A History of Glitter and Blood (18 page)

“One of his brothers would be more likely. . . ,” Beckan says to herself.

Josha's still watching Scrap. “You'll make sure they don't bring his name up? You have a lot of pull down there or something?”

Scrap groans. “Josha, I'm just down there a lot.”

“Yeah, and
why
? You didn't used to go down nearly this much—”

“There's only two of us tricking now!”

“Wow,
really
? You think I didn't know that?”

Beckan looks at Scrap and shakes her head. “Not cool.”

“I wasn't trying . . . to be cool.”

Beckan gets up and hugs Josha.

Scrap says, “Look. What happened to Cricket is all the more reason for us to be really careful. To not be running around stealing things.”

Again, another moment where Beckan and Josha look at each other.

“You're overreacting,” Beckan says. “The war's over. We're just trying to keep it that way.”

“I hope I'm overreacting. I seriously hope so. Are you sure no one saw you go down?”

Josha says, “Stop hovering.”

“There are ways to have fun, okay? There are ways to have fun—”

“We're
looking for Cricket
, you asshole,” Josha says.

“So the paperwork is what, then? What does that have to do with Cricket?”

“You've been trying to get me out of the house for weeks, you think you'd be okay with me freaking multitasking. And you want to talk about intentions?”

Scrap says “What're you talking about” like it's a statement, not a question. Like he already knows exactly what Josha's talking about and doesn't have the words to stop him.

And sure enough, Josha takes the blue notebook off Scrap's nightstand and throws it at the bed before he walks out. The pages flutter open, and clippings from newspapers and older books come loose and fall onto the comforter.

“Shit.”
Scrap starts stuffing everything back in. He is very adept now with his fake arm. He balances the notebook on it, uses the wrist to tuck pages back into the pockets, scoops up pages between the fingers.

But Beckan stops him. “What is this?” she says.

“It's nothing. Just something I've been working on. A journal.”

“I saw my name.”

“It's nothing,” he says, but he doesn't fight when she takes it out of his hands.

She opens it near the beginning and reads a little.

“Even though Beckan was only a tooth, an eye, and an ear away from living alone, Scrap and Cricket's parentless house felt lawless to
her in a way hers never did. Maybe that one eye was enough to make her feel watched—though she had to admit that, more and more often, she was leaving her father tucked away in corners or stuffed, as he was now, at the bottom of her tote bag—or maybe it was that her father's apartment could somehow never feel small and bright and reckless in the way of this cottage, where every corner felt filled with something easy and significant, like family.”

“You're writing about me?” she says.

“No, it isn't about you. It's about the war. I'm using us, but just as a device.”

“What? I'm not a device!”

“No, that's not what I—”

“No, but you're pretending to be in my head,” she says. “You're writing as me.”

“And Josha! Josha, too. And sometimes Cricket, even. Not just you. It's just . . . easier than being in my own head. I don't know.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I can't write from me right now.”

She flips through the pages. “Some of this is familiar.”

“Yeah, from the old notebook, parts of it, some of the descriptions from back then, a few pages from Tier's books, and the conversations we've had, the scenes I'm in, those should look familiar, I have a good memory, the dialogue's off some of the time I'm sure, but it's close—”

“This must have taken you ages.”

He keeps talking like he didn't hear her. “The stuff from during the war is in past tense, the stuff happening now is in present tense, but that's just to make it clearer. I'm a few days behind, always, I'm always a few days behind, and I don't know if that's good because then maybe I can have some perspective, but on the other hand it would be nice to be at the same time as something and I'm writing about you meeting Rig, now, the parts when I was sick were tricky and the parts I wrote when I was sick
are these crazy ramblings, but I think I figured it out from how we talked later—”

“Writing about me meeting . . .” She tries to find the passage in question, but he finally comes to his senses and takes the book away. “You write about things you're not there for?” she says. “Things that I do? Are you spying on me?”

His eyes get huge. “No, no! It's made up. Here.” He opens the notebook. “Here, here. Here's you talking to Rig.”

She reads for a minute, mouthing the words to herself. Then she shakes her head. “No. I didn't say this. We never said this.”

“I know. I'm not trying to . . .” He breathes out. “I'm just trying to write what makes sense.” He shakes his head. “I'm just trying to get it out of my mind.”

She touches the notebook and hands it back.

He says, “I'm trying to put it together in a way that makes sense.”

“But you're not in my head really. So you're going to miss stuff. This isn't really me.”

“I know. . . .”

“Stuff is going to happen that you weren't expecting and it's not gonna work with what you've already written and then what? Books are supposed to make
sense
. Stuff is going to come out of
nowhere
.”

He's breathing fast. “I don't know. Shit, I don't know. It's just to keep my mind clear. It isn't important.”

She shakes her head for a minute, slow.

“You can keep doing it,” she says. “If it helps. Just don't forget you're getting everything wrong.”

Get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head

After Scrap was trapped,
the war changed.

