by Andrea White
“Are you awake?” his father whispered.
“Yes,” Zert said, and then blurted out, “It seems like we’re all alone in the whole wide world.”
His father sighed. “That’s how I’ve felt since your mother died.”
Zert felt rather than saw his father roll toward him.
“And I couldn’t imagine my life getting any lonelier until I began worrying that I might lose you,” his father said.
It was too dark to see the iffy spot on his hand. When Zert rubbed it, he couldn’t even feel the bump anymore. It was nothing now, totally unimportant.
“This new life is going to be tough,” his father said. “It’s going to be the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced. But we’ve got each other. Remember that. We have our family.”
“We’ve got part of our family. Uncle Marin is missing,” Zert reminded him.
“Your mother and I had many conversations about her brother. She never thought much of him, but I always tried to believe in him.” His father was cracking his knuckles. “She appreciated my confidence in him. When I think bad thoughts about your uncle, I feel like I’m letting your mother down,” his father said.
“I don’t like to be tricked,” Zert said. That third door hadn’t closed. He was sure of it. He could still hear Dr. Brown crying out, “What’s going on?”
“Give him the benefit of the doubt,” his father said. “That’s what I’m doing.” He rolled over onto his back. “Give him the same benefit of a doubt that you want Don G. to give to you.” He paused. “To us.”
“Why didn’t you give Cribbie the benefit of a doubt then, Dad?” Zert said, surprised at his own anger. “Why do you get to give it to some people and not to others? Why do you get to decide?”
The greenish darkness seemed to warp the silence and make it deeper.
“I never told you this. I didn’t want to upset you. But a year ago, I asked Glorybeth Vimen if Cribbie could come live with us,” his father said. “I didn’t have anything against your friend. It was just that without supervision, he was headed for trouble, and I didn’t want him to take you down too.”
Cribbie as a roommate. How crunchy would that have been? Cribbie could have been alive today. He could have slept beside him on this blanket. They could have woken up tomorrow morning and encountered all this bizarro stuff together.
“I was sorry when Glorybeth refused me,” his father said.
“But you called him a juvenile delinquent,” Zert said.
“That’s where Cribbie was headed, son. But I know your friend wasn’t a bad boy. It’s just that no one can make it on their own without a family or a community. And in Low City DC, kids don’t get a second chance.”
“This new world is the same as the old,” Zert said. “You heard Don G.”
“I did. But I believe in second chances. That’s just who I am,” his father said.
“Cribbie didn’t get a second chance,” Zert said. “He didn’t even get one chance.”
“No, son, he didn’t. And that wasn’t fair. But you have one now, and your new life is going to be BIG,” his father said.
His father was wrong about so much. The night before his mother died, Zert had begged his father to tell him how she was doing.
“She’ll be fine, son. She’s going to live.”
His mother was killed by a fancy lifter on her way to pick up Zert from St. Lulu’s. It was a hit-and-run. Bystanders reported that the fancy lifter that hit her had an Up City docking license.
“We’re going to catch that driver and bring him to justice,” his father had said to Uncle Marin after she died. He had said it to his customers. He had said it to Zert. He had said it to his net worth calculator. He had said it to his own reflection in the mirror. Zert had only been six years old at the time, but he knew they’d never find the person who had killed his mom.
His father had tried. The petitions. The lawyers. The trips to see the police. There was a time when his father was so busy that Zert barely got by. Zert didn’t know how to wash up, get to school by himself, put a Band-Aid on a cut … He’d lost a few toenails back then. Most days, he had chips for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner.
His father had just been coming out of his fog when the Superpox Epidemic hit, and President Honestloyalkind had imposed a quarantine. His father had lost all his business almost overnight. His creditors wanted to take the store over. As his father explained their situation, “I borrowed to pay lawyers at the worst time.”
Nothing came of all his dad’s efforts. Whoever had been flying that lifter was still free today, living in Up City DC, breathing clean air, and feeling no fear of crime or of catching Superpox.
