Her story was that I’d been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with.
40
Once I’d adjusted enough – adjusted was the word they used, as if I was a bra strap – Lucerne said I had to go to school because it was bad for me to be moping around the house: I needed to get out and make a whole new life for myself, as she was doing. It was a risk for her – I was a walking cluster bomb, the truth about her might come popping out of my mouth at any time. But she knew I was judging her silently, and that annoyed her, so she really wanted me elsewhere.
Frank seemed to have believed her story, though he didn’t seem to care about it one way or the other. I could see now why Lucerne had run off with Zeb: at least Zeb had noticed her. And he’d noticed me, as well, whereas Frank treated me like a window: he never looked at me, only through me.
Sometimes I dreamed about Zeb. He’d be wearing a bear suit, and the fur would unzip down the middle like a pyjama bag, and Zeb would step out. He’d smell comforting, in the dream – like rained-on grass, and cinnamon, and the salty, vinegary, singed-leaf smell of the Gardeners.
The school was called HelthWyzer High. On the first day I put on one of the new outfits that Lucerne had picked out for me. It was pink and lemon yellow – colours the Gardeners never would have allowed because they’d show the dirt and waste the soap.
My new clothes felt like a disguise. I couldn’t get used to how tight they were compared to my old loose dresses, and how my bare arms stuck out from the sleeves and my bare legs came out from the bottom of the knee-length, pleated skirt. But this was what the girls at HelthWyzer High all wore, according to Lucerne.
“Don’t forget your sunblock, Brenda,” she said as I headed towards the door. She was calling me Brenda now: she claimed it was my real name.
HelthWyzer sent a student to be my guide – walk me to the school, show me around. Her name was Wakulla Price; she was thin, with glossy skin like toffee. She was wearing a pastel yellow top like mine, but she had pants on the bottom. She gazed at my pleated skirt, her eyes wide. “I like your skirt,” she said.
“My mother bought it,” I said.
“Oh,” she said in a sorry voice. “My mother bought me one like that two years ago.” So I liked her.
On the way to school, Wakulla said, What does your dad do, when did you get here, and so on, but she didn’t mention any cults; and I said, How do you like the school, who are the teachers, and that got us safely there. The houses we were passing were all different styles, but with solarskins. They had the latest tech in the Compounds, which Lucerne had pointed out a lot. Really, Brenda, they’re so much more truly green than those purist Gardeners so you don’t have to worry about how much hot water you’re using, and isn’t it time you took another shower?
The high-school building was sparkling clean – no graffiti, no pieces falling off, no smashed windows. It had a deep green lawn and some shrubs pruned into round balls, and a statue: “Florence Nightingale,” it said on the plaque, “The Lady of the Lamp.” But someone had changed the a to a u, so it said The Lady of the Lump.
“Jimmy did that,” said Wakulla. “He’s my lab partner in Nanoforms Biotech, he’s always doing dumb things like that.” She smiled: she had really white teeth. Lucerne had been saying how dingy my own teeth were and I needed a cosmetic dentist. She was already planning to redecorate our entire house, but she had some alterations planned for me as well.
At least I didn’t have any cavities. The Gardeners were against refined sugar products and were strict about brushing, though you had to use a frayed twig because they hated the idea of putting either plastic or animal bristles inside their mouths.
The first morning at that school was very strange. I felt as if the classes were in a foreign language. All the subjects were different, the words were different, and then there were the computers and the paper notebooks. I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find – you couldn’t just wipe it away, not like a slate. I wanted to run into the washroom and wash my hands after touching the keyboards and pages; the danger had surely rubbed off on me.
Lucerne said that our so-called personal history – the forcible abduction and so on – would be kept confidential by the officials at the HelthWyzer Compound. But someone had leaked because the kids at the school all knew. At least they hadn’t heard about Lucerne’s sex-slave lust-mad pervert story. But I knew I’d lie about that if I had to, in order to protect Amanda, and Zeb, and Adam One, and even the ordinary Gardeners. We are all in one another’s hands, Adam One used to say. I was beginning to find out what that meant.
