Siren Queen(40)

“It doesn’t matter,” Greta repeated. “I only saw it and wanted it. It looked like it must taste good.”

She showed me the chalk as if that would help me understand. There was something oddly candy-like about it, like it was an enormous buttermint; I knew though that I would only get a dry and bitter powder in my mouth if I tried a bite of it, and I doubted Greta had gotten anything else.

I sat down on the couch, and after a short hesitation, she joined me. For the first time, however, she was stiff, shifted so she curled away from me instead of towards me. A moment passed, and she sniffled. Awkwardly, I shaped myself to her. I was unused to touching her the way she touched me, but slowly she relaxed into it. We breathed together, letting the moment stretch until I spoke again.

“There was a girl on Hungarian Hill who ate paper,” I said presently. “Her skin was black like good ink, and one summer, all she wanted was to eat pages from the pulp novels they sold at the drugstore.”

Greta stirred against me restlessly, allowing my hand to drape over her side, over her belly. She had finished The Belles just a week ago.

“What happened to her?”

“In fall she gave birth to a little girl as dark as she was, but when my sister held her in the light at her first birthday, I could see words even darker on her cheek, her eyelids, her throat. Strange titles that you could almost but not quite read. She was beautiful just like her mother.”

“Like that is any protection,” Greta snorted.

“Better than nothing,” I suggested. “And even if yours isn’t, she’ll be strong and strange and a wonder.”

That made Greta laugh.

“Perhaps I will birth a stick of chalk and Wolfe will use her all up to put marks on the floor, where I should stand and talk.”

“We won’t let that happen,” I said, “but we have to think fast. You’re going to start to show sooner than later.”

“We?” she asked, finally turning to me. Her eyes were red, but she was smiling.

“Of course,” I said, knocking my forehead against hers. “Who else?”

There was a lot of fucking going on at the studios, and where you have something like that, you have babies unless you are very lucky and very careful. Though we all went about as if pleasure were paramount and consequences happened to someone else, there was a brisk trade in underground knowledge about what could be done if you suspected you weren’t lucky and after when you found out you certainly weren’t. A girl in our dorm knew a discreet doctor who would get you kitted out with a diaphragm, and everyone had a friend of a friend who knew the best person to scrape you out clean, leaving you only ill for a few weeks before you were back at class or on the set again. It was important to find the best. Every year, the fresh crop of girls lost two, or five, or seven, and though “peritonitis” or “appendicitis” might be put on their death certificates, we all knew which dark and bloody end they had come to.

They were mostly terrible choices, and being smart and lucky only meant that they were ours. We made them because otherwise it was one more choice that the studios could take away from us, and in the corners of my memory, Abigail McKinnon nodded away. I had heard that they gave her baby to some old lady in San Diego, some relation or another to one of the executives. Harvey Rose was Oberlin Wolfe’s fixer in more ways than one, glaring at the world from behind his green-tinted glasses, and whenever he came by the dorms, girls’ or boys’, we knew that a big problem had to be fixed.

“I want to keep her,” Greta told me over a cup of chicken broth for her and rosehip tea for me. Her calm resolve told me not to argue, and I nodded reluctantly.

“All right. I think I know who to talk to. We need flowers.”



* * *



Mrs. Wiley beamed over the armload of sunflowers we brought her, and she sat us down at her table.

“I know Wolfe doesn’t like his babies roaming so late,” she said. “You two sneak out?”

“We’ve got time but not much of it,” I said. We’d bribed a driver with a picture of Emmaline from the cutting room floor. He was still staring at it in the car on the street.

“Finding an abortionist was as easy as getting cough drops at Aegis,” Mrs. Wiley said. “I can’t imagine Wolfe is any different. I guess you want to keep her?”

“Yes,” Greta said. She kept her hands away from her belly, but I could see her wanting to cup her hands over it, to protect her.

“Why?” Mrs. Wiley’s tone was just short of cruel. “You want something to love you when no one else will? You think this’ll get you your man?”

Greta growled at her, in that moment looking less human than she ever had.

“I want her because she is mine. Because she came to me, and I want to love her and feed her as is my right, the one my mother had to me, and my grandmother had to her.”

Mrs. Wiley looked at her for a long moment before shrugging.

“All right, good enough. First, this other one here should have told you that there’s a price. Twenty years off the end of your life is traditional.”

Greta nodded grimly, and now I watched her go through the same thing I had, her blood soaked into the little card and Mrs. Wiley drinking it up like a dainty vampire.

“Good,” Mrs. Wiley said when she finished, licking every drop so cleanly that there was no need for a napkin.