The Whole World for Each

3. Lost in a Crowd

3

Lost in a Crowd

April bit her lip as she watched her mother move about the room, dressing to go out. She moved slowly, each motion deliberate, but April saw the pain in the tight line of her mouth.

“Maybe I should go out instead,” April said. She was feeling pretty wrecked herself, but nowhere near as bad as her mother looked.

“No. You are gifted, but sales is not your gift,” Melena said, brushing out the long waves of her hair.

“I did OK the last few weeks,” April said. She hadn’t particularly enjoyed it—talking with strangers always stressed her out, and trying to haggle with them to get the most out of every one of their possessions had really taxed her—but now that she was looking at the prospect of being cloistered again like she had been as a child, she missed the freedom, scary as it had sometimes been.

“You took care of the two of us beautifully,” her mother agreed, “but it’s better if someone else brags you up.”

“Like my mother.”

“I’m subtle, you know that,” Melena said. “I’ll be back with a client, hopefully someone who can give us a gift of coin. I’d like to pay for our own room, and of course there’s food”—April’s stomach gave a halfhearted growl in reply to that—“and you’re going to need a wardrobe upgrade.”

“That’s going to take lots of jobs,” April said glumly.

“One job at a time,” her mother said. “Just focus on that. I think I’ll start with that boy’s story about the bridge.”

April nodded, then reached into her carpetbag to dig out her battered old reader.

“With everything else you sold, you held on to the thing with the least use to us but the most value in coin,” Melena said with a frown.

“I also kept your doll,” April said. She looked into the bag but then saw the doll resting comfortably on her mother’s pillow. She was meant to be some sort of superhero from a story April had never heard and doubted her mother had either. But her purple cape was very eye-catching, only the very edges starting to fray despite its age.

“The doll wouldn’t fetch much,” Melena said, but the cross look had faded from her face. “The reader is worth a week’s worth of meals, at least. Besides, it never answers your questions, it just gives you more questions. Doubts. Sometimes I regret ever giving you that thing. I don’t even know why I kept it when I left home.”

“I can’t live without it,” April said, clutching the book tightly to her chest.

“April, always so dramatic.”

“No, it’s completely true,” April said softly.

They never talked about it; after her mother came out of one of her black periods, it was always as if the last few weeks or months had just never been. As if everything April had been dealing with—caring for her mother through lethargic depressions or furious storms of rage—hadn’t happened. But when she was living through those days, the stories in her reader were her only escape. They kept her sane.

But of course she couldn’t say that. Because that would be talking about what they never talked about.

Her mother was frowning over her, as if trying to puzzle out what April had meant. “I suppose just now it’s very handy indeed, if it keeps you in this room safely out of sight while we build the mystery of your persona. I don’t know how long I’ll be. Hopefully not too long; I know you’re hungry.”

“I’ll be fine,” April said, pulling the covers back over her legs and settling her reader on her knees.

April opened the reader’s menu and scrolled through the contents but nothing grabbed her attention. It had originally been Melena’s school reader, filled with learning programs and textbooks as well as every book she had downloaded from the corporate station’s archives. April supposed that technically it was stolen and not something Melena should have taken with her when she left her corporate home. Her mother showed so little interest in it that April would bet she had taken it by mistake; she had always gotten the impression that her mother’s decision to run away had been very spur-of-the-moment. Melena never spoke of the past, but as April’s life had been a succession of moves with little warning, just time to stuff all of their things into bags and catch a ride on the next shuttle, April doubted her mother had been any different as a teenager.

April had long since searched every book the reader contained for information on ghosts. Most of the contents were fiction, but there was an encyclopedia, the part of the reader she spent the most time with, and she followed link after link to article after article. It did often feel like she found more questions than answers. She knew every ghost story from history, the folklore from cultures all over Earth.

She had also read about famous debunkers of ghost stories, people like Harry Houdini, who proved mediums had no real powers, just a variety of tricks. April wasn’t sure what to make of those stories. She never did anything to make anyone believe there was a ghost there when there wasn’t. She wasn’t ripping anyone off, not deliberately, not like those spiritualists had. She didn’t research who the ghosts were supposed to be and pretend to talk with them like she knew all about them or anything like that. She did feel like maybe she shouldn’t take money for something she wasn’t sure she even did, but everyone else was always so sure, and so grateful.

