Page 45 of Poster Girl

She does it again. She closes her eyes, and envisions the red flash of her DesCoin count as it diminishes. Maybe she hasn’t lost her taste for small rebellions after all.

Nine

Sonya is in a dressing room, flanked on both sides by mirrors. Hanging on a hook beside her is a black dress with a full skirt, not unlike one she might have worn to Friday dinner at the Price household to prove that she was worthy of Aaron, her spine flat against the high back of the chair and her mind attuned to the differences between the forks. She started going weekly after the Delegation suggested the match. She and Aaron had been friends for most of their lives, but the promise of the Delegation’s approval—and of the DesCoin that would accompany the wedding, like a dowry—had cemented their relationship, and the Prices had folded her into their family, as the Kantors had embraced Aaron in return.

And she had learned not to look at Alexander, the bundle of disorganized energy and ungainly limbs at the other end of the table. Her eyes tended to get caught on him.

A faint hum fills her head, Knox’s headband disrupting the audio of her Insight. Alexander seemed not to notice it last time, too distracted by the visit from John Clark, but he might notice it after this, and she’s ready to lie to him if she has to.

“Not sure why this is necessary!” Sonya calls out to Knox, who’s waiting for her in the shop.

“You have expectations to meet,” Knox says. “Be a good little princess and put it on.”

The Insight’s constant monitoring meant constant vulnerability, something she trained herself out of thinking about as a child. Herparents assured her the Insight was safe, it wouldn’t watch her change or shower, but that reassurance was empty after the uprising, locked away by enemies who had no reason to exercise restraint. At first, in the Aperture, she changed in the dark and showered without looking at her body, but that level of vigilance couldn’t be sustained for long. She hasn’t thought about it in a long time, but it’s different now, knowing there’s one specific person who could be watching her. Knowing it’s Alexander.

She takes off her coat and her sweater—pilling everywhere and mended half a dozen times—and her pants—dotted orange at the knee from a bleach mishap. She stands in just her underwear, as worn as the rest of the clothes she wears, the elastic rippling at the waist. Gravity is already beginning to catch her, tugging at her forehead, her breasts, her hips, her thighs—just enough for her to notice. She dares him to look at her. She makes herself pause before stepping into the dress to convince herself she’s not afraid of being seen.

When she steps into the dress, though, she steps backward in time. The skirt reaches just past her knees; the waist is snug.

“You decent?” Knox calls out. She steps into the dressing room without waiting for an answer. “Never mind, I don’t care. Let me zip you.”

Knox’s hands are cold, and she’s not gentle with the zipper.

“Looks right,” Knox says. “I’ll get you some shoes. What size?”

“Eight.”

She leaves again, and Sonya feels the ghost of hair on her shoulders, what she would have felt the last time she wore something like this. But it hasn’t been that long in a decade.

Sonya’s mother helped her get ready for the graduation dance just a month before the uprising. They went to pick out a new dress together, a stark white sheath, an echo of a wedding gown. Susanna joked it looked like a towel wrapped around her, because Susanna never could say anything nice to Sonya about how she looked. But their mother had whispered, as she zipped Sonya into it, that she looked beautiful. And Sonya had believed her.

Later, in a stolen moment, Aaron’s mouth against her throat, he toldher she looked obscene, and she thought it was worth the DesCoin it cost her to hear it.

The choreography of getting dressed is the same now. Knox’s hands on the zipper. Standing barefoot on the cold floor. The tickle of nervousness in her throat. People say history repeats, Sonya thinks, but they don’t mention that it warps every time.

She runs her fingers over the skirt. The fabric is thick and smooth; it falls just right. Knox walks in again while she does it and meets her eyes in the mirror.

“Here,” she says, thrusting a pair of shoes at her. They are matte black, like the dress, and have a low heel.

“Didn’t take you for someone who cared about fashion,” Sonya says. Knox is wearing black pants and a white T-shirt. There is a thin gold chain around her wrist with a silver locket at the end of it.

“I know what’s nice,” Knox says. “Meet you out there. We need to find somewhere to discuss the plan.”

Sonya folds the clothes she was wearing and carries the stack out of the dressing room. The woman at the register stared at her when she first came in, her eyes following Sonya around the shop as Knox picked out a few dresses, and she stares now, too.

“Excuse me,” Sonya says, “do you have a bag I can put my clothes in?”

“Oh—of course,” the woman says, and she ducks under the counter to search.

The light above her flickers out, leaving them in semidarkness. The clerk curses, and bumps her head on the counter as she straightens.

“That’s the third time this week,” she says, pointing up at the light fixture. “Sorry about that.”

She rings up the dress and shoes in the half-light. Sonya looks up at the fixture. She steps back into the dressing room to pick up the stool in the corner and carries it to the front of the shop, where Knox is holding her Elicit over a sensor near the counter to pay.

Sonya puts the stool down under the light fixture. “Can you turn off the power for a second?”

The clerk frowns at her, but Knox, eyebrow raised, walks to the backof the store where the door to the circuit breaker has been painted with little yellow flowers to disguise it. She flips the switch as Sonya climbs up on the stool and unscrews the lightbulb.

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