Hungry (13 page)

“I think you both need some space from one another,” Dad says calmly. He turns back to me. “Don’t stay out too late.”

“I won’t,” I say then I hesitate. Part of me feels like I should tell them what I’m doing. I’m sure they’re imagining me at the EA with Yaz. But, I know my mom would never allow me to leave if she knew where I’m heading. I decide to keep the details to myself and get out before she harangues my dad into changing his mind. “See you later,” I say, heading for the front vestibule.

“She can be so impossible, and you two let her get away with it!” my mom huffs.

“Oh now, Lily,” Grandma Apple says in a rare moment of standing up to my mother. I pause in the vestibule to listen. “She’s seventeen. She’s supposed to be impossible. And she’s not supposed to want to be with us. It’s good that she’s going out with friends.”

“Hmph,” says Mom. “My next research project is going to be further altering teens’ Synthamil formula so they’re less of a pain in the butt.”

After hearing that, I’m happy to walk out the door.

*   *   *

In my Smaurto, I tell Astrid the address Basil made me memorize. If it weren’t for the fact that I have no idea where I’m going or how long it will take me to get there, I’d leave my stupid Gizmo behind. The only thing I’ve figured out is how to completely block the network signal so at least I can stop Astrid from constantly yapping at me. The problem is, if I want to use any of her features, like her GPS, I have to accept the signal again, which makes everything I do online trackable and traceable.

As I wait for Astrid to calculate directions, I realize that I could have the address wrong. The numbers could have transposed themselves in my mind over the past few days. The name could have morphed into some other street rattling around inside my brain. Memory is a tricky thing and without a cloud keeping track of hard data, the edges of information become fuzzy. It takes Astrid longer than it should to find the address, which makes me worry that I’m wrong. If I am, I could end up anywhere. But then she says, “Got it!” and we pull out of the drive.

I’m nervous and I second-guess myself as my Smaurto carries me west. What if my parents find out where I’m going? They never told me I couldn’t go to an Analog meeting. Then again I never asked. Do they even know about the Analogs? I’m in that murky territory of not exactly lying but definitely evading the truth. That’s something I don’t mind doing as HectorProtector, but real-time Thalia doesn’t like to disappoint her parents. Then I have a worse thought.
What if Basil isn’t there?

Then again, what if he is there? Will he be excited to see me? My pulse quickens and my stomach gets all jumpy when I think of him. Has he been thinking about me this week? Will there be a chance for us to talk? Could we find a quiet place to sit, facing each other, our knees nearly touching, so I can ask him all the questions that have been circling around inside my head since I first met him? While I run through possible scenarios, my Smaurto goes farther and farther west, until after almost twenty minutes it slows down and idles at a tollgate on the western edge of the Inner Loop.

“Would you like to proceed?” Astrid asks, which snaps me out of my daydream, sweaty and a little embarrassed for getting lost in thoughts about Basil. Again. At least the patch is off my back so Mom can’t spy on my emotions while I sneak around.

“1601 South Halsted is in the Outer Loops,” Astrid tells me. A map appears on the Smaurto’s screen with a red star flashing a few blocks on the other side of the wall. Usually when I’ve left the Inner Loops it’s been in my family’s helicopter on the way to a vacation center, but I’ve never crossed over alone.

During the wars, the mega-highways lying like belts around the city were easy to convert into these reinforced steel-and-concrete walls during the worst of the fighting when each population center was fending for itself. Of course, being inland and to the north, our city lasted longer than those on the coasts, which were battered by decades of superstorms then eventually swallowed up by the encroaching seas. Since we were surrounded by farmland, our food supply lasted longer. And the fresh water on one side of us still has enough algae to keep oxygen in our air. Geography, my dad has pointed out, was more than half of the equation when it came to who survived into this century and who didn’t. Of course, having One World headquartered in our population center didn’t hurt either. Once governments failed, the world’s largest corporation cleaned up the mess, starting in their own backyard, which is why our population center recovered more quickly than others.

