I sat upright in bed. How long had I slept? I counted the hours since we got here, 22, 23 –
'Holy freaking… MONEY DAYYYY!'
My fingers spidered across my tummy and turned my org on. Still no wifi, though. God damn it.
'OhmygodohmygodohmyGod.' I scurried into the en suite and peed then started thinking about whether the toilet would have any water in the tank to flush, then remembered Adam Turing had hooked up the rainwater tank.
Adam.
Last night.
Jesus Christ.
There was a lump in my bed. If Maeve walked into my house then –
'GET OUT.' I moved closer to the bed, touching the wall for security. I extended my leg and toed Adam hard. I was pretty much straight-up kicking him. 'You have to get OUT. I don't want people seeing you here.'
'Good morning, beautiful.' He picked sand out of his eyes, pushed himself upright, tucked couch cushions behind his back. 'Waking up next to you is… I'm lost for words.'
I rolled my eyes. 'There's a thesaurus on your organiser.'
He activated his org, scrolled through what was apparently his to-do list, like Adam The Journalist had everything all written out. 'You'll be needing breakfast. Forgive me.' He began to swing his legs out of bed and pulled a pizza box of scraps out from under the bed.
I ran to the doorframe.
'OUT! YOU HAVE TO PISS OFF! JUST GO!'
'Ede, I'll obviously do everything that you say, but– '
'LEAVE. RIGHT. AWAY. Don't let anyone see you.'
'It's a free country. I don't have to– '
'I'll call the pol… I'll call Kane. Just GO.'
He stepped into his muddy pants and pulled his discoloured shirt on. He wasn't some ugly prince with a generous heart, just a ratty boy with a leaf stuck in his hair. 'Your wish is my command.' When he came near the door, I started backing out into the hallway overlooking the stairs, then I fled into another bedroom and slammed the door and controlled my breathing so I could hear him descending the stairs with his garbage sack of half-eaten food and plastic dinnerware rattling.
I hadn't expected my emotions to be thrown all around the place on Day Two of the …the thing. Whatever this was. It sickened me to remember that Adam's faced had screwed up and he'd peppered me with kisses as he– God, I hated to even think the word. Jizzed. Came. Blergh. After he'd done his thing he'd fetched a scrap of wallpaper from the bottom of a drawer and dabbed between my legs and that seemed gentlemanly at the time, but today? Today I wanted this asshole to take the shortest way out. Off the balcony would suit me.
I tiptoed down the stairs, looking left, right, up and below me in case Adam was still inside my house.
He wasn't on my property any more, thank God – Adam had made it halfway across the road before Kane had ambushed him, hassled him for carrying round a rubbish bag bulging with disposable cups and half-eaten sandwiches.
KT told Kane to let him go and they came over and caught up with me as I emerged onto the lawn. Adam got his walk on, disappearing towards the country roads and that corner of his, southeast or whatever, where someone said they'd seen a gas station. They stood in front of me while I squinted, looking up and down my street. Today the mechs had set the sun as mild as the day before. No breeze, nothing different. Desert weather.
'If you're wondering, he slept here cause he's my butler, Rock-a-bye baby boy, I mean,' I told KT. 'On the couch. Downstairs. After he'd decorated the place. Pee-yew. Good riddance. Oi: countdown, please. Aren't we getting paid?'
'17 minutes and twenty seconds.' Anya, Esther, Eli, Chan and Omar gathered with us in the quiet posh street. The sun and the warmth and my friends and the money would hopefully make me feel less gross about last night's thing. Losing my V Card was supposed to make me feel strong, grown-up, like I'd completed the final thing in my life, but right now it was just like I had an injury everyone could see. Like they could smell something different about me.
'You guys find anything awesome?'
'Nothing more awesome than the first aid kit.' Esther pulled it out from the pouch under her wheelchair and held it aloft. 'You kiddies get a scraped knee, come see me.'
'Pfft,' Kane said, toeing Esther's chair.'Unless there's Oxy in there, that ain't a very good score.'
'Well there's an adrenaline injector EpiPen, so shows what you know, Homo sapiens.'
'Fuck d'you call me?'
'PEOPLE: I suggest you look up.'
