All Rights Reserved. Gregory Scott Katsoulis
shouted, as though I were half-deaf. She seemed to think I had only been waiting for someone as clever as her to ask. She tottered alongside me and shoved her crystal-rimmed Cuff under my nose. Her long coat turned a translucent acid yellow. Half a dozen bracelets clinked and rattled as she shook her arm for me to speak.
“I’ll record her voice,” she said in an aside to her friend, like I was a dog who couldn’t understand. “We can play it for everyone.”
The shorter one nodded excitedly. “You could get on the news!” Her coat flashed orange, then clear.
There were no dropters nearby. Attorney Holt had been able to put a partial lockdown on that. I don’t know if he planned to sell dolls or what.
“Meh,” the tall one said, fluffing at her hair. $6.99. The yellow of her coat mellowed. She didn’t seem to care about the news or the money. She just wanted me to obey.
“If you’re not gonna talk, do the zippered lip thing, sluk.”
That word, sluk, put my teeth on edge. $49.99. It was ugly, hateful and pricey—meant to imply I was scarcely more than filth. I’d never spoken it, even if plenty of other kids did before they had to pay. Nancee and Penepoli once went back and forth with it, as a joke, seeing who could say it the meanest. I always told them that if we could say whatever we wanted, it was better to try beautiful words.
Neither Nancee nor Penepoli could hit that k in the hateful, glottal way the girls in the alley could.
“Come on!” The tall one shoved at me half-heartedly. I almost laughed at her. A small push would have done either of those girls in. That’s the way it was with rich people; they were either grotesquely enormous, from gluttony or steroids, or they were distressingly thin. I felt a little sorry for those girls, though I don’t know why I had any sympathy. They had none for me. They chose to starve, while some kids barely survived on printed sheets of Wheatlock™. Despite all their advantage, these girls still looked miserable. I had to remember that it made them vicious.
I peeled off from the main sidewalk, ducking down a narrow alley. I assumed they’d avoid anywhere so dirty, but my disobedience sent them into fits.
“You want to get sued, little girl?” the taller one asked, stamping her heel. Her coat flickered and reddened, and her nose wrinkled as she eyed the tight, shadowy space where I’d fled.
My speech popped up on my Cuff, glowing, as if Keene Inc. had some algorithm guessing the worst possible moment to get me to reconsider reading it. Or maybe Keene considered these girls a good audience.
“Her dad’s a Lawyer,” the other one warned me. She strode fearlessly into the alleyway on her six-inch heels, her coat flashing to black. I picked up my pace, and they started to run after me. Well, maybe not run—their posh high-heeled shoes and unyielding corsets made their progress difficult. They clattered along awkwardly, and after a few seconds they had to stop.
“Oh my God, Mandy, I can’t barely breathe,” the shorter one cried out.
“Sluk!” Mandy shouted. She pulled her heels off and threw them at me, one after the other—insubstantial, spiky heels that wobbled through the air. It occurred to me these girls could have been customers at the shop where Saretha worked. Saretha sold impractical garbage like this, corsets and heels and ornate Leatherette™ boots.
I took off, slipping away into a branching alley and up a fire escape. I was glad for the thinness of the rich girls’ arms and the weakness of their needlessly starved bodies. Even if they saw me, they could never pull themselves up to follow. My heart pounded, but I felt a little thrill in escaping them.
“Advil™, Advil™!” I heard them cry out as their voices receded into the distance behind me.
I climbed a little higher and mounted the roof. I could walk across an arc of six buildings and then return to street level right before the crossing for my school. None of the rooftop gaps would be hard to jump and, truth be told, I enjoyed the little thrill of leaping. I just had to be careful with my landings and not give them any gymnastic style. I couldn’t afford that now. My Cuff was watching.
I was feeling pretty good up there, having thwarted the Affluent girls, when a realization dawned on me.
Would I be facing worse at school?
The Westbrook School was set on the inside edge of the Onzième, a collection of large, connected buildings printed from mottled surplus plastics in uneven, translucent shades of gray. The front of the main building faced a wall meant to discourage—though not completely bar—teenage access to the businesses of the Quatrième. Most of us enter through the back of the Parker™ building.
The moment I stepped inside, Shari Gark blocked my path, while other kids streamed in around me. Despite what it cost her, she demanded, “You guna talk if therza FiDo?”
Shari followed the Word$ Market™ carefully, looking for words that dropped in price. Slang words—sometimes called gutter words—like therza would fluctuate wildly, but could often be spoken for pennies. Her use of FiDo surprised me. FiDo was the code word everyone used for when the WiFi went down, but was pricey. Kids would run up and down the ring, shouting it in an outage; it didn’t cost anything then. Adults would break into wordy conversations, asking each other saved-up questions and savoring the answers. When I was younger, it happened a lot. The rooftop transmission nodes would get damaged or vandalized. Then it stopped happening. Silas Rog spearheaded the effort to centralize the WiFi system, offering to house it in an impenetrable bunker beneath his well-guarded offices.
I didn’t think the WiFi was likely to go out, but if it did, would I speak? Shari stared at me, red rising in her cheeks.
“You think ur better den me?” she demanded.
I was stunned she had spoken so much. Since she had turned fifteen, she had said maybe five words. Now she was willing to spend $57.94 to express her rage, or to show she was different from me. Maybe she just wanted to make me speak.
Her face contorted into a furious sneer. Younger kids chattered and whispered about me as they passed. Older students shuffled through the hallway, staring at me quietly. Shari drifted into the stream, fuming, headed toward our word economics class.
I turned to open my locker, but I couldn’t because it wouldn’t play the Ad before the combination screen. I wasn’t allowed into word economics, either, because Mrs. Oglehorn said I could not be expected to contribute meaningfully to the class. Technically, she was right. But I knew for a fact Shari hadn’t spoken a single word in class since her fifteenth. Neither had half a dozen other kids. Nobody was going to waste money speaking in word economics. Mostly they just sat and waited to learn how to hunt for word bargains.
In communication ethics, Mr. Valk pretended nothing had happened, at least at first. “Shrugs are considered communication, and are Trademarked by the Rand® corporation, unless the movement of said shrug is less than two centimeters, in which case it is exempt from charge, as the ruling Merrill v. Dakin laid out.”
My ears perked up. It was critical that I remember what I could do with my body and what I could not. I could shrug, but only slightly.
“As with any free gesture,” Mr. Valk went on, “repetition will be flagged and charged if a pattern of communication is discerned.”
He must have said this a hundred times. The Rights Holders couldn’t allow a person to subvert the system by microshrugging a love poem in Morse code.
“All modes of affection are charged to the initiating party of said affection and, subsequently, to the reciprocator at a lower rate, with the exception of hand-holding, which is charged equally to both parties, or not at all, if the hand-hold is not an act of affection, as determined by the parties’ mutual serotonin levels. A 0.35 threshold has been defined as that limit as read by a standard Cuff.
“This can allow two clinically