At lunch hour a group gathered around me. Not a mean group, just curious. So, you lived with a cult? Weird! How crazy were they? They had a lot of questions. Meanwhile they were eating their lunches, and there was meat smell everywhere. Bacon. Fish sticks, 20 per cent real fish. Burgers – they were called WyzeBurgers, and they were made of meat cultured on stretchy racks. So no animals had actually been killed. But it still smelled like meat. Amanda would’ve eaten the bacon to show she hadn’t been brainwashed by the leaf-eaters, but I couldn’t go that far. I peeled the bun off my WyzeBurger and tried to eat that, but it stank of dead animal.
“Like, how bad was it?” said Wakulla.
“It was just a greenie cult,” I said.
“Like the Wolf Isaiahists,” said one kid. “Were they terrorists?” They all leaned forward: they wanted horror stories.
“No. They were pacifists,” I said. “We had to work on this rooftop garden.” And I told them about the slug and snail relocation. It sounded so strange to me, when I told it.
“At least you didn’t eat them,” said one girl. “Some of those cults, they eat road kill.”
“The Wolf Isaiahists do, for sure. It was on the Web.”
“You lived in the pleebs, though. Cool.” Then I realized I had an edge, because I’d lived in the pleeblands where none of them had ever been except maybe on a school trip, or dragged along with their slumming parents to the Tree of Life. So I could make up whatever I liked.
“You were child labour,” one boy said. “A little enviroserf. Sexy!” They all laughed.
“Jimmy, don’t be so dumb,” said Wakulla. “It’s okay,” she said to me, “he always says stuff like that.”
Jimmy grinned. “Did you worship cabbages?” he went on. “Oh Great Cabbage, I kiss your cabbagey cabbageness!” He went down on one knee and grabbed a handful of my pleated skirt. “Nice leaves, do they come off?”
“Don’t be such a meat-breath,” I said.
“A what?” he said, laughing. “A meat-breath?”
Then I had to explain how that was a harsh name to call someone, among the extreme greens. Like pig-eater. Like slug-face. This made Jimmy laugh more.
I saw the temptation. I saw it clearly. I would come up with more bizarre details about my cultish life, and then I would pretend that I thought all these things were as warped as the HelthWyzer kids did. That would be popular. But also I saw myself the way the Adams and the Eves would see me: with sadness, with disappointment. Adam One, and Toby, and Rebecca. And Pilar, even though she was dead. And even Zeb.
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. But I knew that already, because of Bernice.
Wakulla walked home with me, and Jimmy came too. He fooled around a lot – made jokes, expected us to laugh – and Wakulla did laugh, in a polite way. I could see that Jimmy had a big crush on her, though Wakulla told me later that she couldn’t see Jimmy in any way other than as a friend.
Wakulla turned off halfway to go to her house, and Jimmy said he’d continue along with me because it was on the way. He was irritating when there was more than one other person: maybe he felt it was better to make a fool of yourself than to have other people do it for you. But when he wasn’t putting on an a
ct he was much nicer. I could tell he was sad underneath, because I was that way myself. We were sort of like twins in that way, or so I felt at the time. He was the first boy I’d ever really had for a friend.
“So, it must be weird for you, being here in a Compound, after the pleeblands,” he said one day.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Was your mom really tied to the bed by a deranged maniac?” Jimmy would come right out with stuff other people might think but would never say.
“Where did you hear that?” I said.
“Locker room,” said Jimmy. So Lucerne’s fable had seeped out.
I took a deep breath. “This is between us, right?”
“Cross my heart,” said Jimmy.
“No,” I said. “She wasn’t tied to the bed.”
“Didn’t think so,” said Jimmy.
“But don’t tell that to anyone. I really trust you not to.”
