Chapter 9: Take It Off

Tavy danced for four minutes, and she was glorious.

She came down the steps in her flat black boots with the wig swinging.

She looked every person in the front row in the eye.

She sat on a gentleman's knee and took his tie and tied it around his own wrist.

The room roared.

I clapped, and kept my face a perfect, pleasant blank.

On my left, Sabina had stopped breathing.

She watched Tavy's hips, Tavy's shoulders, Tavy's long swinging stride.

Her knuckles went white on her glass.

At the end of the fourth minute she stood up.

"Stop the music," she said.

Nobody moved.

"I said stop it."

The speakers cut out.

In the sudden silence, forty people turned in their chairs.

Tavy froze in the middle of the stage with one boot on the step.

"Take off the mask," said Sabina.

"Sorry, honey?"

"The mask. Take it off. Let us see who we're paying for."

A ripple ran down the half-circle of chairs.

It was the sound of a room tilting toward a spectacle.

I sat very still.

Tavy looked at me, for the briefest second, and then she grinned the biggest grin I had ever seen.

"Well, since you asked so nicely," she said.

She took the lace between two fingers and peeled it off her face.

She took the wig off with the other hand and shook out her bleached buzz cut.

"Surprise," Tavy said, in her car-alarm voice. "Hi. I'm Tavy. I've been Starling since March of two thousand nineteen. Anybody got a problem?"

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