The Limit (5 page)

DAD RAN AFTER THE LIMO FOR A
block but couldn’t keep up.

Lunging forward onto my knees, I slammed my fist against the dark privacy glass that separated the front seat from the back. “Stop! Let me out of here!”

“For your safety, Matthew, I’d appreciate it if you sat down and fastened your seat belt.” The honey voice flowed into the back part of the car through a speaker.

I don’t care what you’d appreciate, so shut up and leave me alone.
I picked up the heavy end of a seat belt and chucked it. The strap kept it from doing any damage. That didn’t stop me from throwing it against the seat again and again, grunting with my efforts.

“Matthew, please remain calm.” Honey Lady’s voice was too sweet—like biting into a cube of pure sugar. It made my teeth ache. “You can’t hurt anything in this vehicle. You can’t hurt yourself.” The voice took on a shot of sour. “The only thing you can hurt by not
cooperating is your family. Now please sit down and fasten your seat belt.”

They’d hurt Lauren and Abbie?

I let the seat belt drop. Still kneeling, I leaned the side of my head against the seat.

Honey Lady’s voice, soft and smooth again, spoke to me. “You’re doing a wonderful thing for your family, Matthew. You probably don’t realize it, but you’re saving them from financial devastation.”

A tear sneaked out of the corner of my eye, slid over the bridge of my nose, and plopped onto the leather seat. I sniffed.

“Would you like a tissue?” asked Honey Lady.

“No,” I said, sniffing more quietly. “I’m fine.”

I heard a soft click. Honey Lady must’ve turned off the speaker. My upper body slid an inch to the right on the slick leather as the car turned and slowed down. The turn didn’t feel sharp. It felt like the car had pulled over to the side of the road. The car stopped.

I heard the
ka-chunk ka-chunk
of one of the front doors being opened and closed. Then another
ka-chunk
as the door near me opened. Honey Lady crouched down and leaned inside, her face inches from where mine lay sideways on the seat. A few of her long, golden hairs tickled my nose. I turned my head the other way.

“Is it all right if I ride back here with you, now that you’ve settled down?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” I said. “It’s not like I can stop you.” Not when she had Gorilla Man backing her up. I scrambled to the other side of the limo and slumped against the window, my forehead resting on the cool glass.

I didn’t watch, but I sensed her as she slid next to me, smooth as honey. I heard a click as she fastened her seat belt. A nice, flowery scent filled the space. She even smelled sweet. My fingers tightened into a fist. I wanted to punch something—maybe her or this limo or the limit. Anything.

A tap of Honey Lady’s knuckles on the privacy glass signaled Gorilla Man to go. She turned toward me while stretching out her legs in the massive space in front of our seat. Okay, I peeked.

“I want you to understand the law and what’s happening to you,” she said, patting me on the arm and smiling a warm, sweet smile. “I want you to feel comfortable with me and your situation.”

She kept her hand on my arm. It felt . . . good. I didn’t know what to think. She acted nice—like she cared about me. She couldn’t really, though, or she wouldn’t have taken me away. And she wasn’t just taking me from my family, she was also taking me from my friends, my school, my home—my life.

“Do you have any questions for me?” she asked.

Slumping, I jerked away from her touch and folded my arms across my chest. “Yeah. When can I go home?”

“That’s the beauty of FDO 169-D!” Her smile would have lit up the bottom of a black pit. I almost wanted to squint away from it. “The amount of time you will be required to spend at the workhouse is entirely up to you and your family. The harder all of you work to get back under your debt limit, the sooner you can go home. I’m sure it makes you feel better to know you’re in complete control of the situation. Doesn’t it, Matthew?”

“Matt,” I said, without really thinking.

“You like to be called Matt?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I stiffened. “Whatever. So you’re taking me to some workhouse?” History book pictures from the early 1900s of old factories appeared in my mind. The child laborers—child slaves really—always looked half starved and exhausted.

“Yes. FDO—Federal Debt Ordinance—169, option D, allows children of a certain age to help reduce their family’s debt by spending some time at an FDRA workhouse.”

“What happened to options A through C? I thought families were supposed to be able to choose. I’ve heard stories, but I know of only one person for sure—a girl from Lakeview Middle School—who’s had to go to a
workhouse. Most families choose supervised spending. Why didn’t
my
family get to choose?”