The sky was coming apart, unclasping like a zipper. Patches of blue and white were flickering and flaring like TV static. The teeth of the sky-zipper weren't even metal-coloured, just solid pieces of something disguised as sky. We watched the slow, calm progress of the zipper unzipping right – no – east?
'What way is that, you guys? East?'
'Northeast?'
'What do I look like, a weatherman? Just use your app.'
'FOLLOW IT!'
We jogged to the playground, stepping through a wasteland of pizza crust and chicken bones and lolly wrappers. I hauled myself to the top of the jungle gym.
Adam emerged into the playground, minus his garbage bag of supplies, and crawled inside the jungle gym and crouched in the darkness beneath my dangling legs. 'You should come home, Ede,' he whispered. 'I can take care of you.'
Maeve chewed her lip and tilted her head at me. 'What's he mean, Take care? Did you, like, help him out or… ?'
'MAEVE,' I commanded. 'Update on countdown.'
'Five minutes, Ede.'
'One meeelion pesos,' Omar said in some funny Colombian drug dealer accent, jumping down into the bark, lifting handfuls of the wood chips and biffing them aimlessly. 'There better be a hunting and fishing store round here. My wallet's gonna be HOT!'
Chan slapped palms with him and they did some gangsta fist bump thing. 'Nah, G – you wanna bank that shit. Live off the interest.'
'You'll find few shops,' Watson said coldly, 'Certainly no banks and no electricity to operate the payment terminals. No power for your wi-fi, no air con, no hot water. And you won't be straightening your hair unless you find yourself a diesel generator – not to mention some diesel with which to power it. Need I continue?'
Omar biffed a handful of bark at Watson. 'Just need solar panels. You know nothing.'
'Yeah, you're pretty dumb for a walking Wikipedia,' Chan said, joshing Watson with his shoulder, 'They wouldn't just leave us here without shops to buy shit. Human rights, son.'
'Three minutes!' Maeve chirped. Now, even the strays got excited. Fatima and Eli each grabbed a handle of Esther's wheelchair and helped her come nearer the jungle gym. Adam and Watson didn't drool as openly as us, they killed their three minutes debating who was the hero in Dark Heart or Art of Darkness or something, something about Kurtz, some literature-y thing that wasn't even assigned reading. Probably a World War Two thing, they were always referencing Nazi war stuff. I noticed Adam point at the sky, nod to himself then climb down off the jungle gym.
The time was super-close and we were all ready to receive our gift, our open mouths drying as we watched the sky, when Adam took two steps away from our circle, began putting space between himself and the rest of us, then sprinted across the grass toward our house – I mean, my house.
'Does that dude know something we don't… ?'
'I'd say our observant friend has deduced his dollars' directional drift,' Watson said. The corner of his mouth snagged on a smile. 'Let the games begin.'
I made a break for the bowling club, a collection of wooden buildings painted white. Chan and Fatima and some of the others sprinted out of the playground. Omar headed for a tiny jetty sticking into the river. I saw Adam's squirrely body arrive on top of the roof of my house as things appeared in the hole in the sky, these squares – no, cubes, ten of them, eleven, 12 packages of bank notes coming down by parachute, drifting lazily towards 12 different landing places. MONEY!
Adam was right to clamber on top of the mansion and wait on the balcony – the first lot of money came right to him and he reached out and hugged it. He must have calculated the trajectory of the parachute. Another thing he'd planned perfectly. Asshole.
Eli's money zigzagged low, almost settled right in front of him, then it jerked sideways and crashed through the skylight of a big three storey place. I raced to the top of the fort to see who else was getting money coming at them. It wasn't long before Chan was a whole kilometre away – and he was pushing Esther's chair, thinking about her instead of me. Southeast of the playground, where those shops were, I could make out a white building with nice glass which could have been a library. Two packages lilted in the air; Chan and Esther raced to receive them.
Everyone was getting rich except me. Where was MY money?
I sprinted north then east then north again, passing my mansion, hardly even pausing to look at it. I made it to the top of Alliance Road, went along that posh one called Champs-Élysées, which I knew headed north as much as it headed east. Finally, when I must have been smashing the pavement for eight or ten solid minutes the roads became dirty and I collapsed into a field of corn, my jaw shuddering as I tried to pull cool air inside my hot lungs. Above me, a parachute slowed then made a 45 degree angle and smashed into the top of a big oak tree, raining leaves and spewing notes out of a hole in the money-sack.
