FOUR
AS THE DAYS GREW HOTTER, HONOR AND HER PARENTS
slept downstairs, because the upstairs bedrooms felt like ovens.
A cooling unit cost four hundred points at the Central Store, and
the Greenspoons could not afford one. Will had a job now in the
City, but Pamela still had not been chosen for
employment.
Every morning Honor woke up drenched with sweat.
Even the cold water in the bath was warm. Honor stopped dragging
her feet on the way to the bus stop. She stepped up into the cool
bus, eager to escape the stifling salty air.
School took all of Honor’s time. Her parents
were pleased that she was learning so much. She was studying
geometry and graphing and statistics. She was weaving a long narrow
cloth of deepest purple and lavender. She observed tiny organisms
under a microscope and drew their pictures in her lab book. In
archery she learned to shoot and string her bow. Her map skills
were improving, although the maps she copied looked nothing like
the world she used to know.
School maps showed the North shaded deep pink by
Enclosure. In geography class, the Northern Islands were entirely
Safe and Secure, with perfect New Weather. Mrs. Whyte showed the
class pictures of emerald trees and lawns and cloudless skies. She
showed films of flowers blossoming again and again in perfect
sunlight.
At first Honor had trouble staying quiet when
the class learned about the North, but as time went on, Honor’s
memories of rain and cold and sleet began to fade. The waterways
and the great pine trees slipped from her mind. Her activities at
school pushed the old days from her memory, and the films she saw
of the North began to replace the pictures in her mind. Only in
dreams, fragments of her old home came back to her. In her dreams
the trees in the North were gold, the leaves tinged copper, burnt
orange, scarlet.
One day Mrs. Whyte said, “Honor, you lived in
the North; tell us about the leaves there.”
Then Honor thought Mrs. Whyte was asking her to
tell the class about how leaves change color. “Every year they turn
red, yellow, brown,” Honor told the class.
Mrs. Whyte shook her head and said, “Not
anymore. Not anymore. Not by any means. Do trees change color,
class?”
“No,” the class chorused. Some of the girls were
covering their mouths with their hands. They were laughing at Honor
for saying otherwise.
“But you’ve never even been to the Northern
Islands,” sputtered Honor. “How do you know the trees are always
green?”
“How do you know, class?” asked Mrs.
Whyte.
For a long moment no one spoke. The girls seemed
almost puzzled.
Then Hildegard raised her hand and held up the
climatology textbook. “It says in the book: trees in the Northern
Islands are green all year round.”
Now Mrs. Whyte smiled. She was not angry
anymore. All the sunshine seemed to return to the room. “That is
exactly right,” she said. “We know what trees look like in the
North from our book. This is known as doing the reading,” she told
Honor. “Those who do the reading need not exaggerate.”
“But I did see the—” Honor began.
“Search your memory,” said Mrs. Whyte.
How strange. As soon as Mrs. Whyte told Honor to
search her memory, Honor’s memory failed her. There stood Mrs.
Whyte, absolutely certain in front of her, and there sat the other
girls, giggling and scoffing behind her. She could no longer
remember seeing colorful leaves with her own eyes. She could only
remember dreaming them.
“Do you remember when the leaves changed?” Honor
asked her parents that night as she lay down to sleep.
“I think so,” said her mother.
“Do you remember the colors?”
“I remember the leaves fell from the trees,”
said her father.
“But before they fell. Didn’t they turn
colors?”
Her parents tried to remember, but they could
not.
“They turned brown and died,” her father said.
“I remember that.”
All three of them had trouble remembering the
old life in the North. It was like forgetting a language they had
once known. A few words remained, but they lost more and more each
day.
History lessons were difficult. Honor had to
memorize the events of the Peaceful Revolution from her
textbook.
“After the Flood, disease, warfare, and famine
decimated the human population. Then Earth Mother, the Provider,
rose up. She was a simple schoolteacher, a cookie baker. She loved
flowers and children and sunshine and song. She believed in Safety
First. Her Peaceful Revolution was to protect and defend the
islands that remained. Her program: to build seawalls and Safe
cities, to Enclose the Polar Seas and establish New Weather in the
North with regulated temperatures all year round. The First
Glorious Year of Enclosure marked the securing of the Arctic
Circle, the establishment of the new calendar, the new clock . . .”
