Portrait of a Starter: An Unhidden Story (2 page)

My doorway leads to a small dry cleaner’s sandwiched between two boarded-up shops. Even here, in Beverly Hills, it’s tough for business. But somebody has to clean the clothes of all the working Enders.

One of those Enders, a woman wearing a red suit, walks up to me, holding an armful of clothes to be dropped off. She spots me and freezes. She’s scared. Of me. I smile and flatten myself against the wall, put my arm out, showing it’s all right to pass.

She trembles slightly as she squeezes past me and goes inside. Her heavy perfume hangs
in the air like funeral flowers.

I take a peek at Callie. She’s smiling, hanging on every single word that comes out of this guy’s mouth. She takes a sip of the coffee and he reaches out and wipes some whipped cream off her lip.

My stomach tightens. I take a deep breath and pull out my water bottle. I’m thirsty, but my water’s so warm, it doesn’t even feel like I’m drinking anything. Not something sweet and icy like their fancy beverages.

Something hard pokes me in the arm. I turn toward the door and almost jump at what I see. It’s the owner, one of those stubborn Enders who won’t fix his face, so he looks like a creepy wrinkled Halloween mask. He’s gripping a broom.

“Move along,” the dry cleaner says. “Bad for business.”

The red-suited Ender customer cowers behind him, clutching her newly cleaned clothes so tightly they’re getting crumpled.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” I say.

“Get outta here.” He prods me with the broom like I’m a rabid animal. “Or I call the marshals.”

I peer around the corner and see that Callie’s gone. I run out into the street, trying to spot her.

“That’s right, go!” the Ender shouts at me. “And don’t come back!”

A car honks and almost hits me before I lurch out of its way. I cross the street. Callie and the guy are at the end of the next block, walking away.

I rush but don’t dare run. Enders will call the marshals if they see any Starter running. Especially here in Beverly Hills, where the Enders are super-wealthy. Beverly Hills wasn’t
immune to the Spore Wars that wiped out a generation, but it’s still the place to go for the latest electronics and designer wear.

I keep my eye on Callie and the guy. They turn up one of the smaller streets that lead into the heart of Beverly Hills. I remember this street. My mom took me here I was twelve, when my aunt came to visit. It seemed like every store window was filled with diamonds and gold.

But Callie and the guy aren’t stopping to look in the windows. They’re walking faster now.

Where is she going?

I stay a half block away from them and watch as they stop in front of a building with mirrored windows. Judging by the way he gestures to Callie, the guy seems to be explaining something about the place. A girl comes out of the building.

A hot girl.

She has long straight black hair, looks about my age. Callie and the guy barely give her a glance as she passes them and crosses the street. She heads in my direction. When she gets closer, I recognize her. She used to live on our block, in a nearby office building, until a couple of months ago. I drew her too.

“Chynna?” I call out.

“Yes?” she says before seeing me.

I approach. She slips down her sunglasses an inch.

“Hey, Chynna,” I say with a wave. “It’s Michael.”

“Uh, no. Sorry.” She pushes her glasses back on.

“I’m from the building on your block. You probably don’t recognize me without my nose in my sketch pad.”

“I’m sorry.” She stares back with no expression. “But you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.”

It’s her face, her voice. But she’s dressed differently, wearing a fancy suit with a short skirt and heels and carrying a big purse covered in logos. And her skin, which used to be broken out, now looks perfect. She turns and walks briskly down a side alley. I follow.

“Chynna, wait.”

She keeps going.

“I want to ask you about that place.” I reach out and touch her arm.

She yanks her arm away. “Take your filthy hands off me.”

An Ender shopkeeper taking out the trash butts in. “He bothering you?”

“Yes,” she says. “Keep this Starter away from me.”

She spits out “Starter” like it’s poison. So weird for her to call me that—she’s one too.

“Chynna, what’s the matter with you?” I ask.

The shopkeeper comes over and grabs me. I reach for Chynna, just trying to get my balance. She swings her huge purse at my face, grazing my jaw.

The shopkeeper yanks me hard and I fall to the ground on my back. He comes down with me and struggles like it’s some wrestling match.