“I won’t,” said Jimmy. He didn’t say, Why not. He knew that if everyone heard Lucerne had been bullshitting, people would know she hadn’t been kidnapped, she’d merely cheated big time. What she’d done had been for love, or just sex. And she was back at HelthWyzer with her loser of a husband because the other guy had tossed her over. But she’d rather die than admit it. Or else she’d rather kill someone.
All this time I was going into my closet and taking the purple cellphone out of my tiger and phoning Amanda. We’d text each other with the best times to call, and if the connection was good we could see each other onscreen. I asked a lot of questions about the Gardeners. Amanda told me she wasn’t staying with Zeb any more – Adam One said she was almost grown up so she had to sleep in one of the singles cubicles, and that was pretty boring. “When can you get back here?” she said. But I didn’t know how I could manage to run away from HelthWyzer.
“I’m working on it,” I said.
The next time we were on the phone she said, “Look who’s here,” and it was Shackie, grinning at me sheepishly, and I wondered if they’d been having sex together. I felt as if Amanda had scooped some glittery piece of junk I wanted for myself, but that was stupid because I had no feelings for Shackie whatsoever. I did wonder whether it had been his hand on my bum, that night I passed out in the holospinner. But most likely it was Croze.
“How’s Croze?” I said to Shackie. “And Oates?”
“They’re fine,” Shackie mumbled. “When’re you coming back? Croze really misses you! Gang, right?”
“Grene,” I said. “Gangrene.” I was surprised he’d still use that old kidstuff password, but maybe Amanda had put him up to it so I’d feel included.
After Shackie went offscreen, Amanda said they were partners – the two of them were boosting things from malls. But it was a fair trade: she got someone watching her back and helping her lift stuff and sell it, and he got sex.
“Don’t you love him?” I said.
Amanda said I was a romantic. She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.
41
Jimmy and I started doing our homework together. He was really nice about helping me with the parts I didn’t know. Because of all that memorizing we’d had to do at the Gardeners, I could stare at a lesson and then see everything inside my head, like a picture. So although it was hard for me and I felt I was way behind, I started to catch up quite fast.
Because he was two years ahead of me, Jimmy wasn’t in any of my classes except for Life Skills, which was supposed to help you structure your life, once you had one. They mixed up the age groups in Life Skills so we could benefit from sharing our different life experiences, and Jimmy traded desks so he was sitting right behind me. “I’m your bodyguard,” he whispered, which made me feel safe.
We went to my place to do our homework if Lucerne wasn’t there; if she was, we went to Jimmy’s. I liked Jimmy’s place better because he had a pet rakunk – it was a new splice, half skunk but without the smell, half raccoon but without the aggression. Her name was Killer; she was one of the first ones they’d made. When I picked her up, she liked me right away.
Jimmy’s mother seemed to like me as well, though the first time she saw me she looked at me very hard with her stern blue eyes and asked me how old I was. I liked her all right too, although she smoked too much, which made me cough. Nobody at the Gardeners smoked, or at least not cigarettes. She worked on a computer a lot, but I couldn’t figure out what she did on it, because she didn’t have a job. His father was hardly ever there – he was at the labs, figuring out how to transplant human stem cells and DNA into pigs, to grow new human pieces. I asked Jimmy what pieces, and he said kidneys, but maybe it was lungs too – in the future you’d be able to get your very own pig made, with second copies of everything. I knew what the Gardeners would think of that: they would think it was bad, because of having to kill the pigs.
Jimmy had seen these pigs: their nickname was pigoon, like pig balloon, because they were so big. The double-organ methods were proprietary secrets, he said: extra valuable. “Aren’t you worried some foreign Corps will kidnap your dad and squeeze the secrets out of his brain?” I said. That was happening more often: they kept it out of the news, but there was gossip at HelthWyzer. Sometimes they got the kidnapped scientists back, sometimes they didn’t. The security was getting tighter and tighter.
