Page 10 of Never Broken

I rolled my eyes, not sure I was ready yet to change the subject, but more than ready to call out Corey on having his head permanently stuck up his boss’s ass. Mostly thanks to his family connections, Corey had started interning with Langer last summer, in some super-special position that saw him working with the tech mogul one-on-one. But so far, his sole job description, as far as I could tell, seemed to have been swallowing a bucketload of Langer’s bullshit every damn day. “You know, just because you got a job with him all sewn up after you graduate doesn’t mean you’re required to defend every single thing he does,” I said. “Besides, if you’re now so evolved and all, why haven’t you gotten rid ofyourslaves?”

Corey laughed. “What am I supposed to do, make my own bed? Sweep my own floor? I don’t have time for that. I have school and work to worry about.”

Of course I didn’t want to do any of that stuff either. Nobody did—just like nobody wanted to flip burgers or pick oranges or dig copper. But someone had to. The whole economy would collapse otherwise, wouldn’t it? That’s what Daddy had always told me, anyway, the few times as a kid I’d been curious enough to ask why I got to go to school and the girl wiping down our table at my favorite fast-food hamburger place didn’t.

“Come to think of it, you’re starting to sound a little bit like Muller yourself.” Corey looked at me sharply, his green eyes boring into me like he thought I might be turning into an enemy of the union. You couldn’t get reportedthateasily anymore—those days had ended after most of the violent agitators from Muller’s generation had been arrested and enslaved themselves. Like Muller had said, we nominally had free speech. But that didn’t mean I felt like getting rejected from med school for beingsome kind of crazed radical when I was barely scraping by as it was. Which meant I should probably shut up. I didn’t even believe this stuff, anyway. Did I?

“If you hate her so much, why did you even sign up for that course?” Juliette asked Corey. I hadn’t even known my friend was listening, as rapidly as she was tapping out texts on her pink, blinged-out phone, peering over the gigantic tortoiseshell sunglasses designed to conceal her hangover from last night’s frat mixer.

“I didn’t want to!” moaned Corey. “It’s all those politically correct abolitionist snowflakes in the dean’s office, always yammering on and on about oppression. It’s part of those new course requirements they put in this year. So now I’m stuck in that bullshit factory twice a week, hearing about how slavery reinforces toxic masculinity, whatever that is.”

“Well, part of it, as you must know,” I said, reciting more of one of Muller’s lectures before I could stop myself, “is that masters rape female slaves all the time. Hell, they rapemaleslaves all the time. And all with no consequences. But women are barred from even touching male slaves. Even if they own them, it’s considered taboo. Even if theyorderit. It’s a sexist double standard.”

“Rape? Seriously? Now a guy can’t even have sex with his own property without some social justice warrior calling it rape? Besides, it’s totally different with free women. What if they get pregnant? You know if the mother’s free, the kid is free. We can’t have a bunch of free people walking around with slaves for fathers. They could even inheritproperty.” He shuddered as if that would somehow lead to the imminent collapse of society.

“Who cares? How would you evenknow? Do you think they’re different species or something? I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Corey, but slaves and free people, except for the bracelets, look exactly alike.”

Corey jerked backward. Juliette stopped, too. In fact, a chill came over me as I realized that it wasn’t just them. There wereotherpeople staring at me. Why?

Because nobody ever pointed out this stuff—especially not in public. Nobody really talked about it at all. Even when my parents had had swanky cocktail parties where they used to discuss business and art, nobody breathed a word to questionwhythere were nameless human beings carrying trays full of prosciutto-wrapped melon balls back and forth for no pay. No wonder Erica Muller, who not only wrote papers on the subject butpublishedthem, got a dozen death threats last week.

“Never mind,” I said, my face starting to burn. “Let’s just get our smoothies, okay?”

“You never cared so much about this stuff before, Lou,” needled Corey as we marched up the stairs of the adobe-style structure to the second-floor café and took our places at the back of the smoothie line. “Is there some slave somewhere who’s gotten you all hot and bothered?”

