She had stopped when she was ten. Her mother had caught her, and told her what happened to the others didn't matter. Brooke and her mother would have made more of the opportunity, if they had just been given their due.
Their due.
De was staring at her from across the empty carpet. That look of dread was still on his face.
“So,” Santa Barbara said. “I guess we can use real names now.”
“I guess,” said Los Gatos. He hitched up his pants, and glanced at Boston.
She shrugged. “I'm Julie Hunt. I was born at 12:15 Eastern Standard Time in…”
Brooke stopped listening. She didn't want to know about the failures. She knew how it felt to be part of their group. But she didn't know what it was like to be with the winners.
She wiped her damp hands on her pants and crossed the empty carpet. De watched her come. In fact the entire room watched her passage as if she were Moses parting the Red Sea.
The successes weren't talking to each other. They were staring at her.
When she was a few feet away from him, he reached out and pulled her to his side, as if she were in some sort of danger and he needed to rescue her.
“Comin' to the enemy?” he asked, and there was some amusement in his tone. “Or'd they give you a number when you shoulda had a letter?”
The lie would have been so easy. But then she would have had to lie about everything, and that wouldn't work. “No,” she said. “I was born at 12:05 a.m. in Detroit, Michigan.”
One of the women toward the back looked at her sharply. Anyone from Michigan might recognize that time. Her mother's lawsuits created more than enough publicity. Out of the corner of her eye, Brooke saw Franke. She could feel his intensity meters away.
“Then how come you made the crossin', darlin'?” De's accent got thicker when he was nervous. She had never noticed that before.
She could have given him the easy answer, that she wanted to be beside him, but it wasn't right. The way the entire group was staring at her, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, breathing shallow. It was as if they were afraid she was going to do something to them. But what could she do? Yell at them for something that was no fault of their own? They were the lucky ones. They'd been born at the right time in the right place.
But because they hadn't earned that luck, they were afraid of her. After all, she had been part of the same contest. Only she had been a few minutes late.
No one had moved. They were waiting for her to respond.
“I guess I came,” she said, “because I wanted to know what it was like to be a winner.”
“Standing over here won't make you a winner,” one of the men said.
She flushed. “I know that. I came to listen to you. To see how you've lived. If that's all right.”
“I'm not sure I understand you, darlin',” De said. Only his name wasn't De. She didn't know his name. Maybe she never would.
“You were all born winners. From the first moment. Just like we were losers.”
Her voice carried in the large room. She hadn't expected the acoustics to be so good.
“I don't know about everyone else in my group, but my birthtime has affected my entire life. My mother—” Brooke paused. She hadn't meant to discuss her mother “—never let me forget who I was. And I was wondering if any of you experienced that. Or if you felt special because you'd won. Or if you even knew.”
Her voice trailed off at the end. She couldn't imagine not knowing. A life of blissful ignorance. If she hadn't known, she might have gone on to great things. She might have reached farther, tried harder. She might have expected success with every endeavor, instead of being surprised at it.
They were staring at her as if she were speaking Greek.
Maybe she was.
“I don't know why it matters,” a man said beside her. “It was just a silly little contest.”
“I hadn't even remembered it,” a woman said, “until Dr. Franke's people contacted me.”
Brooke felt something catch in her throat. “Was it like that for all of you?”
“Of course not,” De said. “I got interviewed every New Year's like clockwork. What's it like five years into the millennium? en? Twenty? That's one of the reasons I moved to L'siana. I'm not much for attention, 'specially the kind I don't deserve.”
“Money was nice,” one of the women said. “It got me to college.”
Another woman shook her head. “My folks spent it all.”
More people from the left were moving across the divide, as if they were drawn to the conversation.
“So'd mine,” said one of the men.
“There wasn't any money with mine. Just got my picture in the newspaper. Still have that on my wall,” another man said.
Brooke felt someone bump her from behind. Los Gatos had joined her. So had Santa Barbara and Boston—um, Julie.
“Why'd this contest make such a difference to you?” one of the letter women asked. She was staring at Brooke.
“It didn't,” Brooke said after a moment. “It mattered to my mother. She lost.”
“Hell,” De said. “People lose. That's part of living.”
Brooke looked at him. There was a slight frown mark between his eyes. He didn't understand either. He didn't know what it was like being outside, with his face pressed against the glass.
“Three weeks after I was born,” Los Gatos said, “My parents dumped me with a friend of theirs, saying they weren't ready for a baby. I never saw them. I don't even know what they look like.”
“My parents said they couldn't afford me,” Santa Barbara said. “They were planning on some prize money.”
“They abandoned you too?” the woman asked.
“No,” he said. “They just made it clear they didn't appreciate the financial burden. If they'd won, I wouldn't've been a problem.”
“Sure you would have,” De said. “They just would've blamed their problems on something else.”
“It's not that simple,” Brooke said. Her entire body was sweating, despite the chill in the room. “It was a contest, a race. A lot of people didn't look beyond that. There were news articles about abandoned and abused babies, and there were a disproportionate number born in December, January, and February of 2000, because parents wanted to split some of the glory.”
“You can't tell me,” De said, “that something as insignificant as the time we were born determines our future.”
“It does,” Brooke said, “if we're brought up to believe it does.”
“That bear out, Professor Franke?” De said.
Brooke turned. The professor was standing close to them, listening, looking both bemused and perplexed. Apparently he had expected some kind of reaction, but probably not this one.
“That's what I'm trying to determine,” Franke said.
“And I'm askin' you if you determined it,” De said.
Franke glanced at one of his assistants. The assistant shrugged. The entire room full of people was crowded around Franke, and was silent for the second time that day.
“This part of the study is experimental,” he said. “I'm not sure if answering you will corrupt it.”
“But you want to answer me,” De said.
Franke smiled. “Yes, I do.”