15
“You want to see my jellyfish bracelet?” Amanda said once I got there. I must have seemed pathetic to her, with my orphanish clothes and chalky fingers. She held up her wrist: there were the tiny jellyfish, opening and closing themselves like swimming flowers. They looked so perfect.
“Where did you get it?” I asked. I hardly knew what to say.
“Lifted,” said Amanda. That was how the pleebrat girls mostly got things.
“How do they stay alive in there?”
She pointed to the silver knob where the bracelet fastened. “This is an aerator,” she said. “It pumps in oxygen. You add the food twice a week.”
“What happens if you forget?”
“They eat each other,” said Amanda. She gave a little smile. “Some kids do that on purpose, they don’t add the food. Then it’s like a miniwar in there, and after a while there’s just one jellyfish left, and then it dies.”
“That’s horrible,” I said.
Amanda kept the same smile. “Yeah. That’s why they do it.”
“They’re really pretty,” I said in a neutral voice. I wanted to please her, and I couldn’t tell whether she thought horrible was good or bad.
“Take it,” said Amanda. She held out her wrist. “I can lift another one.”
I wanted that bracelet so badly, but I wouldn’t know how to buy the food and the jellyfish would die. Or else the bracelet would be discovered, no matter how well I hid it, and I’d be in trouble. “I can’t,” I said. I took a step back.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” said Amanda. She wasn’t taunting, she seemed merely curious. “The Goddies. The Godawfuls. They say there’s a bunch of them around here.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not.” The lie must have stood out all over me. There were a lot of shabby people in the Sinkhole pleeb, but they weren’t shabby on purpose the way the Gardeners were.
Amanda tilted her head a little to one side. “Funny,” she said. “You look like them.”
“I only live with them,” I said. “I’m just more or less visiting them. I’m not really like them at all.”
“Of course you aren’t,” said Amanda, smiling. She gave my arm a little pat. “Come over here. I want to show you something.”
Where she took me was the alleyway that led to the back of Scales and Tails. We Gardener kids weren’t supposed to go there, but we did anyway because when we were collecting you could get a lot of vinegar wine if you were early enough to beat out the winos.
That alleyway was dangerous. Scales and Tails was a dirt den, said the Eves. We should never, ever go into it, especially not girls. It said, ADULT ENTERTAINMENT in neon over the door, which was guarded at night by two enormous men in black suits who wore sunglasses even though it was dark. One of the older Gardener girls claimed these men had said to her, “Come back in a year and bring your sweet little ass.” But Bernice said she was just bragging.
Scales had pictures on either side of the entrance – light-up holo-photos. The pictures were of beautiful girls covered completely with shining green scales, like lizards, except for the hair. One of them was standing on a single leg with the other leg hooked around her neck. I thought that it must hurt to stand like that, but the girl in the picture was smiling.
Did the scales grow or were they were pasted on? Bernice and I disagreed about that. I said they were pasted, Bernice said they grew because the girls had been operated on, like getting bimplants. I told Bernice that was nuts because nobody would have such an operation. But secretly I sort of believed her.
One day we’d seen a scaly girl running down the street in daytime, with a black-suited man chasing her. She sparkled a lot because of her shiny green scales; she’d kicked off her high heels and she was running in her bare feet, dodging in and out among the people, but then she hit a patch of broken glass and fell. The man caught up with her and scooped her up, and carried her back to Scales with her green snakeskin arms dangling down. Her feet were bleeding. Whenever I thought of that, a chill went all through me, l…
