Page 4 of Poster Girl

“Oh yes,” Charlotte says. “The goodbye party, I forgot.”

Sonya ignores the sad tug at the corners of Charlotte’s mouth. “Tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, that will be fine.”

Nikhil and Georgia are still arguing. Sonya rejoins them just long enough to hear Georgia accuse Nikhil of giving her bad tomatoes the last time he bought something, and then she clears her throat.

“Five tomatoes,” Sonya says. “It’s a generous offer and I won’t repeat it.”

Georgia sighs, and agrees. Sonya hands over the tomatoes.

Nikhil stays in the market all day, sometimes, talking to everyone. But not her. She goes back to Building 4 with the clock radio under one arm, alone.

She takes the little tomato she stole and bites into it, the taste of summer breaking over her tongue.

Sonya owns one nice dress. It appeared in a heap of Merciful Hands donations two years ago, a shock of butter yellow. She saw the others pining for it, and she knew the generous thing to do—the thing that would have earned her DesCoin under the Delegation—would be to let one of the younger ones have it. But she couldn’t let go of it. She folded it over her arm and took it home, where it hung in front of the tapestry for weeks, like a painted sun.

She keeps it under her bed now, in a cardboard box with the rest of her clothing. She takes it out and shakes it, sending dust into the air. It’s creased at the waist, where she folded it, but there’s not much shecan do about that. Mrs. Pritchard is the only one in the building with an iron.

As she puts it on, she thinks of her mother. Julia Kantor went to parties all the time. To get ready, she sat on the tufted stool at her vanity to twist her hair into an updo. Tipped perfume onto her finger, and then dabbed it behind her ear. Poked at her drawer of jewelry to find just the right pair of earrings—the pearls, the diamonds, or the little gold hoops. Her hands were so elegant that everything looked like an elaborate pantomime.

Sonya touches the back of her neck—bare, because she cuts her hair with clippers now, but the habit is hard to break. She twists a hand behind her back to push up the zipper. The dress is a little off, too big in the waist, too tight in the shoulders. It floats to her knees.

The party is in the courtyard of Building 3. She’ll have to walk past Building 2 to get there, so she tucks a short knife into her pocket.

But this time, Gray Street is empty. She can hear laughing and shouting from one of the apartments, the thrum of music, a glass shattering. The scrape of her own footsteps. She walks through the center of the Aperture, where the market has been cleared away. She hops over a crack and turns down the tunnel that leads to the courtyard of Building 3.

If Building 4 is a place of reminiscence and Building 2 is a place of chaos, Building 3 is a place of pretending. Not pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist, but pretending that life in the Aperture can be just as good. Building 3 hosts weddings and dinner parties and poker nights; they teach classes; they do calisthenics in little groups, running back and forth down Green Street and then Gray Street, and marching up and down the building’s stairs.

Sonya is bad at pretending.

The courtyard is not as well tended as the one in Building 4, but there are few weeds, and someone has pruned back the trees so they don’t tickle the interior windows. A string of lights hangs from one side to the other; only a few have gone dead in their sockets. There’s a little table set up on the right side, where candle stubs in glass jars flicker with light.

“Sonya!” A young woman sets a basket of bread down in front of the candles, dusts off her hands, and reaches for Sonya. Her name is Nicole.

Sonya hugs her, the can she brought digging into her ribs.

“Oh,” Nicole says. “What did you bring?”

“Your favorite,” Sonya says, holding up the can. The label is worn, but the picture on it is still intact: sliced peaches.

“Wow.” Nicole holds the can in both hands, and it reminds Sonya of catching butterflies as a child, how she peered into the gap between her hands to see their wings. “I can’t accept this! These come around, what, once a year?”

“I’ve been saving them for this exact occasion,” Sonya says. “Ever since the Act passed.”

Nicole’s smile is crooked, half-pleased and half-sad. The Children of the Delegation Act passed months ago, allowing those residents of the Aperture who were children when they entered it to be released back into society. Nicole is one of the oldest who was cleared to leave. She was sixteen when she was locked away.

Sonya was seventeen. She won’t be going anywhere.

“Let me get a can opener,” Nicole says, but Sonya takes out her knife. She carves a neat circle into the top of the can, then taps it to pop it up on one side. Other people are arriving, but for a moment it’s just Sonya and Nicole, standing shoulder to shoulder with their fingers stuck in syrup. Sonya slurps a peach slice, and it’s sweet and fibrous and tart. She licks the syrup off her fingers. Nicole closes her eyes.

“They won’t taste quite like that out there, will they?” she says. “I’ll be able to get them anytime, and they’ll stop seeming as good.”

“Maybe,” Sonya says. “But you can get other things, too. Better things.”

“That’s my point, though.” Nicole pinches another peach slice between her fingers. “No matter what I get, nothing will ever taste as good as this does right now.”

Sonya looks over Nicole’s shoulder at those who have just arrived: Nicole’s mother, Winnie, a doe-eyed woman who lives in Building 1; Winnie’s friends, Sylvia and Karen, their hair in matching soda cancurls; and a smattering of people from Building 3, including the others who were too old to qualify under the Act. Renee and Douglas, who were married two years ago in this courtyard, and Kevin and Marie, recently engaged. Marie wears Kevin’s old class ring, stuffed with wax to make it fit on the right finger.

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