Binder frowned. "I should warn you. We performed emergency liposuction on his throat last night because he was having trouble breathing. He may look a bit. . . well, I just wanted to warn you."

Binder led her down the hallway to Nick"s room, then left her there. Nick lay on his back in the bed, covered by a blue sheet. His throat was swaddled in white bandages. His arms were on top of the sheet. The skin of his arms was shiny, taut, bulging. He seemed to have turned yellow in the past day or two. His breathing was slow, labored.

She went to the side of the bed. His nose wrinkled. He opened his eyes.

"Aggie."

She touched his hand. He felt hot and slippery. When she took her fingers away, they left an indentation in his skin that slowly filled again.

"The doctor says you"re going to be okay."

"You"re lying. He already told me."

"I"m sorry, Nick."

"No you"re not. You did this to me."

"Don"t be silly."

"How much weight have you lost? A hundred pounds? In three weeks? For every pound you lost, I put on two. b.i.t.c.h."

He lifted his hand, as if to reach for her, and she stepped back. His hand hit the rail at the side of the bed. The impact split his skin, a thin fissure from between his pinky and ring finger to his wrist. He cried out as if he"d been burned, and yellow fluid spurted out of the cut, thick and sluggish. It slid down the side of the bed in lumps.

When Aggie turned around, Dr. Binder was there. She leaned into him.

"It"s awful!"

Two nurses came in behind the doctor and went immediately to Nick. Binder led Aggie out of the room.

"I"m sorry," he said, holding her close, supporting her. "If there"s anything I can do, you"ll let me know?"

His face was close to hers. The look in his eyes was not just sympathetic. There was something else there, barely hidden below the surface. My G.o.d, was that desire? He wanted to kiss her! Wanted to do more than kiss her. A lot more.

"I"ll try to come by later to see Nick."

"Have a nurse call me when you"re here. We"ll see to it that Nick"s kept comfortable."

"Thank you for your help."

"It"s the least I can do," he said.

His hand lingered on her arm. She did not look back at him as she walked away.

"Everything has a price," Helen said carefully, looking at Agatha across the desk.

"He"s going to die," Agatha said. "He"s gained over two hundred pounds in three weeks. His heart can"t take it. He can"t breathe."

"You gave him up willingly, Agatha. You gave him to us."

"I didn"t know what you were going to do to him."

"We helped you, that"s all. Haven"t we been successful?"

"But Nick ... I know you"re responsible."

"So you know. Are you happy?"

Agatha hesitated only a moment before answering. "Yes."

"I promised you that you would be. Now, take a month or two to enjoy yourself. Enjoy your new body. Take three months. You won"t have to provide a man until September."

Agatha felt suddenly cold. "I don"t understand, Helen."

"Everything balances, Agatha. What you lose, somebody else must gain."

Agatha stared at the other woman. "I won"t bring anybody else."

"That"s your choice. I felt the same way. Let me show you something."

Helen reached into the desk and pulled out a photograph. She handed it to Agatha. Agatha held it gingerly, studying it with dismay. It was Helen. Helen corpulent, bulging.

"I"ve seen this already."

"No, you haven"t. This is the after shot. After I learned how I lost the weight the first time. Four months after, to be exact. I"d been married a month. My new love. I couldn"t give him up."

Agatha stared at the photograph, horrified more by Helen"s words than by the image. "It all came back," she said.

"And more. Pretty soon he didn"t want me. In the end, I gave him up. What choice did I have?"

"Oh, G.o.d."

"Everything has a price, Agatha. We all pay it. Twice a year. It isn"t much to ask. One man does the group for nearly a month. That gives you at least six months between. Sometimes even as long as a year. It can seem like a long time. A lifetime."

Agatha covered her face with a hand. "It"s horrible."

"What"s horrible is the way Nick treated you. That wasn"t so long ago. Do you want to go back to that?"

"No."

"We all pay the price," Helen said, leaning close. "Look at yourself, Agatha. You"re a new person."

Agatha left the office with Helen, followed her outside. A car was waiting.

"There"s only one other thing we ask," Helen said. "That you bring us some interesting recipes. Something simple, something that will camouflage the required ingredients. All right?"

Agatha nodded, numb.

"You won"t have trouble finding men, will you?" Helen said.

Agatha didn"t answer.

Helen slid into the car. The man driving was named David. Helen had met him only a week ago, she"d said. Sweat glistened on his forehead. His fingers were plump worms. She kissed his cheek. David looked up at Agatha, smiled weakly. As the car pulled away, Helen waved.

Agatha thought of Dr. Binder. The way he had looked at her.

No, she wouldn"t have trouble finding men.

GRUB-GIRL.

Edward Lee.

Lemme guess. Head, right? Ten bucks a pop is what I charge. Cheap.

That your car there, the blue Metro?

Huh? You wanna talk a little first? Oh, okay, I get it. You don"t know the full scoop about things. Okay, fine.

But. . . s.h.i.t, look, see that fat guy in the red Escort right there by the Exxon station? He"s one of my regulars. Hang here for ten, okay?

I"ll be right back.