“How can you be sure that living here is going to work out, Dad?” Zert asked despite his doubts.
His father’s snores filled the cabin, empty except for the uncanny green light.
22
PEOPLECOLOR SCHOOL
The next morning, Zert had already been up for hours when he stood with his body wedged flat against PeopleColor Schoolhouse and peered inside.
The kids and the teacher had their backs to him. The kids sat behind crude desks constructed out of cans. Some of the kids wrote on rough paper with feather pens. Others gazed at the front of the classroom at a stone blackboard. Although the setting was slapdash and primitive, without their weird costumes on, the kids themselves looked pretty normal.
While a few were darker or yellower than the rest, most kids had light brown skin, like Zert, his father, and the rest of people in Low City DC, who thought drinking PeopleColor to become blue, green, or whatever color they wanted was an expensive waste of time. But Zert could tell he would stick out in one way. He had a belly that protruded over the top of his pants. At St. Lulu’s, the kids called these “chip bellies.” Zert had gotten his from eating too many bags of chips.
The teacher was writing on the blackboard, “Math lesson.”
Zert had had the bad luck to arrive just in time for math. But among this crew with their feather pens and stone blackboard, at least he was going to be the star pupil. He had to be a star pupil here because the kids in this class were so backward.
“Teacher, I see the new boy at the door,” Beth called out.
Every single kid turned to look at him as though he was the freak.
The teacher stepped toward the round doorway. With brown hair and eyes, she wasn’t pretty, ugly, young, or old; she was right in the middle of nearly any adjective Zert could think of. He thought of one adjective that fit, but he had never applied it to a person before; his new teacher looked peaceful. She had on a blue skirt and furry shoes and wore her hair in pigtails that touched her shoulders.
Smiling, the teacher motioned for him to enter. “Hi, Zert. I’m Mary Kay Casey. You can call me ‘Casey’ or ‘Teacher.’”
Zert took his first step into the room. Remember, you’re smarter than these kids, he told himself.
Someone had drawn a map of earth on the back of the PeopleColor label on the ceiling. The map looked to be about the size of an old-fashioned quarter. Zert guessed that the artist had done it from memory because he could see that the lower world bulged in funny places. He located the dot that represented Low City DC before he turned his attention to the class. Of course, they were craning their necks to stare at him, as the kids at St. Lulu’s would be had he been new there.
“You may have met Zert Cage last night. Zert and his father are seeking permission to live in Paradise,” Casey said.
His teacher turned to face him. The shimmering earrings dangling from her earlobes looked familiar, but he couldn’t identify them. He studied them for a second longer. Insect wings—the finest in fly jewelry.
“Welcome,” Casey said. “Are you excited to find out about your new school, Zert?”
“Yes,” Zert said to be polite. All he really wanted was to find a Mag Lev with a 3-D maximizer button and blast back to St. Lulu’s. He wanted to be sitting behind his usual desk in English class (not math) with his R
ASM portal. He wanted to be looking forward to recess with Cribbie. He wanted to be gazing at Snow.
“Beth, why don’t you show Zert how to use the abacus?” Casey said. She pointed at the rounded end of the room. “Take him to the study corner.”
Zert followed Beth and watched her sit down cross-legged, as if she were doing a Yoga pose, next to an overflowing bucket full of balls. The round objects were insect eyes, not balls, covered with some kind of gloss, like nail polish. One black pupil, surrounded by gray, stared out at him and seemed to follow him, the minimized kid, around.
“You can calculate with this.” Beth held the abacus out for his inspection. The device, if he could call it that, consisted of a bunch of twigs and dried berries. There was definitely no extended warranty for this machine.
The rock that Casey used for chalk screeched.
Zert was expecting to see 2 + 2 = 4 on the blackboard. But the teacher had instead written a word problem.
Artica Chang keeps 94 crickets in a pen. Each lays about ten eggs a day. How many baby crickets does Artica have at the end of 100 days? At the end of 200 days? At the end of 300 days?
