Poster Girl

Dedication

To Tera and Trevor,

hosts of the pandemic oasis where I wrote this book

and dearest friends

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Discussion Questions

About the Author

Also by Veronica Roth

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

When she thinks of the time before, she thinks of the photo shoot. The woman who applied Sonya’s makeup smelled of lilies of the valley and hair spray. When she leaned close to dust Sonya’s cheeks with blush, or to cover up a blemish with a fingertip dotted beige, Sonya stared at the freckles on her collarbone. When she finished, the woman slicked her hands with oil and ran them through Sonya’s hair to make it sleek.

Then she held up a mirror for Sonya to see herself, and Sonya’s eyes went first to the woman’s face, half-hidden by glass. Then, to the pale halo of her Insight, a circle of light around her right iris. It brightened in recognition of Sonya’s own Insight.

Now, a decade later, she tries to remember what her reflection looked like in that moment, but all she can see is the final product: the poster. On it, her young face gazes out at an unseen horizon. One of the slogans of the Delegation embraces her from above:

What’s Right

And below:

Is Right.

She remembers the camera flash, the photographer’s hand as he reached to the side to show her where to look, the gentle piano music that played in the background. The feeling of being right at the heart of something.

She pinches a cherry tomato from the stem and drops it in the basket with the others.

Yellow leaves means too much water, Nikhil says. He frowns at the book in his lap. Wait—or too little. Well, which is it?

Sonya kneels on the grit of Building 4’s roof, surrounded by plant beds. Nikhil built them. Every time someone in the building died, he took the worst of their furniture and pried it apart, saving nails and screws and salvaging what he could of the wood. As a result, the beds are a patchwork of wood colors and textures, here a strip of polished mahogany, there a piece of unvarnished oak.

Beyond the roof is the city. She doesn’t pay attention to it. It may as well be the backdrop of a school play, painted on a sheet.

I told you, that book is useless, she says. Trial and error is the only way to really learn anything, with plants.

Perhaps you’re right.

This is the last harvest of the year. Soon they will clear the beds of dead plants and cover them with tarps to protect the soil. They will move all the tools into the shed to keep them dry and carry the pots of mint down to Sonya’s apartment so they can chew the leaves all winter. In January, after months of eating from cans, they will be desperate to taste something green.

He closes the book. Sonya picks up the basket.

We’d better go, she says. Or everything good will be gone.

It’s Saturday. Market day.

I’ve been eyeballing that broken radio for two months, and no one has shown an interest. It’ll keep.

You never know. Remember that time I waffled about that old sweater for three weeks and lost it at the last second to Mr. Nadir?

You did get it, in the end.

"Because Mr. Nadir died."

Nikhil winks. Every end is a new beginning.

Together they walk to the top of the staircase. They go at Nikhil’s pace—his knees are not what they used to be, and it’s a long descent to the courtyard. She takes a tomato from the basket and holds it to her nose.

She never gardened as a child. She learned everything she knows now through failure—and boredom. But she still associates the sweet, dusty smell with summer, and so she remembers the haze of heat above the sidewalk, and the tension in badminton racquet strings, and the purple-red of her mother’s sangria, an infrequent indulgence.

Don’t eat our product, Nikhil says.

Wasn’t going to.

They reach the bottom of the stairs and walk across the courtyard. It’s green and unkempt, the trees straining at the building that contains them, scratching the windows of those lucky enough to have a view. Sonya is jealous of the ones who do. They can pretend. The others, like Sonya, whose windows look out at the city beyond the Aperture, confront the fact that they’re imprisoned daily. Three stories below Sonya’s window is a coil of barbed wire. Across the way is a collapsing corner store offering five minutes with a pair of binoculars for a nominal fee. She tied a sheet across her windows ten years ago and hasn’t drawn it back since.

On her knees at the edge of the garden path is Mrs. Pritchard, her graying hair in a chignon. She’s digging a dandelion out by the root using a shovel made of a few kitchen spoons tied together. Her hands are bare and her wedding band still gleams on her finger, though Mr. Pritchard was executed a long time ago. She sits back on her heels.

Good morning, she says. The Insight in her right eye brightens as she makes eye contact with Sonya, and again when she looks at Nikhil. It’s a reminder that even though the Delegation has fallen, someone could still be watching them.

Is it market day already? she asks. I keep losing track.

