“I know,” Beckan says. Because she does too. Every day she feels words inside her that she wants to tell a girl, that she wants to giggle to her old neighbor or the women at the grocery store. She wants someone she can say the word empty to without getting rolled eyes or blank stares or a Cricket-style speech about how she shouldn’t let the demands of society and masculine influence trick her into thinking that she wants a baby. She wants someone she can just tell that she wants a fucking baby.
If she does. Sometimes she does. She should be allowed to want one.
Except standing here, fearing for every bit of her, she would never wish being a fairy on anyone.
But then Rig says, “I always thought fairies were so beautiful. You’re beautiful, Beckan.” She smiles through tears and says, “I see why he loves you.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Teach me how to love him again?”
“But I don’t love him,” Beckan says.
It’s important to remember that when Beckan went down to the mines the first time, things were not very bleak yet. She was not even hungry, not really.
Riding down on that elevator for the first time, she still felt safe because she was with Cricket and Scrap. Even the floors passing by, layer after layer of dirt and steel, didn’t scare her, because she hadn’t seen any gnomes yet.
But she still couldn’t help asking, “How do you know they won’t eat you?”
“They need us,” Cricket said, immediately. “Without us they’re aaaaaall aloooone. And the glitter, they don’t like that. And they can still get meat from a few animals they have out in the farms, and they’d have to eat all of us at the same time or else waste all of us because it’s not like we’d come back,” and Cricket kept talking to himself, quietly, while he bounced on his toes and watched the darkness grow through the elevator’s bars, because that was what Cricket did. He talked.
So Beckan looked at Scrap, who said, with a small shrug, “We don’t know. That’s part of it.”
Beckan thought that he meant “part of the risk,” or “part of the job.” It wasn’t until later that she realized he meant part of the thrill, for a gnome and a fairy alike.
That it was just one second, just one pound of pressure difference between kissing and devouring that made the fairies worth every bit of the food they took. It was the reason that the fairies went home feeling disgusted and sick and sore but also alive, fucking brimming with it. It was the reason that, when Scrap and Cricket got drunk and told whoring stories, only half the time was it full of dizzy, drowned self-loathing. Sometimes they really were laughing because they were happy. Sometimes they didn’t hate it.
Things weren’t bleak yet.
“Okay,” Scrap said as the elevator stopped. “They have some system among themselves to determine who gets each of us. It changes. We don’t ask questions. I told them last time that you’re coming, so they’re probably going to be . . . excited.”
She chewed on the inside of her cheek.
Scrap said, “So all you have to do is stand there, keep your mouth shut, and try to look charming. Tell him what you want up front—we need bread, Beckan. Get bread. If he thinks you’re asking too much, he’ll tell you. They’ve never done that to us, though. You should be fine.” He nods. “You’ll be fine.”
The elevator finally groaned to a stop at the lowest floor. She wanted to trail behind the boys, but Cricket gestured for her to get off first, so she did, slowly.
And there they were, in front of her, as if they’d come from nowhere. Thirty gnome men, each twice her size, gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair back in their hands and rubbing their arms. She stood very still as Scrap and Cricket took their spots on either side again.
And then she saw him.
Crate.
He wore a gold crown and a necklace of heavy, uncarved diamonds. His teeth seemed longer and brighter than those of the others, his eyes redder, his thick legs so much thicker. He was something out of a storybook.
He nodded at Scrap, who nodded back.
“The new one?” Crate asked the crowd. “Who wants her?”
Beckan wrapped her arms around herself. Scrap immediately tugged them loose, but it didn’t seem to help. Not a single gnome volunteered, or seemed to be considering her, or even looked up.
Beckan’s heart hurt.
“For Cricket?”
Cricket, beside her, giggled and waved a little, and three gnomes—two halfheartedly, one eagerly—requested him, and Crate gave Cricket to the third, who clamped a heavy hand on Cricket’s shoulder as he led him away.
Then Crate smiled, slowly, with all his teeth.
