week’s food, whatever you got. We have six Geek show tickets and these items for trade. Will lifted his sack of loot from the drop onto the table. Violent looked through Will’s items and fixed him with a direct look that made him blush. Violent’s demeanor cheered a bit.
“Kathy, bring me five days’ worth, on the light side.” A Slut girl brought over a small collection of canned fruit, canned tuna, refried beans, dry soup, and two bottles of tomato juice. As David stuffed those items in his bag, Violent stared at Will with increased interest.
“What’s your name?”
Will met her stare with a look of defiance.
“I’m Will.”
“That’s not a lot of food for a week, Will. And there’s two of you.”
“What about it?”
“Ooh, he’s got a little fight in him,” Violent said to the other girls. “I’ll tell you what about it. I could help you. I have a lot of food, I got everything. Maybe you should come visit me some night. I’ll make it worth your while.”
David stopped putting the food away. He watched Will stand there, frozen on the edge of a response.
“What do you say, girls?” Violent said to the entire room.
“Would he make a good rent boy or what?” Sluts converged from around the room, circling Will, looking him up and down, squeezing his arms, giggling, and detailing their opinion of each part of him, like they were buying a horse.
“Rock hard,” one of them said with a flare of her nostrils.
Will shrank under all the female attention, overwhelmed.
“All right, all right. That’s enough, back to work. Show me some hustle,” Violent said.
The girls dispersed. Will’s breathing was heavy and fast.
David zipped up his bag and led Will away from the table.
“Think about it, Bill!” Violent called out after them.
“I can’t believe you went along with that stuff,” David said as they entered the hallway. “I sure wouldn’t have.”
“Shut it.”
They had nothing left to deliver and nothing more to trade, but David spotted a medic table set up outside the Nerds’ trading post. There was a line of injured people in front, wearing filthy clothes, freshly stained with blood and dirt. Could be good for a quick buck.
David led Will over to the medic table. The Nerds had a couple first-aid kits open and medical books from the library laid out on the table. The Freak at the front of the line was writhing in his seat, getting a V-shaped cut in his arm stitched up with lavender thread. David rooted through his bag to find the mini cleaning kit he kept in there. He approached a couple people who were waiting.
“Get your clothes cleaned before those stains set. I can do it right here for half price. Who wants to save their clothes?” A few people in line looked over with mild interest. Will hung by the door and peered into the Nerd’s room like it was a girls’ shower. He stroked his cell phone in his hand. It was caked with layers of duct tape on the back for protection. Inside the classroom, Nerds had refurbished laptops and phones laid out on tables. David could almost hear Will’s requests already: David, can you buy me a charge? Can I get one of their genre packs of mp3’s? I need my left earbud fixed. He heard those things from Will every time they passed a Nerd.
“If you don’t have a stain,” David said to the line, “maybe you have a torn shirt or pants? I can mend that for you.” A frumpy Nerd who obviously spent no time thinking about his appearance outside of dying his hair plain black out of allegiance to his gang came out of the Nerds’ room and planted himself in front of David.
“No panhandling. Come on, you gotta get out of here.” David buried his frustration, put his kit away, and walked.
He ignored the heat he felt on the side of his face from people in the line staring at him. He hated how low he’d had to bring himself to survive. How far was too far down? He wasn’t that
Scrap in quad, but he was close. He was ready to call it a day.
“David, wait up,” Will said, jogging after him. “You’re just going to leave me there?”
“Oh, sorry,” David said. He hurried toward the market exit, past Varsity’s classroom. David wouldn’t look into it. Not that he was afraid Sam was inside: He knew Sam would be back at the gym at the Varsity drop party by now, drunk on homemade moonshine. David didn’t look in because he couldn’t bear to see it. He didn’t want to see the piles and piles of food or the lines of traders from each gang who stood in there, all at Varsity’s mercy. If Varsity was happy with you, the price of food would be low; if they were upset, it would be high. There was always someone walking away from the trading table in tears.
The Pretty Ones’ classroom was a different story, David always got an eyeful of that before he left the market. Their room seemed to glow from its pristine white walls. They were the only clean white walls David ever saw anymore. Inside the room was the greatest injustice in McKinley. All of the school’s most gorgeous, luscious, kill yourself for them girls belonged to one gang, and they only dated Varsity guys. They wore white dresses. They played with their yellow hair.
David would have gladly done their laundry, but the gym and athletic facilities where they lived with Varsity was equipped with washing machines. They had white-sheeted tables of beauty products on offer, along with hair extensions and wigs. But like all boutique products, they were expensive.
Girls from the other gangs had to save up for months to buy a Pretty Ones product.
As David and Will got close to the doorway, he stopped. He saw a Scrap girl in a chair on top of a black garbage bag drop cloth. He knew her: Belinda Max. David guessed Belinda had weighed more than three hundred pounds before the explosion, but a year as a Scrap in the shadows had changed her.
She’d lost at least eighty pounds, but she didn’t look any more confident for it. All David really knew about her were the taunts he used to hear in the halls: “Maximum load!” Belinda shivered in the chair. She had long curly white hair with a bright luster to it.
“Damn, she must be hungry,” Will said.
Hilary slid up behind Belinda with a pair of electric clippers in her dainty hand. David still couldn’t see her as the head of the Pretty Ones, or maybe he didn’t want to. Hilary clicked on the clippers and made one buzzing stroke down the top of Belinda’s head. It revealed a wide stripe of scalp.
Belinda wept and hid her face. Hilary continued, stroke after stroke, shedding shiny ringlets of white hair down onto the black square.
The school knew Hilary as cruel, even evil. The hottest girl in the hottest gang, who showed no mercy for anyone and never lifted a finger. David couldn’t stand that he was still attracted to her, but he was, even while she shaved a poor fat girl’s head.
Hilary looked up, right at David, as though she could smell his eyes on her. He tried to read the expression on her face but couldn’t. He wanted to talk to her.
“Are we goin’?” Will said.
David turned his head. Will was twenty feet ahead of him, at the exit. He looked back to Hilary one more time, but his view of her was blocked.
Sam stood in the doorway.
His blond eyebrows were bunched up like train cars in a horrible accident. David only met the wrath in Sam’s eyes for a moment. He instinctively looked down and scurried out of the market, feeling like the slave who had dared to look the king in his face.
7
The foyer smelled like a dirty oven.
The floor was charred from a trash fire that had gotten out of control a few weeks earlier. It was warped and scarred like a burn victim’s back. Dim light glinted off scratches on the steel entrance doors, They were engraved names put there by each student as they “graduated.” Beside the doors was the graduation booth, as it had come to be called. The small screen above the thumb scanner, inside the booth, played a loop of a series of health videos
