Year of the Flood: Novel by Margaret Atwood

said were boosted from the SolarSpace boutiques.
    Tawdry rubbish, all of it, the Eves would say. If you’re going to sell your soul, at least demand a higher price! Bernice and I paid no attention to that. Our souls didn’t interest us. We’d peer in the windows, giddy with wanting. What would you get? we’d say. The LED-light wand? That’s baby! The Blood and Roses video? Gross, that’s for boys! The Real Woman Stick-on Bimplants, with responsive nipples? Ren, you suck!
    After Bernice had left that day, I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought maybe I should just go back, because I didn’t feel too safe, alone. Then I saw Amanda, standing on the other side of the mallway with a group of Tex-Mexican pleeb girls. I knew that group by sight, and Amanda had never been with them before.
    Those girls were wearing the sort of clothes they usually wore: miniskirts and spangled tops, candyfloss boas around their necks, silver gloves, plasticized butterflies clipped into their hair. They had their Sea/H/Ear Candies and their burning-bright phones and their jellyfish bracelets, and they were showing off. They were playing the same tune on their Sea/H/Ear Candies and they were dancing to it, swivelling their bums, sticking out their chests. They looked as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it. I envied that look so much. I just stood there, envying.
    Amanda was dancing too, except she was better. After a while she stopped and stood a little apart, texting on her purple phone. Then she stared straight at me and smiled, and waved her silver fingers. That meant Come here.
    I checked that no one was looking. Then I crossed the mallway.

15
    “You want to see my jellyfish bracelet?” Amanda said once I got there. I must have seemed pathetic to her, with my orphanish clothes and chalky fingers. She held up her wrist: there were the tiny jellyfish, opening and closing themselves like swimming flowers. They looked so perfect.
    “Where did you get it?” I asked. I hardly knew what to say.
    “Lifted,” said Amanda. That was how the pleebrat girls mostly got things.
    “How do they stay alive in there?”
    She pointed to the silver knob where the bracelet fastened. “This is an aerator,” she said. “It pumps in oxygen. You add the food twice a week.”
    “What happens if you forget?”
    “They eat each other,” said Amanda. She gave a little smile. “Some kids do that on purpose, they don’t add the food. Then it’s like a miniwar in there, and after a while there’s just one jellyfish left, and then it dies.”
    “That’s horrible,” I said.
    Amanda kept the same smile. “Yeah. That’s why they do it.”
    “They’re really pretty,” I said in a neutral voice. I wanted to please her, and I couldn’t tell whether she thought horrible was good or bad.
    “Take it,” said Amanda. She held out her wrist. “I can lift another one.”
    I wanted that bracelet so badly, but I wouldn’t know how to buy the food and the jellyfish would die. Or else the bracelet would be discovered, no matter how well I hid it, and I’d be in trouble. “I can’t,” I said. I took a step back.
    “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” said Amanda. She wasn’t taunting, she seemed merely curious. “The Goddies. The Godawfuls. They say there’s a bunch of them around here.”
    “No,” I said, “I’m not.” The lie must have stood out all over me. There were a lot of shabby people in the Sinkhole pleeb, but they weren’t shabby on purpose the way the Gardeners were.
    Amanda tilted her head a little to one side. “Funny,” she said. “You look like them.”
    “I only live with them,” I said. “I’m just more or less visiting them. I’m not really like them at all.”
    “Of course you aren’t,” said Amanda, smiling. She gave my arm a little pat. “Come over here. I want to show you something.”
    Where she took me was the alleyway that led to the back of Scales and Tails. We