“Do you know the answer to that?” Beth asked. Although she hadn’t bothered to brush her hair, she had tied it back with a bow. Zert shook his head.
Beth quickly pushed the berries around on the abacus. “It’s 9,400 eggs in a hundred days. You can probably do the first part in your head, but I’ll show you how I did that.” She leaned so close to Zert that he could hear her stomach rumble. “We start using abacuses in kindergarten. See, these are the tens …”
Beth’s fingers moved too fast. Zert was a C math student at St. Lulu’s, but he was going to be an F math student at PeopleColor School.
“So, do you understand?” he heard Beth ask.
“Who cares about this stuff anyway?” Zert said. His voice came out louder than he had intended.
The scratch of pens against paper stopped.
Zert felt a hot blush start at his feet and travel up to his face. Before he could stop himself, he shoved the abacus away.
“Oh no. Here we go again. Another Abbot,” someone muttered.
“Minimized kids are jerks,” another kid said.
“Something’s wrong with him,” a third voice spoke up.
“These abacuses are for cavemen,” Zert said.
“If you don’t like it here, you should leave,” Beth hissed at him.
Casey cleared her throat. “Zert, you sound tired. You had a long walk here yesterday and probably haven’t gotten enough rest. Why don’t you go home for a bit and come back to school in an hour or so? We’ll start over then.”
Kicked out on the first day. Zert stood up and ran out the door of the schoolhouse.
23
TURTLE BATH
Once Zert had escaped, he glanced back at the schoolhouse. Through the walls of the bottle, all the kids looked warped, as if he were viewing them through a fun house mirror. Everyone was working on the math problem except Beth. She stared at Zert through the glass.
Bug eyes, he’d say to her if she gave him any more trouble. Only here, he was sure that was a compliment. To get to the rock formation that looked like a hat, he had to navigate around a pair of BIG blue jeans, a green-and-pink T-shirt, a pair of black Breathe shorts, a pair of ladies’ underwear, and a trampo-shoe, without the springs, which blocked the path. It was like a Rosie mall.
Setting off down the path, he hiked past the houses where the Rosies lived. They weren’t built of wood and enclosed with picket fences as he had imagined last night. Instead, they were boxes perched between intertwined tree trunks, FastGrow bottles wedged between boulders, a Bot’s head hidden by a bush, a plant holder obscured by tall grasses, a crate for cloned dodo food covered with leaves, and even half of a discarded globe smeared with mud. To the eyes of a BIG Zert, the village would look like a jumble of trash.
Maybe he could escape this place and find Abbot and they could … That was the problem. There were no urban trash rifles, 3-D pool halls, or anti-gravity fun houses here. Even if he bolted, there was nothing he wanted to do. The Rocky Mountain park may have been wide open, but he felt as cramped as if he were locked up in a cell at Teen Jail.
At the Hat, he turned right and headed toward the cave.
A filthy Styrofoam doormat greeted him in front of their hut. Correction. Calling the place a hut made it sound grander than it actually was. It looked more like one of the shanties in Botland where the scavengers lived among the headless robots.
He pushed the door open. In first grade, he had had a lunchbox that looked like the blue-and-white cybratom that covered one wall.
I live at Number One Lunchbox Lane.
Only this shack wasn’t funny. Their apartment in the back of their store hadn’t been luxurious, but this Rosie house was one of the poorest he had ever seen. The magazine photos were torn and holey. The floor was packed dirt.
His father looked up. He was pushing a metal desk cut from a soda can against the wall. “Why are you home so early?”
“Their school is really stupid,” Zert complained.
“So you already know everything that the Rosie kids are learning?” his father asked.
“They use abacuses and feather pens,” Zert said.
“It’s our new life,” his father said, stroking his chin. “Let’s try to make the best of it.”
Zert looked around at the nearly empty shack. “We should have stayed home.”
His father let out a sigh. “This is our home.” He paused. “At least I hope it is.”
