FOUR
GRADUALLY, HONOR BEGAN TO SLEEP BETTER, AND
Quintilian’s nightmares stopped. Safety Officers did not search
the house again. When the children came home in the afternoon, they
didn’t jump at every little noise.
Life improved. Will was promoted at work, and at
last the Greenspoons moved to a new house on higher ground. The
house was an end unit with a little garden. The kitchen was big
enough for a round table.
The previous tenants had disappeared and left
their furniture. There was a green armchair and a couch with a
pattern of palm leaves all over it. There were curtains at the
picture window next to the front door.
“Don’t catch the curtain in the door!” Pamela
was always telling Honor when she came in or out. If the curtain
got caught, it could get grease stains from the lock. Will laughed
at Pamela for fussing, but she insisted, “Now that we have them,
we’re going to keep them nice; we’ve never had living room curtains
before.”
Honor and Quintilian got separate rooms.
Quintilian got a tiny bedroom of his own, and Honor got to sleep in
the study attached to the living room. The room had a built-in desk
and a shelf, and sliding doors she could close at night to shut
herself off from the living room when she wanted to
sleep.
Honor was proud of her father’s promotion and
the new house. But when Honor looked at Will and Pamela, she felt
helpless. They broke curfew more than once after moving. They went
outside sometimes in the middle of the night. Honor asked them
where they were going so late. “Stargazing,” said Pamela.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Honor
asked.
“When you look up at the stars, you can see
patterns,” Pamela said. “The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper,
Orion’s Belt. Gemini. You can learn hundreds of
constellations.”
“Your mother knows them all,” Will said
proudly.
“Well, not all of them,” said Pamela, but she
looked pleased.
“How can there be hundreds of constellations
when there are seven stars in the sky at night?” Honor
asked.
Pamela looked uncomfortable. “That’s just the
overlay,” she said.
“Those stars are decorative,” Will reminded
Honor. “We look for the real ones.”
“What real ones? Where can you see real ones?”
Honor asked.
“Away from the City,” said Will.
“And how is that Allowed?” asked
Honor.
“No one ever said it’s Not Allowed,” her father
told her.
“It’s after curfew, so obviously it’s Not
Allowed! You can’t just go off by yourselves in the
dark.”
“We aren’t by ourselves. We go with the
Thompsons,” Pamela said.
Honor shook her head. Her parents were
difficult. They laughed at weather drills and water regulations.
They even complained aloud about their volunteer work. “Why do we
have to volunteer for the anti-litter campaign?” Honor’s father
grumbled as he set off every evening on day three.
“Because everyone in the community has to combat
litter,” said Honor, accurately reciting what she’d learned in
school.
“Yes, but why do they call it volunteering if I
am required to go?”
Honor worried about her father constantly. He
said all the wrong things and he didn’t even care. She worried
about her mother too. One day when Pamela was drawing, Honor saw a
leaflet tucked inside her book.
Counter-Directives for a New World
1. Cultivate your own fruit trees and eat
fresh fruit each day.
2. Find dark places and study the night
sky.
3. Try to remember something new each
day.
4. You have nothing to fear but fear itself .
. .
—The Forecaster
“Where did this come from?” Honor
demanded.
“I found it on the ground. In the City,” her
mother said.
“You’re not allowed to collect these. You’re not
supposed to bring these home!”
“I need the paper,” said Pamela. “I draw on the
back.”
Honor snatched Pamela’s drawings and turned them
over. “Keep a diary. Write down your thoughts . . .” On the back of
each drawing, Honor saw the Forecaster’s words. She began ripping
the drawings, one after another.
“No, Honor!” Her mother snatched her artwork
away.
“You can’t keep those,” Honor protested. It was
a crime just to read the Forecaster’s leaflets. If Safety Officers
found them in the house, Honor didn’t know what would
happen.
“Please get rid of them,” she begged her mother,
but Pamela didn’t listen.
Honor felt her family was heading toward
disaster.
“I want to know where you go,” she told her
father.
“What are you really doing at night?” she asked
her mother.
