The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “I love you, baby!” called a boy from the other side of the room.

  “I love you!” the pregnant girl called back.

  Millie stood up to try to get a look at the girl, but it was too dark to see details. If what she’d said was true, and if Millie could figure out who she was and watch her and follow her, it could be her first drop story. All she could see in the pregnancy pit, however, was a muted cluster of long hair and loose shirts.

  “Even so…Excuse me, children, even so,” the old woman said, and it sounded like she was pushing her microphone bead between her lips, “We do not punish the child for the parents’ transgressions. Do we.”

  Angry voices in the auditorium rose up so loud that Ms. Oster’s voice disappeared. No one seemed absorbed, anymore, by the humping couple, who looked like they were having seizures. The lady had her legs around the man’s behind and dug her fingers deep into his back, and the man squeezed the bed sheet in his fists. Both of their faces looked ugly.

  That was another reason Millie doubted she would ever have sex.

  Ms. Oster walked off the stage, and everyone stopped screaming at her. The lights came up. Millie pushed past people standing and stretching, using her elbows if she had to, so she could get to the pit.

  She was too late. The last two pregnant girls were already leaving through their special door.

  On the way out to the buses, Millie heard people wondering out loud about what the next Wednesday assembly might be, but it ended up being the same subject every week, month after month, their teachers taking turns hosting because Ms. Oster hadn’t wanted to come back. After the first few weeks, unless it was time for the humping couple, no one paid much attention to the presentation. They used the time to talk or fool around under the bleachers. (Millie didn’t write about the bleachers. The one time she tiptoed over there, someone kicked her ankle bone.)

  The good—fortuitous—thing about each assembly resembling one giant recess was that Millie was able, throughout eighth grade and into ninth, to gather all the notes and quotes she could hope for in the room of a thousand stories.

  …“They said once I turn sixteen they can put me in the database for safety, but I guess I don’t mind the illegal ones that come pick me up now,” Wilma Mezrich, grade eight, said to a boy who’s name is unknown. “There’s one that gives me red velvet cupcakes if I wear pigtails. I guess he’s my favorite if I have to pick one. My least favorite is the one that doesn’t believe I can’t get pregnant, but I guess he pays the most. My mom keeps saying I’ll get used to the way he does it.”

  Millie’s mother covered her eyes and shook her head. After a while, she told Millie she could go to bed, but before Millie got to her room her mother called up the stairs, “Your ‘who’s,’ Millicent. At thirteen years old, you should know the difference.”

  Wilma Mezrich’s brother, Leonard Mezrich, attended the assembly before his shift at InSystem again this past Wednesday just as he has every Wednesday since the end of last school year. This time he sat beside Marion Whittaker, who is in grade nine but who everyone says hasn’t gotten her period. He yelled into her ear that he could tell her a “pretty big secret” about InSystem if she would go with him to the bleachers. She said she would go if he told her the secret first, so Mezrich told Whittaker that everything at InSystem was “crazy” while they wrapped up for an operation that would go out in a press release in a few weeks. “You watch. You’ll be standing in line by the end of the month to get a shot into your arm or your supremely gorgeous ass, or wherever,” Mezrich said.

  Millie’s mother lit a cigarette right there in the living room. “The on-going information about InSystem is simply wonderful,” she said. “Did you interview this Mezrich boy?”

  “No.”

  “Have you interviewed anyone about anything?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Millicent?”

  Millie didn’t want to tell her. She didn’t want to know, herself, that no one wanted to talk to her.

  But that wasn’t the reason. Millie decided who she did and did not want to talk to, and the truth was that she got much better information by listening from the side than she’d ever get from people lying to her face.

  “Of course,” her mother went on, saving Millie from having to say anything, “as a practice, what seems about to happen is as unfathomable and unethical as it is unavoidable and, sadly, seemingly necessary, but this is a fine story, Millicent.”

  Millie had never known her mother to talk to her dad about stories he’d missed, but after he came home that night she listened at the stairs and heard them talking about it in the kitchen.

  “If they do this,” her mother said, “who knows what conditions the children will return to, or what lives some undoubtedly perfectly well-intentioned mothe—parents will be forced to lead?”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing, Katherine. He’s probably just a kid saying whatever he has to say to have sex.”

  A thick, white cloud crept into the living room from the kitchen. “How nice it must be to have the freedom to be so absolutely cavalier. Graham. Speaking of, how is she?”

  A window slid up. “Ah! Fresh air, for a change.—Look, if you think it’s a real story, why not send it to the Fact for her? I’m sure there’s enough there for them to look into it. She has first and last names and everything. Our silly Millie is a pretty good reporter, huh?”

  The wind pushed a jerking flower of smoke out of the kitchen light. “Her stories are on printer paper without as much as a header. She also obviously still has no personal interactions with her subjects. No one at the Fact would take her seriously. Besides,” Millie’s mother said as Millie slid away from the railing, “the Fact will apparently receive a press release in a matter of weeks.”

  Millie closed the door to her bedroom and stood at the window. She looked way past their acres of weeds bending under the moon.

  At school the next day, she skipped lunch to meet with Ms. Well.

