Losers Read online

  Should we pay you now or after, Britt? texted Kelsey along with a winky emoji that none of them felt. There was no reply.

  Next period, the empty seat usually occupied by Brandy explained her silence. Chanda was simply regretting her own decision not to auction herself. She’d seen girls less attractive than her raise millions, and her parents could’ve used the money. She was going to be won by some loser, used and perverted and humiliated all the same, and they’d have nothing to show for it. She found herself hating herself for being so selfish.

  There were a lot of empty seats in that class. Mr. Amedori was playing a video; Chanda simply lowered her head to her desk, squeezed her eyes shut, and prayed each time the door opened that it wasn’t for her. But by the time the dismissal bell rang, she was still there.

  Kelsey and Chanda shared a brief hug as they entered last period together. There was a palpable energy in the air as boys were all desperately awaiting news of their chosen pots, and the dwindling female population were all wondering who was yet to fall.

  Plainly, from the looks they directed at the two of them, they wondered not if, but when. How could it be that Kelsey Roach and Chanda Brighton were still sitting among them?

  Chanda and Kelsey were each as acclimated to male attention as they were to female jealousy. Chanda had been dealing with it since fifth grade. She’d been one of the first girls in her class to start menstruating, and the second to start wearing a bra. By the time high school rolled around, those bras had their work cut out for them. Kelsey had a more petite build than Chanda’s, but she had the face of an angel. Yes, she had a big scar on her lower belly from a surgery she’d needed when she was a kid, but Chanda was yet to meet the guy who was truly put off by it.

  Chanda could imagine a world in which guys checked her out without that look in their eyes, where you could see them wondering how many tickets she was worth. Some girls actually spent a lot of their 17 th year deliberately piling on weight in hopes of not being drawn, but most guys had long enough memories not to fall for it. Pointless, and nothing but sadness dressing on a sad salad as far as Chanda was concerned. She was beautiful, she knew it, and she wasn’t going to lessen herself for anyone until she had two. In less than an hour now.

  It was actually a bit jarring. Here in Mr. Corley’s room, there were Kelsey and Chanda, both in the 8-10 range depending on how one felt about particular body types, and then there were the rest of the girls, 3’s or lower all. Snaggle-toothed Janet, Kristin with her bulging eyes and pockmarked skin, and Maria, who could barely squeeze into her desk (and had a hair lip besides). Then Kelsey and Chanda. It felt almost like being part of a different species. One that was very much endangered. All the other hotties had been drawn by now, and the middle range ones as well. Some would have been taken by guys who preferred bidding on girls they had better odds of winning, and some, maybe, hopefully, by boyfriends who’d agreed to seed their girlfriends’ pots to protect them.

  When school resumed Monday after break, Chanda wondered which girls would be beaming adoringly at their faithful fellas, and which would be scowling at them and those other women in their laps. Chanda actually managed a grin at the thought of those pricks who neglected their girlfriends’ pots and didn’t wind up winning anyone. Served them right.

  As it was the final Friday before spring break, Mr. Corley was teaching with a light hand. Everyone received a heads up of what assignments, quizzes and tests needed to be made up or repeated, and those who had such work were working on it. The rest were allowed to quietly socialize or be on their phones.

  Chanda was in the midst of typing out a text to her mom – looks like I might need a ride home today after all! ;) j/k obvs, still waiting and going nuts!!! – when the door opened, and her heart sank. The Lottery officers, two men cut from the same cloth, burly mustaches, navy blue suits, indoor sunglasses and all, approached Mr. Corley and the shorter one murmured something to him. Their heads panned the classroom, slowing quite obviously on where Kelsey and Chanda were seated.

  “Be strong,” whispered Chanda.

  “I’ll miss you,” Kelsey whispered back.

  “Kelsey?” said Mr. Corley. “It’s time.”

