Millie tilted her own head and mouthed, “How so?”
Her mother said, “Are you wealthy, Nellie?”
Nellie said she was probably middle-middle-class.
Millie whispered to her dad, “What’s middle-middle-class?” and he shushed her with his elbow.
“And are you fertile?” her mother asked Nellie.
“No.”
“You sound relieved.”
“Oh, yes,” Nellie said.
“But you could easily afford a child.”
“Easily enough.”
“Then you understand why every neighborhood is troubled. In its own way.”
The reporter wrote something. “How do you deal with drops?”
Millie’s mother glanced in Millie’s direction without making eye contact.
“Cameras,” her mother said. “Signs. Bright lights. As it turns out, probably a complete waste of money for the new store.”
“Because of chipping.”
“Yes.” Her mother did look at Millie, then, and told Nellie that “a twelve-year-old-child” had actually come across the information first, that Millie had “scooped” the Daily Fact.
Nellie smiled at Millie. “We aren’t even sure whether or when it will actually be implemented.”
“No?”
“No one’s saying. I’ll put it that way. Though I don’t see the harm in it, personally. I think it makes sense to have their basic information on them at all times in case they find themselves lost or otherwise…mislocated.”
“Lovely. In any case, had I had more foresight, I could have avoided spending quite so much money. Why install drop surveillance when the drops are apparently going to be walking names and addresses?”
“They say chipping could save thousands of children. What do you think about that?”
“Save them from what, exactly?”
“The shelters.”
“The expensive shelters, I think you mean. Expensive for the government to build and maintain.”
Nellie nodded while drinking her water. She wiped her mouth, and said, “Very.”
“And those children will now be returned to the same parents who re-leased them.”
Nellie kept her pen over her paper. Millie thought Nellie’s pen looked too fat. Millie preferred narrow pens.
“Is there something more you would like me to say?” Millie’s mother said.
“Oh, I’m—Was that it, then? You’re pro-chipping because it can save businesses money on their security systems?—I’m sorry, I’m supposed to get something. My editor. You’re a figure.”
Millie’s mother rubbed her glass, then plucked the lemon wedge from her water and hurled it at Millie’s dad. It stuck to his neck. He peeled it off and set it on his knee. Millie smacked her hands to her mouth and snorted through her fingers.
“All right,” Millie’s mother said. “How about this. By the time my daughter is old enough to have your job, the consequences of chipping will still be feeding the Daily Fact, and in ways neither you nor I can foresee.”
Nellie finished writing almost as soon as Millie’s mother stopped talking. She closed her notebook. “Thank you, Ms. Oxford.”
Millie’s dad got up to help her mother walk Nellie to the door, but something her mother did must have changed his mind, because he sat right down again.
SIXTEEN
Lenny waited until the end of the day, when almost everyone else was out catching buses, to strap on the extra backpack she’d packed that morning and go looking for Floyd. She’d saved him for last because he wasn’t mean like the others. He could look mean, sometimes—his small face was pointy and pale, his wide lips frowny—but he was polite and never tried to get in trouble with teachers.
When she found him, his long, skinny body was bent halfway in the trash can next to the second floor elevator.
He kept digging even when she stood next to him. “Hold this.”
He gave her an unopened coconut yogurt that wouldn’t fit in his stuffed pockets, dug around some more, then took back the yogurt and headed to the stairs.
“Wait,” she said, but he didn’t.
Short sleeves draped loosely around his arms, which were narrow everywhere but at his jutting elbows. Lenny imagined his poor bones clacking around inside his skin, where there didn’t seem to be anything to soften the spaces in between.
She went down the stairs after him while pulling the sandwich container from her bag. She opened it and used the flat top to fan the smell at him. A student volunteer coming up the roped side of the stairs plucked a crude poster from the wall, a pen sketch of a rat…doing it…with a girl on her back and a bunch of little rats making a trail around her. She added it to the stack in her arms. “Yuck, onions,” she said and wrinkled her face, but Floyd stopped on the third to last stair and stuck his nose in the air and closed his eyes.
