names, listening with his mind as well as his ears, and got only one: the woman who had sprayed something in his face on his last night in Falcon Heights was Michelle. When she saw him in the hall, leaning over the drinking fountain, her eyes swept past him . . . then came back for a moment or two.
Michelle.
Another name to remember.
It didn’t take long for Luke to get confirmation of his theory that these were the people tasked with bringing in fresh TPs and TKs. The Emerald group was in the break room, and as Luke stood outside, reading that poster on hygiene for the dozenth time, he heard one of the Emerald men saying they had to go back out to make a quick pickup in Missouri. The next day a bewildered fourteen-year-old girl named Frieda Brown joined their growing West Wing group.
“I don’t belong here,” she told Luke. “It’s a mistake.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Luke replied, then told her how she could get tokens. He wasn’t sure she was taking it in, but she’d catch on eventually. Everyone did.
4
No one seemed to mind Avery sleeping in Luke’s room almost every night. He was the mailman, and to Luke he brought letters from Kalisha in Back Half, missives that came via telepathy rather than USPS. The fact of his parents’ murder was still too fresh and hurtful for these letters to wake Luke from his half-dreaming state, but the news they contained was disturbing, all the same. It was also enlightening, although it was enlightenment Luke could have done without. In Front Half, kids were tested and punished for misbehavior; in Back Half they were being put to work. Used. And, it seemed, destroyed, little by little.
The movies brought on the headaches, and the headaches lasted longer and got worse after each one. George was fine when he arrived, just scared, according to Kalisha, but after four or five days of exposure to the dots, and the movies, and the hurty shots, he also began to have headaches.
The movies were in a small screening room with plushy comfortable seats. They started with old-time cartoons—sometimes Road Runner, sometimes Bugs Bunny, sometimes Goofy and Mickey. Then, after the warm-up, came the real show. Kalisha thought the films were short, half an hour at most, but it was hard to tell because she was woozy during and headachey afterward. They all were.
Her first two times in the screening room, the Back Half kids got a double feature. The star of the first one was a man with thinning red hair. He wore a black suit and drove a shiny black car. Avery tried to show this car to Luke, but Luke got only a vague image, maybe because that was all Kalisha could send. Still, he thought it must be a limousine or a Town Car, because Avery said the red-haired man’s passengers always rode in the back. Also, the guy opened the doors for the passengers when they got in and out. On most days he had the same ones, mostly old white guys, but one was a younger guy with a scar on his cheek.
“Sha says he has regulars,” Avery whispered as he and Luke lay in bed together. “She says it’s Washington, D.C., because the man drives past the Capitol and the White House and sometimes she sees that big stone needle.”
“The Washington Monument.”
“Yeah, that.”
Toward the end of this movie, the redhead swapped the black suit for regular clothes. They saw him riding a horse, then pushing a little girl on a swing, then eating ice cream with the little girl on a park bench. After that Dr. Hendricks came on the screen, holding up an unlit Fourth of July sparkler.
The second feature was of a man in what Kalisha called an Arab headdress, which probably meant a keffiyeh. He was in a street, then he was in an outdoor café drinking tea or coffee from a glass, then he was making a speech, then he was swinging a little boy by the hands. Once he was on television. The movie ended with Dr. Hendricks holding up the unlit sparkler.
The following morning, Sha and the others got a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon followed by fifteen or twenty minutes of the red-haired car driver. Then lunch in the Back Half cafeteria, where there were free cigarettes. That afternoon it was Porky Pig followed by the Arab. Each film ended with Dr. Hendricks and the unlit sparkler. That night