The Other Side of the Island (22 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
Honor was gazing at the drawings of the Barracks. The buildings were all rectangular. There were hundreds set up in a quadrangle with an open square between them. At the corners of the camp, the map showed small square buildings. “Those must be watchtowers,” Honor said.
Outside the camp there were only two other buildings. One was labeled Maintenance and the other Transportation. “I think those are for the buses,” said Helix.
Honor stared hard at the Barracks. “She’s there,” she whispered.
“All the taken parents are there,” said Helix. “And I’m going to get mine.”
“But how?”
“I’m waiting for a storm. A big one.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, “but the last one was over two years ago. Remember?”
She nodded. Of course she remembered the night she and her parents had stayed with Helix and his parents in the safe room. She missed that night when they had all been safe together.
“Approximately every three years,” Helix said, quoting the climatology textbook, “there has been a typhoon in the Colonies. When the storm comes and everyone runs to the shelter, I’ll escape.”
“But even if you could escape, how would you get to the other side?” Honor asked. “And how could you find them?”
“The map,” said Helix, as if it were simple.
“They’d catch you,” said Honor. “They’d . . . Wait,” she said suddenly. “Why should you go? What about me?”
Helix bristled. “I could get them out.”
“How do you know?”
“I stole this map from the library, didn’t I?”
“And how did you get it?”
“I started a fire in the bathroom—just a little one. Then, when the alarm went off, I stole the map from Miss Tuttle’s desk.”
“But it was my mother who gave me the code,” said Honor. “She’s waiting for me. Even if you got to the other side, she might not recognize you. I have to go.”
TWO
THEY MADE A PLAN. THEY MADE A HUNDRED PLANS TO
leave school and rescue their parents. The plans were detailed, but they were detailed like the plans in dreams, full of little pieces of information, like how many steps it would take to get from the classrooms to the potting shed or how they would meet in the Model Forest at the lookout and start off from there. Their plans were missing the most important ideas, like how they would make their way across the steep volcanic mountains and what they would do once they got to the other side. Honor and Helix could not figure out answers to these questions, partly because they disagreed about what to do, and partly because they had so little sense of what the other side of the island would be like.
leave school and rescue their parents. The plans were detailed, but they were detailed like the plans in dreams, full of little pieces of information, like how many steps it would take to get from the classrooms to the potting shed or how they would meet in the Model Forest at the lookout and start off from there. Their plans were missing the most important ideas, like how they would make their way across the steep volcanic mountains and what they would do once they got to the other side. Honor and Helix could not figure out answers to these questions, partly because they disagreed about what to do, and partly because they had so little sense of what the other side of the island would be like.
All their plans began with a storm. When everyone was hiding in the shelters, when the power went down and the world went black, that would be their chance. But where was bad weather? Where were the rain and surf? Where were the floods? Every day, Honor and Helix listened to the weather bulletins, but no storm was predicted. Every storm drill, Honor and Helix looked at the sky and hoped the sirens were sounding for the real thing. No such luck. Days passed and weeks, and not a drop of rain.
Honor had trouble concentrating in class. During geography tests, when she filled in blank maps with Corporation district numbers, she kept thinking of Helix’s secret map of the island. She couldn’t stop thinking about that map, folded in the potting shed. The map seemed to her to have magic powers, it was so strange and dangerous and Not Allowed. Every year in school she’d studied weather maps and oceanic maps, but she’d never seen a map of where she lived. She thought of the map and she thought of the escape plans and she did poorly on her algebra tests.
Quintilian was having trouble too. He had begun drawing on every scrap of paper he could find, even in the margins of his schoolbooks. The pictures were always the same, round smiling faces of the family and a big round face above them for Earth Mother. Sometimes he drew Earth Mother with lines radiating from her head like the sun.
He said his pencil couldn’t help it. Drawings sprouted everywhere. One day, after three warnings, his teacher and Mr. Edwards met and decided Quintilian had to learn his lesson. He got a punishment of extra garden chores to do.
Quintilian’s little hands were too small to weed the garden. He wasn’t strong enough to push a wheelbarrow. All the orphans helped him when they thought Mr. and Mrs. Edwards weren’t looking. After several days of weeding, Quintilian stopped drawing. He drooped sadly at his desk and ate hardly any dinner.
