Page 43 of Poster Girl

Renee snorts a little and drops the cigarette in Sonya’s palm.

Their Insights meet, flash a little brighter in recognition of each other. Sonya tries to imagine Renee without one, her right eye dim, a sliver of a scar at her temple. Her eyes drop to the swell of Renee’s stomach—not a pregnancy, because no one can get pregnant in the Aperture, but time, shifting her body into a new shape.

“I should have gone to David’s funeral,” Renee says.

“Wasn’t really a funeral.”

“Yeah, but I should have gone.”

Sonya tucks the cigarette into her pocket.

“I get it, you know,” she says. “He was hard to be around, in the end.”

“He was like some kind of prophet,” Renee says. “Only nobody wants to hear about the future in here.”

David was always preoccupied with the pointlessness of it all. That with no children, no newcomers, time was just paring the Aperture down to the bone. One day there would just be a few of them left, he said, the youngest ones, and what would they do, among all those hollowed-out apartments, empty streets, bare courtyards? He didn’t want to be around to find out.

He didn’t leave a note.

“Are Kevin and Marie home?” she says.

“Probably,” Renee says. “Why?”

Sonya stands in Renee’s door frame and points one hand right, one hand left, in a question.

“Right,” Renee says.

She follows Sonya to the right, in her champagne negligee and bare feet. Marie is the one who answers Sonya’s knock, her short dark hair piled on top of her head in a half-knot, her body swimming in an oversized gray sweatshirt. Her apartment, unlike Renee’s, is spartan—no mess and no excess, nothing that doesn’t have a purpose. Kevin is sprawled on the bed that takes up most of the living space, holding a book over his head.

“Yes?” Marie says.

“I need to talk to Kevin.”

Marie sighs, and steps back to let her in.

Kevin closes his book with a snap and sits up, his long legs dangling over the edge of the bed. The sheets have crisp corners.

“Hey there, Sonya,” Kevin says. He puts special emphasis on her name. He’s always been difficult to read, his soft, sleepy eyes at odds with his occasional sharp remark. Renee once told Sonya that he was a bully in high school, but a few years ago Sonya saw him coaxing an injured mouse into a shoebox in the courtyard below, cooing at it under his breath. The inconsistencies make her nervous.

She says, “Charlotte told me you used to work in Insight assignations.”

“Yeah,” Kevin says. “Mostly a data entry job, though, not the exciting stuff.”

“I’m trying to find out how a person would get an Insight for her illegal daughter,” Sonya says. “I wondered if you knew anything about that.”

Over in the kitchen, Marie stops scrubbing the countertop.

“A person,” Kevin says. “You mean the parents of that girl you’re looking for.”

“Her name is Grace.”

“Have you considered that maybeGraceis better off where she is, wherever she is?” Marie says.

This is your Alice,Grace Ward says, in Sonya’s head.

“She remembers her parents,” Sonya says. “So, no. She’s not better off.”

Marie’s posture relaxes by a fraction. She resumes scrubbing.

---