Despite kneeling in the dirt, Mrs. Pritchard looks perfect, her shirt free of creases and tucked into a pair of trousers. She has altered clothes for Sonya before, after Lainey Newman died and her things were redistributed within the Aperture.

Good morning, Nikhil returns.

Good morning, Sonya says. Yes, Nikhil wants a broken radio, for some reason.

A broken radio that Sonya will fix, Nikhil says.

I don’t know the first thing about radios.

You’ll work it out. You always do.

Mrs. Pritchard makes a strained sound behind pressed lips, and then says, Those tomatoes are more valuable than a radio. What could you possibly want to hear from— She gestures toward the outer wall of the Aperture. Out there?

I’m not sure yet, he says. I suppose I’ll find out when I get a radio.

She changes the subject. Have you spoken with Building 1 about assigning patrols for the visitation?

Anna assures me they’re handling it.

"Because we can’t have another incident like the one from three years ago."

Of course not.

We can’t have them thinking we’re a bunch of wild animals—

Three years ago, when the three leaders of the government out there visited the Aperture, several drunk residents of Building 2 threw bottles at them. For weeks afterward, deliveries to the Aperture were halted. Some people went without food. It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the peace when outsiders visit—but with the guards’ policy of nonintervention, it’s the prisoners’ job to police themselves.

Mary, Sonya says. Please, don’t let us interrupt your work.

She smiles. Mrs. Pritchard sniffs, and picks up her makeshift trowel.

Sonya and Nikhil continue along.

They walk through the brick tunnel that leads them across the alley. There are names etched into the bricks, which Sonya runs her fingers over as she walks. There are no graves for the people they’ve lost; the names are all they have. The floor of the tunnel is covered in candle wax, remnants of mourners. She has often thought that the wax should be scraped off the ground and melted into new candles, but she doesn’t do it. They’re all used to practicality swallowing sentimentality in the Aperture, but these walls are untouchable.

Thank you for that, Nikhil says. She’s been pestering me about that for weeks.

It’s always something. Last week she was mad about the trash bags piling up next to the dumpster. As if any of us have control over how often trash is collected here.

Before she exits the tunnel, Sonya reaches up to find the name she carved there herself, standing on a rickety stool with the head of a screwdriver in her fist. David. Her fingertips come away gritty.

There are two streets in the Aperture: Green Street and Gray Street, named for the colors of the Delegation. They divide the Aperture into quadrants, and in each quadrant is an identical apartment building. Theirs is Building 4, and it’s full of widows, widowers, and Sonya.

The market is at the center of the Aperture, where the two streets cross. Sonya remembers what real markets looked like, rows of wooden stalls with canvas tops to protect against the weather. Here, everyone brings what they have to trade, and some lay their goods out on blankets, while others walk around making offers. Almost everything is junk, but junk can be useful, a bundle of spoons turning into a trowel, a rickety table becoming a garden bed.

She hasn’t forgotten the feeling of fine things. The cold slide of silk on her bare arms. The snap of new shoes on wooden floors. Her fingernails pinching a crease into wrapping paper at Christmas. Her mother always bought gold and green.

As it turns out, time does not dull every edge.

She pulls closer to Nikhil as they pass a group of men closer to her age. She knows all their names—Logan, and Gabe, and Seby, and Dylan—and it’s for that reason that she pretends she doesn’t see them. They are a sprawling group, one leaning against Building 2, one in the middle of the street, one perched on the curb, one with a hand on the light pole.

"Poster girl," Logan sings, as he turns around the pole, held up by his fingertips.

Even before she was in the Aperture, people called her that. They used to do it because they recognized her face but didn’t know her name. It used to feel like a compliment, when she was sixteen and finally stepping out of her older sister’s shadow. It’s not a compliment anymore.

Can’t pretend not to know us in the Aperture, Sonya. Only so many fish in this fucking fishbowl, Gabe says, as he sidles up next to her. He slides his arm across Sonya’s shoulders. Why don’t you hang out with us anymore?

Too good for us, probably, Seby says. He picks his teeth with a fingernail.

Are you, then? Gabe grins. He smells like moonshine and lavender soap. Not how I remember it.

Sonya lifts his arm away from her shoulders and gives him a little shove. Go find someone else to bother, Gabe.

All four of them laugh at her.

Good afternoon, boys, Nikhil says then. Hope you’re staying out of trouble.

Of course, Mr. Price. Just catching up with our old friend.