After an hour or so her stomach stopped grumbling and settled into a tight, empty knot like a stone under her ribcage. At last April threw back the covers and pulled her other outfit out of her bag. She couldn’t sit here alone in this room all day, no matter what her mother wanted. She had never been on a station like the Triomphe before, and she couldn’t bear not getting another look around, this time out of costume so she could gawk all she liked. She just needed to stretch her legs a little.

Once she had had bags and bags of clothes, but now she was down to two outfits. The costume she was still wearing was designed to get attention, but today she just wanted to blend in, to be the same as everyone else. She also had a single pair of jeans—cut off and rolled up at the knee and so faded they were nearly worn through, but they still fit—and a plain white kameez that had a sheen to it but would perhaps not draw too much attention. It had the advantage of being long enough to hide where her reader was clipped to her belt, in case the marketplace on the Triomphe was a draw for pickpockets. She never went anywhere without the reader close at hand.

She climbed over the footboard and slipped out the door. The landlady was at her desk, gazing dreamily out into the street. She glanced up and April froze. Had her mother left instructions to keep her confined? But the landlady went back to watching people pass in front of her bedsit and April quickly plunged in among them.

A man right outside the bedsit was selling kebabs from a cart, and April’s stomach rumbled back to life at the smell of roasting meat. She lingered for a moment, watching him carefully brush a sweet sauce over each piece of meat on the skewers before turning them over on his grill. He noticed her standing there and smiled but April quickly walked away before he could start talking to her.

She had intended to stay near the bedsit, to walk along the edge of the balcony and watch the activity below, but when she approached the next set of zigzagging stairs she changed her mind. Her body had been achy when she had started, but the walk was actually making her feel better, and everything she wanted to see was down below.

The size of the place was still boggling her mind. She remembered all the shuttles docking when she and her mother had arrived; they had waited for hours to get an open airlock and the captain had unloaded his ship with great haste because the harbor fee was charged by the minute. Looking around, April started to form an idea why. The Triomphe had become a center for trade, not just within its own walls but between all the space stations.

She paused at the bottom of the stairs outside one of the shops that was part of the original architecture. Inside, a man and a woman were consulting a tablet as they packed a crate with a variety of foodstuffs and medical supplies. Then the woman told the man to bring it up to the docks. April looked at the sign over their door: SONG’S IMPORT/EXPORT. That crate was destined to leave on a shuttle.

April walked on, feeling a bit dazed by all the sights around her. Somewhere on the Triomphe there were greenhouses. There had to be, there were so many kinds of fruits and vegetables for sale, as well as bakeries filled with bread of every shape and color. Then something even more amazing caught her eye: a bookstore. She had never seen so many books in one place, boxes upon boxes filled with yellowing paperbacks, battered hardcovers, slightly sticky books for children. She wondered who had sent so many up into space when electronic readers had been prevalent before the first corporate station had even been built, but satisfying her curiosity would involve talking with the shopkeeper. She strolled along the tables he had put out in front of his shop but said nothing and did not venture deeper in to the shadowy depths of his treasure trove. She did look around and note the landmarks. If she and her mother were truly going to be staying on the Triomphe for a while, she wanted to be sure to come back. She would never be able to afford a proper book, but he might also have a digital library with things on it that she didn’t have on her own reader.

She followed the line of shops around a corner to a narrower section of the ship. The space between the shops here was free of carts and stands; instead people had spread blankets or carpets out on the floor and arranged their goods on the ground. They were handcrafts mostly, jewelry of beads and silver wire, hand-knit sweaters, and uncut woven cloth. A woman sat on a square of rough canvas, piles of machinery parts and broken appliances around her, a tablet computer open on her lap as she tinkered with its insides. A small tray of tools sat beside her, and her tongue was just visible at the corner of her mouth as she adjusted something improbably small.

April wished she could learn how to fix things. It must be so rewarding to finish and turn on something that had been nothing but dead weight before you touched it.

“Hey, girl.”

April froze, telling herself no one was really talking to her but reluctant to turn around and be sure.

“Girl with the black hair, come here for a minute,” the man said again. He spoke English but with a strong accent she couldn’t identify.

Still April tried to ignore him, moving away from the repairwoman’s canvas and heading back toward the busier shops, but a hand caught her arm and detained her. April stiffened, her hands curling into fists she had no idea what to do with.

“Hey, take it easy,” the man said, letting her go and holding up his hands in proclaimed innocence. “I don’t think you heard me. I wanted to talk to you for a second.”

“I don’t know you,” April said, not relaxing.

“I wanted to make you an offer,” the man said.

“An offer for what?” April asked. Was this a job? Did he know who she was?

