Plus One (26 page)

Gigi was already smoking and chewing gum.

“You have gigantic feet, so I had to get these from my ex-boyfriend. No heels for you.” She tossed a pair of red high-tops at me, one of which I had to bat away with my left hand before it creamed my face.

“I’ll give you three minutes to shower. That’s two minutes more than you’ll want anyway, because I don’t have hot water.”

While I was undressing in the bathroom she yelled through the door, “And don’t wash your hair, just rinse it.”

The shower was bracing, but that was a good thing. It focused me, it woke me up. I had no baggie to protect my bandage, so I hooked it over the top edge of the shower stall and did all the washing with my left hand. I toweled off, covered in gooseflesh, and pulled on the Noma clothes she had given me. When I stepped out of the bathroom, she had a bowl and a spoon waiting on the dinette table with a quart of expired milk, a box of bran flakes, and a four-pound bag of sugar for sprinkling.

She pointed to the chair in front of the bowl. “I sniffed the milk. It won’t kill you.”

I ate three bowls of cereal while she put product in my hair, spiked it, dried it with a hair dryer, and then applied so much hair spray my scalp felt like it was made of plastic. She let me brush my teeth before she put on my makeup: an off-white foundation that covered my sunburn, freckles, and lips; black eyeliner in the pattern of giant, comical eyelashes; two circles of bright rouge on my cheeks; and lipstick just in the middle of my lips, like a living Betty Boop. As she was applying the lipstick she said, “No macking on lover boy today—you’ll mess up my work.”

I felt my muscles relax just a bit, the way they did when the Night alarm sounded on my phone. There was the promise of D’Arcy.

She gave me a magnetic nose stud and a pair of earrings shaped like tiny knives, and then she led me to the mirror. She had more than carried out her end of the bargain: I was not Sol Le Coeur anymore; I was Noma.

“Time to go to the meeting hall,” she said. I turned, and she handed me a baggie full of doxycycline pills, which I recalled were last in my hoodie pocket. “You can’t have your old clothes back, in case the pigs stop you. And you sure as hell don’t get to keep a prescription made out to Sol Le Coeur.”

I took a pill and sipped from the faucet to wash it down. And then I stuffed the baggie in my skirt pocket.

“Am I ready?” I said.

“You never looked better.” She grinned, showing the silver tooth.

*   *   *

In the daylight I could see that her trailer was near a large vegetable garden, which at this time of year was still carrying some green and pink tomatoes on drying, brown vines. There were rows of healthy kale and patches of squash and pumpkin. I had never seen entire broccoli plants before—sturdy and thick—or broad-leafed stalks studded with Brussels sprouts. Those were things I had assumed only Ray farmers and Agriculture Apprentices saw. My hairstylist was picking from the plot with the help of four boys, and she looked up in time to smile at me. She said something to the tallest, whom I recognized as the boy Fuzz had given our phones to. He nodded, grabbed a small paper bag from the ground next to her, and started walking after Gigi and me. He had long, lanky legs, and he caught up quickly.

“Hey, Gigi,” he said.

“Zen.” She greeted him perfunctorily.

“Um,” he said. She kept walking. He stayed with us, in uncomfortable silence. His bleached, shaved head looked good on him, I decided, which was not the case for many of the Noma men. Perhaps it was because he was a real blond. I looked closer. His lashes were as pale as his eyebrows.

We arrived at the meeting house. The door was open. Gigi hopped up the three stairs, and Zen said to me in a hurry, “I’m Zen, Zinnie’s son—the woman who did your hair?” He put out his hand for me to shake. I looked at it, stunned for a second to be offered a left hand. He nodded at my bandage. “I saw … at the meeting house yesterday. Um, Fuzz tried to—”

“Just hump her already, Zen,” Gigi said.

He dropped his hand and glared at her. “Why do you have to drag everything into the gutter?”

I reached out with my left hand. “I’m glad to meet you, Zen. Your mom was really nice to me.” He grinned and pumped my hand, and for a moment it was oddly like I was a celebrity. I added covertly, “And by ‘nice to me’ you should know I mean she fed me chocolate.”

He laughed, and Gigi rolled her eyes.

“May I take a picture of you, Sol?” Zen asked, holding up his phone.

“Uh, I guess,” I said, and he snapped it before I had a chance to smile.

