“And get stuck on J,” I said. “We never see Js.”
Brooke nodded, staring ahead, but her eyes looked blank—not searching, but simply staring, lost to the world and deep in some memory from another life. “Maybe Kveta,” she said at last, answering my question from earlier. “I’ve been her a lot lately. Or Brooke. I think I’m her more often than not.”
“That’s because you—” I started, and then stopped myself. Brooke was her default state, or at least it used to be. If it wasn’t anymore, bringing it up would only make her feel bad. It made me feel bad to think about it, because this whole problem was my fault. It was supposed to be Brooke’s body; I was the one who’d let all those other memories in there.
I used to never feel bad about anything, but now …
Well, that’s not true. I used to feel bad all the time. I guess the difference is that now, sometimes, I felt good, and the contrast made the bad times that much worse.
I kept my eyes on the road, avoiding her eyes. “Who are you now?”
She glanced at me, though in my peripheral vision I couldn’t tell if she was hurt or surprised or simply curious. “You don’t know?”
“Sorry,” I said. Brooke had been possessed by a monster who had previously possessed tens of thousands of other girls, maybe hundreds of thousands, and all of their memories and personalities had fused with hers. Barely a fraction of the memories in Brooke’s head were actually hers, and with numbers like that you could never tell which personality would rise to the surface in any given moment. “You all have Brooke’s face, you know. You need to … announce yourselves or something.”
“I’m Lucinda,” said Brooke. “You remember me, right?”
I nodded. She was Lucinda a lot, especially while we were traveling, though the little I knew about Lucinda didn’t suggest a lot of travel. “You died on your wedding day,” I said, then paused, looking at her curiously. “Lucinda died hundreds of years ago. How do you know the alphabet billboard game?”
“I don’t know,” said Brooke/Lucinda with a shrug. “I just do.”
I sat up straighter, curious, my back against the wall of the truck bed as I gripped it for balance. “Do you think that means anything? About how your personalities talk to each other?”
“We can’t talk to each other,” she said. “We just kind of share things—like, I know some things that Brooke knows, and some things that Aga knows, and different things from different girls. I don’t know how it works.”
“But do you want to?”
She said nothing for a long time, thinking and scratching Boy Dog’s head. The truck slowed slightly, and Brooke shouted abruptly: “H, I, J, K! Baker Junior High!” She pumped her fist and leaned against the side of the truck bed to look ahead past the cab. “Yes! Js are impossible! Let’s see what else we can find.”
We were driving into the town itself now—still a mile or two out from the main drag, but close enough that buildings were starting to pop up more frequently. We passed the Proud America Motel, but I hoped we didn’t have to stay there; I thought about money differently now that I was carrying our entire worldly possessions in a pocket and two backpacks. We could afford a night in a motel—probably several, if it was as cheap as it looked—but then what? Having money wasn’t the same as having income. If we spent it all today, where would we stay next week, and how would we eat?
One hundred thirty-seven dollars and twenty-eight cents. We could get more, sometimes, from the stashes Albert Potash had left here and there around the country. Money and guns and supplies, in bus station lockers and storage units and sometimes gyms or rec centers. We’d found the list in his gear after he’d died and it had kept us going for over a year now, but even that was running dry. There were only a few locations left, and the nearest one was thousands of miles away.
“L,” said Brooke, skipping from letter to letter without slowing down to say where each had come from. “M.” Pause. “N, O, P. Dangit, we’ll never find a Q.”
“Look for ‘equipment,’” I said, closing my eyes and trying not to fixate on our dwindling funds. “Someone’s bound to be selling farm equipment in this town. Or maybe there’s a quality … something. Quality Hair Salon.”
Brooke laughed. “You think they have hair salons that good in a town this small?”
“I think the scale of quality is relative,” I said, permitting myself a small smile. Anything that made Brooke laugh was a good thing. “The best one in town is the quality one, regardless of the wider world of hair care.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a place that sells quality farm equipment,” she said. “Then we’d have a Q for each of us.”
“I’m not playing.”
“But you could.”
“I suck at this game.”