14

I first met Amanda in Year Ten, when I was ten: I was always the same age as the Year, so it’s easy to remember when it was.

That day was Saint Farley of Wolves — a Young Bioneer scavenging day, when we had to tie sucky green bandanas around our necks and go out gleaning for the Gardeners’ recycled-materials crafts. Sometimes we collected soap ends, carrying wicker baskets and making the rounds of the good hotels and restaurants because they threw out soap by the shovelful. The best hotels were in the rich pleebs — Fernside, Golfgreens, and the richest of all, SolarSpace — and we’d hitch rides to them, even though it was forbidden. The Gardeners were like that: they’d tell you to do something and then prohibit the easiest way to do it.

Rose-scented soap was the best. Bernice and me would take some home, and I’d keep mine in my pillowcase, to drown out the mildew smell of my damp quilt. We’d take the rest to the Gardeners, to be simmered into a jelly in the black-box solarcookers on the Rooftop, then cooled and cut up into slabs. The Gardeners used a lot of soap, because they were so worried about microbes, but some of the cut-up soaps would be set aside. They’d be rolled up in leaves and have strands of twisted grass tied around them, to be sold to tourists and gawkers at the Gardeners’ Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange, along with the bags of worms and the organic turnips and zucchinis and the other vegetables the Gardeners hadn’t used up themselves.

That day wasn’t a soap day, it was a vinegar day. We’d go to the back entrances of the bars and nightclubs and strip joints and pick through their dump boxes, and find any leftover wine, and pour it into our Young Bioneer enamel pails. Then we’d lug it off to the Wellness Clinic building, where it would be poured into the huge barrels in the Vinegar Room and fermented into vinegar, which the Gardeners used for household cleaning. The extra was decanted into the small bottles we’d gather up during our gleaning, which would have Gardeners labels glued onto them. Then they’d be offered for sale at the Tree of Life, along with the soap.

Our Young Bioneer work was supposed to teach us some useful lessons. For instance: Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use. And, most importantly, everyone, including children, had to contribute to the life of the community.

Shackie and Croze and the older boys sometimes drank their wine instead of saving it. If they drank too much, they’d fall down or throw up, or they’d get into fights with the pleebrats and throw stones at the winos. In revenge, the winos would pee into empty wine bottles to see if they could trick us. I never drank any piss myself: all you had to do was smell the opening of the bottle. But some kids had deadened their noses by smoking the butt ends of cigarettes or cigars, or even skunkweed if they could get it, and they’d upend the bottle, then spit and swear. Though maybe those kids drank from the peed-in bottles on purpose, to give themselves an excuse for the swearing, which was forbidden by the Gardeners.

As soon as they were out of sight of the Garden, Shackie and Croze and those boys would take off their Young Bioneer bandanas and tie them around their heads, like the Asian Fusions. They wanted to be a street gang too — they even had a password. “Gang!” they’d say, and the other person was supposed to say, “Grene.” So, gangrene. The “gang” part was because they were a gang, and the “grene” stood for “green,” like their head scarves. It was supposed to be a secret thing just for their gang members, but we all knew about it anyway. Bernice said it was a really good password for them, because gangrene was flesh rot and they were totally rotten.

“Big joke, Bernice,” said Crozier. “P.S., you’re ugly.”

We were supposed to glean in groups, so we could defend ourselves against the pleebrat street gangs, or the winos who might grab our pails and drink the wine, or the child-snatchers who might sell us on the chicken-sex market. But instead we’d break up in twos or threes because that way we could cover the territory faster.

On this particular day I started out with Bernice, but then we had a fight. We squabbled constantly, which I took as a sign of our friendship because no matter how viciously we fought we’d always make up afterwards. Some bond held us together: not hard like bone, but slippery, like cartilage. Most likely we both felt insecure among the Gardener kids; we were each afraid to be left without an ally.

