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"They're really pretty," I said in a neutral voice. I wanted to please her, and I couldn't tell whether she thought horrible was good or bad.
"Take it," said Amanda. She held out her wrist. "I can lift another one."
I wanted that bracelet so badly, but I wouldn't know how to buy the food and the jellyfish would die. Or else the bracelet would be discovered, no matter how well I hid it, and I'd be in trouble. "I can't," I said. I took a step back.
"You're one of them, aren't you?" said Amanda. She wasn't taunting, she seemed merely curious. "The Goddies. The Godawfuls. They say there's a bunch of them around here."
"No," I said, "I'm not." The lie must have stood out all over me. There were a lot of shabby people in the Sinkhole pleeb, but they weren't shabby on purpose the way the Gardeners were.
Amanda tilted her head a little to one side. "Funny," she said. "You look like them."
"I only live with them," I said. "I'm just more or less visiting them. I'm not really like them at all."
"Of course you aren't," said Amanda, smiling. She gave my arm a little pat. "Come over here. I want to show you something."
Where she took me was the alleyway that led to the back of Scales and Tails. We Gardener kids weren't supposed to go there, but we did anyway because when we were collecting you could get a lot of vinegar wine if you were early enough to beat out the winos.
That alleyway was dangerous. Scales and Tails was a dirt den, said the Eves. We should never, ever go into it, especially not girls. It said, ADULT ENTERTAINMENT in neon over the door, which was guarded at night by two enormous men in black suits who wore sunglasses even though it was dark. One of the older Gardener girls claimed these men had said to her, "Come back in a year and bring your sweet little ass." But Bernice said she was just bragging.
Scales had pictures on either side of the entrance -- light-up holo-photos. The pictures were of beautiful girls covered completely with shining green scales, like lizards, except for the hair. One of them was standing on a single leg with the other leg hooked around her neck. I thought that it must hurt to stand like that, but the girl in the picture was smiling.
Did the scales grow or were they were pasted on? Bernice and I disagreed about that. I said they were pasted, Bernice said they grew because the girls had been operated on, like getting bimplants. I told Bernice that was nuts because nobody would have such an operation. But secretly I sort of believed her.
One day we'd seen a scaly girl running down the street in daytime, with a black-suited man chasing her. She sparkled a lot because of her shiny green scales; she'd kicked off her high heels and she was running in her bare feet, dodging in and out among the people, but then she hit a patch of broken glass and fell. The man caught up with her and scooped her up, and carried her back to Scales with her green snakeskin arms dangling down. Her feet were bleeding. Whenever I thought of that, a chill went all through me, like watching someone else cut their finger.
At the back of the alleyway beside Scales there was a small square yard where the trash bins were kept -- the ones for the carbon garboil trash and the other kind. Then there was a board fence, and on the other side of it there was a vacant lot where a building had burned down. Now it was just hard earth with pieces of cement and charred wood and broken glass, and weeds growing on it.
Sometimes the pleebrats hung out around there, and they'd jump us when we were emptying the wine bottles. They'd yell, "Goddie, goddie, stinky body" and snatch the pails and run off with them or empty them onto us. That happened to Bernice once and she reeked of wine for days.
Sometimes we went into that vacant lot with Zeb on our Outdoor Classroom days: he said it was the closest thing to a meadow we'd ever find in our pleeb. When he was with us, the pleebland kids didn't bother us. Zeb was like having your own private tiger: tame to you, savage to everyone else.
Once, we found a dead girl there. She didn't have any hair or clothes: she only had a few green scales left clinging to her. Pasted on, I thought. Or something. Anyway, not growing. So I was right.
"Maybe she's sunbathing," said one of the older boys, and the rest of them snickered.
"Don't touch her," said Zeb. "Have some respect! We'll have our lesson on the Rooftop Garden today." When we came back for our next Outdoor Classroom, she was gone.
"I bet she's carbon garboil," Bernice whispered to me. Carbon garboil was made from any sort of carbon garbage -- slaughterhouse refuse, old vegetables, restaurant tossout, even plastic bottles. The carbs went into a boiler, and oil and water came out, plus anything metal. Officially you couldn't put in human corpses, but the kids made jokes about that. Oil, water, and shirt buttons. Oil, water, and gold pen nibs.
"Oil, water, and green scales," I whispered to Bernice.
At first glance the vacant lot was empty. No winos, no pleebrats, no dead naked women. Amanda led me over to the far corner, where there was a flat slab of concrete. A syrup bottle was leaning against it, the squeeze kind.
"Look at this," she said. She'd written her name in syrup on the slab, and a stream of ants was feeding on the letters, so that each letter had an edging of black ants. That was how I first learned Amanda's name -- I saw it written in ants. Amanda Payne.
"Cool, huh?" she said. "Want to write your own name?"
"Why are you doing that?" I said.
"It's neat," said Amanda. "You write things, then they eat your writing. So you appear, then you disappear. That way no one can find you."
Why did this make sense to me? I don't know, but it did. "Where do you live?" I asked.
"Oh, around," said Amanda carelessly. That meant she didn't really live anywhere: she was sleeping in a squat somewhere, or worse. "I used to live in Texas," she added.
So she was a refugee. A lot of Texas refugees had turned up after the hurricanes and then the droughts. They were mostl
y illegal. Now I could see why Amanda would be so interested in disappearing.
