Starbird Murphy and the World Outside (16 page)

 14 

I
must have fallen asleep again, remembering that sunrise Translation, because I woke up to the alarm clock buzzing. It was time to go enroll in public school.

When I was little, we had school every day but Sunday. The school—which was actually a glassed-in porch on the side of the main house—had up to forty students. We were divided into three or four groups according to age and ability until we were seventeen.

Our subjects included: history, math, writing, creative brainstorming, music, visual art, Mother Nature, community responsibility, and science. Teachers tried to link our lessons to things happening on the Farm; like the year aphids attacked our tomato crop, we did a science lesson on insects and a history lesson on pesticides. When Bithiah's father, a Vietnam vet, came to stay at the Farm one summer, we focused during history time on the 1960s. He visited our class for a week, and so did Firmament Rise, who was an antiwar activist.

Like Doug Fir, my best subject was math, which Gamma Lion taught before she had to take over the office. After EARTH left, our little school slowly deteriorated. Two years later, there were fewer than ten kids.

As I turned off the alarm and got dressed, I thought about the coop. Were the roosters confused when I didn't come in the morning? Would Ursa remember to check the wire fencing for holes?
Are they safe? Do they need me?

When you have spent your life dressing according to the weather, it's a strange thing to decide which T-shirt will look good with an orange skirt. On the Farm, we would dress up for special occasions like Feasts and naming ceremonies, but a normal day usually involved the choice between rain jacket or wool sweater, thermal long johns or jeans.

I dressed in the outfit Io suggested, awkwardly pulling on the stretchy gray tights under the orange cotton skirt and a navy-blue T-shirt with white stripes.
This is vanity
, I thought, putting on the T-shirt.
This is the consumer culture. I shouldn't have to dress up just to learn
. I looked in Io's full-length mirror. I didn't look like a farm girl. Is this what Indus meant when he said “really Seattle”?
Just two more days,
I reminded myself
. Then I can go back
.

V and Cham were waiting at the bottom of the stairs, V holding her travel mug. “To the bus stop,” she said, dropping a pair of sunglasses over her eyes even though it was barely light out.

We walked half a block and waited five minutes for a bus. V handed me a dollar, which barely made me blink after two days of making change at the restaurant. I fed it into a machine beside the driver.

After a fifteen-minute ride, we pulled up near an enormous brick building. Except for the columns, it wasn't unlike the building on the back of the ten-dollar bill. I couldn't imagine how much firewood it would take to heat a building that big, but I would hate to chop it all.

As we stepped off the bus, Cham muttered, “I can't be late,” and slung his backpack over one shoulder.

“Take it easy, you're still recovering,” said V.

“Thanks, Mom.” Cham jogged off as if we were walking too slowly for him.

“Sometimes I get the feeling he's ashamed of us.” V adjusted her clothes to conceal the red bra strap that managed to peek out even from under her blazer. She had worn a slim-fitting black dress under a jacket and shoes with heels. She didn't look like any Family member I had ever seen. “I went to high school here, too. Just pray they don't remember me.”

People streamed past us up the stairs. Tall and short, fat and thin, people with all different colors of hair and skin and jackets and sneakers were threading around us. It was the widest variety of individuals I had ever seen, with one major exception: They were all my age.

After the exodus, Indus was the person closest to my age on the Farm, even though he was three years older. If Indus was helping Iron harvest the back lot today, he would have been up for hours already. It would have been cold when they started up the tractors, and torture getting out of bed.
Was he sleeping alone?
There was a bee still trapped inside my stomach, trying to sting its way out.

V and I walked past a row of locked bicycles as more students darted around us. That's when he walked past me, dangling his bike key at the end of a string, his green army surplus jacket torn just above the elbow, his reddish-brown hair in lazy curls above his ears, his walk as confident as always. My legs turned into dry sticks. “Doug?” I sputtered with a thick tongue.
“Doug?”
I lurched toward his jacket, just managing to grab his sleeve.

He wrenched around and snatched his arm back, the boy who wasn't my brother. He looked at me like I was a spider in the woodpile.

“What did you say?”

“Sorry,” I said, “sorry.”

He turned and darted up the concrete steps to the school. Of course he wasn't Doug. Doug wasn't sixteen anymore
. Somewhere my brother is nineteen, if he's even—

“Did you know that guy?” V asked, taking my arm in hers to climb the stairs.

“No,” I said, not crying. Somehow.

 
 

“Star. Bird?” The woman seated behind the desk in the main office pronounced my name like it was a country she had never heard of. Her hands were paused over her keyboard.

“Hippie parents,” said V with a wink.

“You're not the parent?” The woman didn't wink back.

“Legal guardian.” V unfolded a paper and handed it across the desk. The lady glanced at it and went back to typing.

“And your name is”—she looked back to the paper and read aloud—“Felicia Hale.”

I glanced at V, who refused to make eye contact with me.

“Yes,” V answered. “And Starbird is all one word, no hyphen. Her last name is Murphy.”

The woman tapped away on her keys. Something about her wasn't right. She looked to be the same age as Gamma Lion, whose gray hair sprouted from her temples and cowlick. This woman's hair was vibrant red.

“She went to an accredited home school?” the red-haired woman asked, staring at her screen.

“She did. The Family Farm School.”

“We're going to need transfer documents, or else she'll have to take placement tests.”

“I think the tests would be best.”