Page 13 of Poster Girl

Renee’s face contorts. None of them like the doctor.

The apartment looks just like every other apartment in the Aperture: one big room with kitchen and bathroom attached to it like a boil. Instead of a bed dominating the small space, there’s medical equipment: an exam table, a cabinet full of supplies, a few machines in a row. This is the only room in the Aperture that is allowed a lock, or people would have stolen all the supplies ages ago.

Dr. Shannon is an older woman, stern, her hair worn as short as Sonya’s but white as snow. Her hands sometimes shake when she uses her stethoscope. She can never find Sonya’s veins when she draws blood, which she observes each time with an accusatory air, as if Sonya is making her veins small on purpose. She checks her watch when Sonya walks in.

“I got the message at an inconvenient time,” Sonya says. “I came when I could.”

“Well, fine, I suppose you don’t normally need much time anyway,” Dr. Shannon says. “Sit on the table and let me take your blood pressure.”

Sonya goes through the ritual of it: stripping off her cardigan, rolling up her sleeves, sitting on the cold metal table that Dr. Shannon sanitizes after each visit, putting her arm out for the blood pressure cuff that squeezes her, stepping on the scale that pronounces her weight “healthy enough,” eyeing the paper folder Dr. Shannon flips through to remind herself of Sonya’s medical history.

“You seem fine,” Dr. Shannon says. “Time for your shot.”

Sonya turns her arm out.

The injection lasts for a year, though Sonya hasn’t needed it to prevent pregnancy since David died. It’s mandatory for every person in the Aperture with the capacity to bear children.

She knew David from her life before, but only as a name and a face at the back of a classroom, nothing more. One night early in her Aperture sentence, she danced with him at a party—he was the only one there who knew the foxtrot. Later, her lips burning with moonshine, she went back to his apartment and took off all her clothes to let himlook at her. He was just a body, then. And she just wanted someone to touch her.

He wasn’t Aaron, and that wasn’t difficult in the way that she had expected. Aaron had been an inevitability, and she had wanted him in the same way she wanted childhood to end and the rest of her life to begin. Under the Delegation, though, being with David would have cost her DesCoin—and that was all she wanted, right after she was locked in the Aperture: to shed as much DesCoin as possible, now that the Delegation was gone. She drank and smoked and swore and stripped herself bare and let herself want, and she expected it to mean something, tochangesomething.

And then David died of his own volition. She hosted his funeral in a black dress in the center of the Aperture, where she said little, just laid a dandelion seed head on the pavement to watch its seeds split off into the wind.

“Is there a way to just eliminate the possibility of pregnancy forever?” Sonya says, as Dr. Shannon prepares the syringe. “Without surgery, I mean?”

“Technically, yes,” the doctor replies. She dabs the inside of Sonya’s arm with a square of gauze soaked with antiseptic. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Why not?”

“You’re still young. Something could change—”

Sonya laughs. “In here? No, it can’t.”

“The Triumvirate already released some of you,” the doctor says. “Someday, they may release all of you. And you might want to have a child when that happens.”

The needle is sharp and then over. The table doesn’t warm beneath her legs. The air stinks of mildew and dirt. Maybe whoever lived here before—not Alan Dohr, but the person who lived here before this part of the city was seized by the Triumvirate and converted into the Aperture—kept gardening equipment in it. Shovels leaning into the corner. Bags of earth piled near the door. A place for making things new instead of tending to the dying.

Probably not.

Dr. Shannon presses a cotton ball to the injection site and tapes it in place with her free hand.

“Mood rating for the last week?” she asks, as she always does.

“Out of one hundred?”

Every time, out of one hundred. One hundred, a delirium of happiness. Zero, a soul-crushing sorrow.

“Fifty,” she says, without waiting for the doctor to answer.

“You’ve never given me any other rating.”

“That’s because I always feel fine.”

Dr. Shannon strips off her gloves, and throws them in the trash.

“Most people don’t always feel fine, Sonya,” she says. “Particularly when they’ve experienced some of the things you have.”

“How is this relevant to my health?”

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