Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  I turn on my back and look up at the sky. I like watching the sky from here. You can see more stars in Smithville than the surrounding areas because there isn’t much light pollution.

  John turns on his back too and skootches so he’s parallel to me. “So now what happens to them?”

  “They wait, I guess. Until something changes and the inks go back to being like the rest of us and they can be together. My mom sure as shit isn’t going to break the rules for them again. ”

  “That sucks butt.”

  “I know.”

  “If you ended up somewhere like the inkatorium I’d come rescue you.”

  I turn my face to look at him. “But the thing is, as much as that guy might want to rescue her, he won’t be able to. Because he doesn’t know a thing about being on the inside.”

  “But we do,” I say after a moment.

  “Oh, Christ,” John says. “You already have more community time to serve than any three people, you can’t be thinking about this.”

  “Game?”

  His hand touches mine. “Shh. I hear the security dude making his rounds.”

  “Oh fucking hell.” A whisper.

  “Shut up or he’s going to catch us up here again,” he says. Says, not whispers.

  I start to say if we get caught it’ll be his fault. But then it turns out that’s not true. Because he’s really quiet when he kisses me.

  2.

  It’s good thing that we decide to break out Meche too because without her we wouldn’t know how to begin.

  “Here,” she says and slips a scrap of paper my way. The other inks avoid her in the lunchroom so it’s a good place to consult. “Call the top number. His name is Finn. And by the way, you can stop calling his girlfriend ‘the crazy one.’ She isn’t, you know, and her name is Mari. Anyway, he’ll need to know all the details of the plan.”

  “We have a plan?”

  “Funny. Ask him to get that list of ingredients for us, in those quantities. How good are your chemistry skills?”

  “Crap. The only thing I’m good at is computers.”

  “John?”

  “Bio Boy, but he’s probably fine at chem too. So long as it doesn’t involve math, ’cause he totally sucks at that.”

  “Got it, no math. Once we have this stuff you’re going to have to borrow your school’s science lab and not get caught. You think you can do that?”

  “I could pick the locks at the school before I was ten.”

  She raises her eyebrows but just goes on. “In all likelihood Finn’s going to have to tap into the gang network to get the ingredients, and maybe even to get them to us. The second number on that paper is Toño’s dedicated line. I’m sure Finn doesn’t have it. Also, since we’re going to need something to pay Toño with ….”

  “None of us has any money,” I say quickly.

  “I know. And I can’t free up any of mine from here, so the easiest way is to have Finn negotiate with Toño. Tell him to offer up to half of our product in trade for the raw materials and transport.”

  “What are we making?”

  “Skin.”

  I call.

  “Speak,” says the voice that answers.

  I read Meche’s entire spiel as I’ve written it down because my memory is for shit. There’s a crackly silence on the other end when I’m done.

  “Hello?”

  “Patience, chola, I’m thinking. Tell Havana Barbie I’ll do it for 90 percent of the output. You take delivery of raw materials this Monday at four p.m. at the Route 17 rest stop just south of Smithville. And chola, that’s a freetrade zone, so there’s going to be mara around. You stay cool and don’t flake out, hear?”

  I swallow hard. I can’t believe I dialed the wrong number. I can’t believe I’m going to have to tell “Havana Barbie” that I’ve already screwed the plan.

  “How do I recognize you?”

  “You don’t. I recognize you. Have Havana Barbie tell you how.” Then he hangs up.

  I’m going to have to bag the last class of the day to make sure I make it in time to meet up with a gang member. Leader. Scary dude I wasn’t even supposed to be talking to. John wants to go with me, but Meche won’t allow it.

  “Vary one bit from what Toño agreed to and we’ll bollux the whole deal,” she says. “Besides, it works in our favor that Abbie’s pretty. Toño has an eye for it.”

