The Other Side of the Island (10 page)
Read The Other Side of the Island Online
Authors: Allegra Goodman
Tags: #Nature & the Natural World, #Social Issues, #Families, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #Individuality, #Fantasy & Magic, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Family Life, #Weather, #Peer Pressure, #Islands, #General, #Domestic fiction
“Just remember what you’re saying is pure propaganda,” Will told Honor when she practiced at home.
“What’s propaganda?”
Pamela frowned and shook her head slightly, but Will answered, “Stories Mother tells us.”
Honor glanced at the framed picture of Earth Mother on the living room wall. For a moment the smiling face looked sinister; the twinkling eyes looked small and hard. For just a split second Earth Mother looked like a witch. Honor looked away. “Oh, come on, Dad, don’t you want me to have friends?”
Honor’s troop was all neighborhood girls from year H, and they called themselves the Heliotropes. They met once a month at the Neighborhood Youth Center for fun and games and speeches by their troop leader, Hattie’s mother. There were sleepovers in the Youth Center with its wonderful cooling units. There were spelling bees. There were cookouts—indoors, of course, because of the heat.
The Heliotropes worked to earn purple badges for their vests. They could only earn badges by working together. They were a team. Either all the Heliotropes earned a badge or none of them did. There were badges for recycling projects and badges for litter cleanup. There were badges for sewing and even badges for singing. “Let there always be sunshine,” the Heliotropes sang. “Let there always be blue skies. Let there always be Mother. Let us always agree.”
Even more important than the Young Engineers, in those days, ten-year-olds received official identity cards. Honor had been waiting and waiting for her card.
“Everybody else in my class has one!” She’d nagged her parents all year, but they always forgot, or they were busy with Quintilian. Will and Pamela were disorganized. They piled up papers in their closet and sometimes lost them altogether.
Now, at last, shamefully late, Pamela took Honor into the City on Errand Day and the two of them stood in line at the Identity Bureau. The line was long and snaked all the way around the edges of the tiled lobby.
Honor was so relieved and happy. She swung her hat by its strings.
“Stop that,” said Pamela.
Honor was wearing her new school uniform: a khaki skirt and a white blouse with a window in the pocket for her identity card, just like those on grown-up clothes. Honor craned her neck to see the front of the line, where ushers directed people into different offices.
“Stop fidgeting,” snapped Pamela.
“Why are you angry?” Honor asked. She wasn’t sure exactly why her parents tried to keep her back the way they did. They didn’t like her to go to the Young Engineers. They didn’t want her to get her identity card with the privilege of her own little coupon book at the Central Store. She wasn’t sure why all this made her parents so unhappy, except that they didn’t want her to grow up.
“Next,” said the usher, and the line edged forward. Nervously, Pamela smoothed Honor’s bouncy hair.
They had been waiting an hour before Pamela signed a special permission slip and Honor was called into a small white room much cooler than the lobby. A registrar sat there on a stool. He didn’t say hello. He looked tired and blotchy.
“Right thumb,” said the registrar.
Honor pressed her thumb onto an ink pad and then onto special paper for a thumbprint. “Index finger,” said the registrar.
She held out her finger and gasped in pain and surprise as he pricked her with a needle. Quickly, he smeared the drop of blood on a plastic card.
“Photo.” The registrar sat her down in a straight-backed chair and disappeared behind a large camera on a tripod. “Keep still,” he told her as he clicked the shutter. Then he pushed the buttons on what looked like a small adding machine. The machine spat out a slip of paper, which he gave her. “Here’s your number,” the registrar said. Her number was printed in gray ink: 571207. Head down, Honor left the room. She didn’t feel excited anymore.
TWO
HONOR’S PARENTS DID NOT MISS ANY MORE IMPORTANT
deadlines. She made sure of that. When she turned twelve, Honor got her own Storm Emergency Kit with flares and a bottle of water and packets of energy crackers. The kit included a booklet called Youth Safety, with directives for Safe disposal of dangerous litter. “Dispose of needles in red biohazard bins. Dispose of shattered glass in blue glass bins. Dispose of leaflets immediately. Leaflets marked with the word Forecaster are dangerous to the community. Reading them is a crime. Keeping them is a crime. Fold them in half and then in half again. Drop them in the nearest white paper recycling bin.” When she turned thirteen, Honor went to the Corporation Health Office and received a pamphlet called Earth Mother’s Guide for Girls, which had drawings of flowers with stamens and pistils and also cross sections of beehives, wasps’ nests, termite mounds, and mole rat colonies. We are here on earth to produce without stinting and reproduce within limits, the book said. We give what we can, do what we must, and take only what we need.
