“What’s the stupid goodnews,” I said.
“I got invited to a lawstudent party,” she said. “In Lifeanddeathworld. They want actual me at an actual party, Friday night.”
Usher looked completely miserable and it infected me with a sick feeling.
Prayer was so excited she even told Paddy about it.
“Well, dang,” said Paddy. “I never heard of such a thing. Littlepoors at a middlerich party.”
“Not a bunch of littlepoors, just me,” said Prayer. “Not Warner. Sorry, Usher. They only invited me and honestly, if I had to guess why they chose to do it now, I think it’s because these guys really finally see me for who I am, not just a sad littlepoor weirdo, but as an equal because we can just talk and talk all night, and when we run out of things to say and the talking dies down, that’s truly just the beginning.”
“Prayer,” I said, because Usher was on the verge of killing himself. “Enough.”
“I just never heard of anything like that,” repeated old and not great at listening Paddy. “But I guess it’s like everyone says, times are different now, although I have to tell you, I look around and nothing has changed and nothing’s ever going to change, scale is scale, anybody who thinks otherwise is in store for a rude awakening, and let me just add this as something to chew on, you want to scale up then you gotta make sacrifices and there’s no easy way out, nobody’s giving you nothing for free.”
“Ohmygod, what am I going to wear,” said Prayer, and she wouldn’t shut up about it all the way to work.
LIFEANDDEATHWORLD
For lunch that day, Chess found me on a table and let me eat a corner of his lunch.
“You know, I find myself wondering what you do with yourself all day,” he asked me.
“Runs, climbs, pushandpullups,” I said.
“All day?” he asked, like this was insane, which, okay, it was insane.
But I didn’t want to describe to him the usual scummy littlepoor routine of spy around for crap to steal and use, hustle for munmun opportunities, eat scraps and sneak water, et set set setera, so I lied.
“I’m teaching myself to read,” I told him.
“How,” he said.
“How,” I repeated.
“Yes,” he said.
“I guess I’m still figuring that part out,” I said.
He got a funny look on his face.
“Warner, I want to do something for you,” he said.
“That is great news,” I said.
• • •
So that day Chess tucked me into his cool smooth leatherbag that smelled like woodfire and wisky, and he picked up Usher too, and he took me back to his apartment, so we could teach ourselves things with some magical middlerich tech.
His bed was eighty silk pillows, his water lived in crystal barrels soaking limewedges and mintleaves, his toilet was an ivory bathtub in a vault of candles. Walls were tapestried with screens and fabrics, soft to touch, rippling paisleys and murmuring news.
Chess was doublescale middlerich, twice middlescale, twentytimes Warner Scale.
“My banker says I could be twoandahalf but I think it’s a little tacky to be as big as you could be,” he explained to us, pulling down some tablets. He set my tablet up with some vids of, YEWESS NATIONAL WAR ON ADULT ILLITERACY, LEARN HOW TO READ.
Usher burrowed furiously into his tablet and in seconds had lined up a queue of a dozen vids.
And Chess left for his classes and we spent the day watching vids, me doing LEARN HOW TO READ and Usher doing his own education with chemistry, history, any free and not too janky vids he could find.
And the next day, Prayer came too, infact for the rest of the week, all three of us commuted to Chess’s house, getting some tablet educations in exchange for delightfull amazing sumpchewus dreamstuff.
Learning to read at age fourteen is not so easy. You put letters in your head but it’s like collecting ants in a cup. Sure, you can find some ants, you can drop them in the cup, but while you’re getting more ants the old ones climb out and scatter.
But after four days, me and Prayer had learned some tricks of how to kill the ants dead so they don’t leave the cup. You kill letters by trapping them in words, you kill words by trapping them in sentences. Turn on CLOSED CAPTIONING, listen to some shows or the news, read along the printwords underneath, trap them dead in your mind.
