Éraste had never owned a mirror. Unsurprisingly, he neither needed nor wanted to. Like so many others, he was only one fragment of a mob of many. A patina of Paris apparently rendered them all as good as identical, as the rest of the city tended to treat his kind as if they were one omnipotent and aggravating entity.
In reality, he was different. The others were typically bright-eyed and freckled, with streaks of the sun in their hair. Éraste's eyes were as cool as coals, his dark hair smooth and slow to tangle, his skin pale and therefore more starkly juxtaposed with the dirt that perpetually vitiated it. Not that any of it mattered to him. Glancing only occasionally at his reflection in water and shop windows, he knew little and cared less. There were more important things in life than bits of glass. Such as, for one, having a place to sleep. Most recently, he had remedied that predicament by means of curling up in a stable loft and spending the night burrowed like a rodent into the straw. It scattered in a flurry shortly after dawn when he jolted upright in exasperation.
It was Orien's fault. He had come in to shake him awake, digging bony fingers into Éraste's arm and calling, "Denis, Denis!"
Denis was what they called him, after St. Denis. He knew the area like the back of his hand, he boasted. Orien had once confidentially informed Éraste that his own name was actually Adrien, but he called himself Orien after a hunter who was in books and, if you knew where to look, also in the sky. But that morning, constellations were the last thing on Éraste's mind.
"What in hell d'you want?" he grumbled.
Orien's spotted face was stretched into a grin. "C'mon, I've got money. I owe you, right?"
"I didn't mean you should pay me back before dawn." He began to resume his original position; Orien seized his arm again.
"Shut up and come on. I know where we can get apples."
"Y'can get those off a tree."
"Not this time of year you can't, stupid. Now get up, I know a girl who sells 'em, and they go quick."
"You're the idiot; no one's ever out this early."
"She is. She works in some factory at night, so afterward she goes out to sell b'fore anyone else is out."
"She's not gonna be there..."
"Look, d'you want breakfast or not? I'm paying, remember."
Éraste acquiesced, not without groaning.
The sagacious fruit-seller was called Dulcine. Fourteen and ageless, she wore a threadbare cap and a face that seemed incapable of conveying any emotion. When Orien requested two apples, Éraste was vaguely surprised to see her stringy lips twitch into a smile. "That'll be a sou."
"A sou?" Orien looked dismayed, then outraged. "We could get an egg for that much!"
"Not true," Dulcine said quickly. "Eggs're two. B'sides, they don't fill you up."
"Fine then, give me an apple."
"Just one for the both of you?"
"All I've got's enough for one," Orien said pointedly. "If it's not good enough for you, Denis'n me'll go somewhere else."
"Denis, is it?" Dulcine was studying him intently. "Maybe we can make a deal." She cast him a coy glance from beneath matted hair and smeared eyelids, then held out the fruit and smiled, a black-toothed Eve. "You're a handsome one. Kiss me and you'll get it, it's that or nothing."
Éraste could hear his friend snickering, but food was food, and he leaned forward. The girl's batwing shawl brushed his shoulder as she looped an arm around his neck. His head was spinning with unfamiliar thoughts that absorbed him so completely he registered nothing until she drew back. Even then all he noticed was Dulcine's hand, ice-white and skeletal, woven through with sea-green veins, dirt clinging to her palms like honey as she tossed him the apple.
"Thanks," he said, abruptly aware that his hands were dirtier than hers.
"Not at all." She laughed thinly. "Orien, y'finally did something right by bringing this one by."
Orien snorted again and steered Éraste away from the fruit stall. "C'mon, Denis, she's out of her head."
They walked in silence save the feverish gnashing of Orien's teeth. "Handsome," Éraste finally muttered, frowning at the fruit in his hand.
Orien chortled through a mouthful of apple, releasing a laugh sharp as glass and sick as a shatter, "Don't think anything of it. You'll always be ugly t'me."
"Fuck off," snapped Éraste, not quite knowing what his anger stemmed from. He scowled at the other boy, taking in the cast eye, the pitted face, the straggly hair, as if for the first time. "And I'll never be as ugly as you." He threw a pebble at a streetlamp and the clattering glass sounded no different than Orien's laugh.
"Jesus, calm down. We're all ugly here." Orien flashed a broken-toothed grin and Éraste involuntarily ran a fingertip across his own incisors to ascertain they were still intact. "You gonna eat, at least, after all that trouble?"
Doing his best to push the confusing thoughts from his mind, Éraste shoved the fruit into his mouth. Bruised and leathery, the sticky sweetness seemed to fossilize on his tongue, but it was better than what he had most days. And food was, of course, more important than being told by a scruffy factory girl that one was handsome.