Shoko’s hazy expression suddenly snaps into focus as she holds a creamy yellow Big Belly Jelly between her swollen fingers.
“Lemon ginger!” she says to no one in particular. “Aids the digestion.” She pops it into her mouth and then, as an aside, in between chews: “Burrito’s got his foot stuck in my poop chute.”
I snort with laughter.
“Excuse me,” Ventura says sharply. “I’m the one with the pee stick. I’ve still got the floor.”
“Sorry, Ventura,” Shoko says. “Burrito is making me stoooopid. I can’t stay focused for . . . um . . . you know . . .
shit.”
Heads all around the circle nod in sympathy.
“Well, that’s all the more reason to vote before you go on birthleave,” says Ventura, tossing her glossy black hair over her shoulder. Ventura for seriously lucked out on the hormonal draw because her hair is more lustrous now than ever before. Poor Celine Lichtblau (freshman, amateur, eleven weeks) is losing her hair by the handful and she’s still got two trimesters left. By the time she reaches her due date, she’ll be balder than the delivery she pushes out in the stirrups.
I’m now shaking my hand like a Cheerclone without her pom-poms. Shoko’s face is back in the Big Belly Jellies. Ventura and her adorable six-month bump stand up and look over and beyond our little group, assuming a self-important posture as if she’s about to address a crowd of thousands, not tens.
“If I’m so lucky to be voted our next president today,” Ventura says, winking at the group, “I’ll make it my mission to rilly overhaul our image. We need to get sexier to attract more girls to our cause.”
She puts on her most life-or-death serious face.
“I know you’re all aware of the unfortunate circumstances that led to the dismissal of our former vice president.”
The whole room titters nervously. Ventura’s tone is somber, and yet her heart-shaped face takes on an even rosier glow.
“We live in frightening times, girls, and we need to be role models, not reneggers.”
Oh, no. I can already see where she’s going with this.
“It’s our duty to work together as professionals and amateurs to promote positive pregging for the sake of all the parental units who desperately want our deliveries. Do you appreciate how lucky we are to live in a true melting pot of races, ethnicities, and cultures? In the United States, deliveries of every color and creed are valued. Do you know that if we lived in the Middle East, or parts of Europe, we would be forced by law to pregg with our own kind to keep the gene pool pure?” A ripple of gasps moves through the group. “I know. It’s shocking to think that the government would try to stick its nose in our ladyparts.”
I’m hoping Shoko will break in with a joke about Burrito sticking his nose in her ladyparts, but she’s as hypnotized as the rest of them.
“Our mixmatchy preggs are the best way to promote peace around the world. Who are you going to hate if you have blood running through you from every continent?” She casts a sly glance in my direction. “That is, unless you’re like Melody here, who’s so pure that no swimmers are worthy of her womb. . . . Just scamming!”
Barely muffled laugher all around the room.
I hate Ventura Vida. I want to draw blood. And I’m not scamming.
“For the first time in history, teenage girls are the most important people on the planet.” She sings the last few words, of course. “We can’t all be like Zorah Harding, who, as we all know, is due to make her ninth and tenth deliveries any moment now!”
The room breaks into applause for the most famously prolific eighteen-year-old in America.
“But we can all aspire to her greatness, can’t we? Whether you’re an amateur”—and she pauses to look meaningfully at Celine and Tulie—“or a professional Surrogette”—she stops again to lock eyes with Dyanna and a captivated Shoko—“our nation needs all our preggs, girls, if we have any chance of reclaiming our undisputed status as the most powerful country in the world well into the twenty-first century and beyond. If we hesitate”—and now she slowly turns her head in my direction again—“our multicultural American society, a shining beacon of tolerance and empathy around the world, will die. I mean, like, rilly rilly die.”
Everyone is on their swollen feet. Everyone, including my best friend. Some are clapping, some are crying, all are rocking their huge bellies with patriotic pride. I imagine an army of unseen deliveries pumping tiny fists. “USA! USA! USA!”
