But then the double doors at the top of the building’s stairs swing open as if sensing our arrival, and my words evaporate on my lips. A thin blond man in a worn velvet top hat slithers out of them and extends a hand to Zahra, who’s standing a few feet closer to him than I am. He has a long, skinny black star tattooed beneath each of his eyes.
“Come inside, sparkly girls.” His smile reveals a missing tooth and several gray ones. “Be corrupted.”
A South Sider. I take a reflexive step backward and freeze, the dumb smile of a foreigner in a strange land glued to my face, hoping my initial revulsion at his teeth doesn’t show. But Zahra grabs his hand and follows him in without a second thought.
“Let’s go, Anthem.” Z turns around for a moment and thrusts her pointy chin toward the party, a wicked little grin lighting up her face. “This is exactly where we should be.”
And then she’s inside, leaving me no choice but to follow. I let the man in the top hat pull me up the steps, his grip so firm it hurts a little. Then I walk with Zahra through two sets of shabby velvet curtains until we find ourselves on an enormous checkerboard dance floor.
A tickling heat travels along my spine as I ogle the revelers: guys in bespoke suits and leather pants, women in high heels and shiny vintage dresses, feathers and jewels dripping from their shimmery shoulders. On the edges of the massive room are stations for drinks, each staffed by bartenders in top hats like the doorman’s. Swooping from the ceiling are women on trapezes, wearing nothing more than a sticky-looking wax, each with a set of tattered black wings sprouting from her shoulder blades.
“Told you. Party of the year!” Zahra shouts over the music, stepping out of her boiled wool trench. Gold hot pants cling to her tiny butt, and a white cotton tank with a red-and-black silk bra beneath it is tasked with harnessing her ample chest. Five long strings of black pearls dangle from her neck. “Give me your coat.”
I fiddle with the last button still fastened at my collar, take a deep breath full of sweat and smoke and alcohol fumes, and finally unbutton it.
“How did I let you talk me into wearing this?” I scream, but my words are lost in the noise. Zahra insisted I wear my costume from last year’s ballet recital, so I’m dressed as Juliet. As in, Romeo and.
She looks at me and smiles tenderly. “You look beautiful,” she says, leaning into my ear so I hear her.
“The costume is beautiful,” I correct her. Juliet wears a purple-and-black corset with real whalebone in it, paired with a black lace tutu edged in zippers. It makes my waist even tinier than it already is and gives me the illusion of cleavage. It screams Look at me, and I’m not someone who likes to be looked at. Not unless there’s an orchestra playing and I’m onstage, having rehearsed my every move for months. In real life, I never quite know where to stand or what to do with my hands.
“I’ll stash these and find us some drinks,” Z shouts, taking my coat.
I nod and sway self-consciously to the music, my eyes glued to the angels swinging on their trapezes. Seconds later, I feel two women dancing too close on either side of me, feathers from a peacock boa scratching my right forearm, then fingernails digging into my left hip. I try to dance out of the way, but a third woman, this one short and stocky in a leather catsuit, steps in front of me, blocking my way, keeping me planted.
“Ballerina,” the one with the boa whispers in my ear, her breath hot. I step backward, but I’m surrounded. She’s got SYNDI tattooed on her bare shoulder, and the word ripples as she reaches for my tulle skirt as if appraising its value. “So young,” the one on my right hisses. She’s skinny but sinewy and strong, clad in a tuxedo jacket, frilly bloomers, and heels, her bobbed hair neon yellow on one side of her part, black on the other.
“She’s just the right size,” Catsuit says, twirling around to face me. Her pink hair is shellacked into a towering pompadour, and one of her eyes lists slightly to the left. She grins, and her teeth are sharp and small, feral.
I turn to look for Zahra, my heart racing, but her back is to me and she’s headed toward a row of speakers along the far wall. I start to back up, my lips frozen in a panicked smile.
“Don’t go,” Boa pouts. She’s the prettiest of the three, tall with flawless bone structure, but her head is shaved down to the scalp and her eyes are ringed in two-inch orange false eyelashes. Her hands are around my waist, pulling me toward her. “We like nice girls like you, don’t we, ladies?”
