Orfe by Cynthia Voigt

Author:Cynthia Voigt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

THREE

While Jack and the rest of the Jackets accepted applause and admiration, Orfe sat on the edge of the platform. She wasn’t sitting exactly; she was more wrapped around her own stomach, to comfort it; she was mostly waiting. For the room, and her head, to clear enough so she could get out of there.

She sensed more than saw his approach and heard him begin whatever he’d planned to say, “I’m Smiley’s friend—”

Her head snapped up and she was answering, before she thought, “If you’re his friend, you ought to tell him he’s drugging the talent out of his hands. Out of his arms. Shooting down the drummer he could be if he wasn’t shooting up.”

The taste of her own vomit was still in her mouth, she told me.

Then she saw who she was talking to. Saw his dark, curly hair, the broad forehead and almost pointed chin, the dark eyes looking into hers. Saw the skin, pale under a sheen of sweat. Saw his hands jammed into his jeans, clenched. Saw what he had done to himself, was doing.

It took a couple of seconds for his response to sink in, as if his words fell into her ears and got temporarily lost in the auricular tubes so it took them a while to get to her brain. “Smiley doesn’t shoot.”

“You know what I mean,” she said, still trying to take him all in, not paying much attention to what she was saying. Feeling bad enough to weep, looking at him, feeling joy.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I know exactly what you mean. I really hear you.” He knew, he told me, that she couldn’t understand what he was hoping she had just given him, which she couldn’t have given him unless he understood her perfectly, as she, he hoped, would understand him. Wanting so badly for her to understand, he repeated himself. “I hear you loud. I hear you clear.”

Orfe lowered her legs, until her feet touched the floor, and stood up. She saw that he was tall, tall and skinny. Tall and skinny and strung out. It made her sad and sick. He saw all of that, although all he really saw, he said, was someone like a flame, and not just her hair, a flame like fire to burn you clean. He’d seen women like that before, he said, he’d seen women of all kinds in plenty, but never one that scorched him. Orfe scorched him.

He lived in the house where Smiley lived, so he could ask Smiley what her name was, where she lived.

If she had a guy. Or anything.

Smiley was pretty fried, but he remembered the street where Orfe played. Yuri got out of the house then, because he knew what would happen if he stayed, got out and walked away what was left of the night, walked the sun up into the sky, walked away the morning, until around lunchtime he was waiting for her on the street.

He was pretty sure she didn’t see him.

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