Page 67 of Poster Girl

His voice wavers only once, on “Aaron and Nora Price,” as he fumbles with his flashlight to turn it on. When he finishes, they stand in silence, all their flashlights turned on, casting an eerie glow on every face, so they look ghostly. Appropriate, since they’re remnants of the ones they lost, incomplete, hollowed out.

Someone turns off their flashlight, and everyone else soon follows. She thinks about trying to find Nikhil in the crowd, but she doesn’t want to tell him that all hope is lost, that the impossible task she believed she had been assigned at the beginning really is impossible now. Instead she finds herself moving toward Renee, standing nearby with Douglas and the others from Building 3.

“What happened to your face?” Renee asks.

Sonya almost forgot about the cut on her cheek, the bruise on her jaw. She shrugs.

“Fell in with some bad people out there,” she says.

Renee frowns.

“Well, we’re going to the roof to get drunk,” she says. “Want to come?”

“Yeah,” Sonya says. “I do.”

Marie, Kevin, and Douglas are trying to sing a round, a song from the school they all attended as children, but Kevin keeps missing the moment. He throws off the rhythm, and Marie stumbles over her words, and then all three of them collapse into laughter. It’s happened a handful of times, but every time it makes them laugh harder.

Renee passes the bottle to Sonya. Sonya takes it, and sips. She recognizes the shape of the bottle—it used to hold flavored iced tea. It still has the ridges from the label, and the logo at the bottom.

The moonshine tastes like melted plastic. It burns Sonya’s chapped lips. She licks them clean, and tastes the air, wet and cool.

“How many did you have today?” Renee says. Her eyes are unfocused and dull. She rolls her flashlight between her palms, pressing the button each time. On, then off. On, then off.

“Sips? I don’t know, I haven’t been keeping track,” Sonya says. Her mouth is getting clumsy, the sounds running together. “Why, you gonna charge me a newspaper for each one?”

“No, no.” Renee snorts a little. “People. How many people did they read for you today?”

“Oh, dead family, you mean?” Sonya sets the bottle down betweenthem. She doesn’t remember who makes this liquor. It might be made out of potatoes, or apples. Both are more common in the Aperture than other ingredients. “Three. Mom, Dad, sister. You?”

“One. My brother. My dad died when I was a kid, and my mom’s still out there.” Renee gestures to the city beyond them. It’s the same view Sonya has from her windows. The fireworks are finished now, for the most part. Every now and then there’s a pop, a whizz of light through the air. “Pretending shetriedto help her misguided children, but they just wouldn’tlisten...”

“They didn’t drag her in here anyway?”

“No, she helped the uprising, apparently. No idea how.”

“Nice of her to bring you into it.”

“It was, wasn’t it.” Renee smiles. “Still, I guess I’m glad she’s not dead.”

She picks up the bottle and holds it out to Sonya.

“To your lost trio,” she says, and she drinks.

“To your brother,” Sonya says.

Sonya lost more than three. She lost Aaron and Nora, too. Her closest friend from school, Tana, tried to flee with her family, and they didn’t even make it out of the city. The people she saw every day, sat with at lunch, traded notes with in classes—some of them are in the Aperture, some are outside of it, but a handful of them are dead. And then there’s David. Not killed in the uprising, of course, but crushed by the Aperture, its permanence.

Sonya takes the bottle out of Renee’s hand, and shrugs off her coat. She’s hot now, though the air is cold. She wants to feel the air on her skin, so she climbs up on the ledge of the building and starts to walk like it’s a tightrope, her arms out to the sides.

“You know what I can’t forget?” she says.

“What the hell are you doing?” Renee says. She sounds afraid. “Get down, you’ll fall off!”

“Will I?” Sonya looks at her, and picks up one of her feet. Renee is on her feet, reaching for her. Sonya takes a swig of moonshine and dances back, so she’s out of reach. “Like I was saying—I can’t forgetthe steps. You know, to all those dances they made us memorize.” She steps forward and back, holding her arms up in a pantomime of a partnered waltz.

“Yeah, I remember those, too,” Douglas says. He’s on his feet now, and the others have stopped singing. “Come down here, let’s show everyone.”

“Aaron wasn’t a good dancer. He didn’t know how to lead, so I had to do it half the time, at those practice sessions,” she says. “It was odd, because helovedto tell people what to do. Helovedit. And nobody thought I could do much of anything.” She laughs. “Guess they weren’t wrong.”

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