The room was less crowded than the evening before, and the first thing I saw was D’Arcy, speaking privately with Fuzz, who was at the head of the conference table. D’Arcy was on Fuzz’s right and had been made over as Noma, just as I had. But even with the buzzed blond stubble, red earring, and black clothes, he was all D’Arcy: distinctive nose, seemingly longer without his hair to distract, hazel eyes, beautiful bone structure, and the bonus of a surprisingly pretty head shape. He glanced at us as we entered. I saw his eyes fall on us in succession—Gigi, me, and then Zen—registering each in that observant way he had, while still carrying on a conversation with Fuzz. He found Gigi again, to nod hello, and then he focused on Fuzz, jotting something on the paper in front of them, and I suddenly realized that he didn’t know me. It was the strangest feeling to have D’Arcy look at me but not see me. As if what was Sol in me had disappeared.

Gigi tilted her head to murmur, “Tough break, dummy. Turns out it was just a perverted fetish for redheads.”

But then D’Arcy’s head jerked up again, as if on second thought. His eyes locked on me, scanned my features, slid down my body and back up to my eyes. I saw his smile peel open and I read the word “Sol” on his lips, but I couldn’t hear over the buzz of conversations in the room. He interrupted whatever Fuzz was saying by putting a hand on the paper and excusing himself. He got up from the table and walked around it to greet me. I couldn’t stop myself from running to him.

“Your makeup!” Gigi called to my back, irritably.

I slammed into him and he grabbed me in a bear hug. The room groaned and hissed at the spectacle of our greeting.

“Sit down now,” Fuzz commanded. We obeyed.

Saturday
8:00 a.m.

Zen had taken the seat at Fuzz’s right hand, and I recalled he had been there the day before, too. Fuzz began by saying, “I understand you want to see your grandfather.”

I nodded.

“And Ciel has him, on a yacht.”

“Yes.”

“And…” He hesitated. “You and Ciel don’t get along.”

I wondered how much D’Arcy had been responsible for this information. What else had he divulged to Fuzz, a stranger and a potentially dangerous Noma?

“Gigi and I had a deal,” I said. “My necklace for gas and a makeover.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So can we have our phones back, and the keys to the car?”

D’Arcy covered my hand with his. “We might be able to use their help getting to town.”

“We don’t know them,” I said, not caring that everyone was listening. “How can we trust them?”

Gigi barked, “You trusted me to save your ass when I went in that blind with Brad.”

“Gigi.” Fuzz’s voice had a warning.

“I didn’t ask you to do that!” I said.

“You ungrateful little bitch,” Gigi said through her teeth.

“Shut up, both of you,” Fuzz said.

Gigi backed into a corner, but it seemed more to keep herself from throttling me than to concede.

Fuzz turned to me. “Listen, Sol. Listen and shut up for one single minute. Shit, you are so like your brother.”

I’m nothing like him,
I thought.

“Let me start by giving you back your phone, and maybe you’ll consider trusting us.”

He nodded at Zen, who opened the paper bag in front of him and pulled out our phones. I had assumed the bag had a couple of green tomatoes from the garden, or his lunch. It was becoming clear that I had underestimated Zen.

Fuzz said, “Zen has added the ability to initiate uncensored texts. That should be worth something in the friendship bank.”

Zen said, “I also repaired your global positioning feature, Sol. Did Ciel disable it?”

“I did,” I said.

“Cool.” He grinned. “But you won’t need that sort of camouflage anymore.”

He walked around the table and placed D’Arcy’s phone in front of him. The girl on my right gave up her chair to Zen without his even asking. He sat down and said, “May I?” I nodded, and he tapped the screen of my phone to turn it on. He leaned toward me so I could see what he was doing. D’Arcy got up and stood behind us to watch over our shoulders. Zen opened my text messages and pulled up a photo attachment of me in full Noma regalia—the picture he’d taken outside just a couple of minutes before, which he had sent to my phone in high resolution. With my black hair and no smile I looked like dark clouds before a storm. He tapped away, his fingers magically making it my profile photo—something I thought only the Office of Assignment could do.

Zen is their Ciel,
I thought.

“I’ll do the same for you after the meeting, D’Arcy,” he said, glancing back. He turned his attention to my phone again and pulled up my vital stats.

My name was Sunny Puso.