I froze. Then I tried to laugh, but it got stuck in my throat and started to sound like choking. I grabbed the bottle of water from my bag and took a long swig. When I swallowed, everyone was still staring, and water was dripping down my chin. I swiped at it with the back of my arm. “No.”

Smooth. Real smooth.

“Don’t even joke about that,” scolded Juliette. “Remember what happened to”—she dropped her voice—“Rebekah Roth?”

We swallowed awkwardly. Rebekah—red-haired banker’s daughter, champion swimmer, Type A idea girl—had been an integral part of our social circle until we were sixteen. That was when a neighbor had caught her—in her childhood treehouse, of all places—with the slave boy next door. The boy, like most slaves guilty of serious crimes, had been sold to the mines by his owners. Rebekah had had her college admission rescinded andthe family, after pleading guilty to exploitation of their minor daughter, had moved somewhere on the East Coast and faded into obscurity. Some people whispered that Rebekahherselfhad been sold into slavery, which happened to minor girls who got in trouble with slave boys, especially if their parents couldn’t or didn’t pay the fine. I never did find out for sure, though. The only exception, of course, was if rape could be proven. My own parents hadn’t been shy in pointing to Rebekah as an example of someone who had foolishly ruined her life. In any case, likedon’t talk to strangers, it was a rule we took for granted: slave boys were simply not to be touched, and that didn’t change when you turned eighteen: it just meantyougot charged with a crime instead of your parents and got sentenced to slavery if you couldn’t pay the fine. I, personally—up until recently, maybe—had always wondered why anyone would want to touch a slave boy. After all, you wouldn’t kiss a designer table lamp, any more than you would smash it on the ground and destroy it for no reason.

But now that I thought about it, that sounded just … bad.

Anyway, the merethoughtof Rebekah should be enough to wipe all thoughts of last night out of my mind forever. Should be.

Last night.Every single thought of it sent a jolt of electricity through me, as pure as if someone had flicked a goddamn switch. Hell, it was no wonder Corey had said what he had. He must have seen it flashing across my face like a black-and-white slow-motion movie.Everyonemust have.

I’d awoken this morning and crept breathlessly into the kitchen, stomach twisting, heart pounding, toes flexing on the cold kitchen floor, curl clamped tight between my teeth. All in anticipation of what—who—I might encounter. But the only slave there was the maid, boiling steel-cut oats and glaring at me to get lost, complete with her usual stuck-up, sexy pout. The guy—the boy—the slave—whoever he was—was nowhere to befound. Was he asleep? Had he left? Or had I conjured him up from the depths of my sex-starved, sleep-deprived brain? I even, for a half-second of insanity, considered dropping down to the slave quarters—an area of the house off-limits to me, not that I’d ever cared—to see if there were any new faces down there.

Then I came to my senses. Better to forget it ever happened. If he existed, he clearly had forgotten it, too. I’d been sleep-deprived and delirious last night. I had not, repeatnot, been flirting with a slave, let alone one whose face I couldn’t even see, let alone one living in my own house.

Okay, maybe I had. But I wouldn’t do itagain. What if Daddy found out?

“Lou?”

I whirled around. “What?”

Juliette held out her hands. “Whoa, relax. I was just saying, I’m sick of talking about this stuff. Want to check out Fig and Firkin tonight? Atlas from the mixer last night is deejaying.”

“Who, Ping Pong Man?”

She fluttered her eyelashes modestly. “He invited me. Anyway, I feel bad that I kept bugging you last night when you couldn’t be there. But you really do need to have some fun, instead of rehashing all this boring history shit.”

“History shit?” I couldn’t help but protest. “These are current events, Jules. Hell, there are slaves working at Fig and Firkin. Who do you think cleans the toilets and washes the glasses?” In fact, one-third of the people on our very campus were slaves—virtually all of the grounds and cleaning crews and most of the service workers, too. There was one over in the corner mopping the floor right now.

“I know, but who cares? All that matters is that they don’t look very hard at phony IDs. Come on, Lou. You deserve it. You’ve been thinking too hard.”

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