The news was a lot of, which corpo made the most munmun, which corpo lost the most munmun, did anyone go to the bank and get really huge today, do we have exciting vid of this huge person walking out of the bank and into their new huge house for the first time, where were the bombings and shootings today, how many people got shot and bombed overall, where was the weather terrible, are we building enough stuff in space.
Then there were lots of shows of the lives of the Yewess’s biggest people, what are they doing and eating, how do you make a palace to fit a family twelvetimes middlescale, rooms a hundredfeet high, we’re coming to you live from Balustrade where a pharmalord named Mark is about to eat a mammoth.
The three of us together watched a vid called WOW YOU’RE READY TO SCALE UP!, directed and produced by the bank, and Usher focused on the math, meanwhile me and Prayer read the captions.
At the bank everyone has two accounts, munflow account and scale account. Here’s how they’re different.
Munflow account doesn’t change your scale at all, you just keep extra munmun there because it’s safer than wallets, mattresses, personal treasure chests. You pay for stuff out of munflow account with muncards, and a proper job can deposit munmun direct to munflow, andsoonandsoforth, it’s all super usefull and easy and has no effect on your scale.
Scale account is what changes your scale. So for scale account there’s no cards, withdrawls, directdeposit, anything like that. Instead, to make any changes to your scale account, you must visit the bank personally. Eye ee if you contribute munmuns to it, you go to the bank, designate the amount in munflow you want to transfer to scale, and the bank performs the Scale Up Ceremony, tada, you walk out twice as big as when you came in, or however big.
Or if you’re broke, indebted, need to buy a house and there’s not enough in your munflow box, et set set setera, you transfer munmun out of your scale account and into munflow, ohno, it’s time for Scale Down Ceremony and you walk out a door smaller than the one you came in, sadfaced, wearing temporary bankrobes.
After all ceremonies, the banks robe you so you have something to wear, old clothes obviously no longer fitting you anymore.
And if you’re scaling up to eightscale or more, billionair big or bigger, they can’t even fit you in robes, or the bank forthatmatter, instead they tell you to go lie naked in a field on some slippery tarps, then I guess you go to sleep and they slowly inflate you.
WOW YOU’RE READY TO SCALE UP! mostly tells you how bankers calculate when you can scale up, and by how much, because without the bankers here’s an easy mistake you could make. Let’s say, you have a million munmuns in your scale account and ninemillion in munflow. Perfect, you say, I’ll put the ninemillion in scale and scale up by two, and now all my tenmillion munmuns are in my scale account.
(Onemillion is middlescale, tenmillion is doublescale ay kay ay twotimes middlescale, hunmillion is fourscale ay kay ay fourtimes middlescale, it makes no sense if you don’t have a mathbrain. And then hunthousand is halfscale, tenthousand is quarterscale, onethousand is eighthscale, and fivehundred and below is rat size, about tenthscale, Usher tried to explain the specific math to me but prettyquick he was talking about something called a loggerrhythm and I had to tell him to shut up.)
So okay, you put the entire ninemillion from munflow into your scale account and now you’ve scaled up double. And so ofcourse you need new clothes, new house, new car, plus you’re eating way more food, not even double but more like sixtimes, plus you’re too big to use the middleroads.
But surprise, you have no munmun in your munflow account to deal with any of those situations. Be
cause all your munmuns are in scale account. So you leave the bank doublescale but not ready to lead a doublescale life, so immediately you have to turn back around and scale back down, and it’s a huge mess, that’s why the bankers are there to make calculations and help you.
Ruleofthumb, you shouldn’t put tenmillion in the scale account unless you have fivemillion left in munflow, eye ee, atleast fifteenmillion total, maybe more, it depends on your income, labor costs of maintaining your lifestyle ee gee how many middlepoors are needed to clean your house, tax situations andsoonandsoforth, calculations of that nature, explanations of when to scale and how often, ohmygod was this vid boring.
Usher understood it and even he admitted, yeah, this type of thing is super boring, that’s your life when you work at the bank I guess.
The day of the party Prayer didn’t watch tablets. Instead she spent the whole day in Chess’s bathroom, prepping.
