Her mother had taken down the frothy lace curtains on her four poster bed. She’d exiled the dolls and stuffed animals— God only knew where— and had replaced all of the dainty, girlish pink details with red.
Marcy was an artist. What she considered high drama, June saw as pushing the boundaries of taste that were boundaries for good reason. She liked the color red— loved it, in fact. But she didn’t love it so much that she needed it soaked into every visible surface.
June stood in the doorway, staring.
Her room looked like an afterbirth.
“It’s your band color,” Marcy said, rubbing her shoulders. She sounded proud of herself. “Our band color. Isn’t it nice?”
She only had to live with it for two weeks, June reminded herself. She could pretend to like living in a bloody chamber for two weeks. She’d gotten As in acting class, after all.
June had a fine relationship with her mother, so long as there was at least a couple hundred miles between the two of them. It wasn’t that she hated Marcy— she just didn’t get her. She didn’t understand her, and the feeling was unfortunately mutual.
“Yeah,” June said, eyeing the highly dramatic red carpet. “It’s quite the upgrade.”
“Since I know it’s probably been ages since you’ve indulged in the joys of civilization,” Marcy said, carding her fingers through June’s hair, just like she’d done when she’d been a little girl. “I booked us a girl’s day at the spa. Tomorrow, we’ll get these ragged nails taken care of.”
“Thanks,” June said, examining her nails. They were not ragged. She hadn’t let the wilderness set in. “So, what’s on the agenda for tonight? Big plans?”
“Well, I know that you’ll be busy unpacking tonight, so I’m popping out for a wine tasting with the girls.”
“I’m glad that you and the girls still have such an active social life,” June said, sitting down on the edge of her bed. While the carpet and walls screamed slaughterhouse splatter, the heavy curtains around the fourposter added an opium den/sex dungeon kind of feel to the place. So this was what a big girl’s room was supposed to look like, according to Marcy. Interesting.
“They should be here soon, so I’ve got to fly,” Marcy said, either ignoring or missing the sarcasm. She kissed both her cheeks with exaggerated mwahs. “Order in whenever you get hungry, okay? You know where I keep the menus.”
“Of course,” June sighed. How could she forget? Takeout and delivery menus had taught her how to read. In order to survive her mother’s string of gallery openings and wine bar showings, she’d mastered the art of ordering Chinese delivery early on in her development. And people wondered why she was wired to take care of number one. If modern man lived in a concrete jungle, June had followed the call of the civilized wild.
Kicking off her heels and wriggling out of her nylons, she found a pair of flannel pajamas in her mostly-empty dresser. Since she didn’t have to entertain Marcy for the evening, she could just lounge around. She’d order delivery, then crawl into bed with some of the ‘light’ reading that Amira had assigned her.
It was amazing how much better she felt after she’d taken off her bra and shapewear. The flannel pajamas were big on her, but comfortably so. Flopping back onto her bed, June got out Ernest’s crumpled-up letter. She was able to smooth out most of the damage, thankfully.
Dear June,
If the postal service has done their job, this letter ought to beat you to New York City. So welcome home, Junebug! I’ll bet the Big Apple has missed you. I know that you’ve missed it. You’ve got two weeks to soak in as much of NYC as you can, so I hope you make every second count.
You’re still here, so I can’t say anything for sure, but I’m pretty sure that I’m going to miss you. Maks is staying in Foundation over the break, but he’s not my partner, you know?
I hope you had a safe flight! I’ll talk to you again soon!!
P.S. - Maks says hi!
P.P.S. - Don’t forget to write!!
Your partner and friend,
Ernest
June carefully folded the letter up, smoothing it out one more time before she put it back in her purse. Ernest had been predictably morose when he’d loaded up her luggage and sent her off to the airport. It was kind of sad and kind of cute that his separation anxiety had stretched to cover her. He’d begged her to remember to write, and she’d said that she would, but she honestly hadn’t given it much thought. Who wrote letters anymore, anyway?