“Let me go!” I shout.

My backpack tumbles to the ground and my sketch pad falls out. It slides into a puddle

“No …” Not my pad.

I look up and see Chynna—or whoever she is—running to the end of the alley. She climbs into the back of a fancy white car. She stares at me through a smoky window like I’m dirt. Like she wasn’t where I am a couple of months ago. Her driver takes off.

The shopkeeper finally lets go of me, now that she’s gone.

I rescue my pad and wipe the sludgy water off it with my hoodie’s sleeve. I get up, feeling some pain, and walk out of the alley. I turn to the building where Callie was.

She’s gone. And so is that guy.

Where did they go? Inside that building?

I start to head for the door to find them, but a siren wails a few blocks over. The shopkeeper gives me a half smirk.

“You called them,” I say.

“Kids like you belong in an institution.”

Just like an Ender. Before I know it, my strong young hands are wrapped around the Ender’s fragile throat.

“It’s not my fault. You Enders made this world.” I squeeze until his face turns red. “What is that building?” I point him toward it.

He croaks out the answer. “Prime … Destinations.”

“What kind of place is it?”

He opens his mouth but no sound comes out. His lips turn white.

“What happens in there?” I scream.

I feel his bones underneath his cold, thin skin and swear I can hear them crunching.

What am I doing?

This isn’t me. I’ve turned into that rabid animal.

I let him go. He stumbles and falls to the ground, facedown. I pant and stare at his feeble body as the siren gets closer. Did I hurt him? Bad?

“Hey.” I touch his leg with my shoe.

He’s still. Sweat beads on my forehead. What did I do? Then he slowly moves. I take a deep breath. He gets up on all fours and peers at me through the hair hanging in his face.

“Why don’t you go in there and see?” His voice is raw.

He nods toward the building, Prime Destinations. It sounded like a dare, but all I can think about is bursting into that building to find Callie, to stop her from maybe making the mistake of her life. What kind of place totally transforms Starters into beautiful but stupid mannequins with no memories? But the siren screams as the marshal’s car whips around the corner, its silvery nose heading for me like a shark. The shopkeeper sits back on his haunches and points at me, the aggressor, the animal, the Starter.

I clutch my pad and my pack and I run.

Hours later, back in my room, my feet swollen, my muscles burning, I sit in my corner. Tyler is asleep in his fortress. Callie’s still not back. I push the thought out of my head that she might never return.

I stare at my drawing of her. With the new water stains, the edges of the pad are dirtier than ever, but her sketch managed to stay clean.

I use my charcoal pencil to finish her hair. With fast strokes, I draw one side the way it often looks, messy and a little wild. Then I take a breath. I sketch the other side slowly, methodically, carefully. That side ends up very neat. Before and after? Maybe.

I pick up my brown pencil and fill in one iris. I start to do the other but then stop. I erase the brown in the second eye. I reach for another pencil, my hand hovering over the colors until it stops at the blue one. I use that to fill in the second eye with a color I don’t see when I look at Callie. Why did I do this? I have no idea.

But when I finish and stare at the drawing, it seems right. The result is surprising and haunting and a little creepy. It’s art, I figure, I’m allowed to do this. It’s my artistic interpretation, and truer than some photorealistic portrait. Then I realize why I did it. As close as we’ve become, living together these past months, I really don’t know her. In our stupid desperate lives, everyone and everything is unpredictable.

Even me.

I listen to Tyler’s snores. He believes she’s returning to us.

I hope so.

Lissa Price has studied photography and writing, but the world has turned out to be her greatest teacher.

She has walked with elephants in Botswana, swum with penguins in the Galápagos, and stood in a field at sunset amid a thousand nomads in Gujarat, India. She has been surrounded by hundreds of snorting Cape buffalo in South Africa and held an almost silent chorus with a hundred wild porpoises off the coast of Oahu. She has danced in mud huts at weddings in India and had tea with the most famous living socialite in Kyoto.

When she sat down to write, she found that the most surprising journeys were still inside her mind.

She lives in the foothills of Southern California with her husband and the occasional deer. Visit her at
LissaPrice.com
.