Even before the votes are cast—all but two (thanks, Shoko) in Ventura’s favor—there’s no doubt in my mind that I am rilly, rilly humped.
“TONIGHT?”
A look of disappointment crosses Jondoe face. “I know,” he says apologetically. “I also wish we could get down to business right now,” he says with a wolfish smile. “But you’re my fourth call of the day. Even I need downtime to reload.”
The fire deep in my belly shows no sign of fizzling out.
“On the upside, we’ve got a few hours to make some media.”
He suddenly jumps up, heads to the windows, looks outside. He flexes his arms above his head, flashes a smile, holds completely still for a few beats, then drops his arms and the smile.
“What?” How is it possible to be so enthralled by someone I can barely understand?
“You didn’t get the itinerary?” His face contorts in something resembling anger for the first time. “My assistant should have messaged you earlier. This is totally unprofessional!” He sighs heavily. “We’re going to all your favorite places. The Avatarcade, then the All-Sports Arena, followed by dinner at the U.S. Buff-A . . .”
This all sounds very exciting. “So it’s a date?”
“A date? I’ve never been on a date.”
“Me either,” I say truthfully. We don’t date in Goodside. We marry.
“I’ve had good hangs, but a date?” He can’t stop smiling at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone under a hundred years old use that word. Though it is kind of cute . . .”
He starts walking out of the room before looking back behind him.
“Are you coming with me or not?”
Come, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me . . .
I nod yes before I can say no.
I’M IGNORING MORE THAN 250 MESSAGES MINETTED WHILE I AM in school. I can wait until I get home to check them. I’m in no rush for 250 variations on SORRY U LOST.
The MiNet blind actually extends a hundred yards in all directions around our campus. About a dozen students are clustered on the first unblinded patch of sidewalk, too eager to catch up on eight technology-free hours to walk another step. The MiGamers are the most dangerous because they’re too busy racing, blowing up, or otherwise challenging competitors in the virtual world to pay attention to people in the real world. Just last week a MiGamer was kickboxing a demonic gnome in Troll Troopers 4: Garden of Good and Evil and accidentally skulled a freshman mathlete with his foot. (The mathlete, of course, was too focused on his own chess match against a twelve-year-old Russian prodigy to get out of harm’s way.) Those on MiTunes or MiChat don’t jump around as much, but tend to sing or talk way out loud.
“It’s human nay-cha . . .”
“And he was like, WHOO-HOO . . .”
“For me to sperminay-cha . . .”
“And I was like, NUH-UH.”
“I wanna impregnay-cha . . .”
All of it contributes to the noisy muddle of nonsense that I can’t get away from far or fast enough. One of the sidewalk MiChatters is Zen, wearing black shorts and a tiger-striped zip-front jacket. He must have had a match this afternoon.
“Dude, I’m telling you. If you’re serious about the game, you’ve got to stop spreading your seed around. When I’ve got an important match, I store enough hornergy to power up every electricar on the eastern seaboard. . . .”
“Hornergy” is Zen’s term for the indomitable athletic edge powered by sexual restraint. The basketball, baseball, and football te
ams haven’t had a winning season in years. The table-tennis team, however, is undefeated.
I weave my bike in and out of the babbling crowd and don’t even wait to see if he notices me. I’m about to pass right by him when he holds out his arm to stop me.
“Wait,” he says. Then he unfocuses his attention and says, “Later, bro,” to whomever he was MiChatting with, before winking, blinking, and shutting it off and fixing his attention back on me.
“I was just giving some advice to the captain of the lacrosse team,” he says. “They lost again.”
“Oh,” I say.
“You lost too,” he says, walking his bike alongside mine.
“Ventura sure didn’t waste any time in alerting the MiNet, did she?”
Zen rakes his scalp. “I don’t know why you even wanted to run in the first place,” he says. “How does a virge on the verge represent the interests of the Pro/Am Alliance?”
