Divine enjoys long sessions from time to time, but lately, Joey has been trying to demonstrate his lasting capabilities. She evidently enjoys his pounding, but she isn’t impressed by his ability to delay his orgasm. After another twenty minutes, Divine loses her patience. She gets down on her knees and takes him into her mouth.
Joey grunts and quivers. His mouth forms a perfect O when he explodes. I guess if Divine doesn’t swallow, the fluid will go straight in her eyes. I watch her face, gauging her reaction. I don’t think his semen is tasty, but for her lover, she makes it look as though it’s the most delicious thing she’s ever swallowed.
When they cuddle in their after-sex bliss, I feel envy corroding my veins. I wish someone loved me like Joey loves her.
A noise comes from some trees behind me startling me, but when I turn, knife in hand, I see nothing.
Divine’s eyes travel toward my hiding place, and she smiles. She always seems to expect a standing ovation. Joey’s so lost in his adoration for her that he never looks my way.
When I start my way back toward the clinic, Divine shouts after me. “You! V-girl! Stop ditching meetings. Today at five p.m.”
No way. I’d die if the group found out about my pathetic attempt to seduce our leader. I’m working out on my own.
Walking up toward the town I wonder why Divine and Joey keep doing this. I guess it’s because they can’t get married. It doesn’t help that her ex-husband left her after the troops raped her. She can’t get a new marriage tattoo. She’s African, and he’s Caucasian. The mixing of races is still prohibited in Starville. They aren’t even allowed to live together because biracial kids like me aren’t welcome.
Maybe if I hadn’t seen the soldiers violating my mother, I wouldn’t be a voyeur. Her attacker’s faces haunt me at night. Perhaps I like to watch consensual sex to erase the attack from my mind.
Distracted by all these gloomy thoughts, I forget to watch my steps. That’s when I notice someone else is in the clearing.
He emerges from the woods, near the spot where I was hiding. I can’t decipher his cryptic expression. I doubt he could watch the show but for sure he noticed me watching.
Of all people, why him? He unnerves me. Aleksey resembles one of my mother’s attackers. He’s seen me naked. Now he’s seen another very private part of me. Then I remember who he is. A corrupted, drunk, Accord cop—an ex-soldier most likely with a history of raping. Who’s he to judge me? It’s they who should feel ashamed. Cops do little to defend recruits. Compared to that, my little tendency to watch is nothing.
I take a breath and meet his stare with defiant eyes before turning my back on him. I can feel his stabbing gaze as I put distance between us.
I have many other things to worry about. The train railway will take five more days to repair. I hope I’ll still have a job by the time they’re done. In the meantime, there’s plenty to do. The Assumption feast committee will pay me to make Mother Mary’s clothes, and Dad has found a way to work on his pills again. The whole of the Velez family, even Poncho in his guardian role, take part in the fabrication of the pills.
I cross town with Aleksey just some feet behind me. I won’t jump to the conclusion that he’s following me. They need him at the clinic. Just in case, I take a detour.
My father, as I’ve predicted doesn’t get any payment. Even so, he works as though they’re paying him a fortune. I haven’t seen him so enthusiastic in a long time. Besides my father and two local cleaning ladies, the clinic has a rotating staff. Most of the time, my family has the clinic to themselves. Nurses and doctors come and leave as soon as the wounded soldiers are stabilized and sent to a bigger hospital. But when there are soldiers around, I don’t leave my family alone and make sure the twins remain hidden.
Accord cops are supposed to supply vaccines and run tests at the clinic for Starvillers, but mostly they drink on Starville streets. They only come to get papers signed by Aleksey and receive orders from him. Aleksey and Tristan spend a lot of time at the clinic assisting in every way they can, though. Dad is delighted to have two guys around who listen to his medical expertise.
Sweaty after the long walk, I arrive at the clinic and immediately search for my family. I find Azzy making pills in an empty examination room. She’s ditched the dull philosophy lesson. We work on the pills and the hours pass amicably.