They sat on the worn couch in the main floor lobby. Floyd grabbed the only sandwich with onions and ate it without talking. He’d asked Lenny for it right away, but all the way to the lobby she’d held the container out of reach, switching hands every time he bounced around her from one side to the other. She would have given it to him right away if she hadn’t thought he would take it and run off.
Floyd started on a second sandwich. Lenny watched patiently, happy he wasn’t shoving them into his mouth whole. He wiped his face with his wrist when he finished and said, “So, what do you want?”
Lenny’s mom had told her once that she should try giving something of herself before asking for trust, so she said, “My dog died.” It had been months, but it was something. She shared what little there was of the whole story: The vet had said the cancer would probably kill Murphy by the end of summer, so everyone at home had let him eat and do whatever he wanted until he left his life one night in June. They’d buried him in Lenny’s bug cemetery.
Floyd said, “What’d you tell me that for?”
“In case you thought my life was perfect.”
“What makes you think I think your life is so perfect?”
Lenny didn’t know, really. She’d just always thought everyone thought her life was perfect. And it kind of was, but her dad told her she shouldn’t ever say that out loud.
“Maybe because I never get in trouble.” She picked up the top to seal the sandwich container, but Floyd put his hand in the way. “Though,” she said, “you never get in trouble, either.”
Floyd dropped his jaw and zoinked his eyes, making Lenny laugh. He got in trouble all the time, he said, but no one ever saw it because it only happened at home.
“My mom kicks me a lot,” he said. “Somehow I’m always in the spot she wants.” And if he did something like spill water, his dad would bop him on the head and say they should have dropped him like they did his sister back before the laws changed. “Only reason they didn’t is the laws did change. My mom’s afraid of prison more than anything.”
His parents yelled at each other, too, and sometimes it wasn’t about Floyd. One thought the other was lazy, or someone got a phone call they couldn’t explain in a way the other liked, or someone lost the remote control. Other times, though, most times, it was about Floyd. How he wouldn’t be there if Mr. Stumpy Dick didn’t always have to stick it somewhere, how if his mom wasn’t such a coward they probably could have dropped him at a soccer game and gotten away with it, how it was his fault they had to spend money on him.
“‘Thirteen-year-old boys ain’t cheap,’” he said in woman-voice. “Last year they said the same thing about twelve-year-old boys, so.”
“Then why do you always bring a candy lunch?” she said. “I think an apple or some other fruit costs less than a bag of gummies.”
“My dad has nectarines.” Floyd picked up another sandwich and took a big bite out of a corner. Mouth full, he said, “But he gets mad even if my mom takes any. One time, she bought two extras just for her, but he kicked her in the stomach, anyway, when he caught her eating one. Thing was, she still had this huge bite i
n her mouth that got popped out when he kicked her. Flew all the way across the kitchen and pinged him dead on the forehead.” Floyd smiled around soggy bread clinging to his teeth. “Didn’t end up too good for her, but it was funny for a second.” He swallowed the bite, took a deep breath, and stuffed another sandwich corner in his mouth.
“You don’t have to eat them all right now,” Lenny said. “You can take the rest home.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Might find ‘em.”
“So hide them.”
“Nah. They’re always digging in my room.”
“What about outside?”
He stared up at the ceiling, chewing. He nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
When he finished that sandwich, Floyd said he’d better get home.
Lenny offered to go with him to find a good hiding spot. “I could carry them,” she said. “To be safe.”
Floyd said didn’t she have to go home, or something, but Lenny had already talked to her mom about her plans, so she didn’t even need to make a phone call. (And because it was Friday, Millie had taken her own bus home to see her dad before he and Aunt Kat dropped her at Lenny’s for the weekend. She didn’t tell Floyd that. She didn’t want to talk about Millie.)
