Forge Fans Ship Rosie and Burnham
What? Me and Burnham? “I don’t know about that,” I muttered. Sure I had figured out that Burnham more than liked me, and he certainly was attractive in his own way. But I’d tried to be clear about how I was seeing Linus. I focused on the news that Burnham was better and was grateful for that. Tomorrow I would send him an email through his parents and hope it reached him.
My baby rolled again, and I touched a hand to my belly where a little lump was jabbing out. “You’re okay in there,” I said, and rolled to my other side, facing away from the door. The baby shifted again to a more comfortable position.
I was getting sleepy, but it was so hard to stop browsing. I needed to feel connected to my old friends and my old life, but nothing was satisfying me yet. Restless, I searched until I found The Forge Show streaming. Back in Kansas, the time was early evening, which meant the show was running footage from that morning, twelve hours earlier, on the repeat cycle.
The bare, winter trees around the quad had a light coating of fresh snow, and the grass was covered in white. I pulled up Janice’s feed. She’d changed her hair to a silky red color, and her pixie cut had grown out. Down in our old classroom under the library, she was constructing a tiny stage set out of foam core while the noise of a Ping-Pong match bounced in the background. On a hunch, I pulled up Paige’s and Henrik’s feeds, too, and they were the ones playing Ping-Pong.
Nostalgic, I watched them having fun. My old friends, engrossed in their regular lives, were continuing on as if I’d never existed and no danger of dream mining had ever touched them. I didn’t exactly begrudge them their normal lives, but they brought home how much I’d missed. My life could have been golden, like theirs. I didn’t see why I was the only one who had been ruined by the dream mining, while their lives sped blithely along, like a train on a parallel track while I was stuck in a pit.
Finally, deliberately, I set the phone away from me.
I lifted a hand in the darkness and pivoted my wrist so my fingers made a silhouette before the window. My hand. I didn’t choose to be Althea. The truth finally came to me: it was loneliness, not curiosity, that kept me awake tonight. I trailed my hand softly along my eyebrow, then over my cheekbone, and paused to learn the feel of the bridge of my nose.
When I closed my eyes and went quiet inside, I was still here. If I could dig gently past the old, familiar ache of longing, I found that the reaches and dips of my thinking still felt right. The deepest core of me was still Rosie, and I could hold on to that. The night expanded indefinitely, and home was far away, but I softly filled up with my own blue light.
7
ROSIE
CHERRY LIP GLOSS
THE NEXT TIME, Ian brings me cherry lip gloss.
“Do you want me to put it on for you?” he asks.
I’m filled with rage. This stupid, meaningless token is nothing but a tease from the real life I’m missing. I can barely force myself to smile.
“I can do it myself,” I say. “Do you have a mirror?”
“I forgot.” And then, “Is something wrong?”
I bring my voice light. “No, not at all,” I say.
I unscrew the plastic lid and press my pinkie into the waxy color. I’m like his doll now, and he likes to watch my tricks, so I don’t hurry. I dab the balm on my dry lower lip first, then my upper. I press my lips together to feel the slight smear, and the taste of cherry pops along my tongue.
He shakes the bangs out of his eyes and slides a hand along the rim of my sleep shell. I can see his nubby fingernails.
“You look nice like this,” he says. “It’s a good color on you. You didn’t smudge at all.”
“Thanks.”
He presses against my sleep shell. “Say my name,” he says.
“Thanks, Ian John Cowles.”
He nods. He likes that. He’s gross.
“You seem different today,” I say. “More confident.”
“Really? Funny you should say that. My grandmother said the same thing. She said I’m not mumbling as much. I think you’re good for me.”
“Maybe because you’re good for me,” I say. No brainer there. “Are you going to clean my port?”
“Lindsay did earlier. We can’t talk long today,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Dr. Ash will be here tonight. We’re supposed to clean all the dreamers before she comes.”
“Won’t she see my lip balm?” I ask.
“She won’t mind,” he says. “She lets me put a little color on the females. Nothing too much. It was my own idea.”
I’m surprised that he puts makeup on dreamers who are all but dead. I get the sense that he thinks he’s doing us a favor.
“That’s nice,” I say. “How many dreamers are here right now?”
He turns, and I watch him scan the room, counting. “Eighteen.”
“How often does Dr. Ash come?” I ask.
“Every week or so. It’s hard for her to get away from Forge during the semester. She has to make the round trip in twelve hours.”
“She still works there?” I ask, surprised.
He frowns. “Sure. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Does Dean Berg still work at Forge, too?” I ask.
“Of course,” Ian says. “That’s his job. He’s here more in the summer when school’s not in session.”
This boggles my mind. I guess I’ve assumed there was an investigation into Berg after I disappeared. Then again, if someone found enough dream mining evidence to arrest him, they would have come to rescue me, too, and I’m still here.
“Who actually mines me, then?” I ask.
“It’s Dr. Ash, with Mr. Berg consulting long distance,” Ian says. “Nobody else is allowed to touch your mind. You’ve got warnings all over your chart.”
A trickling noise comes from one of the lines above, and Ian glances up. Then he looks over his shoulder.
“You’d better give me the lip gloss,” he says. “I’ll keep it for you.”
I hand it over, but slowly. “The taste makes me hungry.”
“You shouldn’t be hungry,” he says. “Your weight’s stabilizing. That’s a good sign.”
“It is? I feel pretty skinny.” My wrists are bonier than before, and I’m definitely weaker. When I shift to look at my knees, they’re narrow wedges under the blanket.
“No, you’re good,” he says. “Dreamers usually lose a lot at the beginning. We expect that, but then they stabilize when they hit the right nutrient balance.” He taps my IV. “One of the reasons I was worried about you before was the way you kept losing all along. I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure, but for the last two weeks, you’ve been steady at one-oh-eight. That’s really good.”
No wonder my hand looks so frail. I haven’t been this thin since I was twelve. I smooth a hand over my hip bone. “That’s crazy skinny,” I say.
“No, for a dreamer of your height, it’s good,” he says. “It means you’re settling in like.” He smiles modestly. “You haven’t had a breakdown this time, either, did you notice? That’s very good.”