Gifted

by H. A. Swain

  “Eastern bluebird.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “They may have gone extinct. Check this one out. Yank-yank-yank,” he sings through his nose.

  “Sounds like a frozard.”

  “Nope, a nuthatch.”

  “You’re a nuthatch.”

  “No, I’m not, you are,” he says, which makes me snicker. “How about this one: Frawnk! Frawnk!”

  “I know that! Great blue heron.”

  “That’s right. The old man of the river.”

  “Do you have those where you’re from, too?”

  “I doubt it. I’d never seen one before I came here, much less heard its call in the wild.”

  “How do you know so much about birds?” I ask. Somehow the darkness makes my question feel less intrusive than if we were facing one another in the light.

  “My sister,” he says quietly. “She has a clock. Every fifteen minutes a different bird sings.”

  “So she likes birds?”

  “She likes…” He sighs. “Singing.”

  “Me, too,” I say through an enormous yawn. I burrow into my covers, feeling sleep begin to shroud me. “Are you a lot alike, you and your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, which seems strange but then he adds, “She’d like you.”

  “I’d like to meet her,” I tell him, my voice going warbly with exhaustion.

  Aimery is quiet for a moment. I think that he’s probably fallen asleep, but then he says, “I’d like that, too.”

  * * *

  “Zimri! Zim!” I wake up to Aimery shaking me. The POD is filled with light, so it must be morning, but I can’t figure out why he’s waking me up.

  “What’s the matter? What are you doing? It’s my day off!” I pull the covers over my head.

  Aimery grabs my shoulder. “Someone’s at the door!” he whispers.

  I hear the knock, light but persistent. “Oh, no,” I hiss and kick off the covers. “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to hide? Want me to answer? I could say you’re not here.”

  The knocking comes again. “That won’t work. They’ll just come in and look for me.”

  “You could get inside the bed. I could put it inside the wall. Or the shower. I could spin it around.”

  “That’s the first place they always look.”

  “Right,” he says and looks stymied.

  “Zimri?” someone calls my name quietly from the hall. “Zim, you there?”

  “That doesn’t sound like security,” I say, relieved. I follow Aimery down the ladder then we tiptoe toward the door.

  “Hello?” I call softly with Aimery close behind. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Dorian.”

  My stomach drops.

  “Let me in? Are you okay? I was worried about you all night.”

  “Uh, um, just a sec.” I look at Aimery, who points to himself and then to the closet.

  I nod, then shake my head and grab his arm. “This is silly,” I whisper. “It’s okay. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  But Aimery doesn’t look convinced. He scoots away from me and stands with his back against the fridge as I unlock the door.

  Dorian charges in and wraps his arms around me. “I hardly slept. I was so worried all night. I was afraid…” Then he stops. His body stiffens and he steps away from me. “What? Why is he here?”

  I move aside. “You remember Aimery, right?” I say and realize just how idiotic that must sound. “He needed a place to stay, so since Nonda’s gone, I—”

  Dorian shakes his head. He isn’t listening to me. “You let this guy stay with you?”

  “Hey, man!” Aimery steps forward and holds out his hand like I’ve seen him do a hundred times at the warehouse when he’s trying to make a good impression. “I was in a bind. Zimri let me crash.”

  Dorian looks down at Aimery’s hand like it’s filthy. Then he cuts his eyes to me. “What the hell, Zim?”

  “What?” I say stupidly because I know what the whole thing must look like. “He’s been sleeping in his car and—”

  “Down by the riverside,” Aimery adds with a halfhearted laugh. “It’s been rough. Zimri took pity on me.”

  Dorian looks at me and shakes his head, then he says, “No way. I won’t do this, Zimri. I won’t be that guy for you.”

  “What guy?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer because he’s bolted into the hallway.

  “Dor!” I call after him. “Dorian, wait. Come on!” I chase him down the stairs. “Slow down!” He slams through the exit door into the bright morning light. I run to catch up and grab his arm before he crosses the Y.A.R.D. “Hey! What’s going on? You’re acting like a lunatic.”