Floyd said she could walk home with him, if she wanted, but that it was four miles. Lenny led him instead to a nearby streetcar stop and bought both tickets, at first laughing when Floyd said they were going to Haverton.
Lenny and Floyd peeked over a short brick wall outside an open iron gate. His house, two stories of pretty gold wood and tall, arched windows, was almost as big as Lenny’s. A stone veranda led to the kind of doors she had only ever seen on churches, and a silver car sparkled in front of the three-car garage set back from the house.
Floyd tugged her sleeve. They made a crouched run for it up the driveway and hid behind the car.
“He jerks off to it,” Floyd said, tapping the paint. “No joke. One night I saw him doing it right where you’re squatting. Splooged right there.”
Lenny snatched her hand off the bumper.
Floyd gave the sign to go and led Lenny to a wide, sculpted hedge decorating the opposite side of the driveway. They huddled behind it, the only thing between them and the wall at the far edge of the property a flat lawn of bright green grass. Floyd clawed into the faded soil at the base of the hedge, squinting through the branches every now and then. Lenny pulled her bag’s zipper tab to get the container ready, but Floyd grabbed her wrist.
He held a dirt-caked finger to his lips and pointed with a tip of his head.
Lenny looked through the branches. A tall, lean man in pressed slacks and a black t-shirt bounced down the wide staircase to the car. He got in and backed it out to the street. Floyd didn’t let Lenny move or speak until the rumbling of the motor faded.
“Sometimes he comes and gets me when I’m walking,” Floyd said.
“That’s kind of nice, isn’t it?”
He picked up the backpack and held it out to her. “He’ll go all the way to the school and look around a little if he doesn’t see me, so he’ll be gone at least fifteen minutes. Maybe we can find a spot inside. This’d be hard for me at night.”
Except for the small white angels Floyd said were suction-cupped year-round to each window, Floyd’s living room wasn’t much different from Lenny’s. Two pillowy couches faced a wide stone projection wall, and a remote control disc sat in the middle of a square coffee table. Dried moisture rings made a flowery cluster on a section closest to the couch. (That was different. Lenny’s mom and dad always used coasters.)
Floyd asked for the sandwiches and jammed the container under the couch, then showed Lenny the kitchen. It had a lot of iron and wood, and shiny white counters. Stained glass lights dropped over the island. Like hers at home, the refrigerator had five compartments, but unlike hers it had a stainless steel combination lock built in above the handle.
Lenny noticed, then, that short wire cables painted to match the cabinets wrapped around most of the knobs, their looped ends joined in the middle by combination padlocks also painted to match.
Floyd flipped one of the locks with his dirty finger. He wiped the dirt away with spit. “Food’s theirs,” he said. “If I want to eat, I have to wait and see who loses the game I call ‘Who’s feeding Floyd?’”
The loser usually ended up throwing a bag of something at his face or his dick, he said. But it wasn’t always candy. It could be a package of dried apricots or a bag of plain potato chips.
Lenny asked what was in the unlocked cabinets.
“Dishes,” he said. “But they don’t lock the dishwasher, either, so sometimes I’ll get to lick the plates after they go to bed. If they didn’t already start it, or.”
“Really?”
Floyd blushed so hard his eyes turned red. “No, dumb a—” He jerked his head and held up a finger. “Sh,” he said and listened, his ear tilted a lot like Millie’s. He stretched out his neck and squinted. “He’s coming. We have about a minute.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
He wrapped her arm in his long fingers and took her out of the kitchen. “Yeah, well, I do.”
“But maybe it’ll be better if company is here.”
He ran her to the foyer. “Nobody ever comes over. Too many cables to undo. A real pain.” He pushed her out the door and told her to hide behind the hedge until his dad was inside.
“If friends can’t come here, can you go to their house? You can come over any time,” she said.
“How’ll I get there? What, you’ll pay my way? Forget it.” He nudged her down the shallow stone stairs. “Who really gives a shit about anyone, anyway? Thanks for the damn sandwiches.”
