“Yeah.” Madison sighed. “The thing is, I always said I’d wait till college. But when he’s playing with my breasts… I don’t know.”
Lillie had a sudden, wholly unwanted image of Jon playing with Madison’s breasts. A hot feeling shot up from Lillie’s groin through her own breasts. Shocked, she looked away to keep Madison from seeing her face.
Madison was too absorbed in her own dilemma to notice. “The thing is, I never expected to want it this much. My cousin Christy told me that when she did it with her boyfriend it was only because he insisted, and they’ve been doing it a year now and she still doesn’t like it.”
I’ll like it, Lillie knew.
“Well, Christy’s a dork anyway,” Madison said.
There were no more dances after dinner. Instead, people disappeared in couples or hung around in small groups in the garden. Lillie and Mike had strolled through the little woods and now lay stretched out on the grass under the drooping leaves of a huge tree. It seemed dark to Lillie… were the lights lower than she remembered? They seemed to be. The grass had that marvelous just-mowed smell that seemed perpetual in the garden. A little robot mower moved steadily around the lawn. Rafe had wanted to take the robot apart, but Pam wouldn’t let him.
“Kiss me, Lillie,” Mike whispered.
She did. Her whole body went warm. When Mike put his hands under her T-shirt, she didn’t stop him.
Twenty minutes later she said, “Not here. In your room.”
“Okay.” He was breathing so heavily he could barely get the word out.
Hastily they refastened their clothing. Mike led her by the hand across the grass, around the pond, alongside the cafe. Amy, Sophie, and Julie sat there, sipping drinks. Lillie blushed… they had to know where she and Mike were going. Amy and Julie pretended not to see them, but Sophie stared at Lillie hard and her look was not friendly.
A little chill ran over Lillie.
It vanished in Mike’s room. He groaned and pulled her down on the bed. But almost immediately he sat up again. “Lillie… if… if you’re a virgin, I heard it hurts the first time and I don’t want to hurt you…”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it; nothing else he could have done would have reassured her so much that she was doing the right thing. He was such a nice guy!
“I don’t care,” she said. A second later she wondered: Would it hurt? But Mike had already lain down again and began to move his hands over her breasts, and she forgot everything else.
Madison’s cousin Christy was a dork. It didn’t hurt, and it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and Lillie was in love.
Lillie dreamed. Somewhere in the half-awake recesses of her mind, she was surprised. Since coming aboard the Flyer, she’d seldom dreamed. But now she was running, terrified, something was chasing her, a thing she couldn’t see…
She jerked awake and sat up. She had never taken the green pill Madison had given her.
Mike slept heavily beside her, one leg sprawled over her calves. Carefully she pushed the leg aside and fumbled in the darkness for her clothes, discarded by the bed. Dressed, she fled down the corridor to her own room. It, too, was dark, but by the dim light from the hall she flung open her metal chest and groped in the front left corner for the tiny pill wrapped in toilet paper. When she had it, she moved into the doorway for the better light.
The pill lay in the palm of her hand, as mild-looking as aspirin. Would it still work if you took it after the sex was over? If it didn’t…
She felt a brief flash of resentment that boys didn’t have to worry about this, that the burden fell mostly on girls. But her innate sense of fairness reasserted itself: it wasn’t the boys’ fault. Wasn’t Mike’s fault. With a quick swooping motion she brought the green pill to her mouth and swallowed it.
Still, she didn’t feel like going back to Mike’s room. God, if anything happened… Sajelle’s sister already had a baby, at fifteen. Lillie didn’t even much like babies. Oh, they were cute, but when she saw one, she never had the desire that other girls apparently did to cuddle and coo at it.
Still fully dressed except for shoes, she lay down on her own bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. She needed to know. In the middle of the night? Yes. She needed to know.
Lillie padded into the ghostly corridor and closed her bedroom door. The other doors were all closed. Feeling stupid, she looked up at the ceiling and said softly, “Pam?”
A sudden clear, rare memory came to her: Her mother sitting on Lillie’s bed, folding Lillie’s small hands, teaching her to kneel and pray.
“Pam? Can you hear me?”
Nothing. Well, maybe that was good. Rafe had always asserted that the kids were constantly spied on by some advanced equipment they couldn’t detect. Maybe that wasn’t true. Or wasn’t true here.
Lillie crept down the corridor to the commons room. The door opened easily, but the room was in total blackness, so nobody ever used it after “night” fell. Lillie let the door close behind her and said, “Pam? Are you there?”
Nothing.
“Pam? I need help. It’s an emergency!”
Nothing. God, what if there was a real emergency, if somebody had a heart attack or something? Lillie hadn’t realized how much on their own the kids actually were, when they weren’t in class. Why?
Why not? Fourteen-year-olds don’t have heart attacks. Or maybe Pete and Pam could genetically repair anyone who did. Still, kids were supposed to have adults within call.
Feeling aggrieved, or stubborn, Lillie groped her way in the total darkness to the door to the garden. It took her a while to find it. When she did, it too opened easily.
There was light here. The same dim ghostly glow that suffused the bedroom corridor lit outlines of trees, tall ferns, the tables at the cafe, the basketball hoop. In silhouette they looked scary. Lillie made herself walk several feet into the lawn area before calling. “Pam?”
And then, at a shout, “Pam? Are you there? I need you!”
“Lillie?” Pam’s voice came, from nowhere and everywhere. It gave Lillie the creeps.
“Yes, it’s Lillie. I—”
“What has happened? Why aren’t you asleep?” Pam’s voice held genuine astonishment. Did she and Pete always sleep on an exact schedule, then? No, they’d once told the kids that they didn’t sleep at all. But obviously they thought the kids did, every night all night. “I have to talk to you,” Lillie said, feeling suddenly ridiculous. But the panic was still there, underneath, and she really didn’t think she could go through the rest of the night without easing the roiling inside her. “I’m coming,” Pam said. “Wait.”
Lillie shivered, even though the garden was no cooler at “night” than during the “day.” The thick grass tickled the soles of her bare feet. Something came toward her, moving fast, and Lillie almost screamed. But then she saw that it was just the lawn-care robot that fascinated Rafe so much, moving much faster than its slow steady pace during the day. It swerved to avoid her. Water, or something like water, sprayed from it onto the grass.
Then Pam was there, hurrying from behind a clump of trees, from a place where Lillie had never seen any kind of door. “Lillie! What has happened? How could you be here?”
What a strange way to put it, Lillie thought. “Pam, I have to ask you a question. Mike and I… I mean, Madison gave me one of those pills you gave her. The green birth control pills. But I didn’t take it, and then Mike and I… we had sex.” She felt the fiery color sweep her neck and face. “And I took the pill, but not until much later and so I need to know… I was wondering… will it still protect me? I can’t get pregnant, can I?”