“How will you grow?” Honor asked him.
Quintilian shrugged.
“You can’t grow if you don’t eat,” she said.
“I don’t like food,” he told her.
“But how do you know, if you don’t even try?” she demanded. She didn’t know what to do with him. Fanny had told her that orphans who didn’t eat had to go to the infirmary and Nurse Applebee made them eat. She was afraid this would happen to Quintilian. He looked so listless and sad. He acted like a boy who thought nothing good would ever happen again.
“I’m going to tell him I saw our mother,” she told Helix.
Helix was upset. “He’s too little. He’s only four. He can’t keep a secret.”
“Yes, he can,” said Honor.
“Telling him is a mistake,” Helix warned her.
“Why?”
“I don’t want him to be disappointed,” Helix said softly.
Honor was surprised at this. She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think we’ll be able to get them out?”
The next chance she got, she whispered in Quintilian’s ear, “Promise if I tell you a secret, you’ll eat.”
“What’s the secret?” Quintilian asked.
“Promise first.”
“Promise.”
“Mommy is alive.”
He didn’t ask how she knew, but he smiled at her. He said, “I’ll eat bananas.”
“No!” Honor protested. “Other things too.”
“Bananas,” Quintilian said.
There was an old saying of Earth Mother: A watched pot never boils; a watched sky never rains. Now that Honor and Helix were watching the sky, they could count day after day of sunny weather. Twenty-eight days of sunshine. Twenty-nine. The air was stifling; there was talk of drought. There had never been such heat. The teachers thought about canceling the school field day for fear that children would suffer heatstroke. Then they talked about holding field day inside. But there were no rooms big enough to hold so many footraces, three-legged races, wheelbarrow races, potato-sack races, egg-in-a-teaspoon races, relay races. The teachers decided to hold the field day first thing in the morning before the sun became unbearable.
That morning the sky was overcast, but the sun beat down anyway. The whole school gathered on the Upper Field, the same place Honor had come her first day at Old Colony. As on that day, teachers stood with banners for their classes, but now the littlest children lined up by a banner painted R. The littlest children had names like Rebecca and Rapunzel and Romulus. All the teachers shook their heads and said how time flies and how wonderful it was and was it possible. The youngest students had been born in the eighteenth glorious year of Enclosure.
Miss Blessing wore a white visor to keep the sun out of her eyes. She blew on a silver whistle. Other teachers held stopwatches in their hands, or lined up hundreds of plastic cups of water on the water tables, or arranged ribbons on the ribbon tables. The ribbon tables were covered with white cloths and then adorned with shining satin ribbons in orange and deep purple, sea blue and emerald green. The ribbons were printed in gold: 1st Place, 2nd Place, 3rd Place, 4th Place, and Participant. They were all beautiful, but the green first-place ribbons were the most beautiful of all, because they were adorned with a green satin rosette.
Quintilian competed in a hopping race and won a purple Participant ribbon. Helix ran in the three-legged race with Hector, and they won a red third-place ribbon. Honor stood in the special roped-off archery area and eyed her target. She was not the best at archery anymore and she knew it. True, her eyes were keen, her hand was steady, her arm was strong. She’d won many ribbons in the girls’ archery competition when she was younger, but in the past year, other girls had improved at the sport. There was a group of younger girls, especially, who were now quite good. They practiced together during recreation time, while Honor had hardly touched a bow since the day she’d admitted her parents had been taken.
The younger archers all wore their sun hats at the same angle, and they clustered together and giggled. They had the superior look of girls with parents. They were from year J, and their names were Jessie, Jocasta, and Jill. Of course they wouldn’t speak to Honor. She stood apart and didn’t speak to them either.
A large crowd of students stood behind the ropes to watch. All the children who had finished their races had come to see the competition, and they stood five and six deep with their satin ribbons fluttering in their hands.
Miss Teasdale said, “First three, take your places,” and the three J girls stepped up to shoot. Honor watched with Fanny and Hagar from the waiting line, five yards behind the shooting marks.
Jessie, Jocasta, and Jill knocked back their arrows. Each arrow had a notch for the bowstring. The girls’ arrows all had different feather crests, but the girls looked alike to Honor with their hats pulled back the same way and their smooth brushed hair and their flouncy way of standing, as if they owned the shooting line. When they let fly, each arrow hit its target.