“And for Scrap?”
And everyone started cheering, howling, begging, licking their lips and reaching grimy hands out to Scrap, and Beckan looked at Scrap to see what had changed, where her tiny, pink friend had gone, but he was still there. He had a looseness to his hips and shoulders that wasn’t natural, and his smile wasn’t one she’d ever seen on him, but he was still Scrap. He was still mangy. He still was not beautiful.
But he would make them feel beautiful, and that was why they wanted him.
Crate laughed a little and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, today he’s mine.”
Scrap smiled at him.
Crate reached an arm over Scrap’s shoulder like a proud parent and called, “You can go, fairy girl,” over his shoulder. “There’s no need for you tonight.”
And she was left alone with the gnome men, who rolled their eyes and let her be, and she was not afraid.
She was embarrassed.
She was jealous.
She was so stupid. Beckan.
Rig drives her toe into the ground. “I listened to them rape the other girls. The smaller ones. They didn’t want me.”
“That’s good,” Beckan says. “You know that’s good, right?”
“I know it. I don’t feel it.”
“Why would you want horrible tightroper military bastards to want you?”
“To . . . feel something at the same time as someone.” She swallows. “You’d see the girls crying and comforting each other, and they’d stare at me like they’d never seen me. We grew up together. And now all of a sudden I was the outsider. Like I wasn’t suffering. Like I hadn’t been kidnapped.” She shakes her head. “I’m horrible. They went through something horrible. I know that. I don’t want that.”
But Rig does want that, and Beckan hates her a little. It’s the same hate that made her scream at Josha the time he told her that she loved being a prostitute. It is guilty and self-aware. Of course Rig wanted to be hurt in a way she could qualify. Of course Beckan wanted to feel useful. There were so many truths, and those two were not acceptable.
(And then you are shoved back against the wall and pinned to rock and a dirty mouth finds yours and you are broken and used and adored and you crawl home and are cleaned up and loved beyond all reason and you scream from nightmares, how is anything supposed to be simple nowadays?)
“You have Tier. Tier loves you,” Beckan says. “Look.” She holds out the drawing.
“I don’t feel it,” Rig says. She takes the picture between her fingers, like it’s fragile. “I feel them,” she said. “I feel their hands on me, and they didn’t even touch me. No one has touched me in so long.”
“Teach me!” Beckan begged Scrap, the next day, while he was frying the two handfuls of meat Crate could spare in a skillet on the stove. “Teach me how to do it.”
“The sex part is easy,” Cricket said. “They have nothing to compare it to, you know?” He was on his stomach on the floor, reading through Scrap’s red notebook, the war journal. “Gnome girls are teases. Scrap.”
“Whaaaaat?”
“I’m bored. I am so bored.” He held up the book. “This is so boring. Where’s the sex?”
Josha came in from the hallway and lay on top of Cricket, curving himself to fit Cricket’s body, his belly in the small of Cricket’s back. “Sex?”
> Cricket hit him with the notebook.
“That’s not the part I’m worried about,” Beckan said, though of course she was. How could she not be? She’d never seen anyone naked besides a glimpse of her fairy boys here and there, and those contexts were always too safe to feel sexual. She always thought sex would be something incredibly different, and she always thought her first time, her best time, would be with a devastatingly handsome wandering stranger who held her tightly and went weak when she kissed him.
Beckan could have written lovely sex scenes into Scrap’s notebooks, they just would have had nothing to do with sex.
“Don’t listen to him,” Scrap said. He turned around, arms crossed. “Look. The sex part is important. And it’s going to be terrifying at first. And it’s going to hurt. Your clothes will feel heavy afterward, and you’ll walk differently, and you’ll wake up the next morning with marks and places that are sore and you can’t remember why. You will feel like you missed something. You’ll feel like you slept through some of it.”
“But first they have to want me,” she said.
“That’s just semantics,” Scrap said. “How you stand. How you walk.”
“Teach me.”
He shook his head.
