1. Link whispered at my side, “This so big
sucks.”
“This place doesn’t suck,”
said Marty. “It’s good.”
“maybe,” said Calista, “if
there were certain people who didn’t go jumping on people’s heads near the
snack bar, if there weren’t those people, then maybe we wouldn’t all be
standing here having a big shame banquet.”
Marty was getting angry that
everyone was like turding on his recommendation, and I just wanted them all to
shut up somehow, I mean nicely, because suddenly I realized that we didn’t
really sound too smart. If someone overheard us like that girl, they
might think we were dumb.
I was playing with the magnets
on my boots and trying not to look at her. I didn’t want her to feel my
eyes before I made my move. I was careful. Quendy and Loga went off
to the bathroom because hairstyles had changed.
Marty drifted around and made
slit-eyes at Link. Link and I were chatting about the girl, like I was
going, She is meg youch, and he was
going, What the hell’s she wearing?
and I was going, Wool. It’s
wool. Like from an animal, and then Calista did her own chat to us,
which was, If you want to hear about an
animal, what about two guys staring with their mouths wide open so they look
completely cro-Magnon?
That shut us up, and we stared
out the window. Wrappers were turning through space like birds.
Quendy came back from the
bathroom and said, “Omigod! Like big thanks to everyone for not telling me that
my lesion is like meg completely spreading.”
2. Quendy came back from the bathroom and
said, “Omigod! Like big thanks to everyone for not telling me that my lesion is
like meg completely spreading.”
“Hon,” said Calista, “it’s not
spreading.”
“Omigod! It is going to be like
larger than my whole head! I am going to need a hat just to have all this
lesion. It will like go onto the brim.”
“Exercise the breath,” said
Link. Nobody cares about a stupid
lesion.”
“How can you not?” said Quendy. “It’s huge, and it’s right on my
forehead. It’s like bonnnng!” She trembled her hands around the lesion like
it was a kind of lesion gong.
Loga went, “No one will notice.”
“If they don’t know you,” Marty
said, “they’re not going to know what you normally look like.”
“Oh, so they think that usually my
like forehead is like weeping?”
“Ask her,” said Link. He pointed to the girl in gray.
He said, “Miss, I wonder if you
would, could you look at this girl and tell me if you notice anything?”
The girl turned around and looked at
Quendy. She said, “The lesion isn’t
bad.”
Quendy’s hands were out in a please.
“You saw it! See? Like, how far is the air lock?”
“Hon,” said Calista. “Listen to the
girl.”
The girl said, “I’ve been thinking,
because of my neck.”
3. The girl said, “I’ve been thinking,
because of my neck.”
The girl’s lesion was
beautiful. It was like a necklace. A red choker.
“The face,” said the girl, “is a
grid. The two big imaginary lines are
one down the center of the face and one just across the top of the cheeks. This is my theory, anyway. The nose is where those lines intersect. The more a lesion interferes with those
lines, the more noticeable it is. See,
the hardest lesion to carry off is one of the nose itself. In your case, you have this lesion which is
entirely on the edge of this one quadrant.
That’s not going to matter. It’s
not on a line.” She unclipped herself and reached up with
both her hands and touched her thumbs together, and made football goalposts
around Quendy’s face. “Framing. See?
Your lesion, it’s on the edge
of your face, so it frames your
face. It draws attention to your
face. The good grid. See, you have this great grid. I’m probably saying way too much.”
We were all kind of stunned.
“Yeah,” said Calista, sounding
confused. “She’s right. It just frames your face.”
The girl in gray touched her own
lesion with a napkin. She said, “I want
mine to go all the way around. I want it
to be like a necklace, but right now, it’s just a torque.”
We were all just kind of staring at
her like she was an alien. She
smiled. We kept staring at her.
“There are times you just want to
sink through the floor.” She said, “but then you realize there’s no air out
there.”
4. We
were all just kind of staring at her like she was an alien. She smiled.
We kept staring at her.
“There are times you just want to
sink through the floor.” She said, “but then you realize there’s no air out
there.”
“Hey,” said Marty. “I got a lesion on my foot. You want to see it?”
She smiled sweetly. “No, not really,” she said.
Link pointed at his face and was
like, “Hey, what about my lesion? Look
at this puppy. It bleeds sometimes. You like this?”
She smirked. “Oh, mmm-hm,” she said. “You put the ‘suppr’ back in ‘suppuration.’”
Link thought that was
hilarious. Of course, he didn’t have any
idea what the hell she was talking about either, but he started laughing while
the rest of us were still looking up “suppuration” on the feed
English-to-English wordbook.
She was now completely youch on all
of our meters, except with the girls, who I could tell had started to chat each
other like some ants after someone’s buried a missionary alive in the middle of
their hill. On the one hand, I thought
she was the most amazing person I had ever seen in my life, even if she was
weird as shit. On the other hand, I was
pretty disappointed she was skeezing this sexy talk with link Arwaker, who
women for some reason always go for, in spite of the fact that he’s a meg
asshole to them, for example a slurpy question about, “Oh, what about my lesion? Let’s talk more about me and my open sores.”