  Chanda didn’t think anybody else was close enough to hear the whimper that rose, then caught in her friend’s throat. Kelsey didn’t say a word; she calmly stood up and walked to the front of the room. Her books were left behind. Not likely to be a need for those any more. Once the door had swung shut behind her friend, Chanda put them back on Mr. Corley’s shelves and took her seat, trying to suppress the mounting panic.

  Twenty minutes to go. Chanda could feel glances flickering in her direction from every direction. Why wouldn’t they? Sure, there might not be any official ranking, but she knew full well that she was widely considered to be one of, if not the hottest girl in school. All day long, people had watched 4’s and 5’s and 6’s pulled out of class, won, yet here sat Clark High School’s only viable candidate for 10dom. It was like the fates were screwing with her, taking revenge for all of her attempts at rationalization and equanimity over the preceding year by making her stew as long as humanly possible.

  Why? Why was this taking so long? More than a decade she’d been living in terror of this day, ever since she’d realized that she was pretty, and heard adults speaking behind closed doors about what happened to the pretty ones. There had been nights she’d woken with her fingernails sunk deep into her pillow from some nightmare where she’d been consensually raped by some disgusting pig old enough to be her grandfather, or fat enough to be three of him. It had devastated her ability to make friends with men, knowing that every kindness she showed them was one more reason for them to seed her pot. She’d never so much as had a boyfriend, terrified by the prospect of being torn away from someone she loved. Chanda found some of them attractive, yes, but they were all enemies in the end. The homelier girls might be able to rely on having boyfriends who could scare off the one or two guys who might consider dipping in their pots, but the pots of girls like Chanda would be so stuffed full of tickets that if the terminator were her boyfriend, he’d still be trampled to death by the stampede of guys who wanted to make her their slave.

  Was she having a hot flash? It was all so overwhelming! How had she ever managed to attempt a defense of this barbarism?! Whatever justification the government wanted to offer, it was female slavery. No. Not mere (“mere”) slavery, but brainwashing and indoctrination, a violation of a sort that had never before been possible. She wouldn’t simply lose her virginity; she would lose her entire self. Her body, yes, but also her personality, her aspirations, her reservations, all bonds of love and friendship so that a bunch of horny assholes wouldn’t keep breeding the species into certain oblivion. She thought back to that defeated girl she’d seen on the sidewalk, and heard the echo of her voice from the night before. This fucking sucks. It’s so unfair.

  And yet she was helpless before it. Completely and utterly helpless.

  She heard a sound from the front of the room and her head whipped around so fast, and she was so light-headed, and so frightened, that she fainted dead away.

  Chanda could hear again before she could see. She’d been dreaming – nightmares, really – but was surprised to hear only the soft white noise that must be an oscillating fan. She could tell because she could feel it blowing gently across her skin. That felt nice. Her face felt hot, flushed, even though the rest of her body felt frigid. Her clothes kept the moving air off of her body though – which was doubly reassuring as she realized she was still wearing clothes. Her own clothes.

  Her eyelids fluttered open. She was in the nurse’s office, she soon realized. It was dark in here. No, only dim. Chanda was lying on the cot, the same cot she’d wound up on when she’d sprained her ankle freshman year in gym class. She hadn’t been back in here since, but not much had changed.

  “She’s awake!”

  A male voice, and a loud one. With a groan, her head swimming, she craned her neck to
see the boy sitting beside her, now standing, darting out of the room. Aaron. Eichhorn, she thought. She didn’t have time to ponder what he was doing here before he was back, the nurse walking quickly in his wake, then brushing him aside when she reached Chanda.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “You fainted. Third fainter today, in fact.” The nurse’s tone offered no sympathy. She must be one of those women who resented all the pretty girls who traded a lifetime of labor for thirty years of pampering sexual servitude. It seemed that the older a woman grew, the more that resentment leaked out in public. The nurse was not young.

  “I did?”

  Aaron nodded. “Yeah. I saw you were kind of breathing funny, then suddenly you went limp. I barely caught you before you hit the floor.”

  Oh, right. He was in her seventh period. Aaron was a wallflower’s wallflower, the sort of unremarkable nobody she’d always sort of figured would own her someday. Oh, shit. Did he? Had it happened? Was this slightly doughy stranger her new owner?