She’d never missed her parents when she’d been shipped off to her string of boarding schools. June had missed New York, but that was about it. But she missed Ernest and Maks and everyone else in Oregon that she called her friends (without sarcasm and without airquotes). She hadn’t expected to miss them— especially not even twelve hours after leaving Pacific Standard Time. She didn’t know what to do with that feeling. It just settled in her heavily.
“Love you, Baby June!” Marcy sang as she left. “Don’t wait up for me! I’m sure you’re pooped from your trip!”
June waited until she heard the front door close behind her, then started counting. Marcy didn’t pop back in by the time she’d counted to three hundred, so she got out her pen and notebook.
Dear, she wrote, then immediately crossed it out and turned to the next page.
Ernest,
The flight was bearable. I’m counting down the days until I can legally drink, since I have a feeling that it will make air travel MUCH smoother. I’m looking forward to being good friends with the adorable little bottles of booze they offer.
Your letter beat me here. You’re such a nerd. I’m glad that Maks is with you, because
June paused, tapping the end of her pen on her lower lip.
She was glad that Maks was with him, because she knew that he got lonely around most major holidays? True, but she didn’t need to remind him that holiday hobnobbing and the need for ‘visibility’ kept the Commander anywhere but home from November on. He knew that already.
She was glad that Maks was with him, because it was Maks’ first Christmas alone? Again, that was true, but not something that the worrywart wasn’t already worrying about.
June ripped out the entire page. She set it on fire. Time for dinner, she decided. Whether it was teenage angst or low blood sugar causing her distress, food would help. She never brooded well on an empty stomach.
She was halfway to the kitchen when the phone started ringing. As an Artist, Marcy surrounded herself with like minds. June separated them into two categories: will bes and had beens. The will bes were the up-and-comers, the fresh blood that kept Marcy vicariously young in a Báthory kind of way. The had beens were the will bes that, like Marcy, had developed laurels comfy enough to sit on. She kept them around mostly to say that she knew them, because everybody loved a well-timed name drop. The had beens and the will bes were equally weird and mostly nocturnal, so it wasn’t uncommon for the phone to ring until after dawn.
While June refused to be Marcy’s personal secretary, there was a chance that maybe— possibly— the call was for her. Maybe one of her old friends had heard that she was in town. Maybe they wanted to catch up. It was a shaky hypothetical, but she went for it.
“Marcy’s Mortuary,” June answered, using the bubbly Nice Girl voice that she’d perfected for strangers. “Ask me about our recycling program for customers who’ve undergone five plastic surgeries or more!”
There was a significant pause on the other end of the line.
“I’m so sorry, I must have the wrong number,” Ernest Wright said, then hung up.
Ernest had begged her to write during their two-week vacation because he was a borderline Luddite. He didn’t use computers unless he had to, and phone conversations made him nervous and mumbly. She’d been too shocked to hear his voice to correct him in time. June’s stomach knotted with worry. She didn’t want to think about the kind of things serious enough to make Ernest pick up a phone. Of course, not wanting to think about those things just
made her focus on them more. The niggling worry of leaving Maks after punching Ida Mae right in the ego erupted into a volcano of suppressed panic.
The phone started ringing again. She picked it up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi? June? Hi! It’s me! Ernest!”
June slowly let go of the breath she’d been holding. Her partner wouldn’t have sounded perky if something was wrong. It didn’t solve the case of the mystery call, but it did calm her down.
“What’s up?”
“Um, I seem to be lost.”
Typical Ernest. She was several thousand miles away from being able to assemble a search party, but he fully believed that she was capable of orchestrating miracles.
“What do you want me to do? I’m in New York,” June said, checking the fridge for anything marginally edible. Marcy was an Artist, not an Oppressed Housewife, so the fridge was a mystery date game of unmarked takeout boxes and possibly-expired condiments.
“Keep talking? Please?” Ernest wheedled. “It’ll help.”