“My friend is there—” I say, too softly. I stick my elbows out and get ready to thrash, gulping in air. But just then the one in the catsuit takes a step away from me, motioning for her friends to do the same. “Forget it, bitches,” I hear her mutter.
Their eyes are glued to a tall, shaggy-haired guy in a crisp white shirt and a velvet jacket. His rangy body and sharp cheekbones are freshly torn from the pages of a magazine. He’s walking toward them. Toward me.
“There you are,” he says, smiling as he opens his arms. An expectant smile plays on his lips. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Let’s dance.”
I cautiously take his hand in mine, too shocked to do anything else. A heartbeat later, we’re twirling around the room in a loopy, confident waltz. My body goes into ballroom mode even as my eyes stay glued to the bald woman, who winks at me before she turns away. In seconds, they’ve all faded into the crowd.
“I think you have me confused with someone else,” I stammer.
“Nah.” He smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I thought you might need an escape route from those Syndicate girls. The dance was a bonus.”
Syndicate girls. My skin prickles at the mention of Bedlam’s crime ring. Everything bad that ever happens here—murders, muggings, gambling, prostitution—is said to be the Syndicate’s doing. “We can stop now,” I say. “They’re gone.”
“How about one more dance?”
I look up at his face. It’s broody and square-jawed, with thick, straight eyebrows above beautiful eyes. He has a half-wilted white flower stuck in his lapel. For a moment I think there is something harsh, even mean in his expression, but then his mouth softens into another disarming grin.
I crane my neck over his shoulder to check on Zahra and spot her up on a platform, waiting in line for drinks. She flashes me the thumbs-up and mouths yummy, which is Zahra-speak for handsome. I swallow a smile, then pull my head back so he can see my face when I nod yes.
He pulls me closer, and we begin to move again. He leads effortlessly, his hand warm on the center of my back. As we spin under the chandelier, I notice a splotch of blue in the brown iris of his left eye, as if it’s been erased.
“Where’d you learn to dance like this?” I ask as he pulls me smoothly out of the way of a group of performers on stilts.
“Here and there. You?”
“Cotillion, starting at age seven. And ballet every day since age four.” Immediately, I wish I could take it back, unlabel myself as a snooty rich girl.
“Then you can probably do this,” he says, dipping me so low my hair sweeps the floor.
When he suggests we go to the windows and look at the view, I stammer out something about needing to find my friend. But like magic, Zahra’s behind me, putting a drink in my hand and pushing me toward him.
She winks at him, then waves like she’s sending us off on our honeymoon. “See you on the dance floor.”
The boy slides his jacketed arm through my bare elbow. “I’ll bring her right back to you.” He smiles at Zahra and leads me away.
We climb through an open window onto a kind of makeshift terrace covered in tar, where a few people are gathered in couples or small groups, speaking in low voices. A soft steam rises from our warm skin.
“Gavin Sharp,” the boy says, pushing a tumble of sandy-brown hair out of his eyes. He pulls a leather pouch from his back pocket and starts shaking tobacco into two rolling papers.
“Anthem Fl—Flood,” I say, changing my name at the last second. I don’t feel like being a Fleet tonight—not
here, not with him.
He nods. His eyes flick across mine for an instant, and then back down as he licks the paper closed on the two expertly crafted rollies. “Want one?”
“No thanks,” I say. I never smoke. Dancing as much as I do takes lungs of steel.
Gavin runs a silver lighter along his jeans and cups his hand around it to protect the flame from the wind. His fingers are long and elegant. My mother would call his hands “artistic.” He smokes quietly, and I bring the plastic cup Zahra brought me to my lips and finish off the bitter green drink in two swallows. We stand side by side and stare at the brooding city, the night lit up under an almost-full moon.
Feeling slightly calmer from the alcohol, I study the view. Gleaming skyscrapers and stately mansions glitter on the north shore of the Midland River. On the other side of the water, the night is many watts darker. In the tangle of poorly lit streets, low-slung buildings yawn on their foundations. The South Side looks not just like a different city but like it exists in a different century.
