David didn’t wait for their responses. He cut through the crowd. Hilary wanted to talk to him, and he’d been waiting to talk to her for more than a year. It wasn’t smart. She’d cheated on him. She’d dumped him. She dated the guy who wanted David dead. She didn’t make a move to help him when Sam strung him up. She had a hand in all of this misery. It could be a trap. There were so many reasons for David to stop walking, but he didn’t.
He caught up to Hilary at a table of electronic goods at the Nerds’ trading post. Behind her haggard bangs, her face was smeared with soot, but her eyes were vibrant. She pretended to look at a battered laptop for sale. David stood beside her and poked through some used phone batteries.
“What the hell is this about?” David said.
“I know this is crazy, David, but I’m desperate. I didn’t know how else to get your attention. I tried to send you a letter, but it got turned away.”
Turned away? Who did that? Why didn’t he know? And why was she desperate? What did Sam do? Her frantic tone made him want to hold her. But he kept still. Stoic.
“Why should I trust you?” David asked.
He wanted to trust her. He knew that any reason, even a thin excuse, would have been enough.
“You know me, David. Don’t you? I mean, I’m still me.” David looked up and studied Hilary’s face. Now that he was only inches from her, he could see that her dirty white hair was a wig. Her lip quivered. Part of David wanted to reach out and cup her face in his hand and whisper that everything was all right, like she had done for him after his mom died.
“Don’t look at me,” Hilary said. “Somebody might see you.”
“Hil, what do you mean desperate, what’s happening?” Hilary looked up at David for the first time since he entered the room. Her face was flushed, even through the gray and black of the soot. She needed him. He didn’t know why, but he knew that look. He wanted to tell her that he missed her.
A few Varsity guys entered the room, and the yearning in Hilary’s eyes was overtaken by fear. David reached out and took her hand. It was still soft. If anyone else had touched her skin they would have known for certain that this was no Scrap.
“David, let go,” Hilary whispered, barely convincing.
“Talk to me,” he said.
She tried to pull her hand away, but David wouldn’t let go.
He’d hold on until he got an answer.
“We’ll meet tonight,” she said.
19
Lucy wished she was a Nerd. Best she could tell, they got to hide in the library and read books all day. It sounded wonderful. She wondered if the Nerds organized salons to discuss great fiction or the pertinence of historical events to the present. Were they living out some Chekhov-worthy existence two floors up, musing over phi-losophy or quantum physics, while the people below them smashed their heads together?
It didn’t matter. She wasn’t one of them. That was the point.
She was a Loner, standing in a cluster of Loner girls, at the Nerds’ trading post, sifting through their bin of bargain books. Like Will said, she would be here for two and a half more years, maybe more. Either she was going to need a whole heck of lot of books, or she would have to adapt and figure out a way to make peace with her surroundings. Sasha, Gonzalo’s girlfriend, stood next to her. She was a Persian girl with a smattering of freckles across her olive cheeks. Everything about her was miniature, except her attitude. Lucy usually kept clear of Sasha, but maybe it was time to start making friends.
“I heard this was pretty good,” Lucy said. She held up a rust-colored paperback. She didn’t know if it was good. She did remember seeing it on her mom’s beach-book shelf though, and she needed a way into the conversation.
“Hmm,” Sasha said, considering it for barely a second before moving on. Conversation failure. Sasha didn’t need Lucy.
Sasha had Gonzalo, and that was enough to survive. Belinda was on her other side, and she didn’t even bother to look up.
Belinda had been the hardest nut to crack, and Lucy was sure that if she could just get Belinda to warm up to her, the other girls would ease up too.
“Really?” Dorothy said with a dreary tone from behind her.
“I heard it was trashy.”
“Of course it’s trashy. That’s why it’s fun,” Lucy said. She hoped that was right attitude to take.
Lex Thomas
Quaranteen: The Loners
“I’m sick of trash,” Belinda said.
Lucy sagged. In Belinda’s eyes, Lucy was beneath Dorothy.
She was worse than the girl who turned her back on the Loners when they needed her most, and then groveled her way back in. Was there any point now? If she spent the next year
pandering, would it still not make any difference?
“Lucy.”
Lucy looked up from the beach book in her hand. A tall Asian girl with crimson hair stared back at her. The tip of her nose had been horribly torn away. It was Julie Tanaka, and she was flanked by six Sluts. Belinda, Sasha, and Dorothy clambered to attention and snatched their weapons off the book table.
“Um… hi?” Lucy replied. Lucy’s father had been friends with Julie’s in college. Once or twice when she was younger, Lucy’s family had made the trip to Pale Ridge to visit. When Lucy’s father got a job with Mason Montgomery Technologies, the family relocated to Pale Ridge, and Lucy’s parents decided that she and Julie Tanaka would be probably be best friends.
Lucy and Julie never got the chance for that.
“I didn’t know you were a Slut,” Lucy said, in an attempt to make the moment less awkward. But it didn’t sound so friendly. No matter how she tried to say it, it always sounded bad out of Lucy’s mouth. The big Slut. The Asian Slut. The Slut without a nose.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Julie said.
“Okay,” Lucy said, staying put.
“Like, in private?”
Lucy looked to her gang mates. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, and even if their dads were friends, Lucy didn’t have a good reason to trust this girl. Who knows what they
had in mind for her? Most of what Lucy heard about the Sluts came from rumors among the Pretty Ones. All the Sluts were lesbians, and they beat each other up all the time just to get more scars on their faces. Lucy didn’t believe any of it, but she couldn’t help but doubt herself as she stared at Julie’s nose.
Julie sighed, fed up with waiting, “Fine. Anyway, we’re all new recruits and we’re each supposed to bring in one prospect. I picked you.”
“Oh, well, that was nice,” Lucy said.
Julie sneered at Lucy’s gang mates, then dropped her eyes back to Lucy. “Well? You want in?”
“Want in? I don’t get it. I have a gang.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t you rather have somebody who can back you up?” Julie said, and she looked Belinda up and down.
Lucy didn’t know how to respond. She’d never had a chance to consider the Sluts as an option. She’d left the Pretty Ones and gone straight to the graduation booth, where David had swooped in. Could she leave David? Should she? Eventually, he’d be leaving anyway, and then what would happen to the Loners? Most of them seemed to only put up with her because Will had made such a scene. Lucy turned to Belinda. Belinda met her eyes, just as interested in Lucy’s response as Julie Tanaka was.
“No,” Lucy said. “No, thanks.”
“Um, yeah, get lost,” Belinda said, quick on Lucy’s heels.