Honor recited the words to herself in the bathtub as she soaked in
tepid water. “A new compact of—”
“Are you all right in there?” asked Pamela
outside the door.
“Oh, you made me lose my place.” Honor sat up
with a splash.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
Honor pulled the plug. She dried herself with a
scratchy white towel and changed into her nightgown.
“I have to recite in history tomorrow,” she told
her mother when she opened the door. “I need to
practice.”
“It’s late,” said Pamela. “You need to go to
bed.”
“Please. I need to get this right,” Honor
begged, “or I’ll miss recess again.”
“Is that what they do? They punish you for
forgetting your recitation?” Pamela looked shocked.
“They don’t call it punishment; they call it
thinking time,” said Honor.
“What are you supposed to think?” asked Will,
who was pinning up laundry to dry on a rack in the
bedroom.
“You’re supposed to think about correcting your
Inaccuracies,” said Honor. “Obviously.”
“Don’t take that tone of voice with me,” said
Will.
Honor stayed up late and practiced her
recitation. She sat up in her nightgown in the living room and she
stared at the ceiling lamp above her head as she recited, “A new
compact of nations, a new generation without . . .”
In the glass globe of the ceiling lamp, she saw
a dead black spider with stiff, folded legs. Next to it, a living
spider tried to climb up inside the slippery globe to escape. The
spider inched upward only to fall back again, shrinking from the
scorching heat of the lightbulb. Again and again, the spider tried
to climb, but each time, he failed. Honor wanted to look away, but
she could not. She needed to keep practicing, but she couldn’t
think about the recitation with that spider struggling above her
head.
“Could you get him out? Could you unscrew the
globe?” she begged her father.
He stood on a chair and he could reach, but the
globe was hot and screwed in tight. “I’m afraid I’ll break the
glass if I try to force it loose,” Will said.
“He’s going to die in there,” said
Honor.
“Maybe if we turn off the light, he’ll have a
better chance,” said Pamela.
“That’s right. He’ll make his escape in the
dark,” Will said.
“No, he won’t. You’re just saying that,” said
Honor. “You just want me to go to bed.”
In the morning, Honor dressed for school and
trudged downstairs, imagining the humiliation to come.
“It’s not so bad,” said Pamela encouragingly.
“Just remember: ‘a new compact of nations, a generation without
fear, a world of Safety and Order.’”
“Why don’t you recite it yourself, then?” Honor
grumbled. She hated the hot morning. She hated the soggy cereal in
her bowl. She tried to keep her head down and avoid looking at the
light fixture. She didn’t want to know, and yet she had to
see.
Just as she left the house, she looked. She saw
that she and her father had both guessed wrong. The spider wasn’t
dead, and he had not escaped either. He was still struggling
against the glass.
All day Honor sat at her desk and wished she
were home. Not home in the hot town house, home in the North, in
the strange wild places. Home where her parents paddled boats
through marshy fields and the ruins of old buildings. Home where
ducks nested in drowned fairgrounds. In her homesickness a memory
returned to her. She was sitting in a boat and trailing her hand in
the water. Beneath the surface she saw something glint and shine.
She saw the head of a horse adorned with gold and jewels.
“This was called a carousel,” Will told
Honor.
“Look at the mirrors,” said Pamela, pointing at
the spotted silver gleaming underwater.
“Children rode on these painted animals. See the
lion? And the white swan? I’m not sure what this one is called.
What’s this orange one?” Will asked Pamela.
Honor reached through the water to caress the
mysterious painted creature with black and orange stripes. Water
rippled over his long, sinewy body. She tried to touch his
sparkling eye.
Honor rarely dreamed now of the cool mornings in
the North and scarlet trees. She could no longer picture the wild
sky with its Unpredictable colors, changeable and always new. The
sky she saw now was only one color at a time, and those colors
changed each hour, according to the clock. In the City, a golden
yellow sky was pure yellow without any other hue mixed in. When the
sky was blue, it was Sky Blue, exactly like the crayon in the
box.