Okay, the full scoop on me? Sure. s.h.i.t, I got time. You"ve heard about the grubs, you must"ve. Probably just haven"t heard that some of us are hookers. Not the kind of thing the state legislature wants getting around. Bad for tourism, you know?

Average john, all he wants is head. No mess, no fuss, just a quick suck in the car, parked in some dark cranny off West Street at three in the morning. Look, I"m just your average garden-variety alley pross, not some fancy streetwalker or stuck-up call girl. Standard price on the street is twenty for head, thirty for a straight lay, and forty for an a.s.s-f.u.c.k, but I can charge half that and pull twice as many tricks "cos, well... "Cos I"m what you might call special.

They call us "grubs." Nice, huh? Well... I guess we are a little on the pasty side. But, look, don"t get freaked out. I heard somewhere there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing, I don"t know, a couple of years ago. Christ, I"m sure you heard about that. NASA and the air force were testing some new kinda plane, remotely piloted, they called it, flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. It was a nuclear ramjet or some s.h.i.t, could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, ran by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. "The ultimate deterrent," the president said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this thing. What they didn"t announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall kinda radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn"t worried about it "cos it flew so high, the s.h.i.t would go right out of the atmosphere. Well, something f.u.c.ked up during one of the test flights, and one of these things wound up flying up and down the East Coast at treetop level on something they called an "emergency urban alert bomb mode" for something like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over cities, for s.h.i.t"s sake. And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get p.i.s.sed on by it.

I"d just come up from the docks down there, you know, by the Market Square, and I was walking up toward Clay Street. "Rome, my man, he usually picked me and his other two girls up at about four A.M. Best time for us alley girls to turn tricks is after two, after the bars are closed, "cos then the cops stop buzzing the street to bust our chops. f.u.c.kin" cops, nine times outa ten when they catch you, all they do is make you give "em a quick b.l.o.w. .j.o.b, then let you go. Anyway, here I am, hoofing it up to Clay after turning about five tricks, and then there"s this rumble way down deep in my belly and this sound like slow thunder, and I look up and see this ugly thing flying about hundred feet over my head. Didn"t know what to make of it. It looked like a big black kite in the sky, and when it pa.s.sed, I could see this weird blue-green glow coming out of the back of the thing, its engines, I guess. I died a couple hours later, and the next day I woke up a grub.

There was a big whupdeedo for a little while. All of a sudden there were ten thousand dead people walking around and not knowing what the f.u.c.k hit them. President called an emergency meeting or some s.h.i.t. Oh, you should"ve heard all the fancy talk they were spouting. At first they were gonna "euthanize" us "to safeguard the societal whole from potential contraindications," until some egghead at CDC verified that we weren"t psychotic or contagious or radioactive or anything. Then some a.s.shole Republican senator made a big pitch about how we should be "socially impounded." "Protean symtomologies," see, that"s what they were worried about. These s.h.i.theads wanted to round us all up and put us on an island somewhere! It all blew over, though, after the activists started gearing up, and they let us be.

After all, grubs are people too.

It didn"t hurt really. Just felt sick for a few minutes, got a headache, and died. Woke up the next day feeling pretty much the same as I always did. Woke up a grub. We call live people "pink" or "pinkies," and they call us grubs. Only fair, they got names for us, we got names for them. "Rome didn"t get it, the p.r.i.c.k, he stayed pink, and so did his other two hookers. The s.h.i.t from the plane wouldn"t get you if you were in a car or under a roof. About a dozen other hookers got it, though, "cos they were out on the street just like me when that f.u.c.ked-up plane flew by, and now every pink hooker in the city hates us. See, johns want grubs more than pink girls "cos we"re cheaper and we ain"t got diseases. AIDS, herpes, and all that s.h.i.t, I had it all when I was pink, but not no more, and a john knows that if he buys himself a nut with a grub, he ain"t gonna catch nothing.

Here"s why I killed "Rome, though. After 1 got grubbed, he got this brainstorm that he could really cop a bundle off me with the kinks. He"d work me right out of his crib, hitting johns up for a couple hundred bucks an hour! These sick f.u.c.ks"d come in and do anything they wanted, and I mean anything. Bondage, S & M, scat, that sort of s.h.i.t. "Rome"s only rule was that they weren"t allowed to break any bones or cut off any parts. These kinks were a trip, let me tell you. You"d be surprised how many really sick motherf.u.c.kers there are in the world. They"d tie me up, jack me out, stick needles in my t.i.ts, s.h.i.t in my mouth, you f.u.c.kin" name it. Grubs don"t feel pain, so "Rome figured it didn"t matter. Anything goes, you know? Then he gets this bright idea about how he"s gonna start his own video line called "Grub Paradise" and how I"m gonna be the star. The f.u.c.ker wanted to film me while these kinks were working me over! Well, I started to get sick of this s.h.i.t real fast. Grubs don"t gotta sleep, so "Rome figures he can turn me into a twenty-four-hour-a-day enterprise. Here"s this sc.u.mbag making cash hand over fist offa my a.s.s, and I don"t get s.h.i.t out of it. So I...