“That hair of yours,” he said, reaching towards her but letting his hand drop when she flinched away. He smiled at her in a way she was sure was meant to be disarming.

“What about my hair?”

“Sister, do you know how much hair like yours would sell for? That length, that color, that shine. It is real, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s real,” April said, pulling her hair forward over her shoulder and twisting it between her hands.

“You must eat well, to have hair like that.”

“Sometimes,” she said, not adding, Not lately. “I’m not selling it.”

“I’d be willing to go quite high,” he said. “I have a few clients in mind already. And what would you be out, really? It’ll grow back.”

“No, thank you,” April said and turned her back to him.

“Come on, we can at least negotiate a little. You can’t just say no and not talk it over.”

April didn’t answer, just kept her hair pulled tight in her hands as her walk became a jog. She didn’t want to look back but she felt like he was getting closer. Was he planning to tackle her, to steal her hair?

“Stop following me!” April said, then broke into a run, pushing back into the thickest part of the crowds. She collided with person after person, upsetting more than a few and leaving quite a ruckus in her wake. Then the crowd thinned out and she could run again. She ran until a stitch in her side made her stop, hands on knees as she tried to catch her breath. Her hair swung forward over her face and she brushed it back in irritation. Then she straightened, turning and turning as she looked at everyone around her, trying to figure who else might be wanting her hair. She quickly combed through it with her fingers, then braided it, wrapping the braid around her head and tucking the end back through itself. Without pins it was sure to fall sooner rather than later, but hopefully it would catch less attention this way. She should just go back to their room and wait for her mother to return. She had had enough adventure for one day.

Her stomach gave a sickening lurch as she realized she had absolutely no idea where she was. She tried to walk back the way she had come, but the path she’d taken as she ran through the crowds had been nothing like a straight line. She had been on the seventh level, that she remembered, but looking up she could see that most of the balconies above her didn’t connect. They stopped and started at regular intervals; she would need to find the exact staircase she had come down in the first place.

She tried to remember what had been at the bottom of the staircase. The import/export business for sure, but what else? A bakery? The bookstore had been farther down, but she had paid more attention to those surroundings. She could probably find the bookstore again and, once there, figure out the way back to the room. That would be better than trying to find the room itself.

April kept walking, resisting the urge to cover her hair with her hands. Suddenly everyone seemed to be looking at her too closely, too long. She told herself it was just her imagination, but she didn’t like it. She longed to have the layers of veils once more between her and the world. She wanted to be back in her room, alone.

April twisted her hands together. She was going to have to ask for help. She looked around. When she’d first stepped into the marketplace, the tableau of cranky shopkeepers chastising the street kids with harsh words or even quick cuffs to the head had been entertaining, at least in its shock value. Now the prospect of trying to talk to one of them was positively frightening. She didn’t want to get yelled at, or worse, cuffed. But she wasn’t sure asking one of the street kids was a better option; the first words out of her mouth and they’d surely know she wasn’t one of them. She could understand their patois well enough—each station had its own variety, though they were more similar than not—but she didn’t think she could speak it more than haltingly.

As if in answer to her thoughts, a phrase carried through the hubbub, a trick of the market acoustics, a snatch of unadulterated English. She turned to find the source but at first saw only what she’d been seeing all afternoon: a mass of people wearing all manners of clothing and hairstyles, speaking every sort of language and somehow making themselves understood to each other.

April felt a thickness in her throat as tears threatened to spill, and she closed her eyes tight, willing the feeling to pass. She could deal with this. The only reason she didn’t know what to do was that she’d never been on her own in a strange place before. It wasn’t because she was helpless.

Her quiet moment of centering herself was shattered by the feeling of someone else’s hand exploring the pockets of her pants. Her rather tight pants; she couldn’t tell in the moment if the person was trying to rob her or molest her. She let out a cry, flailing her arms and backing hurriedly away. She didn’t see the culprit, but that feeling of everyone staring at her was now a certainty. She ducked her head to hide her flaming cheeks, patting a hand over her stomach. The reader was still there. She wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not; it was nice to still have it, but she didn’t like the way that answered the robber-versus-molester question.

She couldn’t stay cowering against the wall of the spice shop forever. April lifted her head and looked at each person around her carefully, listening and watching, hoping to find someone who spoke English or, failing that, French. But even if that didn’t work out, surely she could speak and gesture and be understood the same as anyone else.

Then she found him, the voice she had heard speaking English, and her brief flame of hope blew out. It was the boy from the day before, the one who had glared at her with such hate in his eyes.