The Body Market by Donna Freitas

Author:Donna Freitas
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

21

Kit

tattoo, artist

I WENT TO my room and pulled out a flat wooden box from under my bed. Skylar had unearthed most of what I kept in this cottage—a few books, my stash of homemade whiskey, the jar of sea glass I’d collected during walks on the beach. Even the single photograph I had of Maggie hidden under my clothes in a drawer. But she had not found this, or if she did, she didn’t mention it.

I think she would have mentioned it.

The box was gray and battered, the grooves in the wood deep, some of them jagged and sharp. I’d made it for Maggie with driftwood I found washed up on the rocks. It was rectangular and fairly large, though not deep. Big enough to store a few of the old kind of magazines inside.

Big enough for my sister’s books.

Maggie was an artist. If we still lived in a world where artistry mattered, she would have had a long and illustrious career as one. She was always with a pencil in her hand, bent over whatever sheets of paper she could find—or that I could find for her. Paper was scarce in the Real World these days.

“What are you working on?” I’d ask Maggie each morning.

She always looked up at me with a dreamy smile. Drawing took her to another place, another world, one that she created from her very own imagination.

Well, sort of.

“My novel,” she’d tell me.

“Novels are made of words,” I would say back.

“Not mine,” was her perennial reply.

Maggie’s novels were made of pictures, long thin panels that stretched across the paper before her like stripes on a flag. They were filled with intricate scenes, detailed portraits of the people she loved most to write about, telling the stories of their lives according to her own hopes and dreams for them; her own hopes and dreams for herself, since Maggie loved to insert herself amid the drama she was always creating.

I took out the thin bound books now and opened the one on top.

The face that met me provoked a grimace.

Rain Holt stared back from the very first panel. He stood there with his hands shoved in his pockets, shirt half untucked, eyes wide and full of contempt. Or, more like, he floated in the center of a blackened sky. Tiny App icons hovered around him. In the next panel he was reaching out to one of them, or maybe it was reaching out to him, melding with his mind.

I closed the cover again.

My sister’s stories were about life in the App World. The famous people there were famous here, too. There were citizens throughout New Port City who were obsessed with them. People like my sister.

The worlds weren’t quite as separate as people thought.

We spent time connecting to them ourselves.

We couldn’t seem to help it.

The Holt family was top on everyone’s list, of course, especially their son, Rain, who made all the real girls swoon. So were politicians like Emory Specter. Mean girls like Lacy Mills and her wealthy friends.

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