“Please,” she said, quietly.
Scrap took a few practice steps, crossing each foot in front of the other. The meat hissed on the stove.
Beckan got up and tried to copy him. “Like this?”
“No . . .” Scrap tried again, his brow furrowed. “Like this, more.”
“I’m doing what you’re doing.”
Josha was watching Scrap’s ass. “You’re definitely not doing what he’s doing.”
Cricket hit him. “Give it up, Becks,” he says. “It’s not something he can teach. It’s something about him. Gnomes think he’s hot, I don’t know.”
Josha stood up and palmed the top of Scrap’s head.
“Well,” Scrap said. “I guess it’s nice that someone does.”
“Scrap fairy,” Cricket said, affectionately.
“Yeah,” Scrap said. “Scrap fairy.” He was so short, but so was Beckan. He was messy hair and pink glitter. He still had both his arms then, but they were pale and not as muscular as Cricket’s, and his eyes were too big and too dark. . . .
But there was something about him.
(Please, please, let there be something about him.)
Beckan scribbles down an address. She uses the back of Tier’s drawing of Rig. “Come here tomorrow night,” she says.
Rig looks at it. “Where is this? I don’t know your addresses.”
“Right. It’s on the hills, at the edge, nearly out of the city.” She sketches a map in the floor. The dirt gives easily under her fingernail, surprising her.
Rig’s face says There’s an out of the city?
“Tier knows the way. Bring him.” She pauses. “Did you meet a boy named Piccolo when you were up there?”
She shakes her head.
“None of the girls mentioned him?”
“No. We weren’t with any boys. We were with the men.”
“He picks up trash.”
Her face changes. “Oh. Oh, him.” She nods. “I remember him.”
“In a good way?”
Rig chokes out a laugh. “I don’t think I know any good ways anymore.”
“In a not-bad way.”
“Yes. Not bad.”
“I don’t think Piccolo would ever hurt anyone,” Beckan says. She hands Rig the piece of paper. “Piccolo likes art. We’ll have tea and then . . . there’s stuff to do. Anyway. You should come. With Tier. Tomorrow night. Around six?”
Beckan never got the walk exactly right. But the second time she went down to the mines, she brushed out her hair and put on sluttier clothes and she went on a night Cricket was off. Scrap kept studying her in the elevator, and it took her a minute to realize that what was confusing him was the two-and-a-half extra inches she got from her shoes.
“I like you short,” he mumbled, which was stupid, because even barefoot she was a hair taller.
“I look like I know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t know shit,” he said.
“I know how to stand and that it’s going to hurt. What else is there?”
And then he grabbed her by her wrists and pinned her against the wall. He gripped the chest of her T-shirt, yanked her down to his level, and stopped. His hands were caught in her perfect hair and she was struggling out of her shoes and they were forehead-to-forehead, nose-to-nose, gasping into each other’s mouths.
Beckan had kissed two boys before this: Josha, once, drunk, two years ago, and Scrap himself, small, snotty, spitty, when they were six years old, crashed in beds next to each other at the clinic, everything muffled by coughs and high fevers. She was so aware now of every bit of Scrap, from his dark dark hair to the chapped spot on his lip that he could never stop aggravating. Every part of him that was no longer a sweet, sick little boy. She ran her tongue over the chip in her front tooth, and then they were imperfect mouth against imperfect mouth, as hard and as deep as they possibly could.
