"Locker room," said Jimmy. So Lucerne's fable had seeped out.
I took a deep breath. "This is between us, right?"
"Cross my heart," said Jimmy.
"No," I said. "She wasn't tied to the bed."
"Didn't think so," said Jimmy.
"But don't tell that to anyone. I really trust you not to."
"I won't," said Jimmy. He didn't say, Why not. He knew that if everyone heard Lucerne had been bullshitting, people would know she hadn't been kidnapped, she'd merely cheated big time. What she'd done had been for love, or just sex. And she was back at HelthWyzer with her loser of a husband because the other guy had tossed her over. But she'd rather die than admit it. Or else she'd rather kill someone.
All this time I was going into my closet and taking the purple cellphone out of my tiger and phoning Amanda. We'd text each other with the best times to call, and if the connection was good we could see each other onscreen. I asked a lot of questions about the Gardeners. Amanda told me she wasn't staying with Zeb any more -- Adam One said she was almost grown up so she had to sleep in one of the singles cubicles, and that was pretty boring. "When can you get back here?" she said. But I didn't know how I could manage to run away from HelthWyzer.
"I'm working on it," I said.
The next time we were on the phone she said, "Look who's here," and it was Shackie, grinning at me sheepishly, and I wondered if they'd been having sex together. I felt as if Amanda had scooped some glittery piece of junk I wanted for myself, but that was stupid because I had no feelings for Shackie whatsoever. I did wonder whether it had been his hand on my bum, that night I passed out in the holospinner. But most likely it was Croze.
"How's Croze?" I said to Shackie. "And Oates?"
"They're fine," Shackie mumbled. "When're you coming back? Croze really misses you! Gang, right?"
"Grene," I said. "Gangrene." I was surprised he'd still use that old kidstuff password, but maybe Amanda had put him up to it so I'd feel included.
After Shackie went offscreen, Amanda said they were partners -- the two of them were boosting things from malls. But it was a fair trade: she got someone watching her back and helping her lift stuff and sell it, and he got sex.
"Don't you love him?" I said.
Amanda said I was a romantic. She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.
41
Jimmy and I started doing our homework together. He was really nice about helping me with the parts I didn't know. Because of all that memorizing we'd had to do at the Gardeners, I could stare at a lesson and then see everything inside my head, like a picture. So although it was hard for me and I felt I was way behind, I started to catch up quite fast.
Because he was two years ahead of me, Jimmy wasn't in any of my classes except for Life Skills, which was supposed to help you structure your life, once you had one. They mixed up the age groups in Life Skills so we could benefit from sharing our different life experiences, and Jimmy traded desks so he was sitting right behind me. "I'm your bodyguard," he whispered, which made me feel safe.
We went to my place to do our homework if Lucerne wasn't there; if she was, we went to Jimmy's. I liked Jimmy's place better because he had a pet rakunk -- it was a new splice, half skunk but without the smell, half raccoon but without the aggression. Her name was Killer; she was one of the first ones they'd made. When I picked her up, she liked me right away.
Jimmy's mother seemed to like me as well, though the first time she saw me she looked at me very hard with her stern blue eyes and asked me how old I was. I liked her all right too, although she smoked too much, which made me cough. Nobody at the Gardeners smoked, or at least not cigarettes. She worked on a computer a lot, but I couldn't figure out what she did on it, because she didn't have a job. His father was hardly ever there -- he was at the labs, figuring out how to transplant human stem cells and DNA into pigs, to grow new human pieces. I asked Jimmy what pieces, and he said kidneys, but maybe it was lungs too -- in the future you'd be able to get your very own pig made, with second copies of everything. I knew what the Gardeners would think of that: they would think it was bad, because of having to kill the pigs.
Jimmy had seen these pigs: their nickname was pigoon, like pig balloon, because they were so big. The double-organ methods were proprietary secrets, he said: extra valuable. "Aren't you worried some foreign Corps will kidnap your dad and squeeze the secrets out of his brain?" I said. That was happening more often: they kept it out of the news, but there was gossip at HelthWyzer. Sometimes they got the kidnapped scientists back, sometimes they didn't. The security was getting tighter and tighter.
After doing our homework Jimmy and I would hang out at the HelthWyzer mall and play tame video games and drink Happicappuchinos. The first time, I told him Happicuppa was the brew of evil so I couldn't drink it, and he laughed at me. The second time I made an effort, and it tasted delicious, and soon I wasn't thinking too much about the evilness of it.
After a while Jimmy talked to me about Wakulla Price. He said she was the first girl he'd ever been in love with, but when he'd asked her to get serious with him she'd said they could only be friends. I knew that part already, but I said that was too bad, and Jimmy said he'd been a puddle of dog vomit for weeks and he still hadn't got over it.
Then he asked if I had a boyfriend back in the pleebs, and I said yes -- which wasn't true -- but since I had no way of getting back there I'd decided to forget about him because that was the best thing to do if you wanted someone you couldn't have. Jimmy was really sympathetic about my lost boyfriend, and he squeezed my hand. Then I felt guilty for telling such a lie; but I wasn't sorry about the squeezing.
By this time I had a diary -- all the girls at school had them, it was a retro craze: people could hack your computer, but they couldn't hack a paper book. I wrote all of this down in my diary. It was like talking to someone. I didn't even think that writing things down was that dangerous any more: I guess that shows how far away from the Gardeners I'd grown already. I kept my diary in the closet, inside a stuffed bear, because I didn't want Lucerne snooping on me. The Gardeners were right about that part: reading someone else's secret words does give you power over them.
Then a new boy came to HelthWyzer High. His name was Glenn, and as soon as I saw him I knew he was the same Glenn who'd come to the Tree of Life on the Saint Euell'
s Week when Amanda and I had walked him over with that jar of honey to visit Pilar. I thought he gave me a little nod -- did he recognize me? I hoped not, because I didn't want him to start talking about where he'd seen me last. What if the CorpSeCorps were still trying to track down Lucerne's pretend sex-slaver? What if they found Zeb through me and he ended up without his parts, in a freezer? That was a horrifying thought.
But surely even if he did remember me, Glenn wouldn't say anything because he wouldn't want them finding out about Pilar and the Gardeners and whatever he'd been doing with them. I was sure it was something illegal, or why would Pilar have sent Amanda and me away? It must have been to protect us.
Glenn acted like he didn't care about anybody, him and his black T-shirts. But after a while Jimmy started hanging out with him, and then I wasn't seeing so much of Jimmy.