deadlines. She made sure of that. When she turned twelve, Honor got her own Storm Emergency Kit with flares and a bottle of water and packets of energy crackers. The kit included a booklet called Youth Safety, with directives for Safe disposal of dangerous litter. “Dispose of needles in red biohazard bins. Dispose of shattered glass in blue glass bins. Dispose of leaflets immediately. Leaflets marked with the word Forecaster are dangerous to the community. Reading them is a crime. Keeping them is a crime. Fold them in half and then in half again. Drop them in the nearest white paper recycling bin.” When she turned thirteen, Honor went to the Corporation Health Office and received a pamphlet called Earth Mother’s Guide for Girls, which had drawings of flowers with stamens and pistils and also cross sections of beehives, wasps’ nests, termite mounds, and mole rat colonies. We are here on earth to produce without stinting and reproduce within limits, the book said. We give what we can, do what we must, and take only what we need.
The year Honor turned thirteen was important in the Greenspoon family because it was also the year Quintilian turned three. At three, Quintilian was finally eligible to start school. That meant Pamela could get a job.
Quintilian was a dreamy brown-eyed boy with short-cropped curls. He always had an imaginary story or game in his head and often bumped into things because he paid no attention to where he was going.
Will and Pamela worried Quintilian wouldn’t get into the Old Colony School and that he would be sent to a special school for Special Children. Before Quintilian’s interview, Will and Pamela and Honor all sat with him and told him what to say.
“Who cares for the earth?” Honor tested Quintilian.
“Earth Mother,” Quintilian shouted.
“What are her watchwords?”
“Peas, dove, and toy,” Quintilian answered.
“Stop it!” Honor said. “You know the answers.”
But Quintilian just laughed at her. He thought he was funny.
Honor was worried when Miss Blessing came to the house for the interview. Quintilian did not know the Corporate Creed by heart. But Miss Blessing did not question a three-year-old so closely. She asked Quintilian to draw pictures instead. When he drew a picture of his family, he drew five round smiling faces with stick legs and arms.
“Who are all these people?” Miss Blessing asked him.
“Mommy, Daddy, Honor, Quintilian . . .”
“And who is this one?” Miss Blessing pointed to the largest face.
“Earth Mother,” said Quintilian, looking at Miss Blessing with his dark, trusting eyes.
Miss Blessing smiled. “What a sweet child,” she told Will and Pamela. “It’s a pity you did not give him back to the community.”
Honor looked at her parents, but they did not answer this. Tense, they sat across from Miss Blessing and waited for her verdict.
“We will do our best with him,” Miss Blessing said at last.
On his first day of school, Quintilian was ready long before Honor. He didn’t cry like other three-year-olds when the bus came. He had been waiting to ride the school bus his whole life.
“Pay attention to your teacher,” Pamela reminded Quintilian as he climbed the bus stairs.
“Stay near Honor,” said Will, as if it were perfectly normal for a family to send two children to school.
Quintilian sat next to the window and Honor sat on the aisle. She scrunched down and looked straight ahead when other students got on. She didn’t want to hear them ask why a
girl from H was sitting with a little kid from Q.
girl from H was sitting with a little kid from Q.
She’d been waiting for Quintilian to start school, but now that he was actually coming, she was embarrassed. As soon as the bus arrived at Old Colony, she took him by the hand and hurried him over to the teacher for year Q. She did not want to be seen with him.
“Class,” said Mrs. Goldbetter that afternoon, “open your history books to page fifteen. Hildegard will recite today.”
“North America was divided into three parts. . . .” recited Hildegard. “The Northern Lands were uninhabitable because of ice and snow. The Southern Lands were desert. The Midsection of the continent was more favorable, but the people there were Unpredictable. They built weapons; they practiced war; they committed so many Crimes against Nature that the climate overheated. Gas from factories, cars, and heating and cooling units damaged the earth’s atmosphere. Heat built up until the polar ice caps melted. The tides rose; dams and levees broke. Houses, businesses, and streets filled with mud. After the Flood, North America was no more. With the ceiling of the Polar Seas, Earth Mother Stabilized and Secured the Northern Islands that remain. The Northern Islands now enjoy New Weather, but the Corporation has not yet numbered them for resettlement. Future Planners are now mapping new cities in the Northern Islands. This artist’s drawing (facing page) shows a plan for a city called Security on an island in the Northeast. The Central Plaza displays the famous Arm, which broke from a larger idol known as the Statue of Liberty. The Arm holds a torch, which will light the plaza at night. . . .”