Sweat streaked Honor’s face as she waited and watched the younger girls. The best two out of three would advance to the next round, but the scores were close. It wasn’t clear until the last moment which of the friends would move on. When Jocasta was eliminated, Jessie and Jill rushed to hug her and make her feel better while the audience applauded. The three girls reminded Honor of herself when she had decided to become perfect and make Helena her friend. They were sickeningly sweet.
She set her quiver down next to her mark and began testing the string of her bow.
“Oh no, Heloise, wait!” Miss Teasdale cried, alarmed, because the first-round shooters had not yet cleared away. “Back off! Back off! No shooters on the mark until I give the all-clear signal.”
Honor did not back off. She stood and glared at the target before her, while Miss Teasdale ushered the other girls away protectively. When Fanny and Hagar stepped up to shoot with Honor, Fanny whispered to Honor, “What’s wrong with you? Do you want to get disqualified?”
Honor shrugged. She felt strange, as though she were standing outside herself. Why had she ever tried to act like those girls from J, sweet only to one another and mean to everybody else? What in the world had she been thinking? Why had she thought she could change her name and that would make her fit? How had she been so sure her parents were wrong about everything and her teachers were right? She could see herself standing there on the field, and she remembered the day she’d begun crying uncontrollably when she tried to shoot. She would not cry now. She would not shoot into the grass now. She would not behave like those girls from year J. She stared at the target. She stared so hard that the colored circles seemed to float before her eyes. Red, blue, black, white.
She scarcely heard Miss Teasdale give the signal. She knocked back her first arrow and let it fly, straight into the bull’s-eye. “Ooh.” The children watching drew a breath, but Honor didn’t care. Fanny and Hagar were shooting next to her, but she didn’t notice. She knocked back her second arrow and sent that close to the first, in the blue circle outside the bull’s-eye. Then she took the third arrow from her quiver. She pulled her bowstring back and felt the muscles in her arm tense and ache. She felt a cold prickle on her shoulder, and for a split second she thought she might have hurt her arm pulling too hard. She let the arrow fly. “OOH.” The crowd was louder this time. Bull’s-eye, just to the right of the first.
The crowd grew louder. The onlookers had begun to scream. Honor realized it wasn’t because of her shot. What she’d felt on her shoulder was cold rain. The sky was dark. Teachers were blowing their whistles and racing with the children for the shelters.
“Come on! Come on, Heloise!” screamed Fanny, but Honor held her bow, unable to move. The storm sirens were sounding; the wind was picking up. Honor knew what to do, but she had been waiting so long, she felt for a moment she couldn’t do it. “Take my hand,” Fanny shouted, and she began dragging Honor to the shelter. The girls were wet all over; they were already drenched. Honor slipped her hand from Fanny’s and turned her head the other way. “No, Heloise!” screamed Fanny. “Come back! Come back! You’ll get hurt. You’ll get killed.” Honor ducked her head, clutched her bow, slung her quiver over her shoulder, and began to run.
THREE
SHE SPRINTED OVER THE SLICK ARCHERY FIELD AND BEHIND
the targets. She could hear the screaming and the sirens, but her heart was pounding louder. The quiver with her remaining arrows bounced against her back. The air was full of flying plastic cups and ribbons. The fields streamed with screaming children and teachers, shouting themselves hoarse. Faintly, far away, she heard Miss Blessing’s silver whistle. Security orderlies wheeled around catching stray children, one in each hand. Everyone was racing to the shelters, but Honor ran the other way, up to the Model Forest.
the targets. She could hear the screaming and the sirens, but her heart was pounding louder. The quiver with her remaining arrows bounced against her back. The air was full of flying plastic cups and ribbons. The fields streamed with screaming children and teachers, shouting themselves hoarse. Faintly, far away, she heard Miss Blessing’s silver whistle. Security orderlies wheeled around catching stray children, one in each hand. Everyone was racing to the shelters, but Honor ran the other way, up to the Model Forest.
Her feet slid out from under her. She tripped and fell flat, only to scramble up again. Her legs were streaked with mud, and her feet slid and sloshed in her wet sandals.
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