“How do you know?” asked Ellie Gow. “You can’t smell him from here.”
“He wouldn’t smell pretty, either,” Felice said disdainfully. “He’s too tall.”
Ellie winced. She was known for her sensitivity to sounds and a preference for talking while lying under a blanket. “What’s that got to do with a cat’s fart?”
Felice smiled tolerantly. “Whiskers,” she said.
Stella paid no attention to them.
“Someone you met when you were young can exert a profound influence,” Felice continued.
“I didn’t see him for very long,” Stella admitted.
Celia quickly told them the story of Stella and Will, speaking in her halting double, while the counselors and teachers huddled and arranged the rules of the confab. The rules changed week to week. Today, on the outskirts of the field, three men stood watching them with binoculars.
Nine months ago, Stella had been taken aside and driven to the hospital with five other girls after such a meeting. They had all given blood and one, Nor Upjohn, had suffered other indignities she would not describe, and afterward she had smelled like a mildewed orange, a warning scent.
The girls made their formation, four long columns of fifty each. The counselors did not try to stop them from talking, and Stella saw that some of them—possibly all—had turned off their nosies.
Will looked across the brown grass and gravel at the lines of girls. His brows drew into a narrow straight line and he seemed to be sucking on something sour. His matted hair was cut jagged and his cheeks were hollow pits, as if he had lost some teeth. He looked older than the others, and tired. He looked defeated.
“He’s not pretty, he’s ugly,” Felice said, and with a shrug turned her attention to the other boys they had not seen before. Stella had counted the new arrivals on the bus: fifty-three. She had to agree with Felice. Whatever her memory of Strong Will, this fellow was no one’s idea of a good deme partner.
“You want to cloud with him?” Celia asked in disbelief.
“No,” Stella said, and looked away with a sharp pang of disappointment.
The woods were far away now for both of them.
“What’s anything got to do with toad skin?” Ellie asked nervously as the teachers started to shoo the rows and columns toward each other.
“Crow on the road,” Felice replied.
“What’s that have to do with apple feathers?” Ellie riposted by reflex.
“Oh, just-KUK grow,” Celia said. Her face wrinkled like a dried peach in a sudden despair of shyness. “Grow big and hide me.”
The lines drew up before the concrete lunch tables and the boys were pushed to go and sit, three to one side, leaving the opposite side of each table empty.
“What’ll we say?” Ellie asked, hiding her eyes as their turn approached.
“Same thing we always say,” Stella said. “Hello and how are you. And ask how their demes are growing and what they’re doing on the other side of the wire.”
“Harry, Harry, quite contrary,” Felice sang in an undertone, “how does your garden grow? Pubic hairs and wanton stares, making the hormones flow.”
Ellie told her to shush. Miss Kantor walked in front of the rows from their barracks. “All right, girls,” she said. “You may talk, you may look. You may not touch.”
But the nosies are turned off, Stella thought. The girls fanned out from the lines. Stella looked up at the cameras mounted on the long steel poles, swinging slowly right and left.
Ellie’s turn came and she ran off to join a table of boys whom, as far as Stella knew, she had never visited before. So much for shyness. Stella’s turn came, and of course whatever she had thought earlier, she moved toward the table where Will sat with two smaller boys.
Will hunched over the table, looking at the old food stains. The two smaller and younger males watched her approach with some interest and freckled each other. She thought she heard some under, difficult to be sure at this distance, and Will looked up. He did not seem to recognize her.
Stella was the only girl to sit at their table. She said hello to the two boys, and then focused on Will. Will rested his cheeks in the palms of his hands. She could not see his patterns, though she saw his neck darken.
“He’s in our barracks,” said the boy on the right, strong but short, Jason or James; the boy to the left of Will was named Philip. Stella had sat with Philip three weeks ago. He was pleasant enough, though she had learned quickly she did not want to cloud with him. Neither Jason/James nor Philip smelled right. She freckled Philip a butterfly greeting, friendly but not open, meaning no offense, etc.
“Why did you sit here?” Philip asked with a frown. “Doesn’t somebody else want to sit here?”
“I want to talk to him,” Stella said. She was not very good at dealing with the boys, but then few of the girls were. There were unspoken, unwritten rules, rules yet to be discovered, but this way of doing things was never going to make the rules any plainer.
“He doesn’t talk much,” Jason/James said.
“Girls play games,” Philip said resentfully.
“Nothing like human girls,” Will murmured, and looked up at her. The glance was brief, but Stella knew he remembered their last meeting. “They cut you like knives and you never know why.”
“Right,” Philip said. “Will lived among the savages.” Jason/James giggled at this, and made a gesture of tangled fingers Stella could not interpret.
“I passed,” Will said.
“Was it the woods?” Stella asked, hope flickering like a small ember.
“What?” he asked.
“They scrubbed him before he came to our barracks,” Philip said, just being informative. “His skin was red from soap.”
“Did you stay with your parents?” Will asked. He looked up and let her see his cheeks. They were blank, dark and raw. Most of Will’s neck and face were red and rough. Stella inhaled, only what was polite under the circumstances, and could still smell the Lysol and soap on his skin and clothes.
“Only for a few days,” Stella said. “I got sick.”
“I missed out on getting scabs,” Will said, touching between his fingers. The SHEVA kids referred to the disease that had killed so many of them as “scabs” or “the ache.”
“We’re going to another table,” Jason/James and Philip said, almost in unison.
“You two should be alone,” Philip added brusquely. “We can tell.”
Stella wanted to ask them to stay, but Will shrugged, so she shrugged as well. “They’re breaking the rules,” she said after they were gone.
“They can find a table with not enough boys,” Will suggested. “They’re making up rules in the barracks. Something about demes. What are demes?”
“Demes are families,” Stella said. “New families. We’re trying to figure out what they’ll look like when we’re grown up.”
Will looked directly at her once more, and Stella looked away, then covered her own cheeks. “It doesn’t matter,” Will said. “I don’t care.”
“I came over to say hello,” Stella said. He could not know what his words had meant to her. “You must have got away.” She watched him eagerly, hoping for his story.
“We’re talking human talk. Do you know the under and the over?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “Do you speak it the same way?”
“Not the way they do in the barracks,” Will admitted with a twitch of one arm. “Out on the road… It’s different. Stronger, faster.”
“And in the woods?” Stella asked.