Читать книгу All Rights Reserved - Gregory Scott Katsoulis - Страница 16

PREY: $6.99

I was an agitator. I was a fool. I was brilliantly devious. I was a mental deficient. I was an unpatriotic threat to the nation. I was a pathetic symptom of a generation with no soul. “Kids never used to be like this,” interviewees said.

But my mother approved.

I was seditious, a word I’d never heard before. It meant I wanted to destroy the government. They said I’d driven the price of the word up to $29.99 this month, but I had nothing to do with it. Rights Holders changed prices each day as much as they could, depending on what the market would tolerate.

One news report claimed I had tricked Beecher into killing himself to cover my tracks. (What tracks? I wondered.) Another report, the most flattering of the bunch, claimed I had a brain tumor that rendered me mute. I was a sad, worthless little girl.

Three networks offered bounties to the first person who made me speak. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that might mean word had gotten out of the city. What did they think of me out there? I knew, at least, what my parents thought, and that made things a little easier to bear.

On my first day back to school, I was on Fuller Street, just away from the roar of the outer ring, when two skinny rich girls in gold corsets and Transparenting Mood™ coats approached me. They wanted me to talk—to talk, goddammit, and they were going to make it happen.

“I’ll pay for your speaks,” the taller one shouted, as though I were half-deaf. She seemed to think I had only been waiting for someone as clever as her to ask. She tottered alongside me and shoved her crystal-rimmed Cuff under my nose. Her long coat turned a translucent acid yellow. Half a dozen bracelets clinked and rattled as she shook her arm for me to speak.

“I’ll record her voice,” she said in an aside to her friend, like I was a dog who couldn’t understand. “We can play it for everyone.”

The shorter one nodded excitedly. “You could get on the news!” Her coat flashed orange, then clear.

There were no dropters nearby. Attorney Holt had been able to put a partial lockdown on that. I don’t know if he planned to sell dolls or what.

“Meh,” the tall one said, fluffing at her hair. $6.99. The yellow of her coat mellowed. She didn’t seem to care about the news or the money. She just wanted me to obey.

“If you’re not gonna talk, do the zippered lip thing, sluk.”

That word, sluk, put my teeth on edge. $49.99. It was ugly, hateful and pricey—meant to imply I was scarcely more than filth. I’d never spoken it, even if plenty of other kids did before they had to pay. Nancee and Penepoli once went back and forth with it, as a joke, seeing who could say it the meanest. I always told them that if we could say whatever we wanted, it was better to try beautiful words.

Neither Nancee nor Penepoli could hit that k in the hateful, glottal way the girls in the alley could.

“Come on!” The tall one shoved at me half-heartedly. I almost laughed at her. A small push would have done either of those girls in. That’s the way it was with rich people; they were either grotesquely enormous, from gluttony or steroids, or they were distressingly thin. I felt a little sorry for those girls, though I don’t know why I had any sympathy. They had none for me. They chose to starve, while some kids barely survived on printed sheets of Wheatlock™. Despite all their advantage, these girls still looked miserable. I had to remember that it made them vicious.

I peeled off from the main sidewalk, ducking down a narrow alley. I assumed they’d avoid anywhere so dirty, but my disobedience sent them into fits.

“You want to get sued, little girl?” the taller one asked, stamping her heel. Her coat flickered and reddened, and her nose wrinkled as she eyed the tight, shadowy space where I’d fled.

My speech popped up on my Cuff, glowing, as if Keene Inc. had some algorithm guessing the worst possible moment to get me to reconsider reading it. Or maybe Keene considered these girls a good audience.

“Her dad’s a Lawyer,” the other one warned me. She strode fearlessly into the alleyway on her six-inch heels, her coat flashing to black. I picked up my pace, and they started to run after me. Well, maybe not run—their posh high-heeled shoes and unyielding corsets made their progress difficult. They clattered along awkwardly, and after a few seconds they had to stop.

“Oh my God, Mandy, I can’t barely breathe,” the shorter one cried out.

“Sluk!” Mandy shouted. She pulled her heels off and threw them at me, one after the other—insubstantial, spiky heels that wobbled through the air. It occurred to me these girls could have been customers at the shop where Saretha worked. Saretha sold impractical garbage like this, corsets and heels and ornate Leatherette™ boots.

I took off, slipping away into a branching alley and up a fire escape. I was glad for the thinness of the rich girls’ arms and the weakness of their needlessly starved bodies. Even if they saw me, they could never pull themselves up to follow. My heart pounded, but I felt a little thrill in escaping them.

“Advil™, Advil™!” I heard them cry out as their voices receded into the distance behind me.

I climbed a little higher and mounted the roof. I could walk across an arc of six buildings and then return to street level right before the crossing for my school. None of the rooftop gaps would be hard to jump and, truth be told, I enjoyed the little thrill of leaping. I just had to be careful with my landings and not give them any gymnastic style. I couldn’t afford that now. My Cuff was watching.

I was feeling pretty good up there, having thwarted the Affluent girls, when a realization dawned on me.

Would I be facing worse at school?