“Stargazing,” her mother insisted.
“Tell that to Quintilian; don’t tell that to
me.”
Her parents said nothing.
“Why can’t you stay home?” Honor
asked.
“We wouldn’t go if it weren’t important,” said
her mother.
“Tell me!”
Her parents turned away from her.
“What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” her father
murmured.
“At least give me some warning you’ll be home
late,” Honor pleaded.
Her parents looked at each other. Then her
father said, “Time for dinner.” The discussion was over.
However, on Errand Day, when the four of them
went to the Central Store, Will and Pamela stopped at the photo
booth.
“We’re getting our picture?” Quintilian
exclaimed with delight.
“Honor,” said Will, “you get to pick a glitter
globe.”
She couldn’t believe her luck as she stood at
the booth where a sign said: PICK YOUR OWN ENCLOSURE. She stood a
long time gazing at the globes. They were the size of mangoes,
perfect little worlds, each filled with water and glitter. She
couldn’t decide between the one with plastic palm trees, tiny pink
flamingos, and the words Safe and Secure or the underwater scene
with miniature fish and plastic coral. In the end she picked a
different one altogether, a little red barn with a white picket
fence, glitter green as grass, and the words Welcome to Our
Country.
They paid twenty points and entered the photo
booth one at a time for their portraits. Then they watched as their
miniature full-length pictures emerged from the photo machine. In
their photos, even Will and Pamela stood no more than half an inch
high. A young woman in a white photo booth uniform cut out each
image. She inserted the pictures in grooves in the black base of
the globe and then took out a clear plastic Enclosure already
filled with glitter, scenery, and water. She snapped the base and
Enclosure together and gave the globe its first shake. There they
were in miniature, the four of them smiling in their tiny farm.
Quintilian grabbed the globe and shook it hard.
“Careful!” Will warned him.
“It’s guaranteed watertight,” the photo booth
lady told them, “as long as no one drops it.”
“Don’t let him hold it,” Honor begged her
parents. “He’ll drop it before we get out of the store.”
Usually Pamela just told Honor not to complain
about Quintilian, but this time she listened. She took the glitter
globe and put it in her purse.
At home, Pamela kept the globe. Honor was
disappointed. Since she’d chosen the scenery, she’d thought it was
her special present.
“Why did you buy it if you’re going to hide it?”
she asked.
But the next afternoon, when she came home from
school, Honor found the globe on her desk. Will and Pamela stayed
out late that night, past curfew, past bedtime.
After Honor put Quintilian to sleep, she turned
off the light in her room, lay down, and held the globe in her
hand. She shook it and tried to make out the dim figures next to
the little barn. Her eyes closed, and her fingers loosened. When
she woke up in the morning, she was afraid she’d dropped the globe
and broken it. Pamela came in and found Honor hunting under her
bed.
“I put it away last night when I got back,”
Pamela said.
Then Honor understood that her parents had left
the glitter globe out for her because they’d planned to be away.
She sat back on her heels. Her parents had listened to her. They
were giving her warnings about when they would be gone.
She began to see that she was quite different
from her parents. She understood how to get along where they did
not. At school she’d learned that if you played by the rules, you
did well. Ms. Lynch was her teacher that year, and she said there
was a time and a place for everything.
School wasn’t hard, once you understood how to
fit in. If you fit in, then you wouldn’t need thinking time or
accident forms. In fact, you would never get in trouble. Honor saw
all this, but her parents didn’t.
She decided that year she was going to fit in,
even if they did not. She would be perfect. If she had a test, she
would get all the answers right. If she had homework, she would
earn the extra points for neatness.
Honor worked on her penmanship. Each letter was
small and perfect on the page. Her printed words looked like ants
marching along on the lines of her notebook paper. Gradually, she
began to write even smaller. Now her words looked like aphids on
the veins of a leaf. The ancient civilizations waged war against
each other, Honor copied painstakingly. Their weapons were loud and
violent. Their guns shot missiles called bullets with tremendous
force. Bullets lodged in the flesh of victims or even blew off
parts of their bodies. Other weapons included bombs, which caused
explosions and fires. There were no Watchers to guard against
wrongdoing. There were no tasers or compost bins. The Rule of
Self-order was unknown. She got A’s in all her classes because her
work was Accurate. Ms. Lynch said so.