  She tells me I must wear the colors of the Mexican flag: red, green and white. That way I’ll be instantly identifiable as a supplier or client of Toño’s gang. The Central American flags are mostly blue and white so people doing business with the mara will wear those colors. It’s one of the ways the freetrade zones manage to stay functional, the gangs don’t step on each other’s business no matter how much they might be tempted to.

  The red hoodie and the white sneakers are easy, but I don’t own anything green. I have to go searching in my mother’s closet the night before. The only green piece she has is a spangly, stretchy dress she hasn’t worn since way before she packed on all those extra pounds.

  There are a bunch of cars at the rest stop when I pull in. I park Blue Belle – my beloved piece-of-shit SUV – in one of the spots out front, then waste time trying to make my skimpy dress go where it won’t. Finally I get out and walk into the building. It’s one of those unstaffed rest stops with nothing but vending machines and publication racks in the one big room. There are at least three people dressed in blue and white inside, two by the men’s room and one rifling through the visitor brochures. They all look up at me, then go back to back to their badly disguised loitering.

  I sit on one of the benches just inside the entrance. About ten minutes pass before anyone else comes through the door. He’s a skeevy guy who looks like he hasn’t washed his hair in weeks. Since he’s not dressed in flag colors he must be a civilian. I watch in fascination as a bug crawls out of the guy’s hair and across his forehead. I must make a face because he leers at me and makes a grunting noise.

  “Get lost,” I say.

  He walks into the men’s room. I hope there’s Lysol in there so he can deal with the bug situation. When he comes back out, he’s talking on his cell phone and walks out the back door without looking around. Three or four more people come in, but since they’re not in colors, I don’t pay any attention to them or what they do.

  After another contactless fifteen minutes I walk over to the coffee machine, feed it some quarters and punch the “regular” button. Even the minimal bending involved makes me worry the dress is going to ride up and expose some butt cheek. And maybe it does because one of the blue-and-whites comes right over to me.

  “What are you, seller or buyer?”

  “Tired driver,” I say holding up my coffee, then walk back to reclaim the bench.

  I sip the watery coffee and wait. Another uneventful twenty minutes and I’ve hit my forty-five minute mark. I walk back to Blue Belle, unlock the doors and bend down to rummage in my bookbag for my earbuds and Mp3 player.

  “I want you to thank Havana Barbie for me.”

  I knock my head on the sill in my hurry to turn around. The man leaning on my hood has intensely dark eyes, a perfect little goatee, buzzed hair and a blue tat hidden among a multitude of figural ones on his arms. His muscles are cut enough to show through his clothes. Regular, unflag clothes.

  “Why do I thank her?”

  “I’ve gotten to see you bend over twice now. Third time and I’ll be in love.”

  I blush to my knees.

  “What’re you doing involved in this, America?”

  I shrug.

  He cocks his head, studies me. “Unlock the car, I’ll have some of my boys load up the stuff.”

  They materialize out of nowhere. None of them is wearing colors. One of them, I know, has bugs in his hair. They start piling plain cardboard boxes in the back of Blue Belle as soon as I open the rear door. The gross one rubs up against me. When I move away, he finds a way to rub up again on his next foray past me.
I go to back away again, trip and am held up by something hard and unyielding. Toño. He says something in Spanish, not very loud or threatening sounding, but the gross guy blanches under his grime.

  Toño’s arm is around my waist. He pulls me tight to him, tight enough that I can feel the flexing of his deltoid as he reaches behind his back with the other arm. “Don’t worry, America, there’s no chance at all I’ll be letting him get his hands on anything so fine.”

  The arm that isn’t holding me comes forward, a gun in hand. He brushes the hair back over my ear with that hand, then his mouth is there and the breath skittering across it makes me shiver.

  “I’m underage,” I say.

  “I know,” he says, but doesn’t move his mouth. “Havana Barbie would never have sent you otherwise. She knows exactly which few shreds of decent still cling to me. But thank me for this, America. From this moment on you can walk through a roomful of gangsters and not one will look your way for fear I’ll cut out his eye.”