He was cold, cold like water, and he made her so thirsty and she wanted to drink all of him, pull him into her mouth, suck him dry and carry all of his weight. Sounds vibrated out of her throat and into Scrap’s lips and glitter scraped off his cheek and onto hers. She hit her ear against the wall and grabbed his ear so he could feel it too, so they would feel absolutely everything in this moment at exactly the same time. Their bodies were all elbows and sweat but this kiss was perfect. She was in love with this kiss in a way she had never been in love with anyone or anything; her whole life had come to this kiss, not the boy but the kiss, face-burning, clothes-ripping, heart-vibrating in love. And she bit Scrap’s lip and he bit back and pinned her against the bars with his knee. And she had always thought it would be safe, would be horribly boring, would be an impossible, hideous life sentence to be in love with a fairy, to never die, to never hurt, and right now his nails dug her skin and his hipbones collided with hers and how did she ever think he was too short or too cold or too buttoned—undo the fucking buttons—or too near? For this second, he was perfect because he was half of this kiss, and this kiss was something rare and special. And his hands, his hands were everywhere, his hands were holding her and grabbing her and begging her closer and closer to him and longer and harder. His arms were around her neck with his hands on either side of her head, squeezing every bit of her out that he could get, begging every bit of her into his mouth, then grabbing her shoulder blades and squeezing her chest to his so hard they couldn’t breathe and the elevator jerked to a stop at their floor.
They flew away from each other. Scrap wiped her lipstick off his mouth.
He said, “Now you know what you’re doing.”
And maybe it was the messed-up hair and smeared lipstick and the high heels she shoved back on as the elevator stopped, maybe it was her face, still a little dazed, or maybe it was just that Cricket wasn’t there that day or that Tier had said something that either greatly pleased or gravely disappointed his father, but today Crate passed Scrap off to an attendant and gave Beckan a shrug. “Tier can have you,” he said.
The crowd parted and on the floor sat a boy, chubby and small, a heavy book in his lap, a smudge of dust down his nose. He looked up and said, “Me?” and he looked at Beckan, and he was young and so much more terrified than she was.
And maybe she fell just a little in love.
It’s so hard to picture now.
There is nothing in the history books about love.
Except Beckan would say that there’s all that is.
Sometimes I think that Beckan is full of shit. Are you reading this, Beckan? Sometimes I think you’re full of shit, and sometimes I can’t believe how shortsighted you are, and sometimes I want to take you and pin you up against that wall again but I can’t because Cricket’s dead and the world is for shit and this was never about me. This will never, ever be ab
out me.
And now I have so much else to worry about. I don’t think you could ever know what I would give to have you be my biggest problem, Becks.
Fuck, I can’t believe Josha was right, I can’t believe this is a story about you.
9
An hour before everyone is scheduled to arrive, Beckan is a mess. She pushes the chairs in at the kitchen table, pulls them out to readjust the cushions, trips over Josha’s shoe on the way to make the beds. “Do the fucking dishes!” she yells at Scrap, who is sitting uselessly at the kitchen table during all of this, head in his hands, reading Tier’s history book.
“Shouldn’t you be writing or something?” she says.
He looks up. “What?”
“All you’ve been doing lately is writing.”
“I’m not writing anything,” he says, absently, vaguely, turns a page.
“You’re cutting and pasting. Making a scrapbook, Scrap? Should I take pictures? Come on. Do the dishes.”
“I’ll do them later.”
“You don’t even sleepwalk anymore.”
The first problem is Josha. Beckan has been preparing him for hours, but as soon as Tier and Rig walk in, he is snarling his way to a corner of the kitchen. Rig flinches and watches him.
“He’s fine,” Beckan says. “Don’t worry about him.”
Tier says something in Rig’s ear. Beckan listens for Cricket’s name, but instead hears her own. Rig loosens and nods, and on the way to the table, she grabs Beckan’s hand for a second and squeezes, and Beckan is confused that this makes her feel comfortable and big.
The second problem is Piccolo, who arrives late, but he shows up before anyone gets too suspicious. “Sorry, I got so lost,” he says, with a smile like Beckan hasn’t seen, on anyone, in months. He comes up behind her and gives her a hug that lifts her a few inches off the ground.
The third problem is Scrap, who watches this hug with one eyebrow arched, his arm wrapped around himself while he leans against the refrigerator.
“It’s good to see you, Scrap,” Piccolo says. He offers his hand—his left, to match Scrap’s—and Beckan is nervous for a split of a second that Scrap won’t take it. But he does, immediately.