Once Read Online Free PDF Page B

her shaved head, spotted with scabs, her thin face, her skin crisscrossed with tiny scratches, and her fingernails, still dirty despite two baths. “Yeah.” I shrugged. “You’re definitely the tramp.”
    The back doors were open, letting in the smell of the campfire burning behind the restaurant. Delia and Missy, two of the earliest escapees on the Trail, were flipping green coins into one another’s drinks. It was a stupid game they liked to play after dinner, to the exclusion of everyone else. They stopped when Arden and I walked past, Delia nudging Missy hard in the side.
    Some women sat along the tables in the back, chatting as they broke apart crab legs. I spotted Maeve and Isis in the corner. Maeve, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, was opening an abalone shell for Lilac.
    Betty set two mugs of beer on the bar. “Where’s the dog?” she asked, checking the floor by Arden’s feet for signs of Heddy.
    â€œLeft her behind.” Arden took the mug and swigged it. Then she stared at Betty, her brow furrowed in annoyance, until the woman left to attend to someone at the other end of the bar. Arden swallowed. Her whole body seized as she coughed, the beer nearly coming back up. “Since when do you drink?” she whispered, looking at the amber liquid.
    I took a few sips, enjoying the sudden lightness in my head. “Nearly everyone does here,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
    I thought of those first days, when I would sit alone in Lilac’s bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, having already completed my chores. Everything had seemed so foreign. The women chopped wood in the clearing above us, the sound following me through the house. The branches rapped on the windows, refusing to let me sleep. Quinn would come retrieve me, insisting I accompany her to the dining hall, where she would sit with me for hours. Sometimes we’d play cards. Betty would pour us her newest batch and I’d sip it slowly, telling Quinn about my journey to Califia.
    When I looked up, Arden was still studying me. “Besides,” I added. “It wasn’t exactly easy to lose you and Caleb in the same month.”
    Regina, a heavyset widow who’d lived in Califia for two years, teetered on the stool beside us. “Caleb is Eve’s boyfriend,” she whispered to Arden. “I used to have a husband, you know. They’re not as bad as everyone here says they are.” She raised her glass, signaling for another drink.
    â€œBoyfriend?” Arden narrowed her eyes at me.
    â€œI guess,” I said, resting my hand on Regina’s back to steady her. “Isn’t that what he would be called?” At School we’d learned about “boyfriends” and “husbands,” but only to be warned against them. In our Dangers of Boys and Men class, the Teachers told us stories of their own heartbreaks, of the men who had left them for other women or the husbands who’d leveraged their money and influence to keep their wives in domestic slavery. After seeing all that men were capable of in the wild—the gangs who slaughtered one another, the men who sold women they’d captured, the Strays who resorted to cannibalism in desperation—some of the women in Califia, especially the escapees from School, still believed that men were universally bad. Life after the plague seemed to prove that, over and over again. But there were also the few who still remembered husbands or past loves fondly. Many called Regina and me hopeless, to our faces and behind our backs. But when I awoke in the middle of the night, my hands searching the bed for where Caleb should’ve been, hopeless seemed too mild a term for how love made me feel.
    Delia and Missy were arguing now, the packed tables quieting as their voices grew louder. Everyone’s attention shifted to their side of the room. “Let it be! Enough!” Delia yelled. She