Before I could decide, Henri’s eyes peeked up over the pages and flashed with alarm, then surprise. He stood, put the book carefully on the chair, turned to an open glass security case on the wall where the book must have been kept, then turned back to the chair like he didn’t know what he was doing. Finally, he turned to me. His wide smile broke across his face, muddled slightly by confusion as he crossed the room and opened the thin balcony door.
“What are you doing?” he whispered. It was just like Henri to ask a question, even though he knew I wouldn’t answer. His Cuff charged him. It was weird hearing the telltale buzz from his arm—I’d only ever heard him speak in a Squelch.
I went in and took off my mask. My hair crackled with static. I smoothed it out, but could feel bits of my ragged pixie cut still standing on end.
I took stock of the room, looking for his backpack, then thought, what kind of person does this make me? Henri deserved my attention before I moved on to other things.
Henri was looking at my mask. He didn’t say it, but I knew he was thinking I shouldn’t be wearing it. I wasn’t a Placer. Not anymore.
“Do you want to sit?” he asked. He picked up the book again, self-consciously, like it was something he shouldn’t have. “It’s licensed,” he explained. “I have to renew soon.” Maybe he was embarrassed by the extravagance of it.
His apartment was not very different from ours, though he lived alone, which meant he had been allocated three times as much space as Sam, Saretha or me. He had a couch, a counter and kitchen, and a giant wall-screen in roughly the same setup as ours. There was also the chair and, beside it, the open glass case. Without knowing what to do, I sat in the chair.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I have Mandolin Inks?.”
A small pang for Tylenola Ram hit me. I’d completely forgotten about what she’d done, and had heard nothing about her condition. I microshrugged, which was as close as I could come to saying no, but unfortunately, it was also as close as I could come to saying yes. He looked at his book, then offered it to me. I took it. I hoped he would tell me something about the team or what had happened when I was late.
“Check the haircuts,” Henri said, crossing the room.
I opened the book. It was filled with black-and-white pictures of kids doing things—playing soccer or basketball or tennis, out in the open sun. They played hockey and swam in pools and wore what looked like Olympic? leotards for their gymnastics. There were kids laughing, and kids chatting with each other and kids sitting at desks looking forward. Kids leaned on books, looked in books and read books. There were books everywhere. They were discarded on desks and stacked carelessly on shelves. Books seemed like no big deal.
Henri printed out a hamburger, popping out the two spongy circles of bread and a darkly colored burger circle from a laser-perforated sheet, followed by a thinly printed slice of cheese. He assembled it all together, putting the extra outer bits into the printer’s reclamation drawer. He offered it to me. I did not take it—a clearer way to say no. Henri shrugged, fully, and scarfed it down.
“I could have ordered something better, like a real plum,” Henri said, chewing, “if I’d known you were coming.”
My mouth watered a little, thinking of a real plum, imagining what it might be like. A pang of jealousy ran through me. Henri could afford a plum—and not just for himself. For me.
“What do you think?” he asked, tapping the book and talking to me like I was someone who could answer.
I didn’t understand the book I was holding. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t Laws. It wasn’t history. It wasn’t news. There were captions under all the pictures, like “Dee and Catherine share a good laugh on the way to class,” and “The sophomores enjoy a school activity.” I stared at the audacious waste of words, inked on the page for posterity.
Henri knelt down next to me and impatiently turned the pages, past grids of angled faces over expensive-sounding names, like Kim Hunter and Doug James. Then I saw a girl named Catalina Jimenez, and a longing washed over me. She didn’t look like me, and it was hard to tell from the black-and-white image if our skin color was the same. I wasn’t sure if our family had actually been named Jimenez, but I knew it hadn’t always been Jime. I couldn’t help but wonder—was this the girl who illegally downloaded music so long ago?
Henri wanted to show me the color pages. He was obviously proud. These pages showed more faces, with more amazing—and colorful—hair. These kids were older, all around eighteen, and each of them had four or five lines of text beneath their names, like they were important somehow.
I’d never seen something so fascinating and dull at the same time. Someone had put tremendous effort into documenting a school year in 1984. I didn’t know anything about that period of history. I knew there was a big war that century, but the specific story of it was not something my school could afford the rights to. All we needed to know was that the domes had put an end to war.
I tried to discern the greater reason Henri was showing me this book. He giggled and put a finger next to one girl’s picture. Her hair was wild, the color of platinum, sticking out on each side like two Pegasus wings. Around her, everyone’s hair looked incredible and strange, and beneath each picture was a beautiful name like Mark, Lewis, Sara or Claire, and under the name, a list of sports and activities, and then a phrase.
I looked at Henri. Was he really not going to tell me anything? He ran his finger down over one phrase and then another.
“We were born, born to be wild”
“Snorts & Slorts”
“Never call me Gordo”
“Cut the Jibba Jabba”
“I wandered lonely in a wood...”
Were these phrases they had each Trademarked? Was this a book of Affluents? Influents?? No. It was too old. Henri smiled. He ran his finger under a phrase below a boy wearing thick glasses on his face.
“Pretty cool, ya?”
He held it there and waited. It took me a minute to understand; Henri was choosing these words. His Cuff did not buzz. It was just like I had always heard. You could point to any word or phase or sentence. His eyebrows raised.
“You want to try?” he asked.
I had misjudged him. He wasn’t just showing off with his book; he wanted me to use it to communicate. This wouldn’t be like talking in a Squelch. It would hardly be like doing anything at all.
I scanned the page, considering. I didn’t want to tell Henri “Make my day” or “Love ya, cutie.” I wanted to know what Kel had said about me, or where he kept his small teardrop-shaped device, but the only question I could find was, “Where’s the beef?”
That would not help.
I paged back to the front of the book, to the title page. 1984: Lincoln High School. Longing filled me for the world to be a different way. Maybe not like it was for the kids of Lincoln, but with some of the freedom they had.
The book wouldn’t help. Pointing to other people’s words and letting those kids speak for me was not a solution. I closed it and put it back in Henri’s hands.