  The nurse kept her from sitting up with a firm hand on her breastplate. “Don’t try and move just yet, girly. You’ll just wind up right back here and we’ll have to start over again. I’m supposed to be on my way home. They’re already closing the school.”

  “They are? But…” She paused, but figured she may as well say it. “Did someone… win me?” No sense beating around the bush. Not like her not asking would make it any less so. She’d read an article about this one case where a young woman had been in a car accident on the morning of Drawing Day, and when she woke up from her coma four days later, her winner was right there waiting for her. According to the article, he hadn’t even let her parents in to see her.

  “I don’t know. They’re still processing down in the gym, so you’d better stop by and check. Or not. I don’t care.” She turned to Aaron. “You know this girl?”

  “Um, yeah?” He looked confused by the question. “I mean, it’s Chanda .”

  It was a big high school; the nurse didn’t seem to see her as quite such a legend, judging by her apathetic shrug. “Good. Get her a cup of water and let her rest a few minutes, then help her out. OK? I’m gonna be in my office packing up.”

  “Sure,” said Aaron gamely. He looked pretty pleased to be ordered to interact with this classmate who was otherwise entirely outside his league.

  With one final look conveying her displeasure at the delay, the nurse left the room, leaving the two of them alone. “Are you OK?” asked Aaron.

  Chanda, however was not about to change her stance on male friendship here in the final minutes of freedom. “Did they come for me? I thought I heard the door.”

  “No.” But even as the surge of hope threatened to send her right back into oblivion’s embrace, he amended his reply. “Not that I know of, that is. When you passed out, it was only somebody coming back from the bathroom. I helped Mr. Corley carry you down here. I told him we shouldn’t move you, because we didn’t know why you… ya know. But he said it was only nerves, so we just did it. Guess they must’ve come for you after that.”

  She nodded. “Hey, about that water…?”

  “Right!” Aaron leapt to his feet, hurrying so quickly to the water cooler in the corner that she had to conceal a laugh. The whole room was only ten feet long. The guy nearly knocked the jug off the stand. Then he was back, offering her the conical paper cup with a trembling hand. She accepted it, and then the refill was fetched with a bit more grace.

  “So you really didn’t get… won?” he asked softly.

  “No. Well no, I mean I didn’t find out yet is all. I’m sure I did. I just don’t know by who yet. They’ll tell me when I get to the gym, I guess. Probably waiting for me outside the office in case I try to run. Not that I’d want to piss off the Lotto gestapo by making them postpone their vacations like I did the nurse.” She snorted.

  Aaron chuckled. “Lotto gestapo… I like that. We could’ve used that when we were doing signs. Though Principal Doherty would’ve probably made us take them down.”

  “Signs? What are you talking about?” Chanda made a face. She didn’t find him especially interesting, but she’d certainly rather be here chatting up this geek than in the gym having her brain scrambled.

  “You know, for the WAL.” She stared blankly. “We’re All Losers…?”

  “Oh!” That did ring a bell. WAL was a nationwide group of protesters against the Lottery. By reputation, it was mostly young Lottery-losers-to-be and older women who’d not been won but still opposed it on principle. Chanda hadn’t realized there was a local chapter. She was even more surprised to hear that they counted an eighteen-year-old boy among their members. “You’re… are there a lot of you? I hadn’t heard anything.”

  “It’s really only three of us. Me, Heidi Weaver and Julie Burgess. Or it was, anyway.”

  “Was? They get cold feet?”

  She realized her mistake even as he pointed it out. “They were won. Julie during second period. Heidi got taken out of lunch.”

  “Oh. Um, sorry.”