I sneak a look at Gavin’s profile and then move my gaze eastward, drawn to the arctic smoothness of Lake Morass. Still covered in a layer of pale blue ice, the lake is the only pure, blank space in the otherwise teeming city. The one place where nothing moves and nobody gets hurt. Not since Regina’s accident, anyway. My parents have made sure of it by funding the lake patrol themselves.
“Right there . . .” Gavin squints and points into the warrenlike streets of South Bedlam. All I see is a ragged collection of burnt-looking structures. “That’s my building. The one with the water tower on it.”
My eyes travel over dozens of water towers, perched like giant, frozen tarantulas on top of buildings. A tickling curiosity springs open inside my chest. “What’s it like . . . over there?”
“We’re not all thugs and criminals, you know.” Gavin takes a last squinting drag from his rollie and pinches it out between his fingers, stuffing the butt back into his leather pouch to reuse later.
“Of course not.” I rush to agree, to assure him I don’t believe everything they print in the Daily Dilemma. “It’s just, I’ve never . . . I don’t get there too often. I guess because—”
“It’s not safe. That’s what they want everyone to think, right?” His eyes flash with something, a challenge maybe, but his mouth is still curled into a smile. Then he shrugs. “Seems all right to me, but I have nothing to compare it to, really. It’s the only place I’ve ever lived.”
“I’m sure it’s like anywhere else,” I suggest, “and has its bad days and its good days,” though I don’t really think that can possibly be true. South Bedlam is the murder capital of the country. There are more arrests per capita in South Bedlam than anywhere else in our hemisphere. It seems like every day is a bad day there.
I stare at the puff of white my breath forms in front of me, thinking guiltily of my nightly rides home from ballet practice in our cream-colored Seraph, an imported car so rare and expensive it elicits stares from people in the streets. The glass in the windows is bulletproof, and we live in the safe part of town.
Gavin nods. “I guess.”
During the beat of uncomfortable silence that follows, I look toward Fleet Tower. If I squint, I can see my room on the top floor, the faint glow of the desk lamp I’m always forgetting to turn off.
As if reading my mind, he asks if I live nearby.
“Not far, yes. You can’t see my place from here, though,” I tell him, wishing it were true.
“So how do I find you again if I don’t know where you live?” Gavin turns and studies my face, his eyebrows raised above those beautiful, playful eyes.
Find me again? I stare down into the melting ice in my cup, holding it with both hands because I worry if I don’t, they might start to shake.
“Um . . .” I grope for words, blushing so violently that I’m sure he can see it in the moonlight. Before I can decide what to say, his eyes leave my face and focus on something over my shoulder. His expression turns hard. He leans in, his mouth against my ear, and my body tingles a little from the closeness of his lips, the tickle of his shaggy hair on my skin. “Party’s over. Put this over your nose and mouth, and run.” He presses a soft gray bandanna into my hand.
“What?” I whirl around to look behind me through the tall windows, but all I see is the party raging inside. “What do you—”
“I’ll catch up with you,” he says sternly, pushing me forward. “Just go. Now.”
And then the first feargas canister skitters across the floor.
It all happens so fast. Gavin practically shoves me inside through the open window. I spot Zahra’s black pixie cut in the crowd—she’s still dancing, still breathing, oblivious to what’s coming—and run toward her, holding my breath. Then people begin to scream and the lights go out in the building, leaving only candlelight from the chandelier diffused with purple gas from the canisters. Riot police fan out across the room, helmets down, black glass covering their faces.
I press the bandanna over my mouth and nose and pull Z toward the doors. She’s coughing on the thick purple fumes, already hallucinating, screaming about snakes and spiders and roaches. I drag her out into the black night, repeating Everything’s okay, nothing to be afraid of, as she cries hysterically. Police raids and gas-and-dash are so common in Bedlam that we’ve been trained at school on what to do if we inhale feargas, giggle gas, cyanide spray, arsenic oil. This is the first time I’ve ever seen the effects of feargas up close.
I usher her through the crush of people spilling out onto the sidewalk and manage to lead her down the block, toward an empty lot between two derelict warehouses.