  “You expect me to trust the children at this school to write something intended for distribution?” Ms. Well’s narrow, penciled-on eyebrows rose over her big, black sunglasses. Little slivers of light striped her windows through the blinds. “I’m sure you haven’t considered the financials,” she said. “Paper and toner and potential litigation.”

  Millie shook her head.

  “Once upon a time we were a peaceful little school, Katherine Oxford’s daughter.” She smiled. “I bet you thought I didn’t know who you were.”

  “I don’t know. No. I’m nobody.”

  “K through eight. But fifteen years ago, we had to take on four new grades and thirty new teachers. That’s minus the seventeen we had to lay off, now. There’s financials for you. We also took on six hundred extra students. It would have been seven hundred, but we had to expel over one hundred in the first month. The first month, Katherine Oxford’s daughter, and we’ve expelled at least ten a month ever since. Do you know why?” She flipped out her hand, palm up, and pushed down a finger. “Kids hacking into the fuck database during research hour.” She pushed down the next finger. “Kids handing out party balloons and calling them condoms.” Another finger, and then another, until she started over from her thumb: “Kids selling black market Plan B, kids doing you-know-what under the bleachers during Wednesday assembly, kids terrorizing pregnant kids, kids taking part in some fool note chain about how to have sexual relations without getting pregnant—all of which but one, by the way, are correct, but how much do you want to bet, Katherine Oxford’s daughter, that seventy percent of those pregnant girls had sex that one wrong way?” She waited, then sighed. “Come on, now, how much?”

  “Five dollars?”

  In a picture on her shelf, Ms. Well in her sunglasses smiled and hugged a girl a few years older than Millie.

  “Little girl, we already have far too much to worry about without having to worry about some ninth-grade student starting up some student-written school newspaper.” Ms. Well took off her sung
lasses and held them in front of her on the desk. Millie couldn’t think of anyone who had been allowed to see her eyes before. They were brown. Ms. Well said, “I’m sorry, Millicent.”

  Millie skipped lunch again the next week to try again. The paper wouldn’t count for any kind of credits, she offered. Ms. Well said, “I’m sorry, Millicent.” The following week, Millie promised to never write about a teacher. “I truly am sorry, Millicent,” Ms. Well said.

  The next week, on the Friday before their three-day winter break, Millie tried one last time. She said she would be the only writer, which would minimize risk. She would also pay for everything herself—the paper, the printing, and any staples, if needed. (She’d been saving what her mother and dad paid her for doing things like ironing their clothes, dusting their bedrooms—two, now, ever since Millie’s dad moved into his office—and washing their cars.) But also, she read from her notes, “As I am now in the ninth grade, it is the school administration’s obligation to encourage me to take on new challenges and responsibilities.”

  Ms. Well never turned away from her monitor, not even when she said, “All right, Millicent.”

  She had only one requirement, and that was that Millie not write about the chipping rumor.

  “We don’t want anyone getting excited. Obviously no one in white coats will be here late next week to insert tiny computer chips into your necks,” she said. “But what I just said is off the record, you understand?”

  By the time school began again on Tuesday, Millie was ready to be the sole writer, senior editor, and publisher of the Students’ Weekly.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was hard to find anyone (anyone but Millie, who Lenny knew without having to see her was probably, as always, somewhere right behind her) in the Group A crowd. On stage, where the lines were supposed to start, adults in light purple medical blazers were setting up a row of green chairs that had their own attached side tables. Some of the pregnants had already gotten into their safe section, but the rest of the kids ignored both the chipping stations and the teachers’ orders to “choose any one of the markers in front of the stage and fall in single file, please.”

  Lenny gave up looking for Floyd and tried to find William and Jacob. It helped that they were always together, and it also helped that they were tall, because except for the elementary school kids running around, the auditorium was as crowded and wild as it was for Wednesday assembly. (Or what she remembered of how the assembly was before she’d started skipping it to meet with the Collectors.)

  If it weren’t for Floyd, who liked helping the abandoned just as much as she did, Lenny never would have thought of Jacob and William for the Collectors.

  “They work out and everything,” Floyd had said one day after a wriggling little girl named Agnes tried to fight them off. “But also, they eat food. Not that powder and pill stuff, or. They’re strong for real. One in each van could help with the tough ones.”

  Lenny stood on her toes and finally saw William and Jacob eating apples near the water table all the way on the other side of the room. She politely shoved through her classmates, stood on her toes again, thought she lost them, found them standing in the same spot when someone moved, and pushed through again. William and Jacob were upperclassmen, and because she would never miss a Wednesday Collectors’ meeting, Lenny didn’t know when she’d see them again if she didn’t get them now. She had to talk to them before everyone was told for the real last time to get in line.

  She got to the red ropes of the pregnant line and almost ducked a shortcut underneath, but any non-pregnant seen entering the pregnant zone would be suspended. (A few of the girls who weren’t pregnant anymore had gathered there, but they were carrying babies who would be in the basement nursery any other day but today. The rule was that any parent carrying a baby also had to stand in the zone.) Most of the girls had their heads down, but one bounced her baby fast as she searched the auditorium.

