Peeps by Scott Westerfeld Page A

answer.
    “Come on, Lace,” the boy said. “You’re going to show him the thing, aren’t you? That’s why you asked him in, right?”
    “Roger, why don’t you call for the pizza?” Lace said sharply.
    He retreated to the kitchen muttering. I heard the manic beeps of speed-dialing, then Roger specifying extra cheese in a wounded tone.
    The rest of us had filtered into the living room. Lace’s three other friends took seats, still keeping their coats on.
    “How well do you know Morgan?” Lace asked. She and I remained standing, as if faced off against each other, but out of the confines of the elevator, her smell was more diffuse, and I found it easier not to stare so maniacally.
    To distract myself I cataloged the furniture: urban rescue, musty couches and other cast-offs, a coffee table held up by a pair of wooden produce boxes. The tattered decor didn’t go with the sanded floorboards or the million-dollar views.
    “Don’t know her that well, really,” I said. She frowned, so I added, “But we’re related. Cousins.”
    Kind of a fib, I know. But our parasites are related, after all. That has to count for something.
    Lace nodded slowly. “You’re related, but you don’t know where she lives?”
    “She’s hard to find sometimes.” I shrugged, like it was no big deal. “My name’s Cal, by the way.”
    “Lace, short for Lacey. Look, Cal, I never met this girl. She disappeared before I got here.”
    “Disappeared?”
    “Moved out.”
    “Oh. How long ago was that?”
    “I got in here at the beginning of March. She’d already been gone a month, as far as anyone knows. She was the weird one, according to the other people in the building.”
    “ The weird one?”
    “The weirdest on the seventh floor,” she said. “They were all kind of strange, people tell me.”
    “The whole floor was strange?”
    Lace just shrugged.
    I raised an eyebrow. New Yorkers don’t usually bond with their neighbors, not enough to gossip about former tenants—unless, of course, there are some really good stories to tell. I wondered what Lace had heard.
    But my instincts told me to back off for the moment. The five of them were still twitchy, and there was something Lace didn’t want to say in front of the others. I could smell her indecision, tinged with a weird sort of embarrassment. She wanted something from me.
    I opened my hands, like I had nothing to hide. “In the elevator, you said you had a question?”
    Lace bit her lip, having a long, slow think. Then she sighed and sat down in the center of the couch. The other two girls scrunched into its corners to make room for her.
    “Yeah, maybe there’s something you can tell me, dude.” She swallowed and lowered her voice. “Why am I only paying a thousand bucks a month for this place?”
     
    When the shocked silence finally broke, the others were appalled.
    “You told me sixteen hundred when I stayed here!” Roger screamed through the kitchen doorway.
    Lace rolled her eyes at him. “That was just so you’d pay your long-distance bill. It’s not like you were paying any rent!”
    “A thousand? That’s all ?” said one of the girls, sitting bolt upright on the couch. “But you’ve got a doorman !”
    Hell hath no fury like New Yorkers in someone else’s cheap apartment. And what with the elevator, the doorman in his marble lobby, and those sunset views across the river, I reckoned the place should be about three thousand a month at least. Or maybe four? So far out of my league I wouldn’t even know.
    “I take it this isn’t a rent-control thing?” I said.
    Lace shook her head. “They just built this place last year. I’m only the second tenant in my apartment, like everyone else on the seventh floor. We all moved in around the same time.”
    “You mean all the first tenants moved out together ?” I asked.
    “From all four apartments on the seventh floor. Yeah.”
    “A thousand bucks?” Roger said. “Wow. That makes me feel a lot better about