“Oh, Matt,” she laughed and patted my arm again. “I know you overheard me tell your mother that I don’t know why this option was chosen for your family.” She leaned in close, twitching her eyebrows, and whispered, “Trust me. You’ll like option D. FDRA workhouses are fabulous places to live—especially for kids like you.” Her last word came out with a puff of air that tickled my ear. I leaned back until my head bumped against the glass.

“Wha . . . what’s FDRA?”

“It stands for Federal Debt Rehabilitation Agency. It’s where I work. We oversee those participating under FDO 169-D.”

She went on and on about how amazing this workhouse was and how much I was going to love it there. After a few minutes I tuned her out. One thing I knew for sure, no place could be as much of a paradise as she seemed to think the workhouse was. I stared out the window. Soon we were speeding down the freeway, heading for the city. Honey Lady pulled out a case she’d brought with her from the front seat. It contained a portable movie player for me and a laptop for her. I only half watched the movie as my mind planned my next move. They were dead wrong if they thought I’d skip along happily to some slave-labor camp.
No way, suckers. Just like Nana, I wasn’t about to go without a fight.

My movie was nearing the end when Gorilla Man pulled the limo onto an exit ramp. He had to stop at a light at the end of the ramp. That’s when I made my move, yanking on the door handle with all my might. My muscles burned with the effort, and I slammed my shoulder into the door—again and again. It didn’t budge. I’d thought that when Honey Lady climbed in back with me, maybe she’d left the doors unlocked. She hadn’t. It didn’t matter. I kept slamming.

“Matt.” Honey Lady slid her arms around me, coaxing me away from the door. How could arms be so strong and so soft at the same time? She drew me in close, like a mother comforting her upset child. She whispered soft sounds into my hair and rocked me for just a second, enough for me to unclench my fingers and let go of the door handle. “You’re going to be okay.” The mother in her disappeared and the sales-pitch woman returned. “I’m so excited for you. We’re almost to the workhouse. Just wait until you see it. You’re very lucky, you know. Six months ago you would have had to take an airplane to a workhouse in the east. Now they’re building them all over the place. Some people still have to travel much farther than you’ve had to—since our workhouse serves the entire Midwest area.”

I wriggled out of her grasp and turned back to the window, calculating the average number of windows for the buildings we passed. It wasn’t hard, since we had to drive slowly because of the traffic, and the buildings we drove by were small—eight floors, max. The really big skyscrapers stood clustered together in the distance. A few flower beds and trees appeared every once in a while between the buildings. I even saw a small park. Green and space nudged out steel and cement more and more as we drove.

“There it is,” said Honey Lady.

Even though I tried to keep my eyes sulkily staring at the piece of lint on the floor by my shoe, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing out the window on Honey Lady’s side of the car, following her gaze. At least I could
sound
unimpressed.

“Yeah, it’s a building. So what?” I fought for every ounce of boredom I could squeeze into my voice. This was no child slave-labor workhouse. The silver and glass building sat almost glowing in the growing darkness. A wide spread of grass stretched out around it, and trees grew everywhere. Lampposts lit up the grounds like a ballpark. A clump of trees stood in the middle of the front lawn. Short trees straddled the walkway to the building from the parking lot. A whole bunch of trees—enough to make a small forest—stretched up tall and strong behind it.

“Home, sweet home,” said Honey Lady as Gorilla Man pulled off the street.

Home? Not for me. Never. Even if I had to spend the rest of my life here, this building would never be home.

A security arm blocked our entrance into the parking lot. Through the side window I watched as Gorilla Man’s hand reached out and his long fingers punched a few keys on a keypad that hung from the end of a white, candy-cane-shaped pole. A narrow red laser beamed out to scan his retina. The gate lifted.

With only three other cars parked in the small lot, Gorilla Man pulled lengthwise across the spaces closest to the curving cement walk that led to the building entrance.

Honey Lady let out a little-girl squeal and gave my knee a sharp squeeze. “We’re here!” She sprang out of the car, seeming to have forgotten about her laptop. Maybe Gorilla Man would clean up after her. I followed, leaving the portable movie player behind as well. I didn’t have a suitcase to fetch from the trunk, so we headed straight up the walkway.

