just for us
Murphy’s life gets much better, very suddenly.
They call the underground hideout ‘the Skybox’; it’s the sunken basement of an old office building. There’s another girl who comes by, with long blonde hair: Murphy mistakes her for Harper at first. Except. She’s softer around all the edges, and she doesn’t live at the Skybox like the rest of them; she has a home somewhere else. And she still chooses to spend most of her time here.
Her name is Clarke, and when she isn’t trying to corral them into painting a mural of the sky all across the walls, she’s heckling Bella about how to run things. She says things like they can’t eat just cereal all the time, Bell, and come on, you have to wash these blankets sometime. At the end of every week, she goes out with Bella with the cash jar, and both of them come back with groceries: every other night, she helps Bella make decent food. They argue most of the time.
At first, the arguing really grates at Murphy, makes her anxious and sick to her stomach. And then it just fades, like everything else, into background noise. They don’t really mean anything by it: it’s just habit, an old comfort to fall back into.
There’s a collection of cots in one corner; Murphy secures one for herself without too much trouble: she’s sick of sleeping in a huddle of clothes. There’s a set of stall-type bathrooms with the plumbing miraculously still working. There’s Bella’s office, where she mostly seems to sit and read heavy books. There’s a coffeemaker that makes the worst coffee and a lot of noise. There’s another set of stairs and something that might have been a garden, a walled terrace tucked in between buildings, but they’ve cleared away most of the weeds and made a fire pit: that’s where they do most of their cooking. Finally: her skill at starting fires comes in handy; makes her useful.
Clarke tries to put up a chore chart on the wall. That goes over less well than the mural painting.
During the day, they spread out across the city, do whatever they can to bring in money for the cash jar. Murphy follows Mbege around for awhile, but Mbege does not limit himself to panhandling; he’s also skilled at pickpocketing, which is less profitable with a partner. So Murphy follows around Monty and Jasper for awhile; they fix up computers for old people in a park. Murphy knows less than nothing about computers, and they don’t need a third person in their gig, so they cut her loose. Then she heads out with Monroe and Harper: Harper plays guitar and Monroe plays violin, and when all eyes are on them, Murphy steals purses. Then somebody elbows her in the face by accident, and she goes off on them, and she gets a bloody nose for her troubles. So that’s done with.
Then: at last. Bella pairs her up with Emori, and with Emori, everything clicks into place. They’ll case a store; Murphy will distract the salesperson, Emori will steal Basically Everything, and then they leave separately. They’ll sell whatever they took on the street, and then they’ll jump the turnstile into the subway back home. They’ll tip the cash into the money jar when they get home, skimming some off the top. Sock money, Emori calls it.
Sometimes Bella is standing there, and she asks: “Got anything interesting for me?”
And Murphy starts stealing little things for her. A bottle opener. A set of keys to someone’s house. Miscellaneous wallets. Bella flicks through them, giving her this tiny, approving smile. She feels shocked with warmth, all the way through.
A set of earrings. A pendant necklace. They go together.
A set of cufflinks. Bella stops her with her hand on Murphy’s wrist: the touch itself is electric, across her skin, lighting up her nerve endings. “You do know I don’t own anything that has cuffs,” she says. “Basically all I own is t-shirts?”
Murphy allows herself to stop, to stand still. She’s aware of Emori at her back, watching them. She swallows. “You’d look good in a suit,” she says.
Bella considers her. “Nah,” she says. “I think that’s more your style.” Murphy almost bristles at some imagined insult, but Bella continues: “Suspenders, with your hair pulled back, the whole thing.”
“Oh,” says Murphy. “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” says Bella, and drops her wrist. She’s wearing the earrings.
That night, Bella emerges from her office in the back to the fire pit where they’re cooking dinner. She sits down, and she opens her heavy book. She tells them the story of Prometheus’s kind-hearted brother: Epimetheus, and his wife Pandora.
If it were up to Murphy, she would never have given the human race fire. She’s got no kindness in her heart, and humans have scarcely ever been kind to her in turn. But it’s not a decision that was left to her, and that’s probably for the better: she’d still be underneath her mother’s thumb if it weren’t for fire, which cleansed her, which saved her. The last thing in Pandora’s box was hope, and that’s the worst thing she could have.
—
The next day, Emori takes her by the hand to one of the tallest buildings in the city. They take the elevator up all the way to the women’s bathroom on the top floor, and Emori goes into the closet in the corner and jimmies the lock until it opens. It reveals a ladder: she climbs up, and Murphy follows her blindly, like she always does.
It leads directly to the roof, to the sky. Emori crosses the surface easily, like a ballerina, like a tightrope walker. Murphy follows, more carefully. Finally, Emori sits at the edge, lets her legs dangle off the side.
Murphy feels too intimate with her own death to join her, so Emori waits. And the sun sets in the sky, and Emori says “This isn’t an interesting thing you can share with Bella.” And that stirs something in Murphy, so she sits down next to Emori, and there’s the city below them, and it’s so ugly. But the sun is all swirled colors pulling into darkness, and that makes it worth it. “Jane,” she says, and she doesn’t let anybody call her by her first name, and she turns, but Emori’s face won’t tell her anything. “This is just for us.”
Murphy lets out a breath. “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”