That night the moon cast pale-gray light over Belle Heights Tower. The girl was again hunched over her phone, watching ads, as Clara used to do. Liquid Lenses—to replace unwieldy glasses and messy contact lenses. She swiped it away. A mattress with a built-in alarm that gently nudged you awake. Swipe. Movable tattoos. Swipe. Towels that absorbed water and stayed dry to the touch. Swipe. Memory Enhancement . . . there was the woman in the red car, calling herself “a prisoner of fear.”
Clara had always felt as though she was the only person in the world watching these things in the middle of the night. But of course Clara wasn’t the only one, far from it; there were millions of ads playing around the clock for millions of people—all of whom, like her, had been specifically targeted. What were all these other people like, she wondered now, what were they hoping to find? Maybe they were people who knew life wasn’t fair and were trying to change the odds.
No wonder it was such a huge business.
By the time she went to sleep, she realized there were only about sixty hours to go. Saturday, two p.m. was getting much, much closer. So why did it feel like it was moving further away?
CHAPTER 29
Thursday afternoon she sat at the bus stop and imagined the conversation she would have with the girl in the jean jacket. Maybe they’d get along so well they’d want to talk again, about deeper things, hopes and dreams. They’d exchange phone numbers and—
Wait. There was that ID pic on her phone. Something needed to be done about that, right away.
A few minutes later she pressed the buzzer in the lobby of Belle Heights Tower.
“Yeah?” Kim said over the intercom.
“It’s me,” the girl said.
“It’s you, all right. But it’s not next week yet.”
The girl faced the camera. “This is kinda important. Can I come up?”
Kim buzzed her in. The girl got on the elevator and pressed fourteen. A gray-haired man got on with her, pressed nine, and said pleasantly, “It’s cold, it’s muggy, it’s sunny, it’s raining . . . when will the weather make up its mind?”
Small talk. Clara would’ve kept her head down, bangs over her eyes, silent. Rose would’ve engaged the man in lively conversation. The girl glanced over at him and said, “It’s really weird when there’s no weather at all.”
He gave her kind of a look before getting out on his floor.
Outside the elevator she was greeted by Kim, her hair unbraided and covering her shoulders like a thick, glossy blanket. The girl had forgotten that Kim had fantastic hair. Everyone thought Astrid had the best hair in the grade, but clearly she didn’t.
The girl followed Kim down the hall, through the living room, and past the bathroom with the fuzzy blue toilet-seat cover. This time they went to Kim’s room, which was an utter mess. Piles of books and papers and clothes were everywhere, along with scattered notes and slapdash but surprisingly vivid sketches of people with green skin, white cows with large brown spots, and furry gray wolves.
“Great drawings.”
“They’re possible ideas for Into the Woods. I’m having so much fun with it.” Kim plopped down on her bed, on top of a mass of T-shirts, and gestured for the girl to sit in the straight-backed wooden chair at her desk, which only had a few sweaters draped over it.
The girl folded the sweaters neatly and put them on top of Kim’s dresser. She’d always been good at this. Kim’s window looked down on a parking lot. The whoosh of traffic and honking cars on Belle Heights Expressway was actually louder here than in the girl’s apartment. “So, why I’m here.” The girl sat on the wooden chair. “Can I trust you, Kim, as a cross-my-heart friend?”
“Of course,” Kim said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“I’m going to tell you something, and you have to promise not to tell anybody. People who’ve done this—no one can ever know about it, not husbands or wives or children or coworkers.”
Kim threw a pillow at her. It arced and landed softly on her lap. “I promise not to tell your children.”
“Kim. It’s not funny. There’s one person you must especially never, ever tell.”
“And who’s that?”
The girl threw the pillow directly back with a little force. “Me.”
The girl told Kim everything; Kim had never heard of Memory Enhancement.
“Dr. Star said I had extraordinary resistance,” the girl said. “My dad thought I was strong willed. My stepmother called it a stubborn streak. A rose by any other name, you know?” She’d had no intention of saying anything to anyone else, either blurting it out like she did with Mr. Slocum, or deliberately, as she was doing now. But she wanted Kim’s help. “I have to go back for a refresher, this Saturday at two p.m. Rose mustn’t remember my second visit to Forget-Me-Not. So you can’t say anything to trigger it. It’s my last chance—I don’t think they’d let her back another time.”
“You’re talking about yourself in the third person, you know,” Kim said.
“Huh? I’m a third person?”