“It may be your home.” Zert remembered those berries stuck on sticks that Beth had called abacuses and how different it was from his sleek RASM portal back home. “But it’ll never be mine!” he yelled.
His father glared at him. “Keep your voice down.” He paused and then in a quiet voice added, “We’ve got to hope you’re wrong. Because if you’re not, things are going to get a lot worse.”
Zert squeezed his head between his hands. Abbot and his family might have starved to death or been eaten by a … what? He didn’t even know all that could go wrong in this place.
He drew in a deep breath. “What will we do, Dad, if this doesn’t work out?”
“Whatever we need to do. But let’s try to avoid that predicament,” his father said.
Zert sighed.
“This isn’t easy for me either, Zert,” his father said quietly. “I wish the Rosies understood how much you’ve been through in the last forty-eight hours and gave you a break. But I’m just afraid that their experience with this other family has prejudiced them into thinking we’ll never succeed here.” He paused. “And it’s not true. We will succeed.”
Zert started to shake his head.
“Look. You didn’t even get a chance to clean up this morning. Why don’t you take a bath? Then we’ll talk,” his father said.
“Where? There’s no bathroom,” Zert said. Last night, they had used the water remaining in their water bottles to wash off. “There’s no toilet. There’s no running water. We’re on a camping trip that will never end—not ever.”
His father smiled. “But you can take a bath. There’s rainwater in a turtle shell nearby.”
“The rainwater’s clean here?” Zert asked.
“I told you. The Rocky Mountains block low-hanging pollution clouds. The park gets plain-rain. You saw the decontamination pills in our backpacks. Just to be sure, I’ve already treated the water. It’s perfectly safe.”
Zert grabbed his backpack. A tub with clean water. That was something.
“It’s to the east of us,” his father called as Zert hurried out the door.
Being a Rosie was permanent. But maybe he wouldn’t have to live with that fishy smell he’d picked up yesterday for the rest of his small life.
In Low City DC, the streets were labeled as east and west. Here, there was just vegetation, boulders, and a big open sky.
The sun set in the west. That’s what hi
s old scoutmaster had told him.
Zert turned his back on the rising sun to face a squat bush loaded with purple berries. Beyond that, he spotted the edge of an upturned shell.
He passed through a forest of weeds—some spiky and green, others with yellow pods, one with tiny red flowers popping out of its stem and smelling of garlic—as he hiked toward the shell.
A crude rock stairwell led from the ground to its curved rim. With the breastplate removed, the upturned shell resembled a large, funky swimming pool.
On Flade Street, if he had bathed naked in a giant turtle shell, he’d probably have gotten a month in Teen Jail. Or a year in the Teen Insane Ward. But bathing in turtle shells was on the low end of the new Rosie Bizarro Spectrum.
After he stripped down, he climbed up the rock stairwell and dipped his body into the water. It was cool, not freezing. The dirt from his hike clouded the water around him. He pressed his back against the hard, bumpy surface of the shell.
Overhead, the artificial moon was there as always, but there were no lifters, there were no cloudscrapers, there was no Up City. He could barely make out the gaseous high-highways through the branches that curled and twisted to form a green roof above him. His bath was almost as refreshing as a dip in the hot tub at the Blue Line Health Club, built in the old subway system.
A hundred years ago, people had burrowed into the earth to build underground stores and trains. Then, after it grew so hot and the radiation level on earth became too high, people constructed whole cities in the skies—the Up Cities—so they could start over again.
Now the Rosies were building in plain sight. In the wild.
He surveyed the trees and bushes and saw them graying as a cloud passed over the sun. He had no idea who or what lived in those shadows.
As he struggled to stand, he gazed down at the water’s mirror.
The dirt had settled, and his reflection glittered back at him. He looked exactly the same: too much brown hair, too many freckles, light brown skin, and brown eyes. The world was completely different and exactly the same. Cribbie would have said, “Too much philosophy, Old Man.”