Fringe wasn’t sent away, which meant she was all right as she was. Either that or it meant she wasn’t all right, but Pa just didn’t care.
“Do you suppose that could be it,” she whispered to Zasper. “He just doesn’t care?”
“Do you think about that a lot?” Zasper wanted to know.
She really didn’t. She tried not to think about it at all, or about the other stuff that went on. She found she could shut out the real world by pretending things inside her head. Sometimes she went for days not even noticing the real world. Except for some things.
Like the old woman who’d taken to following her around. Fringe thought between Grandma Gregoria and Nada, she had enough old women already, but this old woman kept showing up, here and there, not doing anything much, but sort of always there, a white-haired old thing with keen black eyes that seemed a lot younger than her face.
“Why do you always show up where I am?” Fringe asked her angrily, confronting her in the alley outside Bloom’s place.
“Do I?” asked the old thing. Today she was with a man almost as old as she was, and she looked at him with her head cocked to one side. “Do I show up where this child is?”
“I thought it was the other way ’round,” said the old man. “I thought this child was always appearing where we were.”
“There you have it,” said the old woman. “Contiguity does not prove causation.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re not necessarily following each other around.”
“I think she is, though,” said Fringe to Zasper. “Her name is Jory and I think she’s a spy.”
“For whom?” Zasper wanted to know. “Or what?”
Fringe couldn’t tell him. The only reason someone would spy on her was if she was special for some reason. But she didn’t want to talk about being special. If you talked about things you wanted, or things you hoped for, somehow that fixed things so you never got them.
So, she changed the subject.
“Ma’s sick all the time now,” Fringe said.
“What kind of sick?” he asked, thinking he already knew.
“Just sick,” said Fringe.
These days Souile often lay abed with the horrors, glaring at the ceiling with wide, frantic eyes. The sickness came from near-lethal doses of mood-spray, but Souile never admitted that, not even to herself.
“Before I married Char, I saw my children in my mind,” Souile said to Fringe when Nada sent her with a bowl of hot broth. “You were never babies. You were always grown-up, poised and perfect. You moved like dancers. You were successful. You didn’t need anything from me. I knew you would be beautiful, and healthy and clever. I knew you would be talented and everyone would admire you, and me, because I was your mother. I thought if you were born Professional class, that’s all you’d ever need….”
“She said that, then she cried,” Fringe told Zasper, her eyes wide and ringed with shadows. “She threw the soup on the floor and cried, and she couldn’t get her breath, and I was afraid she was going to die.”
“What did you think about that?”
“I knew it was my fault.”
Zasper gave her a horrified stare. “Why would you think that?”
Fringe threw up her hands in a gesture learned at Grandma Gregoria’s knee. Why would she think that? Because she hadn’t done any of the things a good daughter should have done. She broke her dolls. She hadn’t learned to be classly. She hadn’t cared enough about style. She hadn’t learned to do conversation. She didn’t even know how to play the E&P games she was supposed to know.
“I’ve decided to take all the classes I’m supposed to,” she told Zasper desperately. “I’m going to do better.”
He didn’t say anything. He had never been a Professional-class child. He didn’t know what to say.
Fringe signed up for classes in conversation and personal style. She studied her fellow students, desperately intent on doing and saying the acceptable things, exhausting herself in an effort to make sense of the seemingly pointless rituals. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t believe in them, she could not fit herself into the pattern. She tried to act the part, but she didn’t feel it. Some rebellious part of herself kept rearing itself up and sticking its tongue out, going nyah, nyah, nyah just when she had to concentrate!
Despite all her resolutions, she didn’t fit. She knew it and the Exec-class, Prof-class girls she was with knew it.
“Today one of the girls said I was crude,” she told Zasper in an expressionless voice. “She said I talk like a Trasher. She said I have no polish and my clothes don’t go together. She said I smell.”
“What did you do?”
What she had done had been without thought, without decision. It had just happened. “I hit her. Then I bit her.”
Sharp language, and sharper teeth (a Trasher trait, anger and fighting, learned from Ari). She’d known what the girl said was true though she had had no idea what to do about it or whether, if she had known, it would have been worth doing. She didn’t smell nearly as bad as Ari did.
“What classes are you good at?” Zasper asked gently.
“General classes, like mathematics and systems technology and weapons.”
“Those are important.”
“Nah. Nobody cares about those. Not for Professional-class girls. Professional-class girls don’t use weapons or math much.”
“What happened today when you fought with the other girl?”
“They put me out of the E&P classes. They told me not to come back.” Her eyes were dry when she told him this. She’d finished crying over it, but the guilt was still with her, some guilt at having failed the classes but more—much more—at having felt glad when they’d thrown her out. How could she be a good E&P daughter for Souile if she was glad when they threw her out!
After that, it was pointless to try
