State of Grace (5 page)

By this point I’m sweating all over again, even though the gazebo’s one of the coolest places in creation. I’m guessing that’s because I have no idea what to say to Dot or exactly where to start. So I sit down and just stare up at the portrait. It’s the same one as on the banners, the same as in the Books. You know, just Dot’s head and shoulders, her sheet of long, pale hair, her black skin and her eyes shaped like two almonds, rounded at one end and tapering to these little points on either side. Even now, in the state I’m in, I notice how the portrait always looks like it’s smiling.

The only choice I have is to jump into it.

Hello, Dot?

I don’t need to talk out loud or anything because Dot knows everything I’m thinking. I mean, the gazebo is full of bubbles. She’s going to hear me, right?

It’sWren.

That’s a kind of pointless thing to think too, obviously, since Dot knows who I am already. Apparently now I’m a blurter inside my head as well as when I’m talking out loud.

I had this dream
.

Pause.

But I guess you know that.

More pausing.

I was in the dream. Well, a different version of me was. But I wasn’t here. I was … I don’t even know where. Can you tell me? It’s something to do with the wren Gil found, isn’t it? Or something to do with Blaze?

Parked there on the cushion looking up at Dot’s face, I tell her the whole prenormal story in this waterfall gush. How Blaze said the rhyme that I somehow knew without knowing. The miniature creature with his curly hair. The person called Mum. I even remind Dot about the blurry eyes and stuff, although I’ve already mentioned that a million times before.

Bubbles go on floating past, all silent and serene. I’m sitting there, watching them soak up everything I’m thinking and feeling, carrying it all off to the beyond, when it hits me.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand what all this is about. I’m not
supposed
to.

Dot has her reasons for prenormal wrens and blurred vision and making me see the things I did. That’s all I need to know. My only job is to follow the Books. The rest of it, well, Dot has it covered, so what am I even doing thinking so hard? When she decides I’m ready, Dot will explain.

If she wants to, that is.

If not, I can handle it. I mean, I only need to look around at her perfect creation to realise that Dot completely knows what she’s doing.

I let myself sink back into my big, soft cushion. I stretch my arms and legs across the silk, yawning as Dot smiles down at me and the sun makes yellow-gold pools on my skin.

I’m light again, relaxed and smiling. Right here is where I leave all those precalm feelings behind.

Dot will work it out. And that means I’m free to make today the best day in creation. You know, just another instalment in Dot’s never-ending series of minor miracles.

07

O
N THE EDGE
of the newfruit grove there’s a stack of empty
picking bags, the way there always is. That’s how it works (Book of Contribution, Chapter 5,Verse 2). Every day, everyone fills a picking bag in the grove. Then we empty all the newfruit into a chute built into the ground, which leads … well, I guess it leads directly to Dot. The Books aren’t specific about how that part works. All I know is, when the bags are empty, we leave them stacked up beside the chute, ready to fill the next day.

That’s it. That’s all Dot asks us from each of us. Just one single, perfect bag of newfruit, which is nothing when you think about all the stuff Dot’s given us.

‘Throw me a bag, can you?’ I say to Fern.

She’s gone all glazed with her nose way up in the air and her nostrils practically quivering. That sounds prenormal but it isn’t, not when you understand how totally dotly the smell of the newfruit grove actually is.

Imagine warm grass and dripping honey, fresh sungarb, vanilla beans and bark, sunshine on a warm rock and a creation’s neck as you nuzzle in to it, all rolled into one. That’s close to what the smell is like, except the real thing’s a bazillion times better.

It’s the blossoms that make the newfruit grove smell so incredible. Obviously Dot created tons of other flowers as well as the newfruit blossoms. There are flowers all over the place, in the orchard, by the gazebo, near the lagoon.

But newfruit blossoms are a whole other thing altogether. Newfruit trees only grow in the grove. Their blossoms fall off their branches and there are so many different colours. There’s purple flowers with gold speckles. Bright yellow ones with fuzzy pink centres. Blue ball-shaped things that leave dust on your fingertips when you touch them. And, I swear to Dot, the smell of newfruit is the most incredible thing in all creation.

‘Hello, Fern?’ I wave my hand in front of her face. ‘Anyone home?’