The soft music coming from Aleksey’s room is relaxing. Sometimes, Aleksey’s shuts himself in to play his double bass, and no cop or soldier dares to interrupt him. Whenever Olmo corners Aleksey, the cop listens patiently—wearing his perpetual solemn face—and answers Olmo’s endless questions in nods and grunts. Because of that I don’t hate him as much as I should. I’m not always so patient with Olmo myself.
One day I overheard Olmo asking him, “Why you don’t talk, Mr. Prince Aleksey?” Aleksey tore a piece of paper from his journal, scribbled something, and handed him the note. Olmo grinned and regarded Aleksey with admiring eyes. “Cool!”
Olmo showed me the note later. Only four words: I don’t want to.
But when Elena Rivers, using a seductive tone, asked the same question while Aleksey was busy checking his j-device, she received a different response.
“An experiment,” he said curtly.
“Ooh! I love experiments,” she purred. “What kind of experiment?”
He showed her the time in his j-device chronometer. “To see how long it would take an insufferable, nosy idiot to ask me about it.”
Elena looked affronted. She’d been so nasty to my dad that day that I felt vengeful. Since then, Elena’s recovered well. She comes to the clinic often, still trying to get in his pants. He’s always rudely indifferent to her flirting attempts, but Elena doesn’t take the hint.
Living so near to an ex-soldier scares me but his neutrality makes my family trust him. Neutrality defines Aleksey; I can’t notice if he favors one band or the other. He gives the same care to all the injured soldiers no matter whether they’re Nats or Patriots. And at the same time, it’s as though he doesn’t care for anybody.
“Well, he has to be nice to Patriot soldiers if they keep him fed. He eats a lot,” says Azzy with her uncanny ability to read faces, hearts, and minds.
“Weird. Ex-soldiers barely eat.” That’s another desired effect of the tonics they take to build their muscles.
“He must have stopped taking the tonics after he left the army. Otherwise, he couldn’t drink alcohol.”
“Those aren’t normal muscles. If he’s stopped drugs why is he so built?”
She stops mixing the ingredients to stretch her arms. “Because he trains every morning. Shirtless.”
I look out the window. This room has a magnificent view of the staircase and the mountains beyond Starville. “You’ve been paying attention to him.” Well, as have every other female in Starville.
Azzy shrugs. “There aren’t many things to do around here. Maybe that’s why he’s always scribbling stuff in a leather-bound notebook. I suspect he’s writing music.”
She stops talking and stares greedily when Aleksey appears in our frame of view and climbs down the stone staircase. I smile and nudge her back into reality.
“I wasn’t swooning, idiot! I was studying him.”
I believe her. She likes to overanalyze people. “What’s the verdict?”
“That man is dangerous. You’re not considering him for emergency deflowering, are you, Lila?” Azalea knows I’m still a V-girl. When I arrived home that night feeling so dejected, I thought she was going to give me the I-told-you-so speech. She didn’t. With her talent of guessing emotions, she not only gave me privacy, but she was supportive … in her own detached way.
I scoff. “No! He’s kind of a soldier.” More like a beast.
“Good. Just take a look at his size!” she says. “He towers above soldiers so his truth must be … extraordinary. Too much for a tight V-girl.”
Dad’s biology lessons got us used to describing reproductive functions in clinical t
erms, but we use other words for fun. A penis is the truth. A vagina gets a different name every time. We avoid expressions like tuna taco or fish burger. Fish references make me feel smelly, so today refer to it as Gina.
I wrinkle my nose. “Would that even be physically possible? Ginas ought to have a stretch limit.”
“The size of a baby must be the limit.”
I still remember the monumental size I grabbed in my hands. “That’s different. Mother Nature prepares Ginas and cervixes over nine months to give birth. Not for unnaturally big penises.”
“That’s why Rey’d be better for you. He seems to be well endowed in a normal way. It won’t ever happen, though.”
I shake my head feeling a mix of irritation and longing. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it. “Bigger than normal ... but …” She waits for me to elaborate, but I won’t disrespect Rey by discussing his girth with her.
