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Gram crossed herself and prayed to the crucifix the very first time that I downed the chems. I winced as it filled me up with a fiery cramp. “Fuck a duck!”
“You watch your tongue,” Gram growled.
“I’m sorry.” But then, “Aaahh!” went through me as the pain went away.
“You see? It’ll be like that every single time,” Rico said. “Just a pinch, and then it disappears. Now keep an eye on yourself in the mirror over the next few days, and you’ll start to see the changes.”
He was right. First thing I noticed was how my eyes weren’t yellow and bird-ish like Gram’s anymore. Little by little, they lengthened out and turned into kind of a gold-flecked chocolate brown. My mess of pimples disappeared. And even though my skin tone had always been yellow, it was more golden and so darned smooth, it looked liquid almost.
“What’s goin’ on with you?” Kirsten Louise asked, eyeing my larger breasts about half a week after I started.
“Puberty, I suspect.”
She snorted. “You already done that.”
The boys started looking at me way different than before, which was kinda chill at first, but when they started reaching out and touching my boobs, I clobbered them something good. It seemed like they couldn’t help themselves. That’s when Rico and Gram decided it was time for me to get the hell outta Pompey. Which was terrif, though I was homesick something fierce when I first left.
Gram could have come too, but she wouldn’t hear none of it. “You just get back here now and agin. That’s all I ask,” she said as I climbed in Rico’s car and promised to high heaven I surely would.
“Where we goin’?” I asked Rico.
“First stop, Jizelle’s. We’ll wait for all your changes to materialize so we don’t get any more questions, and then we’ll get you to a school.”
Wowza, was I ever excited to actually be going to a Zone. If I was a dog, my tail would have been whipping back and forth so hard when we got to New York. I couldn’t stop staring at the buildings that shot up past the clouds, with all the giant wallscape screens twirling around them. They were advertising all sorts of shit. It made my insides sing to see it all in person.
There was a whole group of really amaz buildings that jutted out into the Hudson River with gigundo pools and gardens on every balcony. Rico floated the car down on the roof of one of them, and we took an elevator down to Jizelle’s place.
“Just LOOK at YOU!” she said. The three R girls ran around me in circles.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off the floor. “Is that—is that real gold?”
“Yes, darling. Gold lacquered parquet.”
My insides were going, “Wha?”
Jizelle broke down what the hell parquet and lacquer meant as she fed me all sorts of stuff I loved—like chocolate profiteroles and lobster tail and champagne. And we waited for all the changes over the next few weeks.
My teeth stopped looking like corn on the cob. They got kind of delicate and super white. There was still a gap between my two front teeth, but it was smaller. Jizelle said it was kind of like a tease. And those thin little lips I’d hated for years grew so full and moist and pink.
Even my fingers changed. They didn’t look like flat piano keys anymore. They were what Jizelle called “tapered.” And even though she was feeding me left and right, my potbelly didn’t stick out like a shelf anymore. It got smaller and smaller until my middle section was flat as Gram’s old iron. Best of all, my dull, thin hair got kinda like a shiny dream cloud.
“Remember going through that?” Rico asked Dove one day when he stopped by to see me. Dove had waited until Jizelle was out of the place so she wouldn’t get all crazy when he showed up.
“Do I ever,” he said, then shot me a serious look. “Now listen to me, Lush: the guys are going to come onto you even more hot and heavy than you’ve already experienced. Every time you kiss one, it’ll almost be like giving them an aphrodisiac.”
“Aphro what?”
“Disiac. In other words, you’re going to become kind of a sex addiction when you smooch. So be really careful about that. Even your touch will give them a thrill, but not so strong as a kiss, or something more, uh, intimate.”
That explained a lot about Dove’s love life, such as I knew it. But the funny thing was, I didn’t feel attracted to him anymore. The chems seemed to cancel all that out.
I had a new take on Rico, too. Even though we’d hung out in Pompey so relaxed and all, now I was his scientific specimen. He was always watching over my health, making sure I looked like a young Elite, fussing over the way I talked and what I did. Sometimes it seemed like he was studying every speck of my body inside and out, which was as annoying as frog’s spit.
