17

Having Amanda living with me was like having a sister, only better. She had Gardeners’ clothing now, so she looked like the rest of us; and pretty soon she smelled like the rest of us too.

In the first week I showed her all around. I took her to the Vinegar Room, the Sewing Room, and up to the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmills gym. Mugi was in charge of that; we called him Mugi the Muscle because he only had one muscle left. Amanda made friends with him, though. She made friends with everyone by asking them the right way to do things.

Burt the Knob explained how to relocate the slugs and snails in the Garden by heaving them over the railing into the traffic, where they were supposed to crawl off and find new homes, though I knew they really got squashed. Katuro the Wrench, who fixed the leaks and took care of the water systems, showed her how the plumbing worked.

Philo the Fog didn’t say much to her; he just smiled at her a lot. The older Gardeners said he’d transcended language and was travelling with the Spirit, though Amanda said he was just wasted. Stuart the Screw, who made our furniture out of recycled junk, didn’t like people much, but he liked Amanda. “That girl’s got a good eye for wood,” he’d say.

Amanda didn’t like sewing, but she pretended to, so Surya praised her. Rebecca called her sweetheart and said she had good food taste, and Nuala cooed over her singing in the Buds and Blooms Choir. Even Dry Witch Toby would brighten up when she saw Amanda coming. She was the hardest nut to crack, but Amanda took a sudden interest in mushrooms, and helped old Pilar stamp bees on the honey labels, and that pleased Toby, though she tried not to show it.

“Why are you sucking up so much?” I asked Amanda.

“It’s how you find stuff out,” she said.

We told each other a lot of things. I told her about my father and my house in the HelthWyzer Compound, and how my mother ran off with Zeb.

“I bet she had hot panties for him,” said Amanda. We were whispering all of this in our cubicle, at night, with Zeb and Lucerne right nearby, so it was hard not to hear the sex noises they’d make. Before Amanda came I’d found all of that shameful, but now found it funny because Amanda did.

Amanda told me about the droughts in Texas — how her parents had lost their Happicuppa coffee franchise and couldn’t sell their house because no one would buy it, and how there were no jobs and they’d ended up in a refugee camp with old trailers and a lot of Tex-Mexicans. Then their trailer was demolished in one of the hurricanes and her father was killed by a piece of flying metal. A lot of people drowned, but she and her mother held on to a tree and got rescued by some men in a rowboat. They were thieves, said Amanda, looking for stuff they could lift, but they said they’d take Amanda and her mother to dry land and a shelter if they’d do a trade.

“What kind of trade?” I said.

“Just a trade,” said Amanda.

The shelter was a football stadium with tents in it. There was a lot of trading going on: people would do anything for twenty dollars, Amanda said. Then her mother got sick from the drinking water, but Amanda didn’t because she traded for sodas. And there was no medicine, so her mother died. “A lot of people shat to death,” said Amanda. “You should have smelled that place.”

Amanda snuck away after that because more people were getting sick and no one was taking away the crap and garbage or bringing food. She changed her name, because she didn’t want to be put back in the football stadium: the refugees were supposed to be farmed out to work in whatever job they were told to. “No free lunch,” people were saying: you had to pay for everything, one way or another.

“What did you change it from?” I asked her. “Your name.”

“It was a white-trash name. Barb Jones,” said Amanda. “That was my identity. But I don’t have an identity now. So I’m invisible.” It was one more thing I could admire about her — her invisibility.

Amanda walked north, along with thousands of other people. “I tried to hitch, but I only got one lift, with a guy who said he was a chicken farmer,” she said. “He pushed his hand between my legs; you can tell that’s coming when they breathe funny. I stuck my thumbs in his eyes and got out of there fast.” She made it sound like thumbs in the eyes was normal in the Exfernal World. I wanted to learn how to do it, but I didn’t think I could work up the nerve.

“Then I had to get past the Wall,” she said.

“What wall?”

“Don’t you watch the news? The Wall they’re building to keep the Tex refugees out, because just the fence wasn’t enough. There’s men with sprayguns — it’s a CorpSeCorps wall. But they can’t patrol every inch — the Tex-Mex kids know all the tunnels, they helped me get through.”

“You could’ve been shot,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then I worked my way up here. For food and stuff. It took a while.”

In her place I would have just laid down in a ditch and cried myself to death. But Amanda says if there’s something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time.

I worried that there might be trouble with the other Gardener kids: after all, Amanda was a pleebrat — one of our enemies. Bernice hated her, of course, but she didn’t dare say so because like everyone else she was in awe of her. First of all, no Gardener kid could dance, and Amanda had excellent moves — it was like her hips were dislocated. She’d teach me when Lucerne and Zeb weren’t there. We’d get the music off her purple phone, which she kept hidden in our mattress, and when the card was used up she’d lift another one. She had some flashy pleeblander clothes hidden away as well, so when she needed to lift something she’d put those clothes on and go off to the Sinkhole mallway.

I could see that Shackleton and Crozier and the older boys were in love with her. She was very pretty, with her tawny skin and her long neck and her big eyes, but you could be pretty and still get called a carrot-sucker or a meat-hole on legs by those boys; they had a bunch of sick names for girls.

Not for Amanda, though: she had their respect. She had a piece of glass with duct tape along one edge to hold it with, and she said this glass had saved her life more than once. She showed us how to ram a guy in the crotch or trip him up and then kick him under the chin and break his neck. There were lots of tricks like that, she said — ones you could use if you had to.

But on Festival days or at Buds and Blooms Choir practice, no one was as pious as her. You’d think she’d been washed in milk.