The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  She went on to talk about the benefits of William’s and Jacob’s “superior wisdom as upperclassmen” and, granted, their “impressive physical strength,” all of which, she said like a breathless, romance-scene actress, “are a perfect fit for this conveniently timed invitation to participate in a legitimately unique volunteer opportunity that will have any military branch clamoring for you.”

  “Why do you talk like that, freak?” William said.

  Millie didn’t move, but her body got somehow smaller. Lenny thought she might cry. Instead, she stiffened her back and got at least an inch taller.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the way I speak,” Millie said, “but if you want me to dumb it down for you, dro—William, Duh. Duh duh, duh—”

  Lenny said with a hand on Millie’s arm, “You don’t have to like the way Millie talks to agree with her. She’s probably right.”

  “Yes,” Millie said. “Yes. And! I’ll write a story about both of you for the school newspaper, and it’ll be so extraordinary the Daily Fact will definitely publish it. Won’t that look much better in your submission packet?”

  “No!” Lenny said. She didn’t even know there was a school paper. “You can’t write about it write about it. What school newspaper? It was just supposed to be for your note collection.”

  “Then, no,” William said. “If it’s not in the paper, I don’t want to do it.”

  Jacob said if William wasn’t doing it, he guessed he wasn’t doing it, either.

  Millie whispered in Lenny’s ear, “I promise to write them any way you ask me to.”

  Lenny asked Millie why she didn’t just go outside and interview someone. There were kids all over the street she could talk to. Millie said she’d tried, but that the kids would either run, turn away and ignore her, or scream. Lenny believed her. She knew enough about the abandoned to know they probably did do all those things, and that it wasn’t Millie’s fault. They didn’t trust anyone, Lenny and the rest of the team included. They would usually get in the van, eventually, but they hardly ever talked. Millie couldn’t even visit a shelter to interview to the kids there, or Lenny would have told her to do that, instead. Shelters only let in people with an appoint-ment to adopt.

  It was William’s turn for the stage. Lenny poked him before he could leave. She said, “It can go in the paper, okay?”

  William shrugged and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” as he walked away.

  Jacob was called next, and then it was just the two of them. Lenny told Millie she’d let her ride along, but only if she got to read every single word of Millie’s notes before they became a story. She’d get to read the story, too, before Millie even thought about publishing it anywhere.

  “Yes, yes! I agree to those terms,” Millie said, shaking both of Lenny’s hands. She let go, smiling, and stared off into nothing with a look on her face until it was her turn to go on stage.

  Lenny watched the needle go into Millie’s neck. She didn’t flinch at all.

  NINETEEN

  Millie used to make a special effort to listen to every word of her parents’ arguments, but she was too excited about her own life that morning to go upstairs to eavesdrop. (That, and her mother had learned to open the door at unpredictable intervals in case Millie was listening on the stairs or lying on the floor with her ear to the gap.) She had caught the gist of it before they closed the door, anyway: money. Millie’s dad had spent her college fund, so she would have to pay her own way. If she went at all. But that was still three years away, and she didn’t care enough one way or the other to spend any time thinking about it.

  Scratching her neck where she’d received her chip the day before, she unfolded the newspaper. Her introductory ride-along with the Collectors—and the story she’d write that would convince her mother she certainly was Daily Fact material—would all happen that afternoon if someone still hadn’t beaten her to the first in-depth drop story. She skimmed the front page, as she had for months, for the one that would kill her idea:

  Newborns respond favorably to identification implants

  …Lakeland expressed his satisfaction with the process thus far, noting that side effects have been limited to minor rashes and scabbing.

  “Like many of you I had my doubts about this measure, but I think it’s safe to say we all—most of us, that is—agree that anything we can do to see fewer instances of cruelty to children, even if it causes a rash or two, is worth doing. Let’s hope the so-called adults of this nation make the necessary changes to prevent further action,” Lakeland said.

  Pressed to elaborate on what further action might be taken, Lakeland suggested that such a focus indicated “questionable priorities”…

  The door opened upstairs. It would be time to leave, soon. Millie hurriedly flipped to page two, and a headline she ordinarily would have passed over caught her attention:Military raisesenlistment age to 21. She skipped to the part she knew would probably affect her personally, assuming William and Jacob or their parents read the Daily Fact. (It was, after all, the only newspaper in the state. “Our sole source of objective, reliable information,” her mother had lectured many times. “Before the Daily Fact restored the abandoned press on Progress Drive, there were so many citizen journalists flinging their contributions at ‘reputable’ online publications that no one knew who was an actual journalist and who was a so-called self-taught blogger permitted by editors—‘editors’—to fill the internet with unsourced, utterly biased commentary. If not for the boycott and the demand for at least one professional press willing to return to paper (even at the expense of such a thing) in order to leave no possible avenue for the publication of unvetted material, who knows to what level our ignorance, and our intentionally and maliciously stoked anger, would have climbed?” Etcetera.)

  …approved the Department of Defense order that those enlisting or seeking a commission must be age 21 or older, a move that has been in quiet negotiations for two years. Under pressure from the public, Congress will also consider encouraging states whose age of majority is 18 to raise it to 21 to match federal drinking, smoking, and enlistment ages.