  He yanks away from me. “That guy?” he yells. “That’s the guy you bring home? Nonda’s in the MediPlex. I’m up all night worried that you’re going to get nabbed. And you bring home the idiot who could have gotten both of us arrested?” He shakes his head again in disbelief. “Then you call me the lunatic?”

  I cross my arms and look straight at him. “He just needed a place to shower and sleep. I was being nice. You would’ve done the same.”

  “No,” says Dorian with conviction. “Not for a guy like that.”

  “A guy like what?” I ask, genuinely bewildered.

  “Who is he?” Dorian shouts. “Breezes in one day, acting like Mr. Charming, but not giving anyone any information. Where’s he from? What’s he doing here? He’s not like us.”

  “That doesn’t make him a bad person.”

  “I don’t trust him, Zim.” Dorian steps closer and wraps his fingers around my upper arm. “And neither should you.”

  “I make my own decisions about people.”

  He leans over me. “I’ve seen you on breaks at the warehouse with him. Sharing drinks out back by the river.”

  “Oh, big deal,” I say and jerk my arm away from him. “You could have come and hung out with us.”

  “You never invited me!”

  “Do you need an engraved invitation to hang out with me?”

  “I’m not doing this,” he yells.

  “Doing what?”

  He walks in circles, ranting. “It’s our parents all over again. My dad loved your mother for years. Did everything for her. Followed her around like a damn dog since they were kids, waiting for her to feel the same about him. She’s the whole reason he learned to play drums. She’s the reason he built Nowhere. He was trying to impress her!”

  “No…”

  “It’s true. He told me. And then she went off and chose your father—some crazy, dark and brooding painter! He’s so talented, she’d always say to my dad as if his music wasn’t enough. So he got on with his life and married my mom, but he always loved Rainey.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I say, but there’s something inside of me that thinks he could be right. Why else would Marley have been so devoted to my mother? Why else would he and my father never have become good friends?

  “I won’t be that person for you, Zimri! I won’t follow you around, pining away like my dad did for your mom.”

  “I never asked you to,” I tell him, then watch his face crumble. He drops his hands to his sides. They hang heavy like dead branches. “Dor!” I reach out. “I didn’t mean…”

  He steps away and shakes his head, then he turns and runs. I stand there, watching helplessly, as he hops the low wall with Nobody from Nowhere scrawled across the stone, and disappears among the PODs.

  ORPHEUS

  By the time Zimri gets back upstairs, I’ve put the bed away and changed into my clean clothes. I figure my time with her is up and I don’t want to be more of a nuisance.

  “So…” I say when she comes in the door. I rock back and forth on my heels. “That was awkward.”

  At first she looks like she’s going to punch me but then she lets loose a loud and almost painful laugh as she yells, “Understatement! Jeez. I don’t know what got into him.” She drops down on one
end of the sofa.

  “Come on, now. He adores you,” I say. “Anyone could see that.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Zim hugs a pillow to her chest and looks away from me. “It would never work anyway. We’ve known each other since we were little.”

  “Where I’m from,” I say and slowly walk toward the couch, “we have this thing called a carapace that we wear on the back of our hand. You enter a bunch of information, all your likes and dislikes, and you rank stuff like whether you prefer dark hair or light or which celebs you think are attractive and what music and movies and books you like, and it tracks all of your purchases. Then it takes all of that info and turns it into a color. You compare your carapace to other people’s to see how compatible you are.”

  “Why? That sounds stupid.”

  “It’s like a shortcut.” I sit at the opposite end of the sofa. “A time-saver. You know right away if you have a chance with someone. So, things like your predicament with Dorian don’t happen as much because maybe his carapace would be green and yours would be another color, like, I don’t know…” My stomach clenches. “Purple.”

