Mort broke away.
“I wish you didn’t have to see me with blue hair.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Things just sort of fell apart,” he went on. “I still come back here to think about old times.”
David wanted to interrupt and change the subject to Will, but he was touched.
“Sometimes I’ll run into Leonard or Ritchie here and they’re doing the same thing.”
“Really?” David said.
Mort nodded with a smile. “I wish things were like they used to be. I wish the Loners hadn’t—”
“Me too.”
Mort sighed.
“Mort, I really need your help.”
Mort straightened. His eyes bloomed.
“Anything for you, David.”
He said it like he was ready to receive orders, and David was still his leader, as if no time at all had passed.
“I need to find Will.”
“Oh, I heard Will graduated.”
David shook his head. “He came back into the school, and I have to find him or he’s going to die. Can you think of any place he might be? Anywhere. He’s looking for Lucy.”
Mort snorted a laugh. “What, is she knocked up or something?”
“Yes. She is.”
Mort’s grin went flat. He broke eye contact with David.
“Why did you say that?” David said.
“Huh?” Mort said without looking up. “I don’t know … good guess?”
“But why did you smile?”
“If I was Lucy, I’d hide somewhere no one goes. Maybe the dump?”
“Mort.”
“Um.” Mort drew circles on the floor with his toe. “I heard from a Slut that Lucy and Will dated. She liked him so much she got the Sluts in a huge brawl with the Saints to save him from Gates. This guy, Gates, was—”
“I know who Gates is,” David mumbled, turning inward. Will and Lucy had dated. It stung him to hear, but he guessed it made sense. Will had always been in love with Lucy. David had died. They were a comfort to each other.
“I just—” David rasped. “He would have told me.”
“You said he came back right after he heard Lucy was pregnant?”
The math clicked in David’s brain. “That little motherfucker.”
12
THE PORCELAIN TOILET LUCY SAT ON HAD once been white, but was now gray and gouged with black scratches. Its bowl was cracked and it leaked a thin dribble of toilet water continuously, leaving the floor of the stall wet and the air thick with the stink of mold. No one went to this bathroom, it was too deep into the ruins, too far from anything most McKinley students cared about. Lucy’d had to crawl underneath a collapsed doorway to even get into it.
Something was wrong.
Blood poured from her. Too much. More than any period she’d ever had, and full of clumps and clots. It felt like a river of warm caramel flowing out of her. She was shaking. It had begun with the feeling that there was a Rubik’s Cube trying to solve itself inside her uterus, twisting and cranking and scraping her with its sharp corners. The clenching cramps hurt so bad she’d thought she’d been going into labor. She’d told herself that was impossible. It was just her injuries from the fall, and that she only had to find somewhere to rest.
Something large fell out of her and plopped down into the water.
Lucy sat bolt upright at the noise. She didn’t want to look. She looked at her pale, bruised knees. Her pulse thunked in her neck. She felt empty. She sat staring at the coat hook on the back of the stall door, the curve of chrome with a bulbous end, wishing she was somewhere else, somebody new, far away from here.
When Lucy rose to her feet, it was on baby deer legs. With her pants still around her ankles she turned to face the bowl of blood. She could feel more blood trailing down her thighs, but she didn’t bother to wipe herself clean. It didn’t matter that she was messy. What mattered was in the toilet.
Lucy began to sob as she reached her hands toward the red water. There were dark clots floating in the watery blood and little bits of pink tissue, and gray pieces too. One clot was larger than all the others. She reached in and picked it up. The water slipped through her fingers, leaving just a clump of red.
She couldn’t breathe as she staggered out of the stall and over to the sink. She turned on the water and held the clump under the stream. As the blood washed away, she saw it was a clear sac, with something that looked like a piece of liver attached to it. What was inside the sac didn’t look human, it looked like an alien shrimp with a big head and a curly tail. But it wasn’t an alien. It was her baby.
Lucy screamed. She felt the floor strike her kneecaps. She felt herself pulling on her own hair. The world became a blur. The next thing she was aware of was running from the bathroom. Pounding her feet, pumping her arms. Nothing she could do, nothing she could think of, could make what she’d seen go away. There was nowhere to run. No place in the school would reverse what had just happened.
She wanted it to not be true.
She begged God to make it not be true.
The sadness crushed in on her from all sides.
She had to stop this feeling, she couldn’t bear it.
She couldn’t.
She saw the world through a dense cloud of smog. Her brain and her body felt a mile apart. Lucy didn’t even remember deciding to go there, but before she knew it, she was shuffling back into the Burnout drug den. Dirty kids inhaling dirty air together to forget where or who they were. And for the first time, Lucy understood the faraway look in those dirty kids’ eyes. They were gone completely. That was where Lucy wanted to be.
“Bile …,” she said.
When Bile saw her face he must have known, or maybe it was when he saw the blood seeping through the crotch of her pants, because he wrapped her in a bony, dry-skinned hug.
“My … my baby.”
Those were the only words she could get out.
He squeezed her harder. He walked her across the room, stepping over kids who sat against the wall with their chins resting on their chests. They came to the water bottles of human waste with the inflated gloves coming off the top. Stinkers, he’d called them.
Bile reached down and picked up one. He twisted the base of the glove and held the twist of rubber to keep the gas in while he pulled the glove off the bottle. The scent of pungent sewage burned in Lucy’s nostrils and she almost lost her nerve. He tied off the end of the glove like a balloon. Then he pinched the tip of the thumb and snipped the end with a pair of scissors.