She took the nice Japanese robe that she escaped Grant’s house in, and washed it painstakingly three times in Chess’s sink, and then she spent many hours heating up a paperclip with a candleflame and twirling her fine notgood hair into it to get it all bouncy, and it sort of worked. And she took a little coal from a blownout candlewick onto her fingers and smeared it around her eyelids and lashes and it was way too much and she looked like a rackoon, but then she papertoweled some of it off and even I had to admit, it looked pretty fancy and good.
She had no shoes obviously but she figured out how to stalk around on tiptoes in a refined and sophisticated way, and she walked like that the entire way to the apartment complex, with me and Usher bodyguarding as usual.
Why did poor Usher help bodyguard, answer, because Prayer asked him to. I was the most disgusted with her that I could get.
“How can you even look at his face,” I said.
“Warner, please,” she said. “This is why we came.”
“Usher, you seriously don’t have to join, no matter what my poisonhearted demon sister asks you,” I said.
“It’ ’s why I c cc came, t tt t too,” he said, trying to smile, but no smile happening on that gray twisty face.
We walked over in silence, getting plenty of looks and confusion from middlepoors about this little parade of one tiptoeing partygirl and two grubby slumboys wordlessly bodyguarding her.
The apartment building was breezy, outdoorsy, a few stacks of apartments sharing long balconyhalls, hooked around a goofy pale pool. The party was on the secondfloor, there was no elevator, the stairs had no littleramp, so to keep her robe clean, Prayer literally stepped on Usher’s back and then got hauled up by me, each step.
Then at the top she didn’t want lawstudents to see Usher or I, so she made us chill way down at the end of the balconyhall by the stairs while she tried to knock on the door.
No one heard her or answered it.
Finally another middlerich came clomping up the stairs behind us. It was Glen. Usher and me cowered in the shadows, out of sight.
Politely, teetering on tiptoes, Prayer waved and said, “Hi, Glen, I’m here for Ken’s party.”
But he didn’t see or hear her. So she had to do some medium shrieking.
“Oh, look who it is,” he said. “Prayer.” And he knelt down so she could step into his hand, and he carried her inside, and the door closed, and it was just me and Usher out there.
“Usher, man,” I said.
Usher shrugged.
“This is just terrible and awfull and I kind of wish you hadn’t come,” I said.
Usher shrugged again.
“My sis doesn’t deserve everything you’ve done for her and it makes me sick and sad,” I said.
“N no, it’s the op posite,” he told me. “I ddon’t d deserve her.”
“Oh no,” I said. “Usher, shut up.”
“It’s j just obvious,,” he said. “She dd deserves w way better than m me. She des serves to sc cale up. Unt til then I j just want to h help her how w wever I can n.”
“Usher,” I said. “Going forward, I need you to shut up unless it’s to say, Actually I changed my mind, I’m great, and your sister is terrible.”
We sat there and listened to the glitzy thrummy music of the lawstudent party, mostly menvoices talking. Through the walls they alittlebit sounded like the soft hoots of apes.
In my head I tried to figure out what were they saying or who were they saying it to, which one is talking to Prayer, will he really be my brotherinlaw someday, will they have a nice normal middlescale house and two brats growing up going to schools talking on bendy phones and everything, will I live in a littlehouse stapled to the outside, is it even possible, and is this how it starts.
Then up the stairs came a jackedup inky middlepoor guy carrying two littlepoor women, and that’s when it got super weird and bad.
• • •
He was holding his arms up and flexing them, the women were sitting one on each armmuscle, crosslegs with specialmade skirts and stockings, definitely a trampy vibe from these two.
“Hello boys,” said one, fanning evil fingernails stickily.
“Ugh, don’t talk to them,” said the other, adjusting her tits.
As for this superstrong halfscale guy, he said nothing, just looked at Usher and I way too intense, like he was instantly memorizing our entire faces.
Then he carried the women down the balconyhall to the party, and knocked on the door, and Glen or Ken opened it and reached down and picked up the two women and handed this guy a roll of munmun so pink it looked alive, like flowerpetals.
