All Good Children - Catherine Austen [5]
“That’s the artistic heart of town,” I say.
He snorts again. “I don’t see any art in this city. Never. I don’t hear any music. I don’t hear any stories. I don’t see any theater.”
“You can see all that from any room in any building,”
I tell him. “We have our own communications network.”
He sighs. “You like living here?”
“Of course. Who wouldn’t? People line up to get in here.”
“Like me,” he says. “I line up and wait, I come inside, I drop you off, I leave.”
“Times are tough,” I say.
“Not for everyone,” he mutters. He drives up to ground level and heads away from the core.
Chemrose spent eight years and billions of dollars building this city just before I was born. They laid down the spines and connecting roads like a giant spider building a web. People swarmed here. But they didn’t all get in. Shanties and carparks spread outside the western wall, full of hopefuls who come inside for a few hours to clean our houses or drive us home. They were hit hard by the Venezuelan flu, which wiped out half the elderly and 10 percent of everyone else in the city, including my father. The epidemic cost Chemrose a fortune in private funding and public spirit. Mom kept her nursing job, so we’re fit. We moved from a four-bedroom house to a two-bedroom apartment that sits on the fringe of our old neighborhood. Ally and I are still in academic schools, so we have hope, which is a rare commodity these dangerous days. Most people are a lot more damaged.
“Maybe I will find a bed here when I am old,” the driver says with another snort.
“Turn left here,” I say.
We cruise through the northeast residential district, past the white estate homes where I used to live, through a maze of tan-on-beige triplexes and brown-on-tan row houses, and into our black-on-brown apartment complex. “Unit six,” I say.
The driver circles the complex like a cop, slow and suspicious, passing five identical buildings before he gets to ours, the Spartan—as in the apple, not the Greeks. The apartments are memorials to fallen fruit: Liberty, Gala, Crispin, Fuji, McIntosh. “This is where you live?” the driver asks. He looks up, unimpressed.
The apartments reek of economy. No balconies, no roof gardens, no benches. Just right angles and solar panels and recycling bins. I used to mock the people who lived here. Now I withstand the mockery of others.
I hold out my hand to Mom. She stares at me curiously. “RIG,” I say. She rolls her eyes but gives me what I want. I power up, empty the trunk, drag two suitcases to the door. “Thanks for the ride,” I tell Abdal. “Good luck.”
“Good luck to you too,” he shouts.
Before I even cross my threshold, my neighbor, Xavier Lavigne, heads down the dirty hallway toward me. “I told Mr. Reese that our history assignment is a lie,” he says, “and I showed him a report from the free media, but he said I have to go to a disciplinary committee hearing now.” That’s Xavier’s version of hello. He speaks nonstop conspiracy theory to anyone who doesn’t walk away, and he speaks it in seventeen languages, including binary code. He gets caught every week for illegal Internet access, but only because he posts his hacked information into his essays. His brilliant brain is defective. He thinks I’m his best friend because I’m not cruel to him, just slightly mocking. Minimal standards of friendship are part of his defect. I don’t invite him in, and he doesn’t hold it against me.
“Hey, Xavier. Did you sign me up for cross-country like I asked?”
He nods. “I had to forge your attendance to get you in.”
“You can do that?”
He leans against the doorframe and smiles. I take a step back.
The most abnormal thing about Xavier is that he smells delicious, like a human dessert. Today it’s orange marmalade.
He’s a compulsive bather with expensive taste in soap. He’s also the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean that in a gay way, because I’m not gay. It’s just a fact that still takes me by surprise. He looks like an adult.