The walls remain today, but they’re no longer sealed. Automated tollbooths every few miles segregate the Inner Loops from the Outer. The most privileged from the less so. When I question this, my parents shrug and say it’s not really any different than how it always was, just more clearly defined. My mother likes to point out that anyone can come in, to which I always add, as long as they can pay. And her retort:
We foot the bill for automated roads, security, and a constant network connection in the Inner Loops, so why shouldn’t everyone pay for services they use?

“Do you want to proceed?” Astrid asks me again.

I hesitate. I could turn around and go home to play Scrabble or go find Yaz. The gate stays down, waiting for me to make up my mind. Then my belly speaks for me. It rumbles the answer:
Go find other people who feel like this.
I suck in a deep breath. “Proceed,” I say, trying to sound confident.

*   *   *

My Smaurto turns onto Halsted Street. The whole area is run down and dingy. Nothing much has happened here since this part of the city was abandoned. Other places in the Outer Loops, like the South, are starting to come back to life but this one looks beyond resuscitation with its crumbling buildings and rough roads. There are no solar panels and no Whisson Windmills. I think about heading back, sure that I’ve remembered the address wrong, or worse, that Basil gave me false info, but then I see a group of people clothed in shades of green and brown chatting happily as they file into a low brick building with 1601 above the door. Relief washes over me.

I study the crowd. For a moment every boy looks like Basil, except that when I look more closely, none of them are. As the Smaurto pulls up to the curb, I see men and women, old and young, even a few little kids. How will I ever find him? Of course, if he had a Gizmo I could ping him. While I agonize over whether I should get out or give up and leave, someone taps my window. I jump when I turn and see Basil. I command the window down with a shaky voice.

“Apple?” he says, peering at me.

Hearing him call me Apple immediately takes me back to Flav-O-Rite, and I start to smile. He grins as if we’re sharing a private joke. He’s even more beautiful than I remember, and for a moment I can’t talk because he looks at me with the kind of yearning I feel deep in my gut every day. Then he shoves his hands in the pockets of his brown pants and shakes the hair out of his eyes, looking uncertain while I sit like a moron on mute. I force myself to squeak, “I made it,” and cringe at the tremor in my voice. What the hell is wrong with me? I swallow hard and try to pull myself together.

“I was afraid I might have scared you away the other night,” he says, his voice serious and concerned.

“No!” I blurt out. “Not at all. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.” My skin flushes with embarrassment for admitting it, but Basil’s face lights up like the sun coming out from behind dark clouds, and I feel better.

“Me, too,” he says and waits. We stare at each other, smiling awkwardly. “So, are you going to get out of your car?”

“That’d be a good idea!” I say like an idiot. I command the door open then tell the Smaurto to go park, but when I look around, I notice that no one else who is going into the building is coming out of a Smaurto. “Where are all the other cars?”

Basil looks at me out of the corner of his eye and sort of smirks. “Not everybody has their own automated transportation device, Apple. There are other ways of getting around.” Before I can ask what that might be, he touches my elbow. Tiny bumps flash across my skin, and a ripple goes through my belly, which for a moment quells the gnawing hunger inside me. “Let’s go inside.”

We head for the door where people have formed two lines to pass between a man and a woman carefully scrutinizing each person before allowing them inside.

“What’s that all about?” I ask.

“Security,” he says.

I almost laugh. “Against what?”

“The wrong element.”

“Titanium? Helium? Or the dreaded sodium?”

He barks a surprised laugh. “Was that a chemistry joke?”

“Yes!” I say and my heart soars. “Hardly anyone ever gets my nerdy sense of humor.”

“Sounds like you’ve been hanging around with the wrong crowd,” he tells me.

“Understatement,” I say, and he laughs.

We step up to the door. The woman nods to Basil, but the man holds out his arm, blocking my path. “She’s with me,” says Basil. The man glances at the woman, who gives a slight nod. The man lifts his arm for me to pass, and I follow Basil through the door.

*   *   *

The space inside the building is empty and crude. The floor is hard gray concrete and the walls are real brick. Actual wooden beams hang overhead. Weirder still, the room is lit only by the late afternoon sun streaming through a large bank of windows. There’s not a screen in sight or the low-level drone of tiny motors, and yet the place seems more alive and interesting than any PlugIn or EA I’ve ever been to. “Wow,” I say. “This place is beautiful.”