  “It’s about time,” Gwyneth Masters, 20, said of the proposed change. “I’d rather they just lowered everything else to 18 even if the military sticks with 21, but at least they’re finally making some sense.”

  Asked whether she had concerns that a reconsideration of the age of majority would affect the minimum voting age, Masters laughed and said, “You mean people still bother?”…

  “Ready to go?” Her dad walked stiffly down the stairs with her mother behind him.

  Millie picked up her school bag. She assumed William and Jacob watched the “base bait” news her mother had always said would uncoil her brain, and programs like that weren’t likely to give time to such an uncontroversial story. She could only hope and wait and see.

  Millie was sitting inside the gym’s hockey goal, far away from Lenny and the others, when Jacob arrived at the end of the school day to meet the Collectors for the first time. He held a half-eaten eggroll in his fist, and his eyes looked heavy.

  He approached the Collectors in their corner of the gym and an-nounced loudly that William wouldn’t be coming. The group’s four members looked up at him, all but Lenny returning their attention to the school pride poster they pretended to paint. (Technically, they were painting it, Millie knew, but only to appear school-spirited and uninterest-ing. Lenny had explained that they repainted it at every meeting.)

  “I mean, what’s the point?” Jacob bit from his eggroll.

  Lenny stood. Millie flipped open her notes and stared down at them as if she’d heard nothing. She’d already decided during second period that if Jacob and William did back out, which she now hoped they would so she wouldn’t have to write about them, she could easily convince Lenny to keep their deal. After all, Millie couldn’t control what Jacob and William did now. Millie had done her part. Lenny owed her.

  Millie peeked away from her notebook when she h
eard Lenny’s paint brush drop to the poster.

  “But you said—”

  “Yeah. Yeah, Lenny, I know what we said, and we meant it, but that was when we thought we’d be enlisting in a few months. Say there is some little story on us. What difference will that make when we’re twenty-one? And who’s to say there’s even a story to write? No one’s going to drop a chipped kid.”

  “But they’re not all chipped!” she said. “What about people who have their babies at home? What about the ones who were abandoned before the chip—”

  “Sorry.” He offered Lenny a loose, eggroll salute before crossing the gym to the exit with a “Good luck. And I mean that, too, gorgeous...girl. Gorgeous girl…”

  Millie waited inside the goalie’s net through the closing of the metal door and through everyone getting up and dropping their brushes, afraid (even though she’d prepared an impenetrable rebuttal) Lenny would say she wasn’t welcome, anymore.

  Lenny didn’t address her until they all started walking out. “Coming?” she said.

  Millie rode with Lenny’s rotating team for three long years in the clunky, burgundy van with windows tinted so dark the sky from inside was always gray. She might have left after two or three months, but her drop stories were so popular at school (they liked the ones about kids with neck gouges the most) that students would track her down in classes they didn’t share with her, or corner her in the bathroom (ten times over three years), so they could read about the latest child found in…well, wherever they found them.

  Each drop’s situation was unique, even if at their foundations the stories were all basically the same. They’d found a child sitting with a picture book on a mall loading dock, a baby screaming in a car seat on the interstate shoulder, and a toddler sleeping on old bags of garbage behind a shuttered drug store. They had picked up a ten-year-old girl clutching an empty superhero lunch box outside a barber shop, an eight-year-old boy wearing a flowered sunhat in the middle of an abandoned strip mall parking lot, and outside a Drink-and-a-Donut, a twelve-year-old girl—her southern accent so thick it was gibberish—anchored in place by a rock-filled backpack secured to her chest with three bike locks. (They could have used William and Jacob for that one. It had taken Lenny, Floyd, and a temporary Collector named Carlotta fifteen minutes to lift her and then wrestle her into the van. Millie, an objective journalist, could obviously not participate.) In each of the cases, no matter how varied the details, the story always began, Child dropped… (And almost all of the drops smelled like one disgusting thing or another, but Lenny said she would stop allowing Millie to tag along if she ever included that detail “in one single sentence of one single article.”)

  However repetitive the stories may have been to Millie, reader response, faculty included, convinced her that when she finally wrote the right story about the right drop at the right time, the Daily Fact would publish her. So she kept writing, and she submitted each and every one.

  The Fact had rejected her first unsolicited story—which was also her first drop story—at the end of her freshman year. We don’t accept freelance work. –Ed. She’d continued submitting one story a week, just the same, up through her junior year, fantasizing with each submission about her mother seeing her byline in the morning newspaper. In most of the daydreams, her mother would smile and get out of her chair to caress Millie’s hair and hug her head to her chest. In real life, she would probably just keep a steady string of cigarettes lit. Millie had decided long ago that she would accept that.

  To speed things up during her senior year, Millie had been submitting a story every three days (excluding weekends), and she’d received not a word from the Fact until now, five minutes before breakfast on the morning of the last day of school.

  Upon seeing Daily Fact in her inbox, Millie slapped her palms flat to her desk and touched nothing. Until she opened it, it could be an acceptance.

