Free Year of the Flood: Novel by Margaret Atwood Page B

the “grene” stood for “green,” like their head scarves. It was supposed to be a secret thing just for their gang members, but we all knew about it anyway. Bernice said it was a really good password for them, because gangrene was flesh rot and they were totally rotten.
    “Big joke, Bernice,” said Crozier. “P.S., you’re ugly.”
    We were supposed to glean in groups, so we could defend ourselves against the pleebrat street gangs, or the winos who might grab our pails and drink the wine, or the child-snatchers who might sell us on the chicken-sex market. But instead we’d break up in twos or threes because that way we could cover the territory faster.
    On this particular day I started out with Bernice, but then we had a fight. We squabbled constantly, which I took as a sign of our friendship because no matter how viciously we fought we’d always make up afterwards. Some bond held us together: not hard like bone, but slippery, like cartilage. Most likely we both felt insecure among the Gardener kids; we were each afraid to be left without an ally.
    This time our fight was over a beaded change purse with a starfish on it that we’d picked out of a trash pile. We coveted finds like that and were always looking for them. The pleeblanders threw a lot of stuff away, because — said the Adams and Eves — they had short attention spans and no morals.
    “I saw it first,” I said.
    “You saw it first last time,” said Bernice.
    “So what? I still saw it first!”
    “Your mother’s a skank,” said Bernice. That was unfair because I thought so myself and Bernice knew it.
    “Yours is a vegetable!” I said. “Vegetable” shouldn’t have been an insult among the Gardeners, but it was. “Veena the Vegetable!” I added.
    “Meat-breath!” said Bernice. She had the purse, and she was keeping it.
    “Fine!” I said. I turned and walked away. I loitered, but I didn’t look around, and Bernice didn’t hurry after me.

    This happened at the mallway, which was called Apple Corners. This was the official name of our pleeb, though everyone called it the Sinkhole because people vanished into it without a trace. We Gardener kids walked through the mallway whenever we could, just looking.
    Like everything else in our pleeb, this mallway had once been classier. There was a broken fountain full of empty beer cans, there were built-in planters with a lot of Zizzy Froot cans and cigarette butts and used condoms covered (said Nuala) in festering germs. There was a holospinner booth that must once have spun out suns and moons, and rare animals, and your own image if you put money in, but it had been trashed some time ago and now stood empty-eyed. Sometimes we went inside it and pulled the tattered star-sprinkled curtain across, and read the messages left on the walls by the pleebrats. Monica sucks. So does Darf only betr. UR $? 4 U free, baBc8s! Brad UR ded. Those pleebrats were so daring, they’d write anywhere or anything. They didn’t care who saw it.
    The Sinkhole pleebrats went into the holospinner to smoke dope — the booth reeked of it — and they had sex in there: we could tell because of the condoms and sometimes the panties they’d leave behind. Gardener kids weren’t supposed to do either one of those things — hallucinogenics were for religious purposes, and sex was for those who’d exchanged green leaves and jumped the bonfire — but the older Gardener kids said they’d done them anyway.
    The shops that weren’t boarded up were twenty-dollar stores called Tinsel’s and Wild Side and Bong’s — names like that. They sold feather hats, and crayons for drawing on your body, and T-shirts with dragons and skulls and mean slogans. Also Joltbars, and chewing gum that made your tongue glow in the dark, and red-lipped ashtrays that said, Let Me Blow It For You, and In-Your-Skin Etcha-Tattoos the Eves said would burn your skin down to the veins. You could find expensive stuff at bargain prices that Shackie