Free Skandal by Lindsay Smith

pedestrians’ gazes on me: the suited, hatted men and the crisp, Easter egg–colored women.
    Donna gives me a quick once-over with one eyebrow raised. “Who dresses you, anyway? Twiggy?”
    “Winnie says it’s ‘the height of fashion,’” I say.
    “Well, she’s right about the height.” Donna thins her lips as she studies the top half of my dark hair piled high atop my head. “I’m sure it’s a bit of a culture shock for you, coming here, but you should dress like a proper young lady, like Cindy and me.”
    Donna loops her arm through mine before I have a chance to protest, like we’re the stewardesses on the PanAm posters, and steers us after Cindy. Somehow, Donna’s disdain for my mod clothing gives me more confidence in it—maybe I should embrace my odd clothes, my odd words, my odd accent. I smile into the stream of questioning faces we pass as I limp into the Senate Office Building and Cindy flashes her credentials at the guards.
    The deeper we wind through the cool marble hallways, the more I sense something opening inside of me—a box I’d locked up months ago. I’ve used my power so sparingly since that night in the tunnels of East Berlin, but now I’m plunging back into that world without coming up for air. I’m afraid of myself in the same way I used to fear Rostov or Valentin, when I didn’t understand their powers—or their weaknesses. This time it’s my own mind, my own skin that’s turned against me, and I wonder if I can ever be sure which one of us is in control.
    I need to limber up if I’m going to take back control of my abilities. I stretch my fingers toward the marble wall and drown in their maddening noise.
    Urgency—it shivers like a live wire, powering every memory. Men in suits barking orders back and forth; staccato, frenzied heels clacking on the floor. Perfume and cologne and stale sweat from too-late nights. They scream about Cuba, Korea, poverty, Martin Luther King. They hang on their tentpoles: If Jack were still in charge and we didn’t think like that during the war. That goddamned negro and those communist pricks, those pinkos in Hollywood, those bloody Japs, the slants and krauts and Charlies and Chicoms and fairies , a million phantom enemies guiding their actions with hate and burdening their days.
    Everyone’s yelling. Is it in the corridor or in my head? I can only hold so many thoughts; it’s like someone’s held up a camera for a photograph, and hundreds of faces are pressing inward to crowd into the frame. I lurch forward as someone screams right in my face, finger to my sternum like an adrenaline shot, spit spraying against my face—
    “Easy, now,” Cindy says, snapping me back from the memory. Just a memory. Her hand coils around my wrist to catch me from stumbling. She peels back her lips for a Pantone-white grin. “Having trouble finding your feet?”
    “In a figure of speech.” No, that’s not right. I straighten up and tug my dress back down my thighs. “In a manner of speak.”
    Heads swivel toward us—toward me . I heard in the very walls how little these people think of those different from them—is it written on my face, burned onto my skin, what I am? A psychic, a traitor, a freak?
    “It was your accent,” Cindy says, slipping the words under her breath. “Also, your shield’s weak.”
    I clench my teeth and let Shostakovich’s symphony hammer out the rise and fall of my thoughts as we reach Saxton’s corridor.
    A pert, mint-clad secretary greets us at his main door. Dark boy-cut hair feathers her tan face, framing her cheekbones. She jabs a hand toward us, fanning out nails that could double as pickaxes. “Anna Montalban,” she purrs at Cindy as they shake. “We spoke on the phone.”
    Cindy’s face pulls tight like vinyl. “So we did. My girls and I are thrilled for this opportunity.” High shoulders, outsized grin; Cindy plays her role as a polished, well-heeled working woman perfectly. I wonder what else she conceals