decide where he wanted to go to grad school when the walls fell, leaving him cut off and alone. Home-schooled by multiple tutors and smarter than anybody I ever met, he finished college six months ago, speaks four languages fluently and can read three or four more. His folks are humanitarians, über-rich from old money. His dad is or was some kind of ambassador, his mom a doctor who spent her time organizing free medical care for third world countries. Dancer grew up all over the world. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around his kind of family. I can’t believe how well he adapted. He impresses me.
I watch him sometimes when he’s not watching me. He catches me now.
“Thinking how hot I am, Mega?” he teases.
I roll my eyes. That kind of stuff isn’t between us. We just hang together.
“Speaking of hot …”
I roll my eyes bigger, because if he’s finally about to say something about how much prettier I am since the Gray Woman took my looks then gave me back a little extra, I’m out of here. He’s been cool so far about not commenting. I like it that way. Dancer’s … well, Dancer. He’s my safety zone. There’s no pressure here. It’s just two kids in a fecked-up world.
“… try some hot water. Mega, you’re a mess. I got the shower working again. Go take one.”
“It’s just a little blood—”
“It’s a bucket. Maybe two.”
“—and a few bruises.”
“You look like you got hit by a truck. And you smell.”
“I do not,” I say indignantly. “I would know. I have supersmell.”
He looks at me hard. “Mega, I think you have guts in your hair.”
I reach up, dismayed. I thought I got them all out on the way over. I root around in my curls and pull out a long slimy piece.
I stare at it, revolted, thinking how maybe I should cut my hair really short or start wearing a ball cap all the time, then I look at him and he’s looking at me like he’s going to toss his cookies, then all the sudden we both start cracking up.
We laugh so hard we can’t breathe. We’re on the floor, holding our sides.
Guts in my hair. What kind of world am I living in? Even though I was always different, and saw things other people didn’t see, I never thought I’d be sitting on a sofa, in a virtual bomb shelter underground, with security cams and trapdoors and booby traps all around us, hanging with a seventeen-year-old (hot!) genius who makes sure I eat more than protein and candy bars (he says I’m not getting the right vitamins and minerals for proper bone health) and knows how to get a shower running in post-wall Dublin.
He plays a mean game of chess, too.
He pauses the movie when I head for the shower. I grab a change of clothes on the way in.
This is Dancer’s place, not mine. But he keeps things stocked for me in case I come by. Like me, he’s got lots of other digs, too. You have to keep moving in this city to increase your odds of survival, and set things real careful when you leave, so you know if somebody’s invaded your turf while you were gone. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. People kill each other over milk.
The hot water lasts four glorious minutes. I scrub my hair, wrap it in a towel and study my face in the steamed-up mirror. Bruises are me. I know the progression: black turns purple, purple goes green, then you get all jaundiced-looking for a while. I look past the bruises. I lock eyes with my reflection and don’t look away. The day you look away you start to lose yourself. I’m never going to lose myself. You are what you are. Deal with it or change.
I toss the towel, finger-comb my hair, tug on jeans, a tee, and consider a pair of combat boots. Dancer picked them out for me. Said I won’t burn through the soles as fast. I decide to give them a try.
I grab another bowl of puny orange slices on the way back to the sofa, pop open a jar of marshmallow cream and slather it on, then coat it all with hard-shell chocolate.
Dancer and me get down to business. He starts the movie again while I get out the game board. He kicked my butt at Go Bang for hours the last time I dropped in, but I’m feeling lucky tonight. I even magnanimously accept a restricted second move when I win the flip for opening play.