Fern stoops and takes a picking bag from the pile at our feet. But with her short arms and everything, she ends up flubbing the throw.

‘Careful,’ Gil says, arriving at the exact right moment to see the bag hook itself over one of the newfruit trees.

Gil’s walking with Brook and Drake, the three of them in sungarb as bright as the blossoms all around us. Drake has his sungarb unbuttoned lower than the others, which gives me a perfect view of the creamy-yellowy skin underneath. Arms, legs, chest, chub. Drake’s pretty much hairless apart from the black hair on his head, which brushes his shoulders as he walks. He smiles and I think about hooking up with him again, about feeling that smooth skin. Maybe at the completion night party, if I don’t end up with Jasper. Or maybe I could hook up with Drake as well as Jasper. Dot would probably like that. Hooking up as much as possible would be a dotly thing to do, I’m pretty sure. I notice Drake’s kind of looking at me with that hooking-up expression, so I figure he’s thinking about it too.

‘Wren?’ says Gil. ‘Are you listening to me?’

All around us, people are drifting up from the gazebo in pairs and threes. Except for Blaze who (gigantic surprise) is walking by himself. When I see him, of course I end up thinking about the pond and what he said there, that prenormal rhyme.

Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.

But I shove it away pretty fast. I don’t know how I know it and I don’t know how Blaze knows it, but I do know I don’t want to think about any of it. It’s not like it matters or anything. Going to the gazebo reminded me that all that stuff ’s for Dot to handle, not me. End of story.

But I guess Blaze doesn’t get the message that I feel this way because he keeps trying to get my attention. You know, catch my eye or something superawkward like that. So what I do is turn around to Drake and Gil and Brook and start chatting the way I always do. As bright and up and fun as it’s possible to be.

‘I’m totally listening. I was just thinking about the completion night party at the same time. Who’s looking forward to it? Drake?’

I flick my spiralling hair then let it fall so it covers one eye. Now Drake definitely knows I’m interested. As a bonus, I can’t see Blaze’s face and he probably can’t see mine.

As Blaze goes past, Gil untangles my bag from the tree. Before he hands it to me, he makes this big point of checking the fruit underneath is okay. Newfruit are Dot’s fruit, so it follows that no-one would ever want to bruise or damage one. And the fruit is fine, thank Dot. Round with thin, silver speckled skin, exactly the way Dot created it. Perfect.

Gil hands me the bag and walks off deeper into the grove, leaving me and Fern to find two trees side by side. We need trees with enough ripe newfruit to fill our picking bags, but that isn’t exactly hard. Like everywhere else in creation, the trees in the newfruit grove are covered with fruit pretty much constantly.

When I find a tree, I climb into the lower branches. Beside me, Fern’s in her own tree humming ‘We Belong 2 Dot’.

I reach for the nearest branch and pull it closer to me. Then I scan the newfruit dangling down. It says in the Book of Contribution that newfruit has to be picked at the exact right time. Too firm and Dot might find it sour. Too ripe and it could drop from the branch overnight and split, and that would mean one less newfruit for Dot to enjoy. So I look hard till I find the ripest, most perfect fruit. Supergently, I press around the stem with the pad of my pinky finger. Newfruit skin is so thin that it bruises if it isn’t handled the proper way. I mean, if you even
breathe
on a newfruit wrong it could bruise.

I turn to Fern. ‘What do you think about this one? Does this look ripe to you?’

Fern’s holding a branch herself but instead of picking, she’s cupping a newfruit in both hands. Then she strokes it against her cheek. She holds the newfruit up to her nose and does this great big sniff.

‘Um, Fern?’ I say, all chirpy. ‘Pretty sure Dot wants us to pick the newfruit, not smell them.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Fern sighs.

She starts stroking the newfruit against her cheek again.

‘I just love thinking about it. This newfruit, the one I’m touching right now … Dot’s going to eat it. Isn’t that incredible?’

An actual tear spills out between Fern’s lashes and rolls down her cheek. I guess you could say Dot created Fern sentimental. Everyone loves Dot, obviously, but Fern really shows it on her face. As in, the whole time.

Everyone agrees she’s probably going to be one of the ones chosen on completion night. On top of following the Books, Fern’s always doing extra stuff to please Dot. Like right now, she’s making every single person in the garden a garland of flowers to wear at the completion party. You know, just because there’s a picture of someone wearing a garland in the Books and Fern’s decided that means Dot wants all of us to really wear them.