Well, if you wanna know the details, I busted a toilet tank cover over his head one night, cut his belly open, and ate his guts.

h.e.l.l. Sometimes a girl"s gotta do what she"s gotta do.

See, grubs can only eat raw stuff. You eat regular food like the pinkies and the s.h.i.t don"t come out, you bloat up. There was this one gal named Sue who got grubbed just like mea"blond, kinda heavyset, really big t.i.tsa"and she just goes on eating the regular s.h.i.t that the pinkies eat, and one day I saw her walking past the hotel and, I swear, she"s big as Jabba the Hut, and before she could make it to the bus stop, she, like, exploded right there in the street, made one holy h.e.l.l of a mess.

And this s.h.i.thead Republican senator I was telling you about, you should"ve heard the guy, like because we can only eat raw stuff, that means we"re gonna go on some zombie rampage eating people in the streets like some horror movie, so that was his case for "socially impounding" us. Glad that a.s.shole"s s.h.i.t didn"t fly. Of course, it probably sounds pretty hypocritical of me, since I just got done telling you I chowed down on "Rome"s insides. I just figured it was the thing to do, that"s all. I got tired of being used by this sc.u.mbag, so I did the job on him. It wasn"t like his guts tasted any better than anything elsea"grubs don"t have a sense of taste.

One good thing about being a grub hooker, though, you start to stick up for yourself. You get a case of the a.s.s and you don"t take s.h.i.t anymore. The rule had always been no girl works solo. You wanna work the street, you gotta have a pimp. Ask any hooker in any city in the world. You try to work solo, you get your face beat to mush or wind up in some Dumpster with your throat cut. We"d always be too afraid to fight back, stand up for ourselves, you know? s.h.i.t, most girls are strung out anyway. I was. Back when I was pink, I was firing up scag four times a day, had to shoot up into my foot "cos the veins on my arms all collapsed and turned black. I"d turn over my take to "Rome every night like clockwork, and he"d keep me in junk, and that was all I cared about. When you"re strung out, you really don"t have a soul anymore. Yeah, turning my tricks, keeping "Rome happy, and getting my fixa"that"s all there was for me. It was h.e.l.l, let me tell you. But after I got grubbed, I didn"t need the scag anymore, and it finally dawned on me that I didn"t need "Rome, either. All the other grubs working the street got the same gist, and all of a sudden a lot of pimps were winding up in body bags. The pink girls, sure, they"re all still in their stables, but their pimps don"t f.u.c.k with us grubs "cos they know that if they do, they"ll wind up just like "Rome. f.u.c.k "em.

s.h.i.t, man. I can"t hardly tell the difference. Sometimes I"m not sure if there is a difference. p.u.s.s.y"s p.u.s.s.y, and c.o.c.k is c.o.c.k. And when I"m sucking a nut outa some john in his car, it don"t make no difference if my mouth is alive or dead, and it"s better in a way "cos I don"t taste his j.i.z.z when he comes, and if he"s a stinker, I can"t smell him. And best of all, cash is green whether you"re a grub or a pinkie, you know?

I go shopping, I buy clothes, I watch TV, I got myself a decent little apartment. s.h.i.t, I"m just like anyone else out there trying to make it.

All right, I can tell you"re new in town, and you"re probably thinking, s.h.i.t, this chick"s f.u.c.kin" dead, but those girls across the street are alive. Well, let me tell you something, man. That little blondie there with the gla.s.ses, the one by the MOST machinea"she"ll rip you off. And those two black chicks at the corner of Calvert, both of "em got AIDS. And how do you know any one of "em won"t take you to some alley where they got their pimp waiting to bust your head, take your cash, jack your car, maybe even kill you?

You wanna take a chance like that?

So come on, man. Let"s party. s.h.i.t, I"ll give you the c.o.c.k-suck of your life, and you can take all the time you want to come. And I won"t f.u.c.k you over like those pinkie b.i.t.c.hes across the street. Straight up, mana"ten bucks for a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b so good, I guarantee you"ll be comin" back for more, and I"ll swallow it, too, no bulls.h.i.t. Whaddaya say?

All right!

Hey, nice car. Just keep going, and I"ll tell you wha"okay, turn here, pull into this little alley right here. Yeah, good, now turn off your lights.

And pull your pants down, partner.

Hmm, let"s see what we got here, yeah. Hard already, that"s what I like. Lotta times at this hour most guys are on their way home from the bars and they"re s.h.i.tfaced. Takes "em forever to get it up, you know?

All right, time for me to do my thing. Just lay back in the seat and relax . ..

Wait a minute, what the fa"

Hey, look, buddy, I"m sorry, but. ..

I didn"t do anything wrong, s.h.i.t! It ain"t my fault the skin came off your d.i.c.k! I was justa"

What gives here, man? What the h.e.l.l"s wrong with you?

Youa"you"re a . . . what?

Oh, man! What a trip! You"re a grub too! Just like me!

Calm down, will ya? Lemme fix ya up here, the skin only came off at the base. Don"t worry, I"ll get it back on, no sweat.

There, see? Still works.

Okay, okay, just lay back and relax. A grub, huh? That"s really cool.

I"ll give you this one for free.

HUNGER.

Kathryn Ptacek.