As the clock on the wall ticked away, Honor
sensed her classmates waiting too. They loved to hear Honor lose
her place in recitations. The other girls lived on high ground in
the City, in tall apartment buildings waves could never touch. They
lived in villas in the mountains with flowering gardens and
turquoise sprinkler pools. Honor saw these places as she rode the
bus. The other girls visited each other after school, but they
would never visit her. “Did you know?” they whispered to one
another. “She lives by the shore.” The girls were always polite to
her in class when Mrs. Whyte was looking, because politeness was
the rule, but they taunted Honor the minute the teacher’s back was
turned.
“Shorebird, shorebird,” they chanted
softly.
The moment came. The whole class waited as Honor
stood trembling by the board.
“Take your time,” said Mrs. Whyte.
“After the Flood, disease, warfare, and famine .
. .”
“Use your whole voice,” said Mrs.
Whyte.
“. . . decimated the human population. Then
Earth Mother, the Provider, rose up. She was a simple
schoolteacher, a cookie baker. She loved flowers and children and
sunshine and song. She believed in . . .”
Honor looked out at her classmates in their
identical school uniforms. Everyone sat perfectly, heads up, backs
straight. Everyone held still, except that in the second row,
Hester was slowly, slowly crossing her eyes. Honor looked away
quickly, but she’d lost her place. “She believed in . . .” All she
could think was that Hester’s dark eyes were drawing closer and
closer together.
“Believed in what?” Mrs. Whyte asked.
Honor had no idea.
“Search your memory,” said Mrs. Whyte.
Honor hung her head. When she looked up, Hester
was smiling at her again. Her eyes were in the right
places.
“Honor,” said Mrs. Whyte. “Once again, you are
unprepared.”
“But I—”
“Are you contradicting me?” asked Mrs.
Whyte.
“No,” said Honor.
“You need a simpler text,” said Mrs. Whyte. “Can
you read this?” She handed Honor a card with just a few lines
printed on it. “Can you remember this?”
Honor nodded.
“Recite it with your whole voice.”
No, Honor thought when she saw the nursery
rhyme. Please don’t make me.
“Let’s hear it,” snapped Mrs. Whyte.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,” Honor
recited. “The earth is on fire. Your children will burn.”
“And the next one.” Mrs. Whyte handed Honor
another card.
Honor took a breath. “Atmosphere is falling
down, falling down, falling down . . .”
“I believe this is a song,” Mrs. Whyte reminded
her.
“Atmosphere is falling down. My fair lady,”
Honor sang haltingly.
Then her classmates could not cover their
giggles any longer. Their laughter rang through the
classroom.
“Take the sky and close it up, close it up,
close it up. Take the sky and close it up. My fair lady,” sang
Honor. The other girls put their heads down on their desks and
laughed until they cried.
Mrs. Whyte let them laugh. She did not say a
word, but let the laughter come until Honor’s cheeks
burned.
At recess Honor wandered alone. The whole Lower
School had recess together on the Lower Playground while the
teachers sat and talked at picnic tables in the shade. Honor’s
classmates gossiped, whispering to each other as they walked in
pairs. She stayed as far away from them as possible.
She stood by the playground fence and stared at
the orderlies pruning bushes on the other side. The orderlies wore
white jumpsuits and hats on their bald heads. They looked neither
happy nor sad, because they had no eyebrows.
“Hello,” she said through the fence. The
orderlies didn’t even glance at her.
“My name is Honor,” she said, and then asked the
nearer orderly, “What’s your name?”
Out of nowhere, Mrs. Whyte was upon her, taking
her by the hand and hurrying her away. “Too close. Too
close!”
“Why?” Honor asked.
Mrs. Whyte was fuming, muttering, “Ten years old
and speaking to the . . . Haven’t your parents told you never to
talk to orderlies?”
Honor shook her head. “We didn’t have orderlies
where we lived.”
“It’s as if you’ve been raised by wolves,”
exclaimed Mrs. Whyte.
“I just wanted to know their names,” said
Honor.
Mrs. Whyte turned on her. “They don’t have
names. Run along. Find an activity.”
Honor stood at the edge of the field and watched
the boys running and kicking an orange ball. Her parents had never
told her to stay away from orderlies, only not to stare.
She wandered over to a dusty place under the
trees. Two girls swung a rope and the rest took turns jumping in.