This time our fight was over a beaded change purse with a starfish on it that we’d picked out of a trash pile. We coveted finds like that and were always looking for them. The pleeblanders threw a lot of stuff away, because — said the Adams and Eves — they had short attention spans and no morals.

“I saw it first,” I said.

“You saw it first last time,” said Bernice.

“So what? I still saw it first!”

“Your mother’s a skank,” said Bernice. That was unfair because I thought so myself and Bernice knew it.

“Yours is a vegetable!” I said. “Vegetable” shouldn’t have been an insult among the Gardeners, but it was. “Veena the Vegetable!” I added.

“Meat-breath!” said Bernice. She had the purse, and she was keeping it.

“Fine!” I said. I turned and walked away. I loitered, but I didn’t look around, and Bernice didn’t hurry after me.

This happened at the mallway, which was called Apple Corners. This was the official name of our pleeb, though everyone called it the Sinkhole because people vanished into it without a trace. We Gardener kids walked through the mallway whenever we could, just looking.

Like everything else in our pleeb, this mallway had once been classier. There was a broken fountain full of empty beer cans, there were built-in planters with a lot of Zizzy Froot cans and cigarette butts and used condoms covered (said Nuala) in festering germs. There was a holospinner booth that must once have spun out suns and moons, and rare animals, and your own image if you put money in, but it had been trashed some time ago and now stood empty-eyed. Sometimes we went inside it and pulled the tattered star-sprinkled curtain across, and read the messages left on the walls by the pleebrats. Monica sucks. So does Darf only betr. UR $? 4 U free, baBc8s! Brad UR ded. Those pleebrats were so daring, they’d write anywhere or anything. They didn’t care who saw it.

The Sinkhole pleebrats went into the holospinner to smoke dope — the booth reeked of it — and they had sex in there: we could tell because of the condoms and sometimes the panties they’d leave behind. Gardener kids weren’t supposed to do either one of those things — hallucinogenics were for religious purposes, and sex was for those who’d exchanged green leaves and jumped the bonfire — but the older Gardener kids said they’d done them anyway.

The shops that weren’t boarded up were twenty-dollar stores called Tinsel’s and Wild Side and Bong’s — names like that. They sold feather hats, and crayons for drawing on your body, and T-shirts with dragons and skulls and mean slogans. Also Joltbars, and chewing gum that made your tongue glow in the dark, and red-lipped ashtrays that said, Let Me Blow It For You, and In-Your-Skin Etcha-Tattoos the Eves said would burn your skin down to the veins. You could find expensive stuff at bargain prices that Shackie said were boosted from the SolarSpace boutiques.

Tawdry rubbish, all of it, the Eves would say. If you’re going to sell your soul, at least demand a higher price! Bernice and I paid no attention to that. Our souls didn’t interest us. We’d peer in the windows, giddy with wanting. What would you get? we’d say. The LED-light wand? That’s baby! The Blood and Roses video? Gross, that’s for boys! The Real Woman Stick-on Bimplants, with responsive nipples? Ren, you suck!

After Bernice had left that day, I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought maybe I should just go back, because I didn’t feel too safe, alone. Then I saw Amanda, standing on the other side of the mallway with a group of Tex-Mexican pleeb girls. I knew that group by sight, and Amanda had never been with them before.

Those girls were wearing the sort of clothes they usually wore: miniskirts and spangled tops, candyfloss boas around their necks, silver gloves, plasticized butterflies clipped into their hair. They had their Sea/H/Ear Candies and their burning-bright phones and their jellyfish bracelets, and they were showing off. They were playing the same tune on their Sea/H/Ear Candies and they were dancing to it, swivelling their bums, sticking out their chests. They looked as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it. I envied that look so much. I just stood there, envying.

Amanda was dancing too, except she was better. After a while she stopped and stood a little apart, texting on her purple phone. Then she stared straight at me and smiled, and waved her silver fingers. That meant Come here.

I checked that no one was looking. Then I crossed the mallway.