A few feet in front of the wide glass doors Honey Lady pulled a remote out of her pocket and pushed some buttons. She froze for a second while a laser scanned her eye. The doors slid open.

“Come on in, Matt,” she said, gesturing with her hand like a butler on TV.

Okay. I had to admit, nice place. It reminded me of the lobby of the five-star hotel we’d gone to for Aunt Rachael’s wedding last summer—every surface sparkly or plush or polished.

“One minute,” Honey Lady said. Her heels clicked across the marble floor as she crossed the wide room to what would have been the reception desk at a hotel.

I sauntered through a grouping of furniture—sofas, chairs, end tables. The marble tops of the tables reminded me of the big marble slab Nana pulls out around Christmastime to make candy—the marble keeps the candy’s heat down. I ran my hand over the smooth top. Not as cool as I expected. My fingers slipped around the edge of the table.

Ouch!

I jerked my hand up to my face, holding it with the other hand. A bee sting? In here? I looked closer. A thin, brown sliver had imbedded itself in the pad of my index finger. Since when did marble have slivers? Fake piece of junk. Honey Lady was still occupied with the scowling, grumpy lady behind the reception desk—what a crab—so after I pulled out the sliver, I wandered through the rest of the lobby, discovering that all the plants were synthetic, the bright candy
in a dish was glass, and the Zen water feature was a holograph.

Yeah, nice place.

“Okay, Matt, let’s get you settled.” Honey Lady’s rah-rah cheerleader voice drowned out the clicking of her heels as she scurried away from the desk. With that butler arm she guided me to a hallway off the right side of the lobby. The thing went on forever, like a tunnel into nowhere.

I backed up a step. Crab Woman, behind the reception desk, barked something into some sort of speaker as she sprang to her feet, making the reading glasses that dangled from a chain around her neck sway back and forth. She seemed older than mom age, but younger than grandmother age. A second later Gorilla Man lumbered into the room and stood, staring me down, with his overmuscled arms folded high across his chest.

“Come on, Matt.” Honey Lady wrapped one arm around my shoulder and leaned in close to my ear, speaking in that airy voice of hers that made me want to pull away. “I know you’re going to love it here. We’re so glad you’ve joined us. Why don’t you take a look at your room and give this place a chance before you decide you hate it? Hmm?”

I shrugged my answer, mostly to nudge her arm off.

“Good choice. Come on!”
Rah, rah.
With a flick of one
hand she waved Gorilla Man back to whatever hole he’d crawled out of. I filed that bit of info away for later as we started down the hall—Gorilla Man wasn’t permanently camped out in the lobby. Maybe it emptied out completely at times—like late at night.

Honey Lady led me past one door before she stopped and opened another one. I stretched around her to get a look inside. Not bad. Not amazing, but not bad. Besides a bed, the room held one large bookshelf full of books and another one of video games. The TV wasn’t nearly as big as the one in the family room back home, but almost as big as the one Mom and Dad had in their bedroom. A computer sat on a small table next to the head of the bed.

“This is where you’ll spend the first night—tonight.” Honey Lady walked across the room and opened a door near the far corner. “Here’s your private bathroom.” She walked around the end of the bed to the computer table. “Use this remote to access TV programs or movies. And here”—she turned on the computer and sat down—“I’ll show you how to order dinner. You’ll also need to order clothes and toiletries—anything you think you might need before tomorrow. In the morning you’ll take your test and get your permanent assignment.”

Test? Permanent assignment? Great. Something else to worry about.
I hope your floors are thick, Honey
Lady, or else my pacing tonight will wear a hole right through them.

“Don’t be shy, Matt, come on in here.” She’d pulled up the Midwest FDRA workhouse’s home page by the time I shuffled to the desk. I ran my fingers over the top of the monitor. Sweet machine, especially for a temp room. The process for ordering food from nearby restaurants and clothes and toiletries from nearby stores was so easy I focused more on checking out the computer than listening to Honey Lady’s explanation—until the end.

“Of course, the laser will scan your eye after you order.”

“Oh, uh, I think my parental permission card is almost empty.” I’d used it to buy lunch at school today—was it really only today?—and the lunch lady had warned me that I was running close to empty.