Among the Imposters (10 page)

Belonging to jackal boy’s group made all the difference in the world. It began that night. Luke didn’t have to creep back from the woods by himself, praying nobody noticed. He went with the others, as part of the crowd. They strutted down the hall, not even trying to be quiet.

“What if someone hears?” Luke ventured.

“Who cares?” jackal boy replied. “Indoctrination’s almost over. If there are any teachers around, they’ll just think we left early to man our hall monitor posts.”

They were in a brighter end of the hall now. Jackal boy got a good look at Luke’s face and whistled.

“You really did get all bloody. Come on. I’ll take you to the nurse.”

Jackal boy led Luke to an unfamiliar office, one he’d seen only once before, when he was searching for windows.

“My friend walked into the wall, coming out of Indoctrination,” Jackal boy told the woman who answered the door. “Stupid, huh? Can you give him a bandage?”

“My, my, you boys. You never look where you’re going,”

the woman fussed. She was old and wrinkled, like the pictures Luke had seen of grandmothers. She puttered around getting antiseptic and gauze and tape. Then she dabbed at Luke’s cheek with a wet cloth. “This is an awfully rough abrasion. Which wall did you run into, dear?”

Jackal boy saved Luke from having to answer.

“Oh, he didn’t get bloody from the wall,” jackal boy explained. “He kind of bounced off the wall and fell down. Then he scraped his face on the carpet. Someone might have kicked him by mistake, too.”

Luke’s mother would have listened to an excuse like that and then said, “Okay. Now. What really happened?” But this woman only nodded and
tsk-tsked
a little more.

The antiseptic stung, and Luke had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. But the woman was quick, and his face was neatly bandaged before he knew it.

“Write your name and the time down in the log on your way out,” the woman said. ‘And be more careful the next time, all right?”

Jackal boy even wrote Luke’s name for him.

Up in their room, jackal boy stretched and yawned and proclaimed, “1 don’t feel like dealing with the new kid tonight Let’s just leave him alone. Okay, guys? He’s getting boring, anyway”

Luke thought some of his other roommates looked disappointed, but nobody complained.

In the morning, jackal boy said, “You can have breakfast with us. We have our own table. Hall monitor privileges.”

“But I’m not a hall monitor,” Luke said.

“The teachers won’t notice,” jackal boy said. “And maybe you will be soon.”

So Luke sat at a table with other boys. For once he didn’t have to force himself to choke down his oatmeal. It practically tasted good. And for the first time, Luke got a good look around the dining hall without feeling like he had to glance quickly and furtively With clean white walls and a peaked ceiling, it really wasn’t such a bad place.

“Can I ask you some questions? Here, I mean,” Luke said to jackal boy.

“As long as you’re not acting like a real exnay,” jackal boy said brusquely, as if he were truly swearing at Luke. But Luke caught the double meaning. It was a brilliant code.

“Why is this school like this?” Luke began. “1 mean, with no windows, and the strange boys
...
and the teachers who don’t seem to notice us unless we do something wrong. And even then, they just say, ‘Two demerits.’ I don’t even know what that means.”

Jackal boy pushed back his oatmeal and smirked.

“Confusing, huh?” he asked mockingly. But he started explaining, anyway. “Hendricks began as an educational experiment. Back when there were the famines, people had debates about whether the undesirables in society deserved food when so many were starving. They let all the criminals die, but a bunch of bleeding-heart, sympathetic types said it was cruel not to feed people with mental illnesses, physical disabilities, that kind of thing.

One man stepped forward and offered his family’s estate to be two schools for troubled kids. Hendricks for boys and Harlow for girls. He said he’d feed them, too—you see how well he’s doing.” Jackal boy made a face at the oatmeal. “They built the schools without windows because Mr. Hendricks had the idea that kids with agoraphobia—the ones scared of wide-open spaces—would be better off not even seeing the outdoors. He thought they’d start longing for what they couldn’t see. And he thought having windows would just overstimulate the autistic kids. But he also thought it’d be good to bring in some normal kids. Like role models.”

Luke tried to absorb all of that. He thought about how differently jackal boy acted when he was explaining something, compared with how Jen had always been. Jen was always outraged, indignant over every little injustice. He could just hear her voice, rising in disgust: “Can you believe it? Isn’t that terrible?”

Jackal boy just sounded secretly amused, almost haughty. Too bad. Poor kids. Who cares?

Luke swallowed another bite of lumpy oatmeal.

‘And the teachers?” he prompted. “Why aren’t they more... um

“Involved? Aware? Semi-intelligent?” jackal boy offered.

“Yeah. All the adults. Like, the nurse last night didn’t seem very smart And what’s-her-name, in the office, when I was in there the first day, it was like all the students were just a pain to her.”

“Think about it,” jackal boy said. “If you were a grownup, and you could get a job anywhere else, would you work here? We got the dregs, man, the real dregs.”

Luke didn’t know anything about grown-up jobs. He’d never thought he would be able to come out of hiding to have one.

Jackal boy was smirking again. “But it serves our purposes, all right, to have teachers who are just one step up from leckers. We can do just about anything we want. Got it?”

He looked around at his cohorts, the hall monitors, and soon they were all smirking, too.

Luke wanted to object to that word, “lecker.” Just because someone came from the country, that didn’t make him dumb. Did it?

Something else bothered Luke, too.

“But I wanted to learn a lot at Hendricks,” he said. “Math and science and how to speak other languages.... I’ve been here a month and I haven’t learned a thing. I don’t even know if I’m going to the right classes. I wanted to—” he broke off at the last minute because he remembered he couldn’t talk about being an exnay. He couldn’t say that he wanted to learn everything he could to help make third children legal again.