Know your place. Do your job. Live in peace.
That was the Rule of Self-order. Honor lived by that rule now. She
did not think about the Northern Islands. In fact, she could not
remember them at all. She thought only about her life in the
Colonies and her work at school. She did not want to stick out
anymore. She did not want to be unusual.
She decided she would change everything about
herself that didn’t fit. That meant she had to stop being friends
with Helix. None of the other girls in her class was best friends
with a boy. They talked about the boys and giggled about them, but
they weren’t friends with them; they were only friends with one
another. So Honor decided she would tell Helix she couldn’t play
with him anymore at recess.
“We can’t,” she told him. They were at his
parents’ house sitting on the floor of his room, playing Truce.
Quintilian was building with Gizmos on Helix’s bed. Gizmos weren’t
just blocks. They had magnets inside so they clicked together. Some
Gizmos were solid colored and some were clear so you could build
cities and then build Enclosures all around them. They were
Quintilian’s favorite toy, and Helix had thousands of them from
when he was little—whole boxes and bins of Gizmos. “We’re too old
for Archeology anyway,” Honor said.
Helix got up and took down his coin collection
from the shelf on his wall. He had a whole collection of coins now.
Quarters, nickels, dimes. He even had an ancient penny. “Why are we
too old?”
“Because,” said Honor.
“Because what?”
“We’re thirteen,” said Honor. “When we spend all
our time finding coins in the playground, we look odd.”
“Why does it matter how we look?” asked
Helix.
“Because!” Honor burst out, frustrated. She was
having trouble putting it into words. “You’re supposed to be
playing ball with the boys,” she said. “My best friend is supposed
to be a girl. We stick out.”
“You never cared before,” said Helix.
“If you stick out,” said Honor, “then sooner or
later, you’re going to get in trouble.”
“If you don’t want to be friends anymore,” said
Helix, “then fine.” He threw down his cards.
“Well, I do, but not . . .” Honor trailed off.
“At school,” she said at last in a small voice.
“You want to be like them,” said
Helix.
“No, I don’t,” said Honor, but that was exactly
what she wanted. She wanted to be like the other girls.
“Hmm,” said Helix. “You’re stupider than I
thought.”
“No, you are.”
“No, you.”
“No more fighting,” Quintilian said.
“Shut up,” said Honor.
“I’m telling Mommy you said a bad word,” said
Quintilian, scrambling off the bed.
“Go ahead,” said Honor.
“Mommy!” Quintilian raced down the
hall.
“Coward.” Helix glared at Honor as he scooped up
the cards from the floor.
After that Honor and Helix didn’t play together.
When their parents made them come along to each other’s houses,
they wouldn’t even look at each other. Honor stayed near her
mother. But Helix got the best revenge. He made friends with
Quintilian. He taught Quintilian all the card games he and Honor
used to enjoy and spent hours building Gizmo cities with him. Helix
didn’t just ignore Honor; he took Quintilian away from
her.
Honor told herself she didn’t care. She was busy
all the time with homework and Heliotropes. And always at school
she watched the other girls to learn how to be like them. She
noticed how they combed their hair behind their ears and how they
wore their sun hats far back on their heads. She copied the way
they sat with their arms on their desks and the way they whispered
about one another.
“Did you see Hortense had gum?” Honor told
Helena as they cleared away their lunches.
Helena drew closer and Honor murmured, “She’s
got sticks of gum stuck up her socks.”
“Eew!” Helena thought for a moment. Gum in
school was forbidden. “Should we tell on her?”
Honor shrugged slightly. “You can if you want
to.”
“Tell her what?” asked Hester, hovering
near.
“Well, I’m not going to tell you!” Honor
said.
“Why not?” asked Hester, and Honor and Helena
laughed. Making friends with the girls wasn’t so hard once you knew
what to do.