  He keeps hold of me like that until the load up is completed and his men vanish as quickly as they appeared. Then he releases me and takes a step back. “Tell Havana Barbie I expect delivery of the finished product to the same site. She’s got a week to produce. She misses deadline, I start taking it out on her folks on the outside. Oh, and, I require the same delivery person. Got all that?”

  I nod, move around him into the driver seat. As I reach for the door, he prevents me from closing it.

  “First time, America?”

  “What?”

  “First time you’ve felt your body pinned by a man rather than a boy?”

  I yank the door shut. He watches me drive away.

  * * *

  We’re at the school’s chem lab. John is setting everything up to follow the bazillion steps of the process Meche has written out for him; I’m on pigment detail and taking care of the stopwatch.

  As John mixes ingredients he wants to hear again about the meeting with Toño. I’ve given him a heavily edited version, but I was stupid enough to let it slip within his hearing that I had expected Toño be scary, but not so hot. Now, every so often, I catch this injured look in John’s eyes.

  Chris, my favorite custodian-slash-security-guard, is on for overnight. He’s a laid-back guy, often reeking of weed. I’ve figured out he does the full round every hour. We kill the lights in the lab at 50 minutes and crawl in the space between the wall and the furthest table, thinking the overhang will shield us if he actually decides to come into the room. So far he hasn’t. He just shines his flashlight through the window panel of the door and rattles the handle. We wait five minutes after he’s left to turn the light on and get back to work. That means we work 45 minutes out of every hour and things are going slowly.

  Meche’s flying by the seat of her pants with the new recipe. Since she can’t afford to mix the instaskin to order she’s altered the formulation and is working with a limited palette she hopes will cover most skin tones. The stuff sets up as a dough which has to be rolled out thin and cut into squares large enough to cover the tattoos. The hard part about this is that the skin is sticky, so it’ll self-adhere, and it’s a bitch to roll out.

  As soon as the pieces are cut and squared we sandwich them between sheets of cooking parchment and roll those in cling wrap, then newspaper. The rolls go into mailing tubes. With all the extraneous material around the skin patches, only ten rolls – with ten patches in each – fit in each tube.

  We’ve got 50 tubes to fill tonight and 50 to fill on each of the next three nights. At the end of the night we’ll gather up the tubes and sneak them into Blue Belle. I’ll be storing the tubes in the chest freezer in our basement. I just hope that my mother doesn’t get the idea to cook a roast until after delivery is made.

  While we’re in the dark waiting for Chris to do his sweep, John can’t keep his hands off me, which freaks me right out. I like making out, but I know this can only end one way: we have sex. And I won’t.

  The test patches adhere fine. I put one on, leave it for a day until I remember it’s there and swab it with acetone. It’s a strange experience to see what looks like skin bubble up then dissolve into foamy scum. There’s just more blank skin under mine, but I imagine with the inks the tattoos reappear line by line, like a story being written.

  Before the delivery is scheduled I run into the discount mart and buy a pair of cheap green yoga pants and a plain white t-shirt to wear under my red hoodie. This time when I pull into the rest area I spy Toño sitting on one of the benches outside the visitor structure.

  “Hey, America,” he says when I walk up to him. “Your car unlocked?”

  I nod.

  He motions to someone, then points in the general direction of my car.

  He pats the bench beside him. “Sit. I never take blind delivery, so my guys’ll check each of the packages and report back. Then you can leave.”

  “Mec … Havana Barbie told me to tell you we had to store the rolls in the freezer, but we thawed them already and tested the patches. The final appearance isn’t compromised.”

  “Got it,” he says. “It’s a shame, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “That Havana Barbie was never willing to come work fulltime for me. I would have kept her out of that P.O.W. camp.”

  “It’s not so bad. My mother is the administrator and she is a good person who tries to treat everyone well.”

  “Bad move, America. Didn’t Havana Barbie warn you about giving me personal information?”

  She had. Emphatically. I swallow hard.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I say after a bit.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know what happens to the babies born in the inkatoriums?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just do.”