“
Puso
means ‘heart’ in Filipino,” Zen murmured. “It was Gigi’s idea.”

“You made—” I stuttered. “You made me a
Ray
. How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do it,” Zen said. “Ciel did.”

Fuzz said in his booming, rumbling voice, “This is the part where we kill you if you divulge our secrets.”

Zen said, “Several years ago Ciel figured out how to program our phones so that we switch instantaneously from Day to Night at the precise moment of each curfew.” He waited, so that we could process what he said. D’Arcy and I were mute. “This means,” he went on, “Noma papers always categorize us as legal, no matter what hour of the day or night it is. During the day we appear to be Rays, at night we’re Smudges, and the designation changes automatically on our phones.”

I remembered Gigi saying, “I’m on a Ray schedule,” and Brad saying to her sarcastically, “Let me guess, your phone says you’re a Ray.”

“The Hour Guard knew it was a trick,” I said.

“The government knows it’s fudged,” Zen confirmed.

Fuzz interjected, “The authorities think it’s Noma technology—so for the moment they feel the problem is contained. They know we protect the code like fighting dogs, and that we don’t hang with Rays
or
Smudges if we can help it.”

“Except when we’re beating them or robbing them,” someone shouted. The room exploded with laughter.

Fuzz put his hand up to quiet them. “The point is, the government is patient while it works on busting open Ciel’s programming. But when it succeeds, we’re dead.”

Something nagged at me. My mind flitted to the trial, to Ciel being denied bail because people he knew had “disappeared” from the Day/Night rosters—they’d vanished from the government’s radar. I remembered Ciel’s voice and his face perfectly when he told me no one knew how they did it.

Ciel
knew. Ciel was the one who had developed the technology.

My eyes got hot with tears. “That bastard lied to me about everything,” I said to myself, my voice breaking. But Zen heard me.

“If I had to guess, I’m pretty sure any lies he told you were to protect you. I would do the same if you were my sister.”

D’Arcy asked, “At the moment of curfew—at that very second—what if an Hour Guard was holding your device? What would he see in your papers?”

Zen said, “He’d see the switch. He’d see a Day assignment flip to Night, or the other way around. And if the device wasn’t protected, the government hacks would be able to back out the programming. The game would be up, for all Noma everywhere.”

“How can thousands of Noma never get caught?”

Zen said, “First, we try not to be on the road right before either curfew.”

Gigi had cut it too close yesterday because of us.

“Second, each Noma phone has a personal code. You and Sol have one now, too. We have a self-destruct command on all our phones. If anyone tries to access the programming on the device without entering the personal code first, the phone’s drive fries itself.”

“Destroying your papers is a federal offense,” D’Arcy said. “You get life, with no parole.”

Fuzz nodded gravely. “We lost people in the beginning, before the government figured out it was pointless to actively hunt us down—that they were just filling their prisons without gaining any information. Someday I’d like to … bargain for the release of those prisoners.”

“Is this how Ciel got rich?” I asked, frowning, thinking of the yacht. “Selling you this technology?”

“He didn’t sell it to us,” Fuzz said. I saw him glance at Gigi in the corner. She raised her eyes to the ceiling, the way you do when you hope tears will drain into their ducts instead of spill onto your face. I began to understand that something had happened between Ciel and Gigi—something he’d hidden from me and Poppu. Fuzz was saying, “Ciel
gave
the technology to us. Which is the only reason we’re helping you now—why Gigi went to so much trouble to get you here.” He got up and put his beefy hand out, with the palm open. My necklace was nested in it. He was giving it back to me. “It’s pretty damned lucky that Gigi found you—for you and for us. We’ve been waiting a long time to pay Ciel back.”

Saturday
9:00 a.m.

D’Arcy and I agreed to let the Noma drive us back to Chicago. They insisted on splitting us up, which I had to acknowledge made sense. If one of us got caught, the other might get away.

Gigi drove me in her car with one of Zen’s little brothers, Cake, sitting next to her in the front, while I was stuffed in the back. Fuzz drove Jean’s sedan with a burly guy named Dope in the back seat and D’Arcy up front. A Winnebago and a pickup truck with a camper top anchored the two ends of our little train. Fuzz had explained that the Noma always traveled by caravan, and a trip of this distance could be no exception without seeming suspicious.