Honor became so busy she didn’t even notice when
her parents stopped going to Helix’s house. One night after dinner
she thought she saw her mother with tears in her eyes, but then she
was sure she was imagining things and went back to studying
geography.
That year the girls were allowed a walk once a
week instead of recess. They were permitted to stroll around the
school grounds for forty minutes. Of course students could not walk
alone, only in pairs. Whenever Honor had a chance, she took Helena
as her partner. Helena was blond and thin. She lived in a house
high up the mountainside. Her mother was an architect, and her
father was a famous engineer who had been posted to the island for
Special Purposes. But Helena was not proud, despite her fancy house
and her father’s high position. She was quiet and good at
whispering.
One day, Honor and Helena decided to take the
path to the school’s Model Forest. This was a steep trail and took
almost half an hour to climb, but the forest was both interesting
and educational. The Model Forest was the forest of the future,
meant to demonstrate how the island would look when Enclosure was
complete.
The Model Forest’s trees were planted in neat
rows. Vines hung down untangled, as if someone had combed them
straight. Along the path, mountain apples and passion fruit grew
abundantly. All the orchids were in bloom at once: white and pale
green and golden yellow veined with red. In the Model Forest,
orderlies set out dishes of fresh fruit to feed the butterflies and
replaced dead or dying plants as soon as they began to
decay.
Honor and Helena were breathing hard when they
got to the lookout point that crowned the Model Forest. This was a
spot where the trees had been cut away and students could look down
over the school grounds and beyond—all the way down into the valley
between the volcano’s ridges. Honor could see the winding road the
buses took to school, the green banana plantations below, and, far
down, the island’s only city clinging to the slope. Beyond that she
saw the strip of empty beaches and the rough green ocean, big as
the sky.
The wind whipped at the girls. “Hold on to your
hat!” Helena called out, and Honor saved her hat just in time. The
younger students had strings that tied under their chins, but older
girls were meant to be responsible and keep their hats on
without.
“Let’s go back,” said Helena as the wind whipped
even harder. Their skirts blew out around their knees. “It’s
getting rough.”
“I like it,” Honor confessed. The lookout was
the only outside place where she felt cool. The wind woke her up;
its force thrilled her. “Don’t you wish you could fly?” she asked
Helena.
She saw Helena’s horrified face and she was
embarrassed.
“Let’s go,” Honor said.
They made their way back through the Model
Forest and headed down toward the school buildings. Wisps of blond
hair had escaped Helena’s hat and blown about her face. Helena
tucked them in. “I don’t like it there,” she said.
“I don’t either,” Honor lied.
Helena looked at her, confused. “You acted like
you did.”
“Well, I don’t,” Honor insisted. “It’s too wild.
It’s scary!”
“I know,” said Helena. “I was afraid of blowing
away.”
“Let’s never go there again,” Honor
said.
“Watch your feet,” Helena warned. The school
grounds were muddy after the rains, and students had to keep to a
raised boardwalk.
The other girls were gathering now, walking in
pairs down the other boardwalks to the classroom, but a couple of
boys with wheelbarrows blocked the path in front of Honor and
Helena. They were orphans wheeling fertilizer for the
gardens.
Honor and Helena wrinkled their noses. The
orphans all had jobs at the school in the gardens. They wore
regular uniforms in class, but they had overalls for
work.
“Hurry up or we’ll be late,” Helena told the
boys worriedly.
One of them, a blond one, looked up and glared
at the girls. “You could go around, you know.”
Honor took Helena’s arm and hurried her off the
path and through the mud.
“My shoes!” cried Helena.
“That was Helix,” Honor whispered.
“Stop pulling me.”
“Helix isn’t an orphan,” said Honor.
Helena and Honor clambered back onto the
walkway. “Yes, he is,” Helena whispered back. “He’s a new
one.”
“What do you mean?” Honor asked.
For a moment, Helena forgot her muddy shoes and
flushed with pleasure at the chance to tell the news. “Didn’t you
hear? His parents were taken.”