The Subprimes Read Online Free Page A

Don’t want subprimes in all those houses.”
    Sargam pursed her lips, weighing her options. “I can’t cross here. I’m going to find a back road in, take my bike down a trail if I have to.”
    â€œYou do what you gotta do. We understand.”
    â€œYou head back down to Mountain Pass, toward Barstow, find a cat road and see if you can back-door it into Nevada. Here.” Sargam handed over another twenty dollars.
    â€œWe can’t take this,” Bailey said.
    â€œTake it. You need it more than me. There’s four of you.”
    â€œGod bless you,” Jeb said.
    â€œNot God. It’s just people. People helping people. That’s all we got.”
    There were a few car lengths open ahead of Jeb. The traffic behind him was honking impatiently.
    Sargam smiled at the young girl and little boy, then flipped down her visor.
    She popped the bike into gear and was gone, a blur of white growing distant in the early-evening gray light.
    THE BOY WATCHED HER GO. Again, he thought. Again. We make a friend. And then they’re gone. And you never see them again, and that’s because we don’t have the Internet anymore, and how can you find someone without that?
    You can’t, the boy thought. Sargam was gone.

CHAPTER 2
    G EMMA HAD NOT DRIVEN TO the Hamptons in years. Everyone she knew flew the HeliJitney. Still, apparently, there were enough service workers, locals, subprimes, and out-of-season tourists that the Montauk Highway was bumper-to-bumper once she exited the Sunrise Highway. Dusk was slipping; in a few minutes the light would pull back, leaving them in the passing headlight wash and the LCD dash displays. The girls watched their movie, the most recent iteration of the Frozen saga, on fold-down screens while the Range Rover idled forward. No wonder no one drove out to the Hamptons anymore, the trip had become impossible, a six-hour ordeal that took them through suburban and exurban wasteland—off-ramp America—Wendy’s, Subways, Taco Bells, and cell towers as far as she could see. Only the plutocrats and their hoarding of acreage and local development ordinances had kept the Hamptons somewhat green—otherwise it would havebeen private airstrips right on the dunes. As it was, the roadside had been denuded of native dogwood and poplar, those species driven out by the hardier, invasive Kamchatka pine, which not only withstood aggressive pine beetles but actually thrived as it hosted them. The symmetrical, white-trunked, and spiney-needled trees proliferated, the Christmas-tree shape identical from sapling to full-grown tree—the prolific species took just eighteen months to grow to full forty-foot height. Their sap was particularly pungent, a turpentine-like odor that had been the subject of numerous comments on local websites. The K-pines were everywhere, a monoculture that was ruining the glens and dales of all but the wealthiest of plutocrats who could afford private botanists to introduce genetically modified strangler vines that could fight the K-pine invasion but then went on their own ecosystem rampage, driving out native vines and bushes. You missed these details when you flew.
    The girls hadn’t realized how odd it was to take the car to the Hamptons. They still had not fully recognized their reduced circumstances. Former necessities such as the HeliJitney, or, for that matter, the house on Nearer Lane, even the brownstone on Eighty-first—these were all slipping away, or had already slipped. Gemma had decided early on that she could either look at her girls and feel pity, or look at them as the reason she needed to be strong—and she forced herself to act the latter despite the truth of the former. They would suffer, more perhaps than Gemma, who had herself come from modest means and could, if she had to, return to them.
    But the girls had only been wealthy; for them, this would be traumatic, and maybe that was why she had never sat