(From Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series, chapter 5.)
Just off campus is a chain drugstore, and I stop there on my way back to the lab, because I’m self-conscious about my jeans now. While Vunkstad’s secretary was commenting on the mud, I noticed that I’ve got a growing rip in my left knee.
I know that the iron-on denim patches must be here somewhere, so I’m chasing my own ass up and down every aisle, looking for them. I start to ask a girl who is stocking cookies, but then I look across the store and I see Gabriela. She is holding a bottle of water and staring at me with her eyes shocked and mouth open, like she has never seen something quite this horrific in her life. She immediately crosses the store and takes my elbow, leading me away with my question to the clerk unfinished.
“Zenna,” she whispers fiercely to me. “You are not reduced to this level of abject poverty.”
“I have a hole in my –”
“No. No,” she insists, talking over me.
“Just to patch –”
“No!” she insists. “No patching. This is too sad. It is the opposite of excellence.”
“But these jeans –”
“Zenna! Somebody will see. Look, everybody is staring at us.”
Gabriela’s eyes dart around us. . She’s so mortified by my appearance that she can’t waste time paying for her bottle of water, so she leans away from me just long enough to plop it onto a magazine rack, and then she steers me out the door.
“Girl,” she murmurs with her lips against my ear, “we are not gray-bearded widows who must mend our stockings by candlelight with needle and thread.”
I wriggle my shoulders, unsuccessfully trying to free myself from her grasp. “But Gabriela,” I plead, “these jeans have a worn knee. I accidentally put my toes through the hole this morning and ripped it open.”
She shakes her head at the distastefulness of it all. “I will take you clothes shopping,” she announces to me. “This should have been done at age eight.”
It’s true: nobody has ever taken me clothes shopping before. Katya and the aunts were usually wrapped in white lab coats. They used to primarily wear polyester, rayon, and other synthetics, preferably in beige. I still have hand-me-downs from Aunt Christina in my closet, and she’s been gone thirteen years. Christina favored compound cellulose lyocell clothes because they hold onto their shiny hues after an infinite number of laundry cycles. Also, she could buy them in the Fospey company store.
Gabriela opens her car’s passenger door for me and guides me in, as if she’s wary of an attempted escape. Once I’m seated, she leans through the window and says, “And we will throw these baggy shapeless denims onto a bonfire of all your other clothes.”
“We’re not burning them,” I bark back. I won’t have these perfectly good pants molecules dispersed into the atmosphere as pollutant gasses. Clothes make up 17% of the bulk waste in the global eco-system, by weight, I think I read somewhere. Or it’s possible I just made that number up.
“With apologies, Zenna, I despair for you,” Gabriela tells me as she shifts her compact into reverse and roars out of the parking lot. She glances at me and grabs a fistful of my sleeve. “Look at this shirt from a previous century. It belongs in a theatrical costume shop.”
I’m wearing a green flannel shirt with a faded plaid pattern. “What’s wrong with this shirt?” I demand.
“It’s Alex’s, for one thing,” she answers crisply.
(Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series is due on Amazon.com in February 2024.)