I see, Nikhil says. Well, as it happens, we are on an errand, so we’ll be on our way.

Sure thing, Mr. Price. Gabe wiggles his fingers at her, but doesn’t follow them.

Building 2, where most of the younger people ended up after they were all locked in, is the most chaotic place in the Aperture. Logan was in school with Sonya once, a few grades above her. He almost burned down Building 2 last year while cooking a drug made out of cold medicine. And there are always fumes from tubs of moonshine wafting around the building’s courtyard. There was a time when she could identify who made each batch by how it burned her nose and pinched her throat. All anyone wants in Building 2 is to grind time down like a molar.

Gray Street meets Green Street in a stretch of cracked pavement, covered now in old quilts and heaps of all manner of things: stained or ripped clothes piled high, stacks of cans with the labels scrubbed off, cords with frayed ends, folding chairs, split pillows, dented pots. For the most part, they’re castoffs, donated by people outside the Aperture. The organization that collected them, Merciful Hands, comes every month with new offerings and apologetic smiles.

Sometimes people sell the new things they make from the old, a little broom made of a bundle of wire, sheets stitched together from fabric scraps, dining trays made from hardcover books. Those are Sonya’s favorite things. They feel new, and so little here is.

Look, just as I told you. Nikhil picks up an old radio alarm clock. It has a screen for a display, with two speakers framing it. Black and squat, chipped at the corners. Wires spraying out the back of it. Georgia, a resident of Building 1, is perched on an old crate behind the graveyard of old electronics.

Doesn’t work, she says.

It’s not much of a sales pitch.

Sonya takes the radio from Nikhil and makes a show of peeking in the back to see the innards.

I don’t know, she says to Nikhil. It may not be fixable.

Her education was not in service of repairing old radios. Nor did it teach her to grow tomatoes on the roof of a crumbling building, or to fend off idle men who were already drunk at noon. She has learned many lessons here in the Aperture that she had no interest in learning. But Nikhil looks hopeful, and he wants her to have a project, so she smiles.

It’s worth a try, she says.

That’s the spirit.

He negotiates with Georgia. Three tomatoes for a broken radio. No, Georgia says. Seven.

A few feet away, Charlotte Carter waves Sonya over.

She looks like something out of a story, in her gingham dress and her long braid and her skin dappled with freckles and age spots. Her eyes crease at the corners when she smiles at Sonya.

Sonya, dear, she says. Can you do me a favor?

Maybe. What do you need?

My brother, Graham—over in Building 1, do you know him?

It’s a silly question. Everyone knows everyone in the Aperture. We’ve met.

Yes, yes. Well, his last stove burner stopped working yesterday, and he hasn’t been able to cook anything since then. She purses her lips. He’s been using the one in my apartment.

I’ll have to check to see if we’ve got any spare burners, Sonya says.

Tonight? Charlotte sounds eager. The tendons stand out in her throat. "I don’t mean to rush you, it’s just that he tends to cook and then . . . stay."

Sonya suppresses a laugh. I have a party tonight. But I can go in the morning.

Oh yes, Charlotte says. The goodbye party, I forgot.

Sonya ignores the sad tug at the corners of Charlotte’s mouth. Tomorrow morning?

Yes, that will be fine.

Nikhil and Georgia are still arguing. Sonya rejoins them just long enough to hear Georgia accuse Nikhil of giving her bad tomatoes the last time he bought something, and then she clears her throat.

Five tomatoes, Sonya says. It’s a generous offer and I won’t repeat it.

Georgia sighs, and agrees. Sonya hands over the tomatoes.

Nikhil stays in the market all day, sometimes, talking to everyone. But not her. She goes back to Building 4 with the clock radio under one arm, alone.

She takes the little tomato she stole and bites into it, the taste of summer breaking over her tongue.

Sonya owns one nice dress. It appeared in a heap of Merciful Hands donations two years ago, a shock of butter yellow. She saw the others pining for it, and she knew the generous thing to do—the thing that would have earned her DesCoin under the Delegation—would be to let one of the younger ones have it. But she couldn’t let go of it. She folded it over her arm and took it home, where it hung in front of the tapestry for weeks, like a painted sun.

She keeps it under her bed now, in a cardboard box with the rest of her clothing. She takes it out and shakes it, sending dust into the air. It’s creased at the waist, where she folded it, but there’s not much she can do about that. Mrs. Pritchard is the only one in the building with an iron.

