Peeps (32 page)

I tried to smile, but the lenses of Pearl’s glasses caught the candlelight, bright as a camera flash, and I had to turn away.

She raised her voice a little. “You okay?”

“Sure. It’s just a little bright today.” Sometimes I blew out the candle, but that made Luz cross. She said I’d have to get used to it if I was ever going to leave this room again.

But my room was nice. It smelled like Zombie and me and the thing inside us.

“So I met these guys,” Pearl said, talking fast now, forgetting to whisper. “They’ve been playing together for a while. They’re nine kinds of raw, not like Nervous—”

I must have flinched again, because Pearl went quiet. Zombie
murrowed
and dropped heavily to the floor. He started toward her, winding his way through my old toys and clothes and sheet music, all the objects on the floor that crept closer every night while I slept.

“We weren’t so bad,” I managed to say.

“Yeah, but these guys are fawesome.” She paused, smiling at herself. Pearl always liked silly, made-up words. “They’re sort of New Sound, like Morgan’s Army, but more raw. Like when we started, before you-know-who messed up your head. But without six composers trying to write one song. These two guys are much more…”

“Controllable?” I said.

Pearl frowned, and the Vile Thing in her hands glared at me.

“I was going to say
mellow
.”

Zombie had tiptoed up behind Pearl, like he’d been planning to wind through her legs. But he was slinking close to the floor now, sniffing at her shoes suspiciously. He didn’t like the smell of anyone but me these days.

“But I was thinking, and maybe this is stupid.” Pearl shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “If these guys work out, and you keep getting better—”

“I’m already better.”

“That’s what Luz says. The three of us aren’t ready yet, but maybe by the time we are…” Her voice wavered, sounding fragile. “It would be great if you could sing for us.”

Her words made me close my eyes, something huge moving through my body, half painful, half restless. It took a moment to recognize, because it had been gone for so long.

To twist and turn, spreading out and surrounding people, drowning them—my voice seething, boiling, filling up the air.

I wanted to sing again…

A slow sigh deflated me. What if it still hurt, like everything else that wasn’t Zombie or darkness? I had to test myself first.

“Could you do something for me, Pearl?”

“Anything.”

“Say my name.”

“Crap, no way. Luz would kick my ass.”

I smelled Pearl’s fear in the room and heard Zombie’s soft footfalls retreating from her. He jumped up onto the bed, warm and nervous next to me. I opened my eyes, trying not to squint in the candle-brightness.

Pearl was sweating again, pacing like Zombie does because Luz never lets him go outside. “She said that singing might be okay. But your name? Are you
sure
?”

“I’m not sure, Pearl. That’s why you have to.”

She swallowed. “Okay … Min.”

I snorted. “Shiny, smelly Pearl. Can’t even do the whole thing?”

She stared at me for a long moment, then said softly, “Minerva?”

I shuddered out of habit, but the sickness didn’t come. Then she said the name again, and nothing swept through me. Nothing but relief. Even Luz had never managed that.

It felt outlandish and magnificent, as naughty as a cigarette after voice class. I closed my eyes and smiled.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

“Very. And I want to sing for your band, Pearl. You brought music, didn’t you?”

She nodded, smiling back at me. “Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t sure if you… But we have this really cool riff.” She reached into her pocket for a little white sliver of plastic, then began to unwind the earphones wrapped around it. “This is after only one day of practice—well, six years and a day—but there’s no chorus or anything yet. You can write your own words.”

“I can do words.” Words were the first thing I’d gotten back. There were notebooks full of scrawl underneath the bed, filled with all my new secrets. New songs about the deep.

Pearl had an adapter in one hand. She was looking around for my stereo.

“I broke it,” I said sadly.

“Your Bang and Olufsen? That’s a drag.” She frowned. “Say, you didn’t throw it out the window, did you?”

I giggled. “No, silly. Down the stairs.” I reached out my hand. “Come here. We can share.”

She paused for a moment, glancing back at the door.

“Don’t worry. Luz went downstairs already.” She was working in the kitchen now, preparing my nighttime botanicas. I could hear the rumble of water through the pipes and smell garlic and mandrake tea being strained. “She trusts you enough not to listen in.”

“Oh. That’s good, I guess.” Pearl put the adapter back in her pocket and took a step closer, the Vile Thing leering at me from her hand.

“But you have to put that
thing
down,” I said, waving one hand.

She paused, and I could smell her start to sweat again.

“Don’t you trust me, shiny Pearl?” I squinted up at her. “You know I would never eat you.”

“Um, yeah.” She swallowed. “And that’s really non-threatening of you, Minerva.”

I smiled again at the sound of my own name, and Pearl smiled back, finally believing how much better I was. She knelt, placing the Vile Thing carefully on the floor, like it might explode.