  Lenny guessed she was looking for an eleventh grader named Orville. He was the only boy in school with hair that matched the thick orange tuft on the baby’s head.

  “I think I saw him over by the bleachers,” Lenny said. She pointed.

  “Huh?”

  “If you’re looking for Orville, I think he’s over there.” She pointed again in the general direction.

  “Right. Thanks.”

  The girl never looked at her. She just bounced and bounced, slowly backing through the pregnant line.

  When Lenny made it past the ropes, Millie’s voice filled her ear. “Did she appear nervous to you?”

  Lenny jumped.

  “She did to me,” Millie said. “Do you think she plans to drop it? Is it possible she can? I wonder if—whether—there’s a way out of here for people like her.” She looked around the auditorium.

  “I don’t know,” Lenny said, not thinking about it either way because William and Jacob were moving.

  She pressed forward with Millie behind her until she was standing in front of the boys, her nose at their chests. Lenny looked up at them and invited them to a quiet corner, then told them about the Collectors and why she needed them to volunteer.

  She stepped a little closer and stood on her toes to say, “But you can’t tell anyone, okay?” She knew Millie had heard it all, but she also knew Millie wasn’t a gossip. The most she would do is write her notes and put them wherever she put the rest of them.

  “We’re not agreeing to anything, but suppose we did,” Jacob said. “Why can’t we tell anyone?”

  Lenny looked over her shoulder at the rest of the pregnants stuffing themselves between the ropes. The one who’d been looking for Orville was gone.

  “We just think it’s better if they don’t know they have someone to go to, if you know what I mean,” Lenny said.

  Jacob nodded. “Yeah. Well, I guess it sounds—”

  William said, “Nah. No, thanks. C’mon, Jake.”

  He pulled Jacob to leave, but they got stuck in line in front of Lenny and Millie when an announcement ordered everyone to line up “immediate-ly, right where you are, unless you are pregnant or accompanying a child and are not in your designated area, in which case, please move right now to your designated area or face expulsion. Voices down while waiting, please. Once again, if you are eighteen or older and your class is Group A, you are excused from this procedure and are to report to the cafeteria for silent study.”

  A new voice, soft and soothing, took over.

  “Chipping is not a violation,” he said from the recessed speakers. “Chipping is for your protection. For sixteen years, children of all ages, children just like you, have been abandoned on street corners, drowned in our state river, transported cross-country and left to starve, or sold to sex traffickers and made to suffer unconscionable indignities and imaginative ab—er, unimaginable abuse. Let not one more young citizen be left behind.” The sound of multiple swallows, and then a soft thud and a throat-clearing. “Removing an implanted chip is a federal offense punishable by up to ten years in prison. Chipping is not a violation. Chipping is for your protection. For sixteen years…”

  The line moved forward, but Lenny was tugged back. She felt Millie’s chin on her shoulder blade.

  “I could have told you they would say no,” Millie said. “I can help.”

  William and Jacob had only one interest, Millie said. They wanted to fly for the military. What she’d learned from the Daily Fact, and what she thought William and Jacob may not know, was that all military branches were nearing “peak saturation levels” and had “become highly selective.” People like Jacob and William, who wanted to join after graduation, needed “unique altruistic extracurriculars.”

  Millie said, “If you let me ride with you and write about your drops, I’ll secure their services for you.”

  “Why do you want to write about the dr—the abandoned children?”

  “What difference does it make? Do you want them or don’t you?”

  Lenny and Millie caught up with the lin
e, and with William and Jacob. They were close enough to the stage to see all seven stations.

  Sylvia, whose mom was in prison for throwing Sylvia’s infant brother against a wall and into a coma, didn’t blink at the needle going into the base of the right side of her neck. (That didn’t mean the injection didn’t hurt. Sylvia had come to school with a broken nose and a dislocated shoulder, so a shot probably felt like nothing.) Lenny stood on her toes to see how a regular kid like Herman did. He squinted through and after the shot, but he seemed surprised when the purple jacket tapped him to get him out of the chair.

  Only three people were in line ahead of William and Jacob.

  Lenny touched Jacob’s back. “The ones already on the street won’t have ID chips to get them home,” she told him. “You’d be doing a good deed.—Um,” she looked at Millie, “unique altruism.”

  William shook the back of his head at them. “You talk like drops are some kind of charity case, or something.”

  “They are,” Millie said.

  William spun on her.

  “Oh!” Millie sort of smiled. “How old were you?”

  “How old was I what?”

  Millie sighed. “Fine. Well, all I mean is that, yes, the military will classify it as charity work, but a completely new and different kind of charity work, which is precisely what you need if you hope to be accepted.”

  Jacob was looking down at Lenny in a way that made her neck warm. Floyd was the only one who had ever done that. She switched her attention to Millie, who was now shining her light blue eyes at Jacob. Millie moved even closer to him, wedging herself right between him and Lenny.

  “Listen, William,” Millie said while smiling and blinking at Jacob. “And Jake.” Jacob lowered his eyebrows. “It isn’t merely your strength that has value. You have so much more to offer. If you’ve ever felt neglected or abandoned,” she looked at William, then, “for even one second, you can relate to these children in a way no one else can.”