“Sit down, Zahra,” I tell her in my calmest voice. She falls to the ground, her hands swiping at her short hair as if it’s infested with fire ants. I pull her up until we’re sitting across from each other, all alone on a weed-choked patch of earth. I take a breath and try to block out the terrified sounds of other screaming feargas victims. The electronic twang of the riot police on their bullhorns is deafening even here. They’re ordering everyone out. “PHOTOGRAPHERS WILL BE ARRESTED,” they keep saying through the megaphones. “DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.”
I concentrate on Zahra’s panicked eyes. “Let’s say the meditation,” I say, putting both hands on her shoulders. “Just like in school, okay?”
We huddle together and begin, repeating the meditation over and over again: This too shall pass. This too shall pass. Is it seven times, is it ten? We say it ten times just to be sure, and Zahra’s movements slow down. She stops yanking on her hair and scratching at her arms, her sobbing reduced to a low series of moans. When we begin to count backward from a hundred, I feel her shoulders soften. Finally, we practice focusing on the objects around us, waiting for the feargas to work its way through Zahra’s frontal cortex.
“The moon, I see the moon,” I whisper, holding Zahra’s head in my lap, stroking her hair.
“But it’s bleeding, Anthem. Why is it bleeding?”
“Shhhh,” I whisper, a shiver running down my spine as I look down at Zahra’s eyes, normally so fearless, now wide with terror. “It’s not, sweetie, I promise.”
“A broken window,” she says hoarsely a few minutes later.
“Good. A clump of grass.”
I feel her nodding, snuffling a few last tears. “I found a dandelion. That’s a good thing, this time of year.”
Much later, when Zahra is able to walk again, we head out into the night. Zahra twirls the dandelion between her fingers and leans on my shoulder as we hobble toward the corner to wait for the cab I’ve called. The screaming and chaos from the raid has stopped long ago. My thoughts keep circling around the boy with the erasure in his eye, the waltzer, Gavin Sharp. He’s fine, I tell myself. He knew just what to do.
And yet I can’t stop hoping he’s okay, wondering how he knew what he knew, and what he meant when he said he’d catch up with me.
CHAPTER 3
“And that’s all the time we have for pro
paganda and the rule of law today,” says Dr. Tammany, our sprightly, old politics teacher, as she perches on the edge of her desk. “Please come in tomorrow with an example of propaganda from a newspaper or the street.”
Dr. T points a tiny remote control at the ceiling, clicking off the last picture in her slideshow from the time of the South Side riots—a picture of a mob of people holding signs, their mouths open in fear as they run away from police on horseback. The headline doesn’t match the picture: BRUTAL RIOTS KILL TWO POLICE OFFICERS. The last real riot happened when I was three. One of my earliest memories is of an angry mob amassing in the pocket park across the street from Fleet Tower.
“How do we know that this class isn’t just another form of propaganda?” a boy’s voice pipes up from the back of the room. Everyone laughs, but a chill goes through me as I think of the billboards on all the highways that say A SAFER BEDLAM IS IN YOUR HANDS with a picture of a scared-looking woman on the phone and the police hotline, 999-TIPS, in red beneath her. Did someone phone in the party on Friday? I can still hear the police on their bullhorns on Friday night. Photographers will be arrested.
“You don’t,” Dr. T says evenly, her ears reddening as she tucks her peach-colored bob behind them. Just then, the church bells begin to ring, signaling the end of class. “Let’s explore that question tomorrow.”
Dr. T pushes her glasses up her long nose and winks at me. “Interesting drawing, Miss Fleet,” she says when the clamor of the bells dies down. “Very lesson-appropriate.”
I smile politely from my desk in the front row by the stained-glass windows—the seat I’ve taken in nearly every classroom since kindergarten—and look down at the row of faceless police I’ve drawn across the top of my notepaper, each with an oversize arm raising a baton high into the air. For a second, I consider telling her I’ve drawn the image from memory. But I keep quiet. I can’t risk being sent to the school counselor for an anxiety assessment. Or worse still, a concerned phone call to my parents.
The Brokenhearted Page 2