She laughs heartily. “You know what they say: Penis is in the eye of the beholder.”
Discussions about sex are not uncommon among us, but Rey’s an uncomfortable topic. Annoyed, I shake my head. I realize that I so do not want to talk about this with my sister.
It’s Azzy who changes the subject. “Aleksey must like you. He stares at you a lot.”
I glare at her. “Then he must like everybody. He stares a lot at everyone with an I-hate-you attitude.”
I need to put distance between Azzy and me, so I take my batch of the pills and head to a deserted emergency room.
She follows me. “Forget about Rey, it wouldn’t have worked. He isn’t the only one with principles. You would’ve felt horrible.”
She’s right. If I can’t have his one hundred percent acceptance, I’ll feel as though I’m raping him.
“It was a stupid plan, doomed from the start.”
I get frustrated with her patronizing tone. All the tension of the past few days comes in full force. “You know what? Maybe one day you’ll feel attracted to your best friend. You’ll wonder how it would be if he made love to you. Because you think he’s so amazing in so many ways that he wouldn’t hurt you!”
My voice rises to yelling levels when she rolls her eyes. “And you’ll want to know what sex is like when it is not forced on you. So you’ll make plans to lose your V, too. Even if there’s nothing else but friendship! Even if you would prefer to wait ‘til you have met a special person, but that’s something that will never happen to you.”
“Friends with benefits? No, thank you.”
“Never say never, Azalea, and let’s talk about it when you’re the one eligible for recruitment.”
Azzy ignores me as she shakes off pill dust from her dress. “It’s too much trouble just to erase it from my to-do list.”
“You’re eleven. You don’t have a to-do list. I don’t want them to rape me … while I’m still a V-girl. It can’t be Rey because—” I feel a lump in my throat while looking at the floor. “—I can’t use him.”
I look up, and her condescending look makes me shout. “I’ll find a way before the troops take me! Don’t you dare to judge me!”
I storm toward the double doors. I wrench them open, stumbling into someone. Someone who might have listened to my outburst. Embarrassed, I look at my feet.
“Excuse me,” I mutter before looking up. But even without looking at his face I know the colossal body could only belong to a particular cop.
At this moment, I want the ground to open up and swallow me. Because Aleksey is looking at me with cold steel eyes. A wicked, humorless half smile crosses his face. He obviously listened to my diatribe.
“Dr. Velez?” he asks coolly.
I’m speechless. We saw him going to town, why did he come back? I mutely point the aisle where I heard Dad’s voice. With no other words, I walk past him.
“So if you won’t use your friend, I have a friend who loves being used. By virgins,” he says.
I want to make a dignified exit and not show him that his words hit me like a punch. I keep walking with my head held up. But my feet don’t respond and I stumble ungracefully. He responds with a weird breathing sound. Has this quiet, broody man repressed a laugh?
I can’t take it anymore. I sprint to my room and slam the door shut.
I’ll make him regret he used the V-word to make fun of me. One day.
Fly your flight my dear dove
Sing your song, make it reach the ocean
I want my freedom
I want to live in peace
I want to sing your song
To have your wings
To be able to fly
I want my destiny to leave the path that it is taking now.
The Dove – Eduardo Carrasco
Chapter 8
As days go by, I fight to mend my self-esteem. I can’t get over my first failed attempt at seduction. First failure, and not likely to be the last. There have to be other options to lose my V, but masturbation isn’t one. I want a shared experience. To feel that someone cares for me during my most vulnerable moment. It’d be difficult to find something like that even under normal circumstances. I stand no chance while there’s war. While there’s hunger.
The air raid left Starville short of communications, which means more shortages in food. More people are enlisting for recruitment. Others scan the ruins for remnants of wallpaper. They say the starch glue is edible. And I’ve noticed the number of rats, stray cats, and dogs has drastically diminished.
The Accord cops distribute food among Starvillers, but it’s never enough. Patriots say Starvillers should pay the occupation costs so most of the Starville production, including food, goes to the war efforts.