The first chanted as she jumped:
“A my name is Alice, and I am an engineer. My
husband’s name is Abner, and we bring back aluminum.”
Then she jumped out and the next girl jumped in,
chanting:
“B my name is Brodie, and I am an engineer. My
husband’s name is Berthold, and we bring back beryllium.”
They kept going as far as they could through the
alphabet. Honor didn’t ask to play. If you forgot an element, the
game had to start all over again and the girls got
annoyed.
She walked to the empty sandbox. The girls never
went there. They were all afraid of sand because they thought it
came from the shore. Honor had seen her classmates shudder as they
walked past, especially if some sand had drifted onto the grass.
“Ooh, don’t go near the sand. It’s filthy! It’s got bugs! It’s got
fleas! You’ll get sand in your pants!”
Honor sat on the wooden edge of the sandbox. She
began to trail her fingers in the smooth white sand. She scooped
the sand up in her hands and let it fall away again.
“There’s no bottom,” said a boy standing at the
edge. It was Helix Thompson, a kid with long blond hair that always
fell in his eyes. His eyes were either dark brown or black. His
hair was always falling over his face, so it was hard to tell.
Helix stepped into the sandbox. He dangled a magnet from a string
over the surface of the sand. “This is a metal detector,” Helix
said.
“What are you detecting?” Honor asked
wearily.
“Anything with iron. Screws, nails, ancient
tools,” said Helix. “I scan the surface with my magnet. Then I sift
the sand through my fingers.”
“Let me see.”
They bent over the magnet together. “If you had
a magnet like this, you could make a metal detector,” Helix
said.
“How many points are they?” Honor
asked.
“I don’t know. Why? Are you poor?” Helix asked
with sudden interest.
Honor hesitated. Then she said, “Yes, I’m poor
and I live by the shore.”
“Are you a refugee?” asked Helix.
Honor wasn’t sure what a refugee was, but she
was too proud to let on. “Maybe,” she said. “I hate school,” she
whispered.
“You don’t have to be a refugee to hate school,”
said Helix.
The next day at recess Helix was looking for
Honor. He dug into his pocket and took out a big magnet tied to a
piece of string. “This one’s for you,” he said. Together they
walked across the playground, trying to detect scrap metal. Honor
found a rusty nail.
“Beginner’s luck,” said Helix, and they kept
walking.
“Your father works for my father,” Helix said.
“They work in the same building.”
“The Central Computer Building?”
Helix nodded. “What island are you
from?”
“I don’t think it had a number.”
“You came from a numberless island?” Helix was
fascinated.
Honor nodded. “In the North.”
“But nobody can live on a numberless island. You
were evacuated, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Honor.
“What was it like? How did they find you? Did
Retrievers come for you?”
Honor didn’t answer.
“Why were your parents sent here?”
“The same reason everyone else was,” snapped
Honor. The Colonies were the only islands with official numbers.
They were the only islands where the Corporation permitted people
to live.
“But why to this island?”
“For work,” Honor said.
Helix looked at her skeptically. They were
standing under a tree, but even in the shade the sun beat down on
their shoulders. Their hair was wet with sweat under their sun
hats. “If they were sent for work,” Helix said, “then why hasn’t
your mother been chosen for employment?”
“When are you going to get a job?” Honor asked
her mother that night. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, and
her parents were cooking chicken and rice in a pot.
Pamela didn’t answer.
“Everyone else has a job,” said Honor.
Pamela looked at Will. Then she said, “Sometimes
the Corporation has too many engineers in one place.”
“They wouldn’t send you here if there were too
many engineers on the island already,” Honor pointed out. “Don’t
you want to find work?”
“Of course I do,” Pamela said.
“If you get a job, we could move. We could
afford to live on higher ground.”
“Yes, I realize that,” said Pamela. “I want a
job very much. I have gone to the City every day and applied at
every office.”
“Then why won’t they give you one?”
“Well, in my case,” Pamela said, “it’s because
we’re going to have a baby.”
Honor stared at her parents in horror.
“You’re going to have a brother or a sister,”
said Will. Honor gasped. Brother and sister were swear
words.
“We’re having the baby in month seven,” said
Pamela.
