Kelley Eskridge Read Free Page A

descriptions of
the fight scenes. She fetched her own next drink from the bar, and
commiserated with someone from another web about the stress of the
holiday season, her voice saying agreeably, “It sounds like you have a
lot on your plate right now,” while her head said you
have no fucking idea, sport .
    None of it worked. She knew she had only
to say, “I have a problem, I need your help,” and she would get
everyone's undivided attention, the benefit of the dozens of brains
here and the others who were part of the web, whether a mile away or a
thousand. But she couldn't do it; she didn't know how to open her mouth
and say I'm not a Hope . It was like
saying, I am a lie; I am not real .
    “I am real,” she told herself. “I am real.”
    “What?” Tiger asked, leaning in closer,
smiling down at her. “What did you say?”
    “I am really drunk,” she said. “And I am
really tired of the whole stupid world and I just want to forget about
everything for a while.”
    “Then let's dance.”
    “That's a great idea. I'd love to. Umm…can
you help me stand up?”
    He laughed. “Sure.”
    She took his hand. “Don't let me fall,
Tiger,” she said. “Don't let me fall.”
     
    That night she dreamed of Terry on the
cliffs.
    They were seven years old, on a school
trip to the south coast of Ko on an early spring day. This was one of
the few natural parts of the island; the rest was human-made, a project
of the company's very profitable custom land-mass construction
subsidiary. Ren and Terry scrambled along the cliff's edge with the
other children, examining rock formations. They were supervised by
teachers and the requisite accompanying parents, including Donatella.
It was already clear to Ren that these trips made her mother restless
and impatient, and she wished Donatella wouldn't come; not all the
parents did, even though they were supposed to take turns. But her
mother always put on her best pair of walking shoes and insisted
brightly that she was looking forward to it, darling Ren, of course she
wouldn't miss it.
    Today, Donatella was organizing the
parents and teachers as easily as she ran multinational projects; she
had completely rearranged the supervising teacher's safety plan and was
ordering everyone about. The teacher tried to argue: Ren sighed, and
pulled Terry farther along the bluff, farther than they were supposed
to go. Behind them the teacher's voice grated against the rocks, and
Donatella murmured soothingly.
    Ren and Terry dug together for a while,
saving the best rocks aside in a fiber bag, and making a game of
pretending that the rejected bits were horrible criminals being forced
to leap to their deaths. The adult voices buzzed behind them.
    “Your mom never yells back,” Terry said,
after a while. He was smaller than Ren, and even better at math, and
the only person she knew beside herself who had ever stayed up all
night just to see what happened to the moon.
    “She doesn't need to yell,” Ren answered.
“She always gets what she wants. She calls it clarifying.”
    “Maybe—” Terry began, and then the cliff
suddenly sighed and slid away from under his bottom, and he went down
with it in a silent, surprised bundle of arms and legs, his mouth and
eyes wide. He broke apart on the rocks as he fell.
    The ground under Ren began to shift. Her
fear was liquid silver weighing down her arms and legs.
    “Ren, get away from the edge!” her mother
shouted in her command voice, the voice that must be obeyed. Donatella
was forty feet away, already in motion; but Ren could not move. Down
below, Terry's small body lay in an impossible shape. Another large
section of crust began to slide, and Donatella howled and threw herself
the last ten feet, landed hard on her stomach and flung out both arms
to snatch Ren's wrists as the ground under her went down in a rumble.
Ren hung over the raw new edge and heard her mother's left hand crackle
as one of the big rocks rolled on it. Donatella turned white and