  “Hey, you sure as heck don’t need to apologize to me for it. I’m the last demographic anyone in yours should be apologizing to today of all days.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Her tone was sharp, but really, she was grateful for his humility. She could only imagine the swagger to be seen around town right now as the losers were being paraded around by the winners. Three Drawing Days ago, a neighbor girl who’d lived across the street and a couple doors down had been won. By an adult, too, one of those older guys who bought extra tickets from Clark’s community chest. (Chanda fervently hoped she’d kept a low enough profile to avoid getting too many of those creeps in her pot.) This one had made his prize take off all her clothes and stand in her front yard shaking her chest at passers-by. She’d been arrested before long, and done some jail time for it. She wondered if her winner had thought it was worth the thrill.

  Punishing losers for their crimes committed while won seemed like the least fair part of it all, but Mya had once pointed out that at least time in jail was time away from their winner, and their records were expunged when their time was up. (Their loser-time, that is.) Many crimes were considered so serious that winners were automatically tried as accessories even so, as apparently in the early days some clever guys had seeded all those 1’s and 2’s pots to form their own tiny gangs. Crazy the things some people came up with.

  Chanda asked for another cup of water, and Aaron once more obliged her. She was sitting up now, and her head wasn’t as fuzzy. She could probably get up and walk. It might be better, she reflected, rather than having the Lottery officers come find her and drag her out with those control batons. She didn’t want her final moments of freedom to be humiliating. But, more than that – much more than that – she did not want to go to the gym.

  “So how did you get involved in WAL? You lose a sister or something?” There was a lot of talk about children of losers and how they might view the process considering their secondhand involvement in it, but the Lottery wasn’t quite old enough as an institution to have any eligible winners or losers born out of it. All over the country, though, grade schools had been shutting down left and right at the Lottery had bottlenecked birth rates, the number of children enrolled plummeting. Middle schools were no following suit, and she supposed high schools weren’t far behind. Chanda could only imagine what that would be like, every student going home to a winner-loser household.

  She supposed before long, she’d know, albeit not from the student perspective.

  Aaron spoke softly, sensing how distracted she was. “No, nothing like that. I… I guess it sounds stupid to say that it just seems… wrong?”

  “It doesn’t sound stupid when I say it, but I’m on the loser side of the debate. There wasn’t anybody you wanted to win?”

  “I don’t want to win a person, no. I always wanted to do it like my parents did it, you know? Meet some nice girl, beg for a date, get shot down, cry so hard she feels
so bad she gives me a shot, hit it off, fall in love, happily ever after.”

  “That’s sweet.” And naïve, but she didn’t feel the need to say as much.

  “But it’s more than that,” Aaron continued. “I hate that as a civilization we’ve decided to formally separate procreation from love. I think about what that must be doing to us as a society, and I shudder. Already, most children’s so-called mothers are nothing more than concubines, raising some guy’s offspring because his name got drawn out of a hat.”

  “So-called mothers?” Chanda frowned. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m with you on the merits, but a mother is a mother. Just because they didn’t choose to have the sex doesn’t mean they can’t be a good mom.”

  “You’re right, sorry. I only meant…” He pursed his lips, obviously trying not to put his foot between them again. “It’s not how it’s supposed to be, is all.”

  “You got that right.” Chanda almost, almost reached out and gave his plump little hand a squeeze. But why? She’d be giving the guys plenty of thrills soon enough. Let Aaron’s principles keep his ego swoll. “I guess we ought to get to the gym, before the nurse comes in and kicks our asses.”

  “Language,” came a dispassionate rebuke from around the corner.

  Chanda extended her middle finger in the woman’s direction, but took it no further. Aaron offered a hand to help her up, and though she probably didn’t need it, there was nothing like a fainting spell to keep you grounded, literally. Once she was sure she could manage it on her own, she let go and made her way past the nurse with her impatient foot-tapping, and out into the halls.

  The school was pretty dark by now, and all but silent. The student population was now divided neatly into five categories: underclassmen, survivors, losers, winners, and boys with bad luck. And Aaron, she supposed. In any event, each category had its own reason not to be in school at that hour. Class had been out for less than half an hour, but already they had scattered. Teachers, too, most probably as eager as nurse whatshername to get out of here for a week.