“How?” Honor demanded. She was dumbfounded. A
mother, a father, and a child made a family. Families came in
threes. She had never heard of a family of four.
“The baby will be interesting,” said her mother,
“and it will grow and go to school like you.”
“No one at school has babies at home,” Honor
said.
For just a second her father looked angry. “What
do you care?”
“We aren’t like other people,” said her
mother.
“Who are we like, then?” Honor asked.
Her parents laughed.
Then Honor ran out the back door to the rocky
place where her father had planted bananas, and she crouched down
under their broad green leaves and cried.
Her father came out after her, but she pushed
him away. She kept crying until her mother bent down and whispered
that she had to come inside. If she kept making so much noise, the
Neighborhood Watch was sure to hear. She went inside and dried her
tears. She sat silently at dinner.
“I’m sorry we laughed,” her father
said.
“A baby is wonderful,” said Pamela. “You’ll
see.”
“We’ll find a better house. We aren’t going to
live here forever, you know,” her father said.
Her parents didn’t understand. After the baby,
her family would never fit in. Other families were three, and hers
would be four. Other families were the right number, and hers would
be too big.
Honor decided she wouldn’t tell anyone at school
about the baby. Not even Helix. But he surprised her. They were
standing on a picnic table and taking turns jumping off. They laid
sticks down on the ground to measure how far they jumped.
Honor was poised to jump off the table when
Helix said, “I heard my father say your mother is going to have a
baby.”
Honor had been so close to jumping that she lost
her balance and fell in a heap in the dirt. “Now look what you made
me do.”
“Sorry,” said Helix, and he climbed onto the
table for his turn.
She scrambled back up. “No, it’s still my turn.
That doesn’t count.”
“Is it true?”
“Shh.”
“It’s a secret?”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“Why?”
From her perch on the table Honor watched as
Helena, Hortense, and Hiroko strolled past. “Because I have enough
trouble already! I live by the shore. No one will come to my
house.”
“You can come to our house,” said
Helix.
Honor thought he was just feeling sorry for her.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“We have a sprinkler pool.”
“I’ll ask my parents,” Honor said.
Honor could keep the baby a secret at school,
but at the town houses, everyone noticed that Pamela was getting
bigger. Honor was glad that none of the neighbor children went to
the Old Colony School.
Sometimes before dinner she played with the
girls from the other town houses. They were children of the
island’s First People, girls with tanned skin and brown eyes. Their
names were Felicia, Gina, and Hattie. Honor envied their smooth
black hair.
There were basketball hoops in the paved lot in
front of the town houses. Honor and the other girls played
basketball, and a group of boys kicked a soccer ball. They played a
wild game called Forecaster where one boy pelted the others with a
ball. The game was Not Allowed, because the word Forecaster was
Unacceptable. Whenever the boys got caught by the Neighborhood
Watch, they had to rake and sweep and break down boxes for
recycling.
“Do you know what you are saying when you use
the word Forecaster?” Mr. Pratt demanded once. “The Forecaster is a
madman. He’d drown you as soon as look at you. He worships Old
Weather. He thinks the world was better off before. And all he
wants is for you to disobey. Take these brooms and sweep the
steps.” He gestured to the cement stairs from the empty lot to the
town houses.
The boys hung their heads and accepted their
punishment, but after some weeks had passed, they played Forecaster
again. The girls could hear them using the F-word as they slammed
the ball into each other. “I’m gonna forecast you!” At a safe
distance, a cluster of little girls jumped rope. If the little
girls found a bit of chalk, they’d draw hopscotch squares on the
asphalt. They’d play clapping games, chanting:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see an elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence
He jumped so high, high, high
He reached the sky, sky, sky
And didn’t come back, back, back
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly.
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see an elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence
He jumped so high, high, high
He reached the sky, sky, sky
And didn’t come back, back, back
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly.
The girls had seen pictures of the elephants
that had once roamed the wild grasslands, but no one knew exactly
what July had been on the old calendar. The older girls argued
about it. Hattie thought July had been a summer month at the end of
the year, but Honor was sure July had been a winter month. Why else
would Miss Mary be buttoned up in back? She must have been cold.
Honor imagined cool breezes way up in the July sky. What a
beautiful word. She wished the impossible: that her parents could
name the baby July.