Page 3 of Poster Girl

“Too good for us, probably,” Seby says. He picks his teeth with a fingernail.

“Are you, then?” Gabe grins. He smells like moonshine and lavender soap. “Not how I remember it.”

Sonya lifts his arm away from her shoulders and gives him a little shove. “Go find someone else to bother, Gabe.”

All four of them laugh at her.

“Good afternoon, boys,” Nikhil says then. “Hope you’re staying out of trouble.”

“Of course, Mr. Price. Just catching up with our old friend.”

“I see,” Nikhil says. “Well, as it happens, we are on an errand, so we’ll be on our way.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Price.” Gabe wiggles his fingers at her, but doesn’t follow them.

Building 2, where most of the younger people ended up after they were all locked in, is the most chaotic place in the Aperture. Logan was in school with Sonya once, a few grades above her. He almost burned down Building 2 last year while cooking a drug made out of cold medicine. And there are always fumes from tubs of moonshine wafting around the building’s courtyard. There was a time when she could identify who made each batch by how it burned her nose and pinched her throat. All anyone wants in Building 2 is to grind time down like a molar.

Gray Street meets Green Street in a stretch of cracked pavement, covered now in old quilts and heaps of all manner of things: stained or ripped clothes piled high, stacks of cans with the labels scrubbed off, cords with frayed ends, folding chairs, split pillows, dented pots. Forthe most part, they’re castoffs, donated by people outside the Aperture. The organization that collected them, Merciful Hands, comes every month with new offerings and apologetic smiles.

Sometimes people sell the new things they make from the old, a little broom made of a bundle of wire, sheets stitched together from fabric scraps, dining trays made from hardcover books. Those are Sonya’s favorite things. They feel new, and so little here is.

“Look, just as I told you.” Nikhil picks up an old radio alarm clock. It has a screen for a display, with two speakers framing it. Black and squat, chipped at the corners. Wires spraying out the back of it. Georgia, a resident of Building 1, is perched on an old crate behind the graveyard of old electronics.

“Doesn’t work,” she says.

It’s not much of a sales pitch.

Sonya takes the radio from Nikhil and makes a show of peeking in the back to see the innards.

“I don’t know,” she says to Nikhil. “It may not be fixable.”

Her education was not in service of repairing old radios. Nor did it teach her to grow tomatoes on the roof of a crumbling building, or to fend off idle men who were already drunk at noon. She has learned many lessons here in the Aperture that she had no interest in learning. But Nikhil looks hopeful, and he wants her to have a project, so she smiles.

“It’s worth a try,” she says.

“That’s the spirit.”

He negotiates with Georgia. Three tomatoes for a broken radio. No, Georgia says. Seven.

A few feet away, Charlotte Carter waves Sonya over.

She looks like something out of a story, in her gingham dress and her long braid and her skin dappled with freckles and age spots. Her eyes crease at the corners when she smiles at Sonya.

“Sonya, dear,” she says. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Maybe. What do you need?”

“My brother, Graham—over in Building 1, do you know him?”

It’s a silly question. Everyone knows everyone in the Aperture. “We’ve met.”

“Yes, yes. Well, his last stove burner stopped working yesterday, and he hasn’t been able to cook anything since then.” She purses her lips. “He’s been using the one in my apartment.”

“I’ll have to check to see if we’ve got any spare burners,” Sonya says.

“Tonight?” Charlotte sounds eager. The tendons stand out in her throat. “I don’t mean to rush you, it’s just that he tends to cook and then...stay.”

Sonya suppresses a laugh. “I have a party tonight. But I can go in the morning.”

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