It was no longer a harmless little thing, an inconvenience keeping them inside, like a thunderstorm or a case of the flu. It was a gray monster hanging over the city, with growls like bomb blasts and claws as sharp as gnome teeth. They had never felt more disconnected from the city, up in their little cottage, and Josha and Beckan responded by locking themselves inside, and Cricket and Scrap stopped coming home every night and started sleeping in shattered doorways and the remains of blasted sidewalk benches.

“We're the ones who grew up in the city,” Josha said. “What the fuck are they trying to prove?”

They couldn't explain it, and neither could Beckan, but somehow it seemed to keep both Scrap and Cricket's nightmares at bay when they crashed in the city, together but not together, each on the opposite side of a destroyed grocery store, empty tin cans and cardboard displays upturned around them like covers, feet stretched out toward each other like they were trying to reach across the rows of black-and-once-white tiles. They found bits of food the armies had left behind. They brought most of it back up to the house. They ate some of it crouched in corners, devouring old coffee grounds and
stale jelly beans. They made pinky promises, like they did when they were six and seven, that they would not tell Beckan and Josha. “I love you most,” Scrap told him. “Don't ever forget.”

“I don't,” Cricket said, but he did sometimes. The city smelled like smoke and something rotten, something sick, something growing in the sores on their skin.

“You look like shit,” Beckan said on one of those days.

Scrap was drinking coffee beans mixed with rain water, swirled in an empty can of split pea soup, wrapped in one of the tightroper army's homemade newspapers.

“I'm just tired,” he said.

“And cold. And skinny as fuck.”

“We're all skinny. There's no fucking food.” He pulled a mouthful from the cup, swished it around his mouth, and spit it out.

“Charming,” she said.

He coughed a little.

“We're all freaked out from you being trapped, okay?” she says. “You don't have to do this wounded mysterious act. We know what's going on. Come home.”

But they were headed to work.

He said, “I'm not pulling any act. I'm not trying to make any sort of point. I'm just . . . doing what makes sense right now.”

“Sleeping on the ground in the cold makes sense? When you already have a cough like that?”

“Being here, in the city, where I can see what's going on.”

“Where you can die the next time they fling a bomb in the right direction.”

He wiped his nose on his hand. “They know we're down here. Cricket talks to them. Haven't been any bombs in forever.”

“Yeah, since the one that almost killed you. What about the gnomes?”

“I'm only worth one thing to them now, and it isn't fucking food, I'll tell you that.” He pinched his skin. “They couldn't eat me. I'm skinny as fuck.”

“Cricket's been bringing home a lot lately,” Beckan said. “Did you ever talk to him about how he's getting that much money?”

“No. Did you?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her, and he didn't ask.

He said, “I don't want to know. I have this image of Cricket in my head and he's just like a big brother and I don't want that to get ruined, okay?”

“Not fucking okay. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I need this. I need this thing to hold on to. He's the one of us who's changed the least and I just want to hold on to that, okay?”

Beckan didn't say anything.

“Just tell me one thing,” Scrap said. “Just . . . what he's doing. Is he safe? Is he going to get hurt?”

Beckan was quiet for a minute, then she said, “No. No, I think he'll be fine.”

I. Do. Not. Blame. Her.

Just making that clear.

They were rewarded that day with a thigh of something they hoped was a chicken, and they were halfway through promising to bring it, intact, back to the cottage, where Josha had tempted Cricket into an extended visit home with promises of boiled-water baths and bedtime stories, when they both took rabid hungry bites of the meat right there in the mines, holding the carcass between them, chewing with teeth that had forgotten what it was like to do real work.

“Fuck, it's rancid,” Beckan said.

“I can't taste anyway.”

They heard a small murmur from the floor, and they looked down to see a gnome boy, younger than anyone they'd seen in a very long time, sucking on his dirty fingers and looking up at them. Or at their meat.

He was almost as skinny as Scrap and he looked a little like Beckan.

“We can't,” Beckan said. “I'm sorry. Go ask your dad.”

“My dad's dead. Just a little?”

Beckan shook her head, her eyes closed, her chin shaking. “No. We can't.” She imagined how Scrap would judge her if she gave in. How he would shake his head and tell her she was soft, and stupid,
and that she should be sleeping on the streets, that if she were cold and hard like he was, she wouldn't need to hide under her comforter and cry herself to sleep. If she were cold, she wouldn't cry. She would cough dust and dirt and dry air.

The gnome looked at Scrap. “Please?” he said.

Scrap hesitated.

Beckan's eyes snapped open.

“Scrap,” she said. “Come on. Let's go.”

Scrap said, “I don't know. I don't know I don't know I—”

And then the gnome boy lunged. He wrapped himself around Scrap's leg and stabbed his teeth through his pants.

Scrap yelled and cursed and Beckan shook the gnome boy loose with her foot and flung him across the tunnel, and they heard a guard yelling—at the child, not at them, because they were worth so much more, because there wasn't enough meat on them to bother, they thought, they thought, they thought—all the way to the elevator. Scrap leaned on Beckan for support but they moved quickly.