As she puts it on, she thinks of her mother. Julia Kantor went to parties all the time. To get ready, she sat on the tufted stool at her vanity to twist her hair into an updo. Tipped perfume onto her finger, and then dabbed it behind her ear. Poked at her drawer of jewelry to find just the right pair of earrings—the pearls, the diamonds, or the little gold hoops. Her hands were so elegant that everything looked like an elaborate pantomime.

Sonya touches the back of her neck—bare, because she cuts her hair with clippers now, but the habit is hard to break. She twists a hand behind her back to push up the zipper. The dress is a little off, too big in the waist, too tight in the shoulders. It floats to her knees.

The party is in the courtyard of Building 3. She’ll have to walk past Building 2 to get there, so she tucks a short knife into her pocket.

But this time, Gray Street is empty. She can hear laughing and shouting from one of the apartments, the thrum of music, a glass shattering. The scrape of her own footsteps. She walks through the center of the Aperture, where the market has been cleared away. She hops over a crack and turns down the tunnel that leads to the courtyard of Building 3.

If Building 4 is a place of reminiscence and Building 2 is a place of chaos, Building 3 is a place of pretending. Not pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist, but pretending that life in the Aperture can be just as good. Building 3 hosts weddings and dinner parties and poker nights; they teach classes; they do calisthenics in little groups, running back and forth down Green Street and then Gray Street, and marching up and down the building’s stairs.

Sonya is bad at pretending.

The courtyard is not as well tended as the one in Building 4, but there are few weeds, and someone has pruned back the trees so they don’t tickle the interior windows. A string of lights hangs from one side to the other; only a few have gone dead in their sockets. There’s a little table set up on the right side, where candle stubs in glass jars flicker with light.

Sonya! A young woman sets a basket of bread down in front of the candles, dusts off her hands, and reaches for Sonya. Her name is Nicole.

Sonya hugs her, the can she brought digging into her ribs.

Oh, Nicole says. What did you bring?

Your favorite, Sonya says, holding up the can. The label is worn, but the picture on it is still intact: sliced peaches.

Wow. Nicole holds the can in both hands, and it reminds Sonya of catching butterflies as a child, how she peered into the gap between her hands to see their wings. I can’t accept this! These come around, what, once a year?

I’ve been saving them for this exact occasion, Sonya says. Ever since the Act passed.

Nicole’s smile is crooked, half-pleased and half-sad. The Children of the Delegation Act passed months ago, allowing those residents of the Aperture who were children when they entered it to be released back into society. Nicole is one of the oldest who was cleared to leave. She was sixteen when she was locked away.

Sonya was seventeen. She won’t be going anywhere.

Let me get a can opener, Nicole says, but Sonya takes out her knife. She carves a neat circle into the top of the can, then taps it to pop it up on one side. Other people are arriving, but for a moment it’s just Sonya and Nicole, standing shoulder to shoulder with their fingers stuck in syrup. Sonya slurps a peach slice, and it’s sweet and fibrous and tart. She licks the syrup off her fingers. Nicole closes her eyes.

They won’t taste quite like that out there, will they? she says. I’ll be able to get them anytime, and they’ll stop seeming as good.

Maybe, Sonya says. But you can get other things, too. Better things.

That’s my point, though. Nicole pinches another peach slice between her fingers. No matter what I get, nothing will ever taste as good as this does right now.

Sonya looks over Nicole’s shoulder at those who have just arrived: Nicole’s mother, Winnie, a doe-eyed woman who lives in Building 1; Winnie’s friends, Sylvia and Karen, their hair in matching soda can curls; and a smattering of people from Building 3, including the others who were too old to qualify under the Act. Renee and Douglas, who were married two years ago in this courtyard, and Kevin and Marie, recently engaged. Marie wears Kevin’s old class ring, stuffed with wax to make it fit on the right finger.

That’s quite a dress, Ms. Kantor, Douglas says to her. The last time she saw him, he was thinning on top, but his head is shaved now, his beard coming in thick. Pilfer that from a widow?

No.

Only joking, he says.

I realize that.

Okay. Douglas makes a face at Renee. Tough crowd.

Don’t you know? Poster Girl’s a fucking killjoy now, Marie says. She walks up to the table, sticks her fingers in the can of peaches. She’s wearing a dress, too, made of a shirt and a skirt stitched together at the waist. On her wrist is a blurry tattoo of a sun. Building 4 is where fun goes to die. Sometimes literally.