I sigh. “Shoko said the same thing. Did you guys co-write your script? And don’t call me that.”
“What?”
“A virgin on the verge of obsolescence. It’s offensive.”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”
I halt my bike. “It’s not true. I have at least a year left to bump!” I hate having to defend myself to Zen of all people. “And unless you’ve got some cure for the Virus that you’re keeping to yourself instead of sharing it with the world and going down in history as the hero who rescued humanity from its slow trudge toward mass extinction, then you’re also on the clock. If I’m a virge on the verge, so are you.”
“And so we are,” he says in a satisfied voice. “Beep. Beep. Beep. Boom.”
We climb onto our bikes and ride together in a tense silence—him in front, me following behind. At a red light, Zen reaches out and—RING! RING!—triggers my bell. The he looks up at me with total seriousness.
“I know what would solve all our problems.”
“What?”
“It’s human nay-cha . . . For me to sperminay-cha. . . .”
I have to laugh. For serious, life would be so much easier if I could just take Zen up on his offer, make good on our secret pact, and get the whole thing over with already. Maybe it could even solve my parents’ financial problems. I mean, if Shoko and Raimundo could make out so well in their postdelivery bidding . . .
Who am I kidding? No one who can pay serious money would be willing to take the risk on Zen.
Zen is humping his bicycle as he sings, “Don’t hesitay-cha . . . Or it will be too lay-cha. . . .”
I punch him in the arm, then move forward at the sight of the green light.
“Hey, watch it, there,” Zen says. “This arm belongs to the number one table-tennis player in the county.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I forgot to even ask about your match. Did you win?”
“No need to ask. Of course I won,” he says. “Mel, my hornergy could end our country’s use of fossil fuels once and for all. I was just telling the lacrosse guys that I can thank my virge-on-the-verge-ness for my total dominance over all my opponents.”
I clutch a hand to my chest, pretending to swoon. “And to think you would have given it all up just to cheer me up.”
I am feeling better. Losing to Ventura doesn’t seem like the omnicidal tragedy it was a half hour ago. Such is the power of Zen.
“I wasn’t just offering to help you,” he says grandly. “But all of humanity.”
“Oh, really?”
He pauses for effect. “I’m starting to agree with the ranters who think the world is overpopulated with all the wrong people.”
I choke as if I’ve just swallowed a soccer ball. Just when I’m about to accuse Zen of being the unlikeliest eugenicist, he explains himself.
“Old people,” he explains. “There are too many old people with their old ideas and not enough new people with new ideas. We are in a state of cultural stagnation—I mean, the last great technological innovation was the MiNet, and that’s been around for more than a decade. Did you ever stop to think about why we drink Coke ’99? Because old people want the formula they drank when when they were young like us.”
“But I like Coke ’99. . . .”
“Of course you love it! Because all the old people who control all of mass media and commercial enterprises have manipulated the system to bend to their grampy whims! Old people control everything because there are so many more of them than there ever will be of us. Unless we want to wait until our parents’ generation finally takes a dirtnap, it’s up to thinking people like you and me to come together and create the next generation of innovators and game-changers. . . .”
I stop my bike and look Zen straight in the eye.
“Do you really believe this? Or are you still trying to have sex with me?”
Zen grins. “A skilled debater always knows how to win both sides of an argument.”
I FOLLOW JONDOE OUT OF THE ROOM, DOWN THE HALL TOWARD the entrance to the house. He stops right before the front door, looks me up and down.
“Are you sure you want to wear your hair like that?”
I touch my braid.
“It’s just that I always saw you with your hair down, except when you were on the soccer field.”
Every girl in our settlement wears her hair in a single braid. It’s one less distraction that can keep us focused on faith. I remove the elastic, and pull out the plaits, and let my hair loose. Something deeper and more fundamentally me is coming apart too. . . .
“Relax,” Jondoe says. “Let the pro handle it. I’ll do all the talking. Just remember to smile.”