“I love it here,” Basil says. “We used to meet in a dark basement below a machine shop in the North Loop like we were hiding, but then Ana found this.”

“Who’s Ana?”

“You’ll see,” Basils says.

We walk around the perimeter of the room, and I put my finger on what’s so strange but compelling about this place. “Look,” I say, pointing at a group of people. “Everybody’s talking to one another. If we were any place else they’d all be murmuring to their screens.”

“That’s why we don’t allow Gizmos here.”

I stop myself from gaping at this information and blurting out,
You mean no one here has a Gizmo!
Instead, I slip my hand inside my pouch and cloak mine.

Basil presses his hand into the small of my back. I want to lean into his touch. “Let’s find a place to sit.”

There must be over a hundred seats and most of them are already filled, but we find a couple of rickety metal chairs, probably from my grandma’s era. I turn to Basil and whisper, “Is everybody here, you know…?”

“Are they what?” he whispers back.

“Like us?” I ask. “You know, hungry.”

“There are many kinds of hunger,” he says slyly. A hush falls over the room. He points to the front. “It’s about to start.”

A woman in a billowy flower-print dress walks to the front. “Hello and welcome, Analogs!” she says cheerfully.

“Hello,” everyone says together, which startles me.

Basil puts his hand on my knee and swallows a laugh. “You okay?” he whispers.

I nod, slightly embarrassed. “Is that Ana?”

He shakes his head then leans close to my ear. His breath tickles my neck. “First there’ll be some entertainment, then she’ll come out.”

“What a wonderful program we have planned,” the woman says. “So many exciting offerings from our pool of talented Analogs. First up, we have our beautiful Radish.”

A small and spritely woman wrapped in fluttery green clothes skips to the front of the room. She looks out on the crowd and announces, “This is called
Full Moon Planting.
It’s an interpretive dance about when farmers would sow their seeds beneath the light of a full moon.”

Everyone politely applauds but me because I’m too busy wondering what the hell an “interpretive dance” is. Radish bows her head and closes her eyes for a moment. Then she looks up and lifts her arms in a circle. She twirls, the edges of her clothes fluttering to the sides. She glides across the floor, pretending to pluck something small from an imaginary basket under her arm and drops it lightly to the ground. It’s as if she’s playing a dancing game, but there’s no animated 3-D world around her or hologram creatures to avoid. Then she stops and curls into a ball. She rolls to the ground, slowly snaking her arm upward into a shaft of sunlight speckled with dust.

I have no idea what she’s actually doing. Part of me is embarrassed for her but another part is mesmerized. I want to laugh because it’s like watching a little kid who still plays make-believe, only she’s a grown woman. On the other hand, her movements are lovely and fluid. And when I stop questioning why she’s doing what she’s doing and I simply watch her, I find myself thinking of my grandfather Hector coaxing his green shoots from the ground. Or of my grandmother picking vegetables from her garden. When Radish stands with her arms above her head, reaching for the sky, beaming with happiness, I feel her joy. She bows and everyone, including me, claps.

“Thank you, Radish!” the woman in the flower-print dress shouts over our applause. “Thank you for sharing such beauty of the human body with us. You are an inspiration.”

Next, the woman brings up a man named Kumquat who strums an antique wooden guitar and sings, “There once was a tree. A pretty little tree. The prettiest little tree that you ever did see. Oh, the tree in a hole, and the hole in the ground.” Then everyone joins in, “And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around!”

I feel silly, like I’m at toddler social time when we’d sit in a circle singing songs together. I used to love how our voices blended and everybody was happy. But that was when I was three years old. I can’t believe all of these adults are willfully joining in. I glance at Basil who unself-consciously sings along. On the next round, I figure what the heck, and I join in, too, singing as I haven’t since I was tiny. “And the green grass grew all around, all around. And the green grass grew all around!”

I laugh wildly at the freedom of acting like this in public. I hope no one is streaming this. I can just imagine the snarky comments about us on some PRC chat board. Then I remember—no Gizmos. Which means no cameras. Which means that only the people who are really here will ever experience this. It’s just us. Here. In the moment, as Grandma Apple would say. And when we leave, there will be no permanent record. What a wonderful feeling.