Even as Hildegard recited at the front of the class, Honor imagined the other girls were whispering about Quintilian. She sensed them passing notes.
At recess she was careful to stay far away from the small fenced playground where the littlest children ran and screamed.
“Look what I found,” said Helix, running over.
“Let me see. Is it rare?”
“Hey, don’t grab. Finders keepers.” Helix’s fist closed.
“Oh, come on, let me look,” said Honor. “Did you find this with your magnet?”
“No. By hand. I think it’s silver.” Helix was trying to rub the mud off an ancient coin. He spat on it.
“That’s disgusting,” said Honor. “Take it to the water fountain.”
They went to the water fountain near the swings and washed the coin until it shone. There was a face on one side and a statue on the other. They bent over the coin, and on the face side they read the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST, and QUARTER DOLLAR. On the statue side were the words NEW YORK 1788 GATEWAY TO FREEDOM, the old-style date 2001, and the ancient legend E PLURIBUS UNUM.
“Look, it still says God on it,” Honor said.
“Where? Where?”
“It’s in the small print.”
“That’s how you can tell it’s from before the Flood,” said Helix. He held the coin carefully between his thumb and index finger.
“What do you think you could buy with this?” Honor asked.
“I don’t know, maybe a . . . book,” said Helix. “A big coin like this could buy a lot. That’s why it says e pluribus unum. That means ‘out of one, many.’ One coin could buy many things. What would you buy if you could buy anything?”
Honor thought about this. “I would buy a . . . house on high ground.”
“You can’t buy houses,” said Helix.
“You said if I could buy anything.”
“Then I’d buy a telescope,” Helix whispered.
“That’s Not Allowed,” Honor said automatically, but she wasn’t really listening. She was gazing anxiously at the fenced area where the tiny boys were playing. Quintilian was there among them, but he looked like he was pushing another boy. Was he playing, or was he fighting? Where was the teacher? What if he got hurt? What if he got caught? Suddenly Honor sensed Helix watching her watching Quintilian. She turned away, embarrassed.
The teachers blew their whistles. Everyone ran to line up under the trees. The faster the children lined up, the faster they could reenter the air-conditioned classrooms.
“Here,” Helix said, and he pressed the coin into Honor’s hand.
She was confused. “What about finders keepers?”
But Helix had already run to get in line.
At the end of the day, Honor waited for Quintilian to get on the school bus. Everyone else boarded, but Honor didn’t see Quintilian. The driver started up his engine and began closing the doors. He never waited more than a moment.
Honor jumped onto the steps and blocked the closing doors with her body.
“Wait! We’re missing somebody.”
“Sorry,” said the driver, and he released the brake.
At that moment, a tearstained, disheveled Quintilian ran up the bus steps. Honor grabbed his arm and charged inside. Swoosh. The door swung shut behind them. The bus lurched forward, and Quintilian and Honor stumbled down the aisle to their seats.
“What happened to you?” Honor whispered, angry and dismayed.
Quintilian’s clothes were ripped and muddy. He held out a red card from the office.
“You got a red card? Your first day?”
“Don’t talk to me!” Quintilian squeezed his eyes closed and covered his ears with his hands.
“Why were you fighting? Don’t you know better than that?”
“He called me a brother!” Quintilian said.
THREE
“MY MOM GOT A JOB,” HONOR TOLD HELIX AS SOON AS
she saw him at recess the next day. She’d been waiting all morning to tell him.
she saw him at recess the next day. She’d been waiting all morning to tell him.
“But it’s an Undesirable job,” said Helix.
Honor was hurt. “How do you know?”
“My mother says you only get one chance to be an engineer. After that . . .”
“After that what?” Honor demanded, hands on her hips.
On Errand Day she found out. Will took Honor and Quintilian to see Pamela at the gift-wrapping department in the Central Store.
The Central Store was the size of a city block, and its doors were so tall they seemed to reach the sky. Inside the store there were whole rooms just for school uniforms. There were entire floors stocked with food. Will and the children walked through aisles of canned vegetables and aisles of frozen chicken parts. There were shelves upon shelves of cereal boxes. However, all the vegetables were the same: green beans, corn, and sliced olives. All the chicken parts were breasts, giant breasts from the Central Chicken Factory on Island 221. All the cereal, thousands of boxes, was one kind of granola without raisins. In the Colonies, the selection of food for sale depended on what shipments had arrived that month. There was special food for high-ranking engineers and members of the Corporation, but everyone else had to buy what the Central Store offered.
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