  Rather than click to view, she found the last piece she’d sent them and read through it once more while pretending to be a Daily Fact editor reading it for the first time.

  When the Collectors meet the Protectors

  WINDBURY—A volunteer drop collection group calling itself the Collectors encountered a vigilante group calling itself the Protectors Wednesday. As the Collectors’ van approached the Main Street VFW, the Collectors’ driver, Floyd, 17, saw a man leaving a little girl on a bench outside the military veterans’ building. Seven individuals wearing knit face masks with “Protector” stitched into their foreheads jumped out of the bushes and attacked the man several feet away, prompting Floyd to stop the van at the VFW. The Collectors exited to ask the child whether the person being beaten was her father, and the girl, who did not provide her name, said he was. The Collectors, along with this reporter, waited with the child while the Protectors kicked and punched the man curled up on the ground. They said such things as, “What kind of person leaves a little girl alone in the world,” and, “Someone could be doing this to your kid right now, you a--hole sick sh-- bastard.” At a break in the beating when the little girl screamed for her dad, the dad jumped up and ran, but the Protectors caught him and dragged him away. The Collectors and this reporter waited for an hour for the dad or the Protectors to return, but no one did. The Collectors and this reporter safely transported the girl to the Nelson Street Shelter, where in seven days pending no family pickup she will be available for adoption.

  It read quite well, she thought. Well enough for her to feel positive about their response. She straightened her back, took a deep breath, and opened the email.

  Thanks for your interest. –Ed. P.S. 1. Keep yourself out of it. 2. Don’t bury the lede. 3. Identify the story. Your proposed headline, “When the Collectors Meet the Protectors,” is misleading, and it isn’t really the story, here. 4. Shorter sentences. 5. Don’t give up. Try again, sometime. Not tomorrow. Wait until you have something good. Good=even more compelling than this potentially compelling story.

  The editor had mentioned nothing about the drop stories, specifically. Did they want something different? Even her mother, who had been interested in them for the longest time, had stopped seeming engaged when Millie read them aloud. “I have no idea how I feel about these ‘drop’ stories, Millicent, other than supremely conflicted,” her mother had said through her smoke after Millie’s last presentation. Millie had stopped showing up to read after that. A week had now passed since her first absence from the living room, and her mother hadn’t seemed to notice. (Millie wished her dad, who said he liked everything she wrote, were home to hear her stories, but he was there less and less frequently. She concluded that it was because her mother was locking him out at night by changing the codes on the doors. Though, Millie had never heard him trying to get past them.)

  That the Fact hadn’t told her not to send more drop stories had to mean they enjoyed them, she decided. She would just have to improve them.

  She would begin with the story she’d write that afternoon about their final run of the school year.

  Floyd pulled into the parking lot of the Eighth Street Shelter so they could deposit a few toddlers and the older girl they’d picked up near the animal hospital.

  Millie didn’t bother taking notes on the toddlers. They were no differ-ent from any of the other toddlers they’d found. And she couldn’t take notes on the older girl, because the only exceptional thing about her was her odor. Even with the windows open, everyone was finding reasons to hold their hands over their noses and mouths until they could get out at the shelter.

  Millie was the first to escape into the fresh air. She breathed and stretched and noticed there was no one outside to greet them. For every other deposit, no matter the shelter, the van had been met by a worker who’d take the drops straight away and whisk them into the building. She hoped no greeter meant they could go inside. She would finally get to see how the drops lived. After all this time, she had never seen the quarters. There had been one series about shelters in the Daily Fact, but they had been the govern
ment shelters, described by the investigative reporter as “unsanitary” and “deplorable.” This was a privately funded shelter—the Collectors would only make deposits at vetted, privately funded shelters—and the media had yet to gain access to a private shelter.

  “Everyone grab someone,” Floyd said.

  Nearly everyone did: two babies for Lenny, a baby and a toddler for a new volunteer named Pearl, and two toddlers for Floyd. The smelly girl was left behind.

  “Millie,” Floyd said.

  Millie stepped back. “Objective observer.”

  “Last day,” Floyd said. “Learn something new.” He released one of his own toddlers to grab the girl’s hand and thrust it into Millie’s. Millie held onto the cold, tiny hand with her thumb and the tip of her index finger.

  “Locked,” said Lenny, who’d reached the doors first. Millie let go of the girl and ran to the entrance. A set of interior doors was closed, as well. The backs of two heads blocked the narrow windows to the inside. Lenny banged and Floyd tapped with his long fingers until one of the shelter workers opened the interior door and backed toward them with a palm held out behind her until she touched the glass. She turned around and, eyes closed, held up a piece of paper.

  The chipping rush has overwhelmed our shelter. We are sorry we cannot help you. Please continue to the closest hospital, fire station, or police station.

  The woman turned away from them and went inside and closed the door, again blocking the narrow window with the back of her head.

  When the Collectors’ van reached the police station, they waited in line for twenty horrifyingly smelly minutes behind child-filled vans similar to their own before finally being instructed to unload.

  “More?” Floyd said as they pulled away. “We’ll just have to bring ‘em here.”

  “Maybe it’s better than the street,” Lenny said.