And before I get to ask him why, the mirrored sunglasses go on and his teeth come out. He opens the front door and I am blinded by intense beams of light shooting at me from all directions.
This is it! The end! The Rapture!
Lights flash all around us, and I falter on wobbly knees. Jondoe puts his arm around me protectively, pulls me to his car, opens the door, gently shoves me inside, and closes the door behind me. I want to tell him it’s no use trying to get away in his car, the angels find us and carry us away no matter where or how well we hide. I’m screaming on the inside, I can’t get any of the words out. He, however, is unshaken. Jondoe rushes around to the driver’s side, opens the door, and slips in beside me.
Before he shuts the door he leans out and shouts, “Suck on this, scummers!”
Then he starts the engine, stomps the foot pedal, and we make our escape in a swirling dust bowl of gray earth and gravel.
WE DON’T SAY ANYTHING UNTIL MY HOUSE IS IN SIGHT.
“So what’s the plan?” Zen asks.
“What’s what plan?”
“How are we going to get your sister to stay?”
“Not that again,” I huff. “She’s a person, not one of your causes.”
“People are my cause.”
Unlike Zen, I didn’t think much about Harmony all day. After being alone in the house for hours, I imagine that Harmony is eager to see me. Did she really amuse herself all day by reading the Bible? I get to the front door and I notice that she’s left it unlocked. I’ll need to remind Harmony that even though we’re not in a high-crime zone, we’re not on the farm anymore either.
“Hey, Harmony,” I call out. “I’m home.”
No response.
Zen comes in behind me. “Where’s my favorite Goodsider?”
No response. The silence makes me uneasy.
“Maybe she’s taking a nap,” I say unconvincingly. When I check the guest room I’m not surprised that it’s empty.
“Maybe she went back home,” Zen says, clearly disappointed.
“Her suitcase is still here.” As is the dress she was wearing when I left this morning, which is folded neatly on her bed . . . next to her veil.
This isn’t good.
Zen pulls on his hair. “I’ll check to see if she left a note or something.”
I head down the hall and peek inside my room, thinking she might have
slept in there again, as she doesn’t know I know she did last night. (I didn’t say anything to her about it because I didn’t want to make her feel more blinked than she very clearly already felt at breakfast this morning.) Though there are signs that she was definitely in here at some point during the day—my bedspread is messed up—she isn’t there now.
“No note,” Zen says.
I start to worry now. If I knew she was back in Goodside, I’d be fine. But all signs point to her being on the loose in Princeton, probably faithing hard in Palmer Square, asking people I know if they have God . . .
“Zen! She went out without her veil! Everyone will think she’s me!”
“So what?”
“What’s to stop her from marching up to Ventura Vida and quoting—oh, I don’t know—the book of Virgin Mary chapter whatever, which says, ‘Thou art a dirty whore and thy pregg is a bastard and thou wilt burn in hell’?”
Zen stops dead. “Does the Bible really say that?”
“YES!” I scream.
“Dose down,” Zen says, his eyeballs flicking wildly in his sockets. “There’s nothing new on the MiNet about you. Just the same stuff about getting humped by Ventura in the election. And if she does show up, you can always say it’s a prank. . . .”
I scan the unread MiNet queue for the day, thinking maybe Harmony somehow tried to contact me while I was at school. There are few from my parents, a dozen nonsense messages from Lib asking random questions like RU TERMIN8ED? HOW IZZE? and tons of scamspam claiming to be Jondoe of all people telling me how reproaesthetical I am and how special and surprising I am and how he’s never met a girl like me before. Gah. Are there any girls out there who are gullible enough to believe that the hottest RePro in the world wants to MiChat them up?
I know I should be focusing on my missing twin, but I can’t stop thinking about the number of messages from Lib. He’s in Stockholm right now scouting for Scandinavian talent. I haven’t heard from him in weeks and to get so many in such a short amount of time must mean something even if I can’t make any sense of what that something might be right now. My curiosity is about to get the better of me when the doorbell rings.