She closed the fridge door with her hip, tucking the phone against her ear and shoulder. She’d need both hands for menu-shuffling.
“You want me to keep you entertained while you wander around. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Just ‘til I find my way. Please?”
June rolled her eyes heavenward.
“The things I do to indulge your antics, Ernest West Wright. I’m going to be in the running for saintdom if this keeps up.”
She pulled the thick stack of takeout menus out of the drawer, fanning herself with it.
“I got your letter. I didn’t realize that this writing thing was going to be a thing with you. Jack has valid reasons to stick to dead forms of communication. You? Not so much.” She waited for his response. And waited. And when his usual bashfulness didn’t come, she started to worry. “Ernest?”
The dial tone clicked over, hollow in her ear.
He wasn’t on the line anymore, she realized. June gasped.
Oh, how dare he. How dare he.
“You did not just hang up on me! This is incredibly not okay to do to me when I’m stuck on the opposite end of the country! You hung up? You had better have been kidnapped!” June yelled at the dial tone. “I’m going to give myself an ulcer worrying about you, but do you care? No!”
June threw the phone. It skittered across the counter.
Abruptly, someone knocked on the front door. Past experience with Marcy’s taste in men made June less than eager to run and get it. Her mother’s gentlemen callers were rarely gentlemanly, and while June usually enjoyed harassing the meatheads, the jet lag was starting to take its toll. Or maybe that was just familial abandonment. Either way, she felt like crap and didn’t want to deal with anything or anyone.
But they just kept knocking, hard and insistent. That was not the knock of someone interested in giving up anytime soon.
“Listen here— “ June started to say as she swung the door open. She was ready to work up to some serious swear words, but she didn’t get the chance. Her gentleman caller blurted out a loud, frantic attempt at an apology/explanation, talking over her before she could lay into him.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to worry you!” Ernest said, pawing wet snow out of his hair. “I had your address written down on a piece of paper, see, but I lost it. I could only remember half of it, so I got close as I could and used a payphone and— “
What was he even doing in New York? She didn’t know whether to hug him or punch him.
“Get in here,” June said, grabbing him by the wrist. She’d worried for a fraction of a second that her fingers would close on air, but she was pleasantly surprised by his chilled skin. As impossible as it might have seemed, Ernest Wright had really come to see her.
He seemed happy enough to be dragged indoors. Judging by his wet clothes, he’d been out in the snow for a while. Even without a coat on, his resistance to the elements ensured that he wasn’t in danger of hypothermia or frostbite, but she had to wonder how long he’d been wandering around.
“How lost do you have to be to end up on the wrong coast?” June demanded, her hands braced on her hips. “Dammit, Ernest, what were you thinking? You could have ended up in Jersey!”
“Oh, I meant to be on this coast. I wanted to ask you something, that’s all,” he said with a smile that made his blue eyes light up. Hovering in the foyer— so that he didn’t drip impolitely on the carpet, knowing him— he looked around the loft. “Wow, you’ve got a real nice place here.”
“Marcy made out like a bandit after the divorce, and her art’s still selling,” she said, retrieving a towel from the hallway linen closet. “So what, you couldn’t have asked me this ‘something’ over the phone?”
“I thought it’d be more appropriate in person, that’s all,” he said, slipping off his glasses. He roughly toweled his hair dry.
“Oh, well then. Pardon me. Ask away.”
Ernest peeked out at her from beneath the edge of the towel, hesitating.
“Oh, no,” she said, waving a finger at him. “No, you did not fly three thousand miles to chicken out on me, Wright. Sack up and spit it out!”
Ernest looked miserable, twitchy and likely to hurl. It was worryingly like his Oh No I Have to Give a Speech face.
“C’mon,” she said, gesturing for him to follow her to the kitchen. She poured a glass of water, handing it to her partner. “Neither of us are going to enjoy the rest of the evening if you stress puke, okay? Take a deep breath and start over from the top.”