Taking a deep breath, she began to cross the room with measured steps. Zombie padded away as she grew closer, and I smelled the catnip on Pearl’s shoes. That’s why he was being so edgy. She smelled like his old toys, which he hated these days.

He went over to sniff the Vile Thing, which suddenly had turned into just some old doll. It looked lifeless and defeated there on the floor, not nearly as vile as it had been.

More relief flowed through me. Just the thought of singing was making me stronger. Even the shiny candlelight didn’t seem so jagged.

Pearl sat next to me on the bed, the music player in her hand glowing now. I saw the apple shape on it and flinched a little, remembering that I
had
thrown something out the window—eighty gigs of music that smelly boy had given me.

Pearl reached across, pushing my hair back behind one ear with trembling fingers. I realized how greasy it was, even though Luz made me shower every single Saturday.

“Do I look horrible?” I asked quietly. I hadn’t seen myself in … two months, if it was August.

“No. You’re still beautiful.” She grinned, putting one earphone in her own ear. “Maybe a little skinny. Doesn’t Luz feed you?”

I smiled, thinking of all the raw meat I’d eaten for lunch. Bacon cold and salty the strips still clinging together, fresh from between plastic. And then the chicken whose neck I’d heard Luz wring in the backyard, its skin still prickly from being plucked, its living blood hot down my throat. And still I was hungry.

As Pearl leaned forward in the Apple glow, I saw the pulse in her throat, and the beast inside me growled.

Mustn’t eat Pearl
, I reminded myself.

She gave the other earphone to me, and I put it in. We looked into each other’s eyes from a few inches away, tethered by the split white cord. It was strange and intense—no one but Luz had dared get this close to me since I’d bitten that stupid doctor.

I could smell coffee on Pearl’s breath, the clean sweat of summer heat, the separate scent of fear. Her pupils were huge, and I remembered that to her eyes, my room was dark. My life was spent in shadows now.

There was a hint of moisture between her upper lip and nose, in that little depression the size of a fingertip. I leaned forward, wanting to lick it, to see if it was salty like the bacon had been…

Then she squeezed the player, and music spilled into me.

It started abruptly—a rough edit, not even on the downbeat—but the riff was too gutsy to care. One guitar rumbled underneath, simple as a bass part, someone playing with three untutored fingers. Another guitar played up high, full of restless and cluttered energy, seductively neurotic.

Neither was Pearl, I could tell.

Then she entered on keys, spindly and thin but fitting perfectly. She was even leaving room for me, laying low, like she never had back in the System.

That thought made me jealous—little Pearl growing up a bit while I’d been lying here in shadows. Suddenly, I wanted to get up and put on clothes and sunglasses, go out into the world.

Soon
, I thought, still listening. The music had me humming, venturing into the spaces Pearl had left open, finding lines to twist and turn. She was right—it was New Sound-ish, like all those indie bands we’d loved last spring. But less frantic, as smooth as water. My whole body wanted to jump into this music.

But when my lips first parted, only random curses spilled out, verses from the earliest, most unreadable scrawl in the notebooks under my bed. Then they sputtered to a halt, like the fading geyser from a shaken beer bottle, and I gradually gained control. I began to murmur a jagged, wordless song across the music.

For a few moments it was beautiful, a savage version of my old self, though with new spells in it. The sound of my own singing made the beast inside me burn, but clever Pearl had cheated it for a few moments: I could only hear myself with one ear. The other was filled with the riff, a dense and splendid protection.

But soon enough the sickness closed my throat, the song choking to a stop. I looked at Pearl, to see if I’d imagined it. Her eyes, inches from mine, glowed like her music player’s screen.

Catching my breath, I concentrated on the riff again, listening. She was right: They were way outside the System, this oddball pair of guitarists. They had pulled something out of me, slipped it right past the beast.

“Where did you find them?”

“Sixth Street. Totally random.”

“Hmm. The one who can really play, he sounds…” I swallowed.

“Yeah,” Pearl said. “He’s lateral and raw, like I always wanted Nervous System to be. No lessons, or at least not many, and
no
theory classes. Almost out of control, but like you said, controllable.”

I smiled. All those things were true, but I hadn’t been thinking them.

To me, he sounded more like …
yummy
.

Texas native SCOTT WESTERFELD

has written several acclaimed novels for adults and teens, including
So Yesterday, The Risen Empire
, the
Midnighters
sequence, and the
Uglies/Pretties/Specials
trilogy. His books have been named
New York Times
Notable Books of the Year, made the
Times’s
essential summer reading list, been awarded the Philip K. Dick Special Citation and the Victoria (Australia) Premier’s Prize. Scott and his wife live in New York City and Sydney, Australia.