It got old sometimes, how he harped on me if I didn’t take my vitamins or do the exercise routines he prescribed. “Stop walking like a farmhand,” he’d bark. Or, “Have you been using your thumbnails as screwdrivers? Go get a manicure!” Or, “No more Nuhope dreamisodes. Those things are riddled with promos.”
It was hard going cold turkey, but after a while, I didn’t miss dreamisodes that much. I wasn’t blissed all the time, the way I always had been coming off one. But I was feeling other emotions so much more, all the highs, lows and stuff between. That kind of took up the space in my head.
In spite of all his harping, Rico could be so funny and kind. He’d tell me a bunch of silly jokes when I got freaked out about how the chems were morphing my body. All the stretching and molding of my muscles and bones got painful and creepy sometimes, especially around my face. One night, when things seemed really bad, we piled in his car, and he floated it right up to Nuhope’s gigundo building. It had all these jagged spires going up and up, and wallscapes of all these famous people. Each one must have been about 10 floors tall.
“That’s where I’ll be, soon enough,” he whispered.
“Really?” I knew he’d left Victory and wanted to work at Nuhope, but I didn’t realize he’d actually made it happen. “When are you going there?”
“Next week. Had to wait for this little non-compete clause in my Victory Star contract to expire.” The “non-compete” thing kind of bungled up in my brain, so he explained: “It’s just a little promise. But it’s gone now.”
I pointed up at the very top floors, on the other side of the clouds. Just a few twinkling windows showed through now and again. “You’ll work up there?”
“Yeah. And you will, too, someday,” he said. “But first, you’ve got get through Graystone. I’m taking you there tomorrow.”
Graystone was this school in the Atlanta Zone. It was so tripodellic. You might say I had the pick of the litter when it came to guys, and even some girls, if I’d wanted them. It twisted me up at first, the way everybody reacted to me so strong.
I was taking learning enhancers that aged me by about five years, in a good way. And I became what they call a voracious learner. (Love that word “voracious.” That’s one of the ones I picked up there.) I majored in psychology and business administration in an accelerated program. And Rico arranged for a tutor to give me special classes on what they called elocution and how to behave in society. I learned to talk funny like everybody else there, but my voice was the same inside.
The weird thing was, even though I’d wanted to get out of Pompey for years and years, now that I was at Graystone, I was so homesick. The other students could be so snobby talking about the Chav like we were a bunch of dirty slimes. They had so much in life, and they didn’t even appreciate it, always complaining about how Aunt So-and-So was marrying some rich numbskull or how bad the dining hall food tasted. Shit. If I’d had even one of those little meatballs Graystone’s chefs cooked up when I was back in Pompey, I would have been in hog heaven.
It just made me want to smack them.
I didn’t talk much about where I came from. But they knew I wasn’t their kind, even though I started talking like them and had a helluva wardrobe, thanks to Jizelle. If it weren’t for the chems I was taking in secret, they wouldn’t have liked me one speck.
So I learned what I could in class and had sex whenever I wanted. The lovemaking was pretty explosive. But the aftermath could be such a pain in the butt. Even the most whip-smart guys got so besotted with me. (That was another one of my new words, “besotted.”)
If there was a way to talk sense to them after we’d finished up the sex, I sure didn’t find it. They got so damned fragile, even the strongest ones. It was like the chems blinded them. Forget about having a normal conversation.
“Want to go get a cup of java?” I’d ask.
“Java?” breathless voice there. “How do you like your java? Can I make it for you? Cream? Sugar?”
“Sauerkraut.”
“Really? Oh, that sounds divine.”
“It was a joke.”
“Oh ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
It was so ridic. If I asked them to go to Paris for cream, they’d go out the door fast as a bat.
Once or twice, I tried to hang out with someone a while after the besotted stage kicked in to see if I could talk some sense into them. It didn’t work. And forget about letting them down easy; they always begged for just one more night together, then another and another.
It was easy enough to say, “yes.” After all, the sex was amaz, and I was crazy about it. But I didn’t want to be somebody’s damned idol.