I grabbed the notes – hundreds! Three of them! – and got a surge of energy. New notes, clean, in thin stacks, they looked just-printed. Translucent, colourful, detailed, luxurious to touch.
Each little thin bundle – not more than ten millimetres at most – held 100 notes, stinking of plastic, never touched with greasy palms, bendable and perfect, amazing to stack, and so collectible. Each bundle was – I paused to work it out – a hundred hundreds… ten THOUSAND bucks. Keep cool, Ede. Don't drop a single cent. I realised I had to keep count while retrieving the notes and squirreling them away somewhere. I was looking out for ten bundles, firstly – that would be $100,000 – then I'd need to find ten of those ten-stacks. One hundred $10,000 bundles. 10,000 $100 bundles. A thousand thousands. I wasn't going to let any part of my million get away from me. My butthole tightened. I needed to poo again. Could I pay some butler to wipe my ass from now on? Alone in under my tree, scraping notes off the grass, I laughed. Yeah. I'd get a butler. I'd get a cook, and a chauffeur. This was enough money to melt away any problem I would ever have. Money I could literally throw at Adam and laugh until my ribs ached. Money to send Esther to a Vietnamese village forever. Money for a Brazilian and a haircut. Money to make myself perfect for my first night with Chan.
While I looked for the best way to climb the tree, seven bundles landed around its roots.
I started to feel sick. I didn't have a place for the first – omigawd – the first $80,000 I picked up. Not long ago I saw my dad pouring water into the milk bottle to turn $3 of milk into $5. I got a flash of upsetting memory of Dad pouring milk into a glass and sliding it across the breakfast bar at me and telling me it was the exact same thing as trim milk, which was the only kind of milk I'd accept, because it was bikini season. I'd slid the glass off the breakfast bar in disgust and it had exploded and bled watery milk across the tiles, spattering the wall with white droplets, and my dad looked at me like I was disgusting and –
I struggled to get up the first bough of the tree, then $20,000 dropped out of my singlet and I fell two metres from the oak, landing hard. I barely felt it. I stared up at the tree, clutching $40,000, dropping another forty.
I pulled the elastic of my shorts away from my midriff, reached down and slid $10,000 against my vag, trying not to let out the nervous pee gathering in my bladder. The elastic waistband held the money in there tightly. I slid in another stack, and another. Insane, ridiculous, painful. But worth it for the money.
I hauled myself into the core of the tree, stepped on a branch, got up, bank notes pricking my thigh. My belly was being poked and scratched by the corners of the hard wads of plastic. I wanted to pee, but I wanted to get paid more, so I climbed. I reached inside the bag, pulled the notes out stack by stack and stuck them in my knickers until the bulge looked like I was wearing adult diapers.
I tossed down $380,000, then $420,000. My socks filled with wads of thin, bendy cash. I had to pee so goddamn bad.
I threw down another $200,000, made sure my undies and socks and singlet were as stuffed as possible. There were six more wads of ten thousand left. Three wads, I tucked inside my bra. The final $30,000 I bit into, and came down the tree so clogged with money my skin itched.
My money and I hit the earth. Bits of dried mud like cornflakes fell off my knees and out of my hair. I reached behind me. I looked on the far side of the tree trunk and circled the tree three times, sure that somebody was behind me waiting to rob me.
I pulled tiny bricks of cash out of my back, my bum, my knickers, my two socks. I stacked them and counted. $10,000, $20,000, $30,000… $120,000, $160,000, $490,000…
I reached 89 wads of money and took a deep breath. If there was not another 11 wads, somebody was going to pay. Three wads, good, great progress, four. Four – and one there behind those toadstools.
Oh – three wads in my bra. That made seven of the missing eleven.
I dragged the grass with my fingernails, bent over, ravenous for cash.
I touched my mouth and realised I'd been biting the missing money, the final $30,000. My jaw ached. I spread my arms, scooped my money in a hug, buried my face in it, found a bigass farm hedge up the road which stretched almost as far as I could see, and made five trips to shove five armfuls of cash deep inside the hedge.
I was safe now. I felt bulletproof. My arms came out of the hedge covered in scratches, some of them deep enough to bleed, but I didn't feel anything except rich.