  “Private adoptions. Big money, which gets funneled back to the inkatoriums. Wish I could figure a way in on that action.”

  “But who would adopt an ink baby?”

  “They only take the ones that’ll pass.”

  “Yeah, but Havana Barbie passes, and so do a lot of other inks inside. And they’re still inside. Why would you want to raise a kid, love him, and see this sort of stuff happen to him the first time he has a runny nose or barfs in public, and somebody calls it in to the public health line?”

  “Well, it’s like this, America, if you’ve got enough money you can pay to destroy any record of your adopted baby’s ink blood. You buy him an uncontaminated history and a future. It costs the adoptive parents big time. Big time enough to fund the ongoing operations of the inkatoriums.”

  “Oh.”

  I look over to Blue Belle. A couple of Toño’s men are still there by the back door. No bug guy. I wonder what happened to him.

  “Once they’re adopted there’s no way to retrieve any information about them?” I ask when I look back.

  “Not that I’ve found.”

  One of the guys walks from my car to Toño and offers his wrist. The patch isn’t a good match in terms of skin tone, but otherwise looks good.

  “How many shades of patch are we getting?” Toño asks me.

  “Five. That’s one of the two lighter shades.”

  He grabs my wrist and turns it over to where I’d have a tattoo if I were an ink. He motions to his minion to put his patched wrist next to mine. The patch is almost a perfect match to my skin tone. “Figures,” he says.

  “I’m not so white,” I say, offended.

  He laughs. “You’re a strange one. Tell Havana Barbie I accept shipment, though I’m disappointed by the limited quantity overall and the color selection specifically. If I find this a profitable enough venture, I’ll place another order, but I’ll expect more and better.”

  He stands up and smoothes the front of his jeans. “I’m saddened not to see your legs this time. Or your other assets.”

  “This is more me.” I meet his eyes. There’s amusement in there, and something else I don’t recognize but makes me
shiver.

  He gives me a mocking smile. “You ever get tired of your safe world, America, you know how to find me.”

  * * *

  There are real advantages to being my mother’s daughter.

  No matter where in the inkatorium I wander, nobody stops or monitors me. With that realization comes a sharp kick of remorse. I’m coasting on a trust I didn’t earn. But it doesn’t stop me from going into the tracking room and swiping a pocketful of betadine wipes, anesthetic spray and a couple of disposable scalpels from the samples an equipment rep left for my mother.

  We do it Sunday, when there are no other volunteers around because they, unlike teenagers or inks, have real lives. I’ve chosen a storage room where staff members sometimes hide out to smoke. It’s a gross and unsanitary space filled with rolling bins used for collecting clothing, hair and soiled linens. A couple of chairs have been hidden in the far corner so smokers can chat or fit a page of reading in with the hit of nicotine.

  Of course, there’s not supposed to be smoking in the building at all, but the smokers have disabled the security cameras. Their restoral is pretty low on my mom’s list of concerns given that the room doesn’t lead anywhere or house anything of significance. Outside of her office, it’s the only place inside the inkatorium that isn’t on camera 24/7.

  Everyone’s decided I should remove the GPS trackers since I’ve watched the reverse procedure so many times. I agree to it because I have the brain of a flea.

  Meche first. My incision is sure and quick. Perfect. Then the thin red line I’ve drawn on her neck turns to a gusher. I hit the floor in a dead faint. I don’t actually hit, though. Mari anticipates the trajectory of bodies as easily as baseballs and catches me on the way down.

  Except it isn’t Mari. It’s a something that resolves itself, after my brain clicks through a series of shapes, to the oddly-reassuring semblance of a wolf. Its eyes are alive with something other than animal intelligence.

  WTF?

  Translucent strands of gold mantle around us. The walls of the room run with a red, fiery substance that sizzles when it meets the floor, itself a dark glassy version of what’s dripping on to it. I feel like I’m pulling in scorching liquid stuff with each breath.