Marie, Kevin says, in a hushed voice. Don’t—

Yes, I’m so sorry to be missing out on all the fun in Building 3, Sonya says. That early morning calisthenics club you started sounds like a riot.

Marie’s lips pucker, but Renee laughs.

Nicole looks up, then points overhead as an airplane passes over the Aperture. Everyone stops to watch it. It’s a rare enough event that even those who don’t care about leaving the Aperture make a note of it. Evidence of other sectors, other worlds beyond their own. Travel between sectors was almost unheard of under the Delegation, and it doesn’t seem to be that much more common under the Triumvirate.

Are you patrolling tomorrow? Winnie asks Douglas. Her eyes are soft with concern. I thought I saw your name on the volunteer list.

Wouldn’t want to miss all the excitement, Douglas says.

Hopefully there isn’t any excitement at all, Winnie says. I don’t like you boys having to take on that responsibility.

Nonintervention policy, Douglas says with a shrug. Guards’re here to keep us in, not keep us well-behaved.

It almost seems like they want us to eat each other alive in here.

Better that than the alternative, Sonya says, a little too loudly. Everyone looks at her, and she straightens. "I don’t think I want them to be the ones who decide what ‘well-behaved’ looks like, do you?"

Some in the Aperture still trust their old regime, the Delegation, to be the arbiter of good. Some don’t bother with good at all. But regardless, their unspoken agreement is not to place any trust in the outside government, in the Triumvirate. No one who keeps them locked up here, who participated in the execution of so many of their loved ones, could be capable of goodness. Even when Sonya had no interest in following Delegation rules, she still hated the Triumvirate—the supposed righteous who killed her family, her friends, Aaron.

Well. Winnie sniffs. I suppose not.

Wind blows through the courtyard. The sky darkens, and the lights twinkle overhead. Sonya sneaks another peach, and asks Sylvia about her bad knee, and tells Douglas how to troubleshoot his broken box fan. Nicole drifts from person to person, and tells them about her new, government-assigned identity, and all the things she’s planning to do in her first week outside. She won’t be living nearby; she’ll take the train to Portland, start over with a new name. Buy a pint of milk and sit near the bank of the river and drink every last drop. Go out dancing. Walk around all night, just to do it, just because she can.

At one point, Renee nudges Sonya with an elbow.

A bunch of us are going to the roof for a cigarette. Want to come? she says.

I’m going to turn in early, Sonya says.

Renee shrugs and joins the others. Sylvia and Karen are leaving. The candles have all burned out. Nicole’s cheeks shine with tears. Sonya hugs her again.

I can’t believe they won’t let you out, Nicole says, her breath hot and fierce against Sonya’s ear.

Sonya holds Nicole at arm’s length and thinks this is a good way to remember her: dimly lit, hair tousled by the wind, eyes wet, angry on a friend’s behalf.

I’ll miss you, she says.

Nicole gives her the peach syrup to drink. She sips it as she walks back to Building 4 slowly, savoring.

She wakes that night to a sharp, loud sound, like the crack of a whip. She sits up in bed, and by the glow of her Insight she can see that the trunk she drags across the doorjamb—the only lock she has been able to manage—is still in place.

Barefoot, she walks to the windows and pulls back the tapestry that covers them. The street below is empty. The wind blows a newspaper across the crumbling sidewalk. The metal shade covers the windows of the corner store like a closed eyelid.

She thinks of the video her father showed her when she was a child, beaming it from his Insight to hers. Footage from a smoky street embroiled in conflict. Cars parked askew, streetlights tipped over. And coming from every direction, the deep, sharp sound of gunshots.

He sat next to her on the couch as she played it again and again with the implant. This is what the world was like, he said, before the Delegation. Showing her cost him two hundred DesCoin—children weren’t supposed to watch that sort of thing. But the sacrifice was worth it to him, to answer her questions.

The moon is high and waxing, almost full. Another month behind her. Time keeps marching forward.

She goes back to sleep.

At first, when someone died in the Aperture, they were like bees absconding from the hive, leaving wax and honey—no one else took what they left behind. But soon the rules of propriety shifted out of necessity. Now when someone dies, everyone in the building swarms the space and picks at their possessions until only the graying honeycomb is left. Whenever Sonya needs a new part, she consults the building map by the south stairwell,