  “Yeah, well, there might be such a thing as too compatible,” Zimri says. “Like with Dorian, everything’s the same for us. We both grew up here. Our parents were friends … or something. We work the same job. We both love music.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “And what about all the things that carapace-thing can’t measure? Like whether you want more out of life than you have? Or how much of a risk-taker you are? Don’t you think that’s more important than whether you both like the same dumb songs or bought the same kind of socks?”

  I sit back and think of Ara’s matching carapace, and how our kisses were always wrong.

  Abruptly, Zimri turns to face me. “Why are you here?”

  “I can leave.” I start to stand, but she reaches out and pulls me back down.

  “That’s not what I meant. I want to know why you left the City and came here. Mr. Fancy bashed-up car. Mr. Fancy torn-up pants. Mr. Fancy glove thingamabob I’ve seen on your hand. There’s more to your story than you’re letting on.”

  My mouth goes dry and I start to sweat. “Yes, you’re right.” I debate about how much I can safely tell her. How much she might already know. I start slow. “I had a fight with my family. Mostly with my dad. Although my mom didn’t help things.”

  “And you ran away?”

  I nod.

  Zimri bites her bottom lip. “Do they know where you are?”

  “Let’s put it this way: if they want to find me, they can, but they aren’t trying.”

  “I know how that feels,” she says quietly.

  “You do?”

  “My mom,” she says but doesn’t elaborate. Then she says, “Do you like it here?” and cocks her head to one side like she’s contemplating the same question for herself.

  “Do you like it here?” I ask her.

  She shrugs and picks at lint on the pillow between us. “Doesn’t matter because I have no place else to go.”

  “There’s always another place.”

  “Yeah, yeah, another crap job in another crap warehouse or factory in some other corporate complex. But I can’t leave my Nonda.”

  “I know what you mean.” I sigh. “My sister is the reason I’ll go back, eventually.” I reach out and put my hand on top of hers. She doesn’t pull away.

  We sit there for a moment, hands pressed together, then she says, “I might not know much about you, Aimery, but I don’t need a carapace or anything else to tell me that you have a good heart.” She weaves her fingers into mine.

  I feel her energy surge into my body like I’ve been plugged into a power source. At that moment I want to tell her everything. Come clean about who I really am. I inhale deeply and lean forward, ready to spill it all, but she lets go of my hand and hops up from the couch.

  “Let’s get out of here!” she says, charging across the floor.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, confused by the sudden shift.

  “You need new pants,” she says. “And Black Friday opens in fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  “What is this place?” I ask Zimri when we join the crowd gathered in front of dark double doors in a nondescript cement block building. The whole place would take up a city block at home and is surrounded by a cracked blacktop parking lot with straggly weeds and busted out streetlights.

  “There are two ways to buy things out here,” she tells me. “You can use the COYN from your Corp X account and buy new stuff directly from the warehouse.”

  “But that’s dumb, because then you pay Plute prices,” I explain, very proud of my Plebe knowledge.

  “The other way to get what you need is this place.”

  I follow as she shoulders her way toward the front of the crowd until we hit a wall of bodies intent on staying put. Zimri stands tall and strong with her legs wide and arms crossed.

  “This is where Corp X sends all the returns, damaged goods, and stuff that doesn’t sell off the shelves.”

  “Must be popular,” I say, uneasy with how the mass around us is growing. There must be at least two hundred people in the lot with more coming from all directions.

  “It’s only open once a week, on Fridays, which is when they restock. You never know what will be inside, but there’s almost always something you can use.”

  “Pants?” I ask and gulp, uneasy with the bodies beginning to push up against me.

  “Definitely pants,” says Zimri with a funny side grin. “When the doors open, things are going to happen fast. Stick close to me and don’t stop until we get to the clothing area and then start grabbing. It takes less than half an hour for the whole store to get cleaned out. And you don’t want to be stuck in line to pay or we’ll be here all day. It’s in and out, as quick as we can.”

  “Sounds like a secret-ops mission.”

  “Pretty much.”