Ernest pulled up a barstool at the kitchen island, trying to comb his hair out with his fingers.
“You, um. Y’know what the Pre-Holiday Posthuman Bash is, right?”
“Do I know what the— ” June rolled her eyes. There were some levels of duh that couldn’t be expressed in mere words. “Of course I know what the Bash is. Unlike some people, I wasn’t raised in a cabin in the woods in a town that isn’t technically on the map.”
Once a year, the biggest poster names in all of the important industries got together to rub elbows and chortle about how the baseline half lived. Like most big money events, it was the entertainment part of the American panem et circenses equation. June paid attention to it, but only because the Best Dressed list was usually a good forecaster for the next season’s fashion trends.
“Would you like to go to it?”
“Who wouldn’t?” June said, shrugging. She started organizing her takeout menus by type, wait time, and likelihood to wreck her Foundation-weakened digestive tract.
“No, I don’t mean hypothetically or nothing,” Ernest said, his messy hair flopping. “I’m asking if you’d want to go to it. With me.”
“You got tickets?” June asked, not able to keep the incredulity out of her voice. “How the hell did you get tickets to the most exclusive party in the friggin’ country?”
“I don’t know?” Ernest said, obviously flustered. “They just came in the mail?”
Oh. Right. The whole only heir of an American icon thing.
“Sometimes, I forget that in the real world, you’re famous.”
Ernest’s flush slowly crept up his neck.
“It’s, uh, it’s more my dad, not me, but— but anyhow, all the Alphas can bring a plus one, and I’m an Alpha, so.” The color rushed into his cheeks. Hooking a finger in his wet collar, he tugged at it. “I thought that maybe you’d want a reason to get dressed up. I mean, I know that you like dressing up and all.”
It was always so, so obvious when he was pushing himself to do something that was difficult for him. Heavy lifting didn’t make him perspire, but anxiety did.
“Are you trying to ask me to go with you to fancy posterprom?”
“The upper-ranked duo pairs are s’posed to go together, usually, and you and me are the top of our class, but.” Ernest sighed dejectedly. “I’m making a mess of it, aren’t I.”
June smirked. “For you? You’re doing su
rprisingly well.”
He looked up at her hopefully.
“So?”
In her head, June weighed the pros and cons. On the one hand, getting to go to the Bash would be amazing. On the other, Ernest’s red face made her wonder who he was asking her as— Ernest Wright: Alpha, Champ, and only son of the Commander, or Ernest Wright: Posterdude. It wasn’t exactly a con, but it could spell trouble.
She knew in her gut which it was, but denial was her favorite security blanket when faced with things she didn’t know how to conquer.
“So I’ll think about it. Three days is not a lot of time to sew something worthy of the Bash.” Tilting her head to the side, she shot him a curious look. She knew that the Commander was loaded, so air travel wouldn’t break the bank, but it still seemed like an unnecessary hassle. “Are you really going to go home, then fly all the way back here in three days?”
“...oh.”
The look on Ernest’s face said it all. He’d been so focused on working himself up to pop the question, he hadn’t planned any further than that. Her big, heroic hero of an Alpha had flown three thousand miles to ask her a question that would have taken all of ten seconds to answer over the phone. His idea of thinking ahead had been to write down her home address. Which he’d lost.
June’s smirk grew. “You didn’t think about that, did you.”
Ernest scuffed the toe of his loafers against the kitchen floor, looking pointedly away.
“Um.”
She was starting to see why Amira thought he needed her help. Ernest Wright was sweet and compassionate and strong enough to turn a crowbar into a bowtie, but he was still about twenty kinds of hopeless.
“Relax. You can stay here. Marcy will rejoice, believe me,” June said, dryly. Her mother would do backflips and sing songs celebrating the fact that her daughter was finally doing something with boys that didn’t include making them cry. “Just remember to call your dad and tell him that you have not, in fact, been kidnapped.”
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 35