According to Fern, weaving those garlands makes her feel closer to Dot. Which is
so
Fern. Everything about her is adorableness.

I reach over and poke Fern’s arm.

‘Can you hurry up and fill your bag? I want to go riding after this.’

Dot’s created horses for us to ride, which me and Fern like to do before we go swimming so we’re nice and hot by the time we jump in.

I’m thinking about spending the whole afternoon having fun, smiling to myself when this voice goes, ‘Riding?’

I look down and there’s Blaze standing down the bottom of my tree.

‘If Fern ever gets finished.’

Blaze has a full picking bag slung over his shoulder. By the looks of it, he’s ready to empty his newfruit down the chute and go back to his hut or whatever exactly it is he does for fun. But he doesn’t.

Instead he says, ‘Can I talk to you?’

I give him this really big smile. The glowing pond is no big deal to me, not anymore, and I want him to know that. Just in case he’s thinking something big happened, or that the little rhyme he said in any way affected me. Or that I was obsessing over it or something.

‘Not if I’m riding. That would be kind of difficult, don’t you think?’

Blaze doesn’t smile or anything, which is fair enough because I guess it wasn’t that entertaining a thing to say. It was just the quickest way I could think of to tell him that I don’t want to talk to him about what he said. Not now. Not ever.

I’ve already spoken to Dot, which is all I need to do. She’s the only one who’ll ever know about the pictures in my head. The best thing now would be for Blaze to walk away.

He picks that moment to put his bag down.

‘Move over,’ he tells Fern, ‘I’ll help you.’

‘She’s fine,’ I say as Fern starts making room for Blaze on her branch. He scales the trunk in that stiff way of his and starts picking newfruit twice as quickly as Fern could. Not even once do I see him touch a stem to check if the fruit is ripe. He hardly even looks at the newfruit before he slides it into Fern’s bag.

I have to ask, ‘Wait. How d’you even know that one was ready to pick?’

Blaze looks at his bare feet, huge against the branch of the newfruit tree.

‘Seemed dotly to me.’

Am I imagining he sounds different from everyone else when he says
dotly
?

I feel like there’s a sourness to it, exactly like biting into an unripe plum. He reaches for a branch and ping-ping-ping, he twists the newfruit from their stems and rolls them into his picking bag. He’s so quick he sends blossoms and leaves showering through the air. The blossoms make this beautiful flickering shadow on the grass underneath us, which catches Fern’s attention right away. In her head, Fern’s probably already thanking Dot for putting on the display.

Blaze grabs his chance. ‘I really want to talk to you.’

‘I’m kind of busy right now.’

‘After picking.’

‘I’m busy then too.’

‘Skip riding?’

The way Blaze asks questions is the opposite of Gil. When Gil asks a question, you can tell he already knows the answer. With Blaze, it’s like he’s never sure about one single thing. Anyway, for once he’s looking at me. Not at my eyes or anything, but at my cheek, which kind of dilutes the impact of my favourite long, slow blink technique.

‘I’m not going riding. I changed my mind. I think I’ll go to the gazebo instead. There’s nothing in the Books to say I can’t go twice a day, right?’

Blaze shakes his head.

‘Because I really want to tell Dot something.’

Like I knew he would, Blaze asks, ‘What?’

I pick a newfruit, this gleaming silver orb, and for a while I just let it roll around in the palm of my hand.

‘I want to tell her how perfect things are. How much I love all creation and how I never want anything to change.’

I put the newfruit into my bag and turn my back on Blaze.

‘Not that anything ever will.’

____________________

Then it happens again. It’s the afternoon, not long after me and Fern get back from riding and swimming and everything. I’m in my hammock, out on my balcony. I’m not even doing anything, just feeling the breeze on my skin and waiting for the sun to dry my thick hair.

Fern and Drake and Jasper are down on the grass outside their huts, close enough that I can talk to them whenever I want. I see Luna coming out of her own hut, sneaking down the stairs with a jug of water in her hands. When she walks up behind Fern she doesn’t make a sound. She smirks at me then tips the entire jug of water down the back of Fern’s sungarb. Fern squeals and suddenly I’m somewhere else altogether.