  The crowd shifts closer to the building like one giant blob as a digital countdown clock lights up above our heads. I see cameras everywhere. Mounted over the doors and on the corners of the building.

  “Alright, get ready.” Zimri hunches lower.

  Everyone around us starts the countdown in unison. “10 … 9 … 8 … 7…”

  She grabs my wrist. “Stay close!”

  On one, the front doors swing open and all the bodies rush forward like water through a broken dam. Zimri holds me tight as we are carried forward in the swell. I’m terrified I’ll trip and get trampled to death. Just ahead of us, to the right, a guy falls. The crowd parts around him but not everybody sees and others go down on top of him. They pile up, rolling off each other, covering their heads and tucking their knees up into their chests to protect their bodies from the mob.

  “Wait!” I yell, pointing at the people on the ground. I try to drag Zimri back to help them.

  “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” she shouts in my ear and pulls me forward. I’m afraid I’ll get separated from her so I willingly follow, although I feel terrible for leaving those people behind.

  Just like in the warehouse, Zimri is quick and nimble. She finds every break in the wall of bodies and weasels through the cracks so that we quickly get to the front of the pack. Up ahead, I see that the flow is parting, people going in many directions, down dozens of aisles with signs overhead that read: Electronics, Furniture, Shoes, Jewelry, Health & Beauty, Party Supplies, Grocery.

  “This way!” she yells and pulls me hard to the left. The mass of bodies has dispersed enough that we can run full speed and outpace the pack heading for the aisles.

  “In the back!” Zimri yells and takes a right. We zip through an aisle of prepackaged noodles, cookies, cereal, baby food, and power bars. We turn left and right again through an aisle of dolls, toy trucks, puzzles, and games. “Come on! Keep up!” She tugs me forward. My lungs burn. “Here!” she shouts.

  We duck into another aisle, this one with stacks and stacks of clothes. “Pants!
Pants! Pants!” she yells as she flies along, scanning every shelf. “Here!” She stops and jumps up and down with excitement. Behind us I hear a stampede of feet. “They’re coming!” she yells. “Find your size! Find your size!”

  “My size?” I freeze. “I don’t know my size!”

  “How can you not know your size?” She grabs me by the back of the waistband, pulls it away from my butt then shoves her hand down the back of my pants.

  “Hey, whoa!” I yell and she cackles with laughter.

  “Thirty-two, thirty-six! Go, go, go!”

  We both run down the aisle, which has been flooded with more people. They elbow each other. A woman trips an old guy and yanks a pair of jeans from his hands. A fight breaks out as two men tug on opposite ends of a red-checked button-down shirt. On top of the shelves, cameras zip back and forth, recording every action.

  Zimri shouts, “Found it!”

  I run to her. Luckily no one else is competing for my size.

  “Just grab some!” She pulls an armful of pants and several shirts off the shelves. I do the same. “Now run!” she screams and we take off, weaving around the other people still pillaging the clothing.

  As we dart toward the front of the building, Zimri tosses pants over her shoulder. “These are ugly. Terrible pockets. What color do you want?”

  “I don’t know. Brown. Or blue.” I’m wheezing. I can’t think about pants and run for my life at the same time.

  Zimri doesn’t stop. “Just find some that you like. We have to get to the registers.”

  I do what she says, jettisoning pants as we jog until I’m down to two pairs that might work. “What do you think of these?” I hold up one pair in each hand while I run.

  “Those are lame.” She knocks the gray ones out of my hand. “But those are good!” She points to the soft brown ones with pockets on the side. “Do you want two pairs?” She holds up identical ones.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have some shirts?”

  “Yes!” I hold up wads of fabric.

  “Hold on to them,” she warns. “We’re going back into the fray.”

  We turn a corner and I see another wall of people, jostling and fighting for positions in long lines forming to get through the gates at the automated registers. Once again, Zimri grabs my wrist and pulls me forward. “This way,” she says and we zip past all the people.