The door closed and this guy walked slowly back toward us, closing the munmun into his belt.
“So, mind if I ask,” said the guy, leaning over us. “What are you doing here.”
He was super jacked and so inky it was a little hard to tell his original color of skin. His hair was crosshawked, each hawk all traced with tats, and his shoulders were each the size of his head, with a face inked on each one, so a lot like he had three heads.
“Sure, if I can ask you the same thing, buddybrat,” I said, and then I couldn’t say anything else or breathe because his hands were wrapped around my face and head, picking me up and dangling me.
“I guess I gotta ask the other kid,” said the guy. “Other kid. What are you doing here.”
My neck was a rope, the fibers were popping onebyone. I reached up and clawed and scraped at the leather of his stinking hands. He jiggled me a little to get me to stop, like saying, hey, keep it up and it’ll be super easy for me to snap your spine.
“If you want your buddy to not die, you should probably answer prettysoon,” he said to Usher.
I heard Usher burbling.
“J j jjj j jj jus sst, g g g ggu guarding,” he managed to say.
“Wow,” said the guy. “Calm the heck down and spit it out.”
I was blowing snot and spit all over the guy’s hands from trying so hard to breathe.
“Hi s s ss s si is,” said Usher.
“The shit are you even saying,” said the guy.
I felt everything go dim, sight, sound, touch. Then the guy dropped me on my face and knees and wrist, they popped against the floor like popcorn.
“Well, look,” said the guy. “You’re both clearly having trouble answering the question of what are you doing here, so, let me give you a hint. The hint is, I had a peek inside the room and what did I see but another littlepoor girl, and did I recognize her, no, I did not. So I assume that girl is what you’re doing around here.”
“She’s my sis,” I said as loud as I could into the ground, which was a mumble.
“Can’t hear you,” said the guy. “This is no good, boys. You’re pimping around here, and this is where I pimp. You’re pimping in Shoulderheads’s neckofthewoods, and guess who I am, spoileralert, I’m Shoulderheads. So I’m going to need to be pretty bad to you now.”
“We’re not pimping,” I mumbled.
“A little louder, shitbeetle,” said this guy Shoulderheads.
I yelled t
hrough my broken throat, “We’re not pimping. My sis got invited to that party. No one gave us any munmuns. We’re not sick pimps like you.”
Shoulderheads had a sour look on his face like, I don’t want to do this, but, looks like I’m about to start strangling and dangling you again.
But instead he started laughing.
“Oh wow,” he said. “You idiots. You are a hundredpercent pimping your sis right now. You’re just the dumbshit kind of pimp that doesn’t even get his tramp paid.”
And now I really started to feel sick.
“What’s going on in there,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s about to get way better for your sis. Next party, I’ll make sure she gets a cut. She’s in good hands now. I saw her. She’s cute, and most important, prettymuch a kid still. So I can get her a lot of work. Like she can be a regular at this party every week, for starts.”
Usher fell, got up, fell, got up fell got up, stumbled down the hall, picked up speed, started really running and galloping.
“Don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” said Shoulderheads. “Hey, look. You should be happy for your sis. She’s about to make way more with me than with you. I mean, with you she makes zero. Plus she’ll get a nice littleplace out by the reservewar.”
“What’s this party,” I said. ‘What happens in there.”
Usher attacked the door, hitting kicking ripping it.
“Probably better if you don’t know,” said Shoulderheads, and he picked me up again and this time heaved me over the rail.
I assumed I was dead, right up to the moment of my body slapping the poolwater.
Then I assumed Usher was dead even though he also hit the poolwater and not the concrete, because from a floor up, water is pretty painfull to hit, and Usher is not robust.
But he lived, and we linked arms and became a single crappy swimmer and paddled to the side. I climbed out on my notpopped wrist, fished Usher out, and rightaway drippingwet Usher hobbled back to the stairs to try for a second impossible rescue.
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