Jackal boy was laughing anyway.

“Oh, right, we’re all here to learn,” he said, rolling his eyes. This made his friends laugh, too. “Just stick close to me,” jackal boy continued. ‘That’s how you learn what you

need to know. Forget the classes. And if you’re worried about grades—don’t you think I know how to fix that, too? How do you think we all got on the honor roll?”

Luke didn’t know. He didn’t even know what the honor roll was.

But when the bell rang for the first class, he left the dining hall with jackal boy and his gang. He felt safe now, traveling in a pack. All the hall monitors he passed gave him knowing looks, with secret nods that nobody else could have noticed.

And when he hesitated between classrooms, jackal boy was quick to tell him where to go.

Twenty Three

Luke didn’t go back to his garden by himself anymore. But two or three times a week, jackal boy would whisper in his ear, “Tonight,” and Luke’s heart would jump. “Tonight” meant, “We’re going to the woods. We’re meeting the girls.”

Each time he stepped outside, Luke would breathe in deeply, the same way a starving man gobbled down food. But he noticed that most of the others, all so brave and imposing indoors, positively cowered in the open air. They squeezed their eyes shut and took halting steps forward, like condemned men walking to their executions.

“You don’t like the outdoors, do you?” Luke asked Trey once as they walked across the lawn to the woods.

They shook his head slowly, as if moving too quickly might make him throw up. He looked a little green already

“It’s better in the woods,” he said through gritted teeth. “At least there we’re covered.”

“But—” Luke took another deep breath, savoring the smell of newly mowed grass and spring rain. He couldn’t understand Trey “Don’t you hate being cooped up all the time?”

They gave him a sidelong glance.

“I spent thirteen years in the same room. I didn’t step foot outside even once until I came here.”

“Oh,” Luke said. He suddenly saw that, for a third child, he’d been very lucky. Before the Government tore down the woods behind his house and built a neighborhood there instead, he’d spent most of his time outdoors. Except for not going to school, he hadn’t lived that differently from his older brothers.

He couldn’t imagine spending thirteen years in the same room.

“Jen went shopping on fake passes,” he told They. “Her mother took her to play groups. I thought other third children lived like her.”

“I wouldn’t know,” They said. “I—I wished—” He hesitated. “I miss my room.”

Luke felt sorry for the other boy How many of his other new friends had basically lived their entire lives in a box?

He watched jackal boy running ahead, then circling back to encourage the others.

“Jacka—I mean, Jason must have been like Jen,” Luke said. “He must have gotten out a lot. He’s not afraid of anything.”

“No,” They said. ‘He’s not. He says he’s overcome all his hiding-related phobias. And he’s only been here a few weeks longer than you.”

“He has?” Luke asked in surprise. He’d assumed jackal

boy was a long-timer, with years of experience at Hendricks.

“The rest of us only started last fall,” Trey continued. “I think. No one talked much before Jason got here.”

Before he could make sense of that, Luke had to remind himself all over again that “Jason” was really jackal boy It was no wonder that Luke had been confused when he first started at Hendricks—the boys, at least the ones he hung out with now, did go by three or four different names. They might answer to the first or last part of their fake name at school, and the first or last part of their real name out in the woods. That was riskier. A few just went by initials.

Trey had explained that his name just meant “three.” He wouldn’t tell even jackal boy his real name.

They reached the woods, and what They had said finally sunk in.

“Wait a minute,” Luke said. “You mean you weren’t all friends before Jason came? You haven’t been meeting in the woods all along?”

Trey flashed him a puzzled look.

“Just since April,” he said.

Luke’s mind was racing.

“The rally was in April,” he said.

“Yeah,” Trey said with a shrug.

The girls met them then, and they started the same kind of banter Luke had witnessed the first night. It sounded different to Luke now, not as if they were allworldly and experienced, but as if they were reading lines in a play, pretending to talk to each other the way normal boys and girls talked. Nina made jokes about how stupid boys were, and Jason made fun of the girls. Luke watched the faces of the ones who were quiet. They all looked scared.

“What’s this meeting for?” Luke asked suddenly

Jason turned to look at Luke in surprise.

“Why—we’re planning ways to resist the Government over the Population Law. To follow up the rally.”

“The rally,” Nina echoed wistfully

Luke’s heart beat fast This was what he’d wanted! He’d wanted to do something brave like Jen. It would be like apologizing to her for not going with her, for doubting her.

But could he be as brave as Jen?

Without dying, too?

“How?” he demanded. “How are we going to resist?”

Nina and Jason looked at each other.

“Well, that’s what we’re deciding,” Nina said. “Just like a boy asking dumb questions!”

But they didn’t decide anything that night. They just joked around some more, made a game of guessing one boy’s real name, and headed back to their schools.

Jason pulled Luke aside as they stepped back into the school building.

“Not everyone’s as ready as you,” he said. “You’ve got to give the others time. As long as they’re trembling in their

shoes every time they step outside, they’ll never make good subversives.”

Luke was flattered. It made sense. “Okay,” he said.

Jason playfully punched Luke’s arm.

“Knew you’d understand. Hey—you ready for finals?”

“Finals?” Luke asked.

“You know, next week? End-of-term tests?” Jason said. “You pass, you get out of here, you fail, you’re stuck for life?”

Luke stopped short

“Oh, no..
. ,“
he breathed.

Jason laughed.

“Scared you, huh? Remember, you stay on my good side, I’ll make sure your ‘parents’ get to look at a brilliant report!”

“I’m not even going to the right classes!” Luke said, panic coursing through his veins. “And I can’t ask anyone now. It’s been too long—”