After doing our homework Jimmy and I would hang out at the HelthWyzer mall and play tame video games and drink Happicappu-chinos. The first time, I told him Happicuppa was the brew of evil so I couldn’t drink it, and he laughed at me. The second time I made an effort, and it tasted delicious, and soon I wasn’t thinking too much about the evilness of it.
After a while Jimmy talked to me about Wakulla Price. He said she was the first girl he’d ever been in love with, but when he’d asked her to get serious with him she’d said they could only be friends. I knew that part already, but I said that was too bad, and Jimmy said he’d been a puddle of dog vomit for weeks and he still hadn’t got over it.
Then he asked if I had a boyfriend back in the pleebs, and I said yes – which wasn’t true – but since I had no way of getting back there I’d decided to forget about him because that was the best thing to do if you wanted someone you couldn’t have. Jimmy was really sympathetic about my lost boyfriend, and he squeezed my hand. Then I felt guilty for telling such a lie; but I wasn’t sorry about the squeezing.
By this time I had a diary – all the girls at school had them, it was a retro craze: people could hack your computer, but they couldn’t hack a paper book. I wrote all of this down in my diary. It was like talking to someone. I didn’t even think that writing things down was that dangerous any more: I guess that shows how far away from the Gardeners I’d grown already. I kept my diary in the closet, inside a stuffed bear, because I didn’t want Lucerne snooping on me. The Gardeners were right about that part: reading someone else’s secret words does give you power over them.
Then a new boy came to HelthWyzer High. His name was Glenn, and as soon as I saw him I knew he was the same Glenn who’d come to the Tree of Life on the Saint Euell’s Week when Amanda and I had walked him over with that jar of honey to visit Pilar. I thought he gave me a little nod – did he recognize me? I hoped not, because I didn’t want him to start talking about where he’d seen me last. What if the CorpSeCorps were still trying to track down Lucerne’s pretend sex-slaver? What if they found Zeb through me and he ended up without his parts, in a freezer? That was a horrifying thought.
But surely even if he did remember me, Glenn wouldn’t say anything because he wouldn’t want them finding out about Pilar and the Gardeners and whatever he’d been doing with them. I was sure it was something illegal, or why would Pilar have sent Amanda and me away? It must have been to protect us.
Glenn acted like he didn’t care about anybody, him and his black T-shirts. But after a while Jimmy started hanging out with him, and then I wasn’t seeing so much of Jimmy.
&n
bsp; “What do you do with that Glenn? He’s creepy,” I said one afternoon when we were doing our homework on the school library computers. Jimmy said they only played three-dimensional chess or online video games, at his place or else at Glenn’s. I thought they were probably watching porn – most of the guys did, and a lot of girls too – so I asked what games. Barbarian Stomp, he said – that was a war game. Blood and Roses was like Monopoly, only you had to corner the genocide and atrocity market. Extinctathon was a trivia game you played with extinct animals.
“Maybe I could come over one day and play too,” I said, but he didn’t go for that. So I guessed that they really were watching porn.
Then a really bad thing happened: Jimmy’s mother disappeared. Not kidnapped, they said: she’d gone on her own. I heard Lucerne talking about it to Frank: it seemed that Jimmy’s mother had made off with a lot of crucial data, so the CorpSeCorps were all over Jimmy’s house like a rash. And since Jimmy was such a buddy of mine, said Lucerne, they might soon be swarming all over us as well. Not that we had anything to hide. But it would be a nuisance.
I texted Jimmy right away and said how sorry I was about his mother, and was there anything I could do. He wasn’t at school, but he texted me later that week, then came over to my place. He was very depressed. It was bad enough that his mother was gone, he said, but also the CorpSeCorps had asked his dad to help them with their inquiries, which meant that his dad was carted off in a black solarvan; and now two female CorpSers were snooping around the house and asking him a lot of stupid questions. Worst of all, Jimmy’s mother had stolen Killer to let her loose in the wild – she’d left him a note about it. But the wild was totally wrong for Killer, because she’d be eaten by bobkittens.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 51