Raina squinted, like she was trying to see Lyra from a distance. “Impersonators, you mean?”
Lyra shook her head; she didn’t know. Her body had turned to vapor. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of all the things in the world she didn’t understand coming toward her, a hard high wave she couldn’t duck or ride. But she clung to the idea of a place where replicas could smile and be photographed in the open: it was a reedy, ropy line of hope.
“I think the whole thing’s stupid,” Raina said. “A bunch of grown men dressing up like some dead rock star from a thousand years ago. I mean, his music isn’t even that good.”
“What do you mean, dressing up?” Lyra asked.
“Well, you know, dyeing their hair, growing sideburns, shopping for costumes and stuff. I mean, it’s just make-believe. But Mike acts like he really is Elvis.” Then, seeing Lyra’s face: “Don’t tell me you don’t know who Elvis is.”
Lyra, miserably confused, said, “He’s like the God in Nashville?”
She was reassured when Raina laughed and agreed. “Oh, for sure,” she said. “He is definitely the God in Nashville.”
In the bathroom, Raina finished Lyra’s makeup, and then dressed her, too.
“You look nervous,” she said, when she stepped back to evaluate her work. “Are you nervous?”
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 that she could tell him. 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-smelling greenery 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 that barely 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. She felt like 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 as hers, 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 her cousin was, 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 when they were everywhere. 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.