We can’t use the provisions TCR saved and without my job we depend on the ration coupons the government gives us. To my humiliation, the rest of my family has started to depend on Aleksey’s charity. He brings us food, but I never eat any of it. Women mustn’t take food from soldiers because they rape the women who accept their food. Then deny it was rape and say it was prostitution. If my family receives Aleksey’s food, that’s okay, but I won’t. I don’t starve, but I never get full. At least Olmo is eating better, although he has got this habit of eating only a part of the chocolate bars Aleksey brings him. Olmo saves the rest in his emergency backpack.
I could use one of those bars at the moment. My stomach growls as I walk down the winding damaged streets toward the museum.
Poncho growls when we reach Exodus Street where some Accord cops are drinking. One of them, Gary Sleecket, leers at me as blatantly as usual. “Why so lonely, pretty?” he shouts before they burst into laughter. I ignore them, hurrying my way to TCR headquarters. I haven’t been there since my seduction failure, and I’m dreading being that close to Rey again.
Buck Weaver founded The Comanche Resistance after he came across some solar e-readers at the museum ruins. He used them to learn survival and fighting skills, and secretly shared what he was learning with his most trusted friends, including a fourteen-year-old Rey. As they got stronger they started to scheme acts of opposition like hiding provisions and specially sabotage against the Patriot trains. Only a dozen of us remain because TCR has lost members to recruitment. We don’t have decent weapons, and if the local government discovered us, we’d be executed.
I take a deep breath before entering the training room.
“Hey! You’re back!” says Duque, pulling me into his arms. I smile widely. It’s good to know at least someone missed me. I missed you, too, Duque. He leads me to the place where his fiancée Veronica is talking to Cara Winston and her daughter, Holly, but I’m not in the mood to join the conversation.
“It’s too bad the law doesn’t permit me to take her place,” Cara says grimly. Unlike me, Holly hopes to marry a local boy one day. If she survives recruitment and plays her V-card, she’ll find a husband quickly. Like her mom, she’s slim and blonde. Just the kind of girl Starville bachelors prefer. And unfortunately soldiers.
The mirrors are still where I put them. Luke Rivers is
already warming up in front of them, his straight black hair falling on his forehead and framing his almond-shaped eyes. Rey trusts him, but I don’t understand why he’s here. The Rivers are one of the few Starville families with enough resources to bribe the local authorities to make them ineligible for recruitment.
My heart skips a beat when I see Rey. I never felt like this before around him, but butterflies are somersaulting in my stomach. He greets me stiffly. Can it get more awkward between us? Something about the way he looks at the mirrors tells me he’s thinking about the last time we were here together.
I can’t stand the awkwardness so I leave the room to enter an adjoining room in which the roof has collapsed. The sunlight blinds me for a moment.
Nats first and later Patriots used this room to behead their enemies. The room’s tragic past and the strange sounds heard at night are the reason for the rumors of a haunted museum. Here, Mathew Berkley is using a highly illegal object: our very outdated solar gadget. On sunny days, it gives us limited access to the wired.
“No news on Midian?” I ask. Up until the night of the air-raid, we kept contact with Midian’s resistance.
He shakes his head. “We haven’t received pigeons either. Fanny has been praying for their souls.”
Fanny is Mathew’s pregnant wife. At twenty-two, Mathew’s been married for six years and is expecting his second child. Starvillers think getting engaged at thirteen and married at sixteen is natural. It isn’t. It’s an aftereffect of war and recruitment.
I throw some bread crumbs to the floor whistling “The Dove,” my dad’s favorite song. Mathew joins me. Our messenger doves magically appear and fight for the bread crumbs. Most gadgets are traceable, but a trained dove delivers the message only to someone who knows the password. We write in codes that later translate into the Comanche language.
When I return to the mirror room, everybody is holding a broomstick.
“Duque will take charge,” announces Veronica proudly as she kisses her fiancé’s cheek.
TCR members are supposed to learn a combat skill and then take charge as the instructor in one of the sessions. Today, Duque will train us in wooden sword combat.