SEVENTEEN
“Childbirth is an inevitability,” said the smiling old woman standing in front of the projection wall. Behind her, babies gliding left to right in a giant slideshow cried in high chairs, ate beige pudding, slept, and performed other ordinary baby activities.
Millie didn’t write that down. It wouldn’t interest her mother. All she’d recorded so far was the old woman’s name (Ms. Oster) and that this was the first Wednesday assembly the school board said grades eight and up had to attend every week to “reduce reproductive behavioral tendencies.” Millie felt lucky to be in grade eight. Had the assemblies started last year, she might not have been granted access and would have had no idea what was happening.
She listened into the darkness for something to note, then looked around the auditorium. Almost a thousand eyes, hardly visible in the light bouncing off the wall, watched Ms. Oster. Millie could see smiles and funny looks on the faces of the kids closest to her, but even though they were sharing shoulder bumps and eye rolls, no one was talking. (Millie wanted someone to roll her eyes at, so she looked for Lenny. She’d tried to stay behind her when they filed in so they could sit together, but Millie guessed the crowd had pushed her to another part of the room.)
At some low laughter, Millie watched the projection. Images of things like condoms, saran wrap, and herbs and spices (all labeled—ginger, cinnamon, pennyroyal, parsley, black cohosh) appeared on the wall and faded away, each one taking the place of the one before it.
“Any effort,” the Ms. Oster said, “to thwart this inevitability while greedily enjoying the benefits of the reproductive act is worse than irresponsible. It is the immature strategy of a coward and a cheat.”
The projection cut off and the room went dark. The auditorium said, “Ooooh.”
“Much worse,” boomed Ms. Oster’s disembodied voice, “is the attempt to deny any unborn, any hopeful soul, the opportunity to enjoy what you enjoy. Who are you to say, ‘You are not worthy!’?” A candle wick flamed next to Ms. Oster on the left side of the wall. She had switched places in the dark. Gold lines and curves on the right came into focus a little bit at a time until everyone could tell it was two naked people humping. “Children,” Ms. Oster said, “we do not condone people your age engaging in the
terrible, sensual, very bad”—the man slid away from the woman’s face to put his head between her legs—“enormously physically gratifying experience you see behi—You! In the front! Get your hand out of there! Teacher, separate those two girls immediately!” The projection turned off. Ms. Oster roared, “Turn it back on!” When the wall came to life again, Mr. Snapper was dragging a girl over people’s knees and feet. Ms. Oster stood with her back to the auditorium and watched the golden couple for many minutes. It wasn’t until the man took his face away from the woman’s vagina that she spun back to the students and then crossed the stage to the flame. “Self-control,” Ms. Oster said. “Unless you are a mindless, flea-riddled animal, you possess it. To say you have no self-control is to identify as a grunting, instinct-driven primate.” The man on the screen behind her arched his back and stretched his neck and jammed himself hard inside the grabbing, writhing lady underneath him. A girl in the auditorium gasped and moaned.
Millie squirmed and looked away from the projection for something to take notes on while the old woman kept talking. She refused to be interested in sex, whose outcome, her mother had repeatedly told her, was always “the prosaic condition of pregnancy followed by the birth and care of just one of half a million other unremarkable children being birthed around the world every single day.”
“But if you do insist that you have no self-control,” Ms. Oster said with a finger in the air, “if you are a fertile person and still you behave like a dirty animal, know that you are in effect making a conscious decision to invite a precious being into your life.”
“My sister didn’t invite hers,” yelled someone in the back. “Her manager did. She said he trapped her in his office for six hours.”
“Yeah,” said someone up front. “My aunt drugged my uncle to get one. Twice.”
A voice in the roped-off corner not far from Millie yelled, “I’m dropping mine as soon as I get it out of me!” The girls around her shushed her. Millie thought she heard Ms. Oster mumble, “We’ll see.”
The Age of the Child Page 14