Children of Exile (10 page)

I started arranging them in a circle. Someone tugged on my skirt.

I looked down and saw Cana looking up at me.

“No one is to be called an enemy,” she said solemnly. That was one of the principles we'd learned in Fredtown. It was part of a longer quote, which also included the words
All are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves.
The Freds always said this when a kid treated someone unfairly, or when we refused to take someone else's feelings into account. It didn't mean anyone had literally said “You're my enemy”—who would do that? It was just a sign that we were pushing someone away, acting divisive.

When Freds quoted this principle, they always seemed particularly sad.

“I didn't do anything wrong!” I said frantically now, to Cana. “That man just kept talking about evil, and—”

Cana blinked up at me, her tiny features so innocent and sweet. And knowing.

Was she right? Had I just turned every adult at that church into an enemy?

I'd never had an enemy before. Unless you counted Edwy.

Church ended
, and the parents came out to claim their children from the field. I'd kept the kids entertained and reasonably quiet for more than an hour in a space where there was nothing to do but run and shout and pick weeds. We'd played Duck Duck Goose, London Bridge, Ring-Around-the-Rosie, and, when I ran out of other games, Hunt for the Prettiest Flower. But none of the adults said thank you. They just stared at me distrustfully and whispered when they thought I wasn't looking.

The Fred thing to do would be to calmly and politely say, “Excuse me. Is there a problem? Is there some issue you would like to discuss with me?”

I couldn't do it. Not when they'd already been whispering about me being a Fred only pretending to be a child. Not if they thought Freds were evil.

The mother and Bobo and I walked back to our house.

“Nelsi?” the mother called as we pushed the door open.
Was this the father's given name? How could I not know that about my own father?

I didn't know the mother's given name either. Why hadn't the Freds told us that basic information? Why hadn't they done that years ago?

Had the Freds thought, even up to the moment we stepped on the plane, that we'd really never need to know our parents' names, because we'd never meet them?

I didn't ask the mother about names now. No one answered her, and she began wringing her hands.

“Looks like he's already left to sell the apples,” she said. She stepped quickly through the house to the kitchen, scanning the table and countertops. The dirty skillet still lay on the stove. The mother reached for a loaf of bread. “Here, Rosi, you take a sandwich for him and a sandwich for you. Hurry! When he doesn't get lunch . . .”

“You want me to take him lunch,” I repeated. “Can you tell me where he is?”

The mother paused in the middle of slapping sandwiches together and frowned at me as if my question annoyed her. As if it were my fault I didn't know where the father might be selling apples.

That's not fair
, I wanted to say.
How would I know?

I kept my mouth shut. But I could feel my lips puckering together into a sulk.

“He's downtown, of course,” the mother said. “Where we were yesterday . . .” She seemed to remember that we'd followed a convoluted path coming from where the plane landed. “Look. All you have to do is go to the end of our street, where there's the creek. Follow the creek until it bends like a hairpin. Then turn to the left. That'll take you to the market. Where your father sells his apples. The two of you can bring your luggage home when you're done.”

“Can I go too?” Bobo asked, bouncing up and down.

I was pretty sure it was the word “creek” that caught his ear. Bobo liked anything to do with water.

The mother's frown deepened.

“No, no, Rosi has to hurry. You'll slow her down,” she said. “And maybe you should take a nap. You're not too old for naps yet, are you?”

How could she not know if her own son still took naps?

“He takes them when he gets up early,” I said. “Like he did today.”

Bobo gave me the stink-eye, because he hated naps.

The mother yawned.

“
I
could use a nap myself,” she said. “I'll lie down beside you, and as you're falling asleep, I'll tell you stories. . . .”

“About when I was a baby?” Bobo asked eagerly.

“Sure,” the mother said to him. “Here,” she said, handing me the sandwiches, now wrapped in a ragged cloth. “Bring
the cloth back when you come home tonight. Now go!”

She actually pushed my arm to hurry me up. I stepped out the front door, into the baking sunlight.

Bobo gets cuddled and told stories and I'm pushed out the door, treated like a servant,
I thought bitterly.
That's not fair either.

But immediately it was like all the Freds I'd grown up with were talking in my head:
Big kids should never be resentful of little kids getting special privileges, because
you
were treated that way too when you were little. And remember that as you grow and get more responsibilities, you also get more freedom and more rights, more opportunity to make your own choices . . .

“Right,” I muttered under my breath. “I got so much choice about whether to leave Fredtown, whether to come here.”

But the Fred voices in my head had shifted my perspective. It was good to be outside, not trapped in that dark hut being forced to take a nap. It was even good to be alone for now. Maybe I would run into other kids; maybe I could ask around and find out where Edwy lived.

It was easy to find the creek, easy to walk along it on a dirt path clearly beaten down by lots of other feet before mine. Because the creek was lined with soaring trees, it was cooler there than along the street of falling-down houses.

Maybe I should just think of everything here as an adventure,
I told myself.
Maybe the mother and father aren't so bad. Maybe I'll get used to them. Maybe I'll stop missing all the Freds.

Just thinking that made me have to blink back tears. So I was looking down and barely paying attention when I heard a voice call from lower on the creek bank, “Rosi?”

It was Edwy.

He was standing
at the edge of the water and holding on to a branch he'd evidently broken off from one of the trees. No—it was a pole.

“Nice,” I said. “You've only been here a day and already you've run away from your parents to go fishing. And goof off.”

“They're
making
me fish, Rosi,” Edwy said. “They said I can't come home until I catch enough fish for the whole family. Aunts and uncles and cousins and everything. They say the Freds spoiled us and we don't know how to work.”

“Oh,” I said.

The way I was thinking shifted again. The creek here was wide but shallow, not much more than a trickle. It would take him a long time to catch any fish, let alone enough to feed a lot of people.

I was supposed to be hurrying sandwiches to the father for lunch. Edwy and I hadn't been friends in more than a
year. But I sat down on the bank of the creek anyway, right behind Edwy.

“Are your real parents . . . okay?” I asked him. “Are you okay with being here?”

Edwy flicked his pole, sending the worm and hook on the end of his line into deeper water.

“You know I didn't like Fredtown, anyhow,” he said.

“That doesn't guarantee you'd like it here,” I countered. “There could be
two
places you hate.”

I almost said,
Maybe you'd hate every place! Maybe
you're
the one who's hateful. Did you ever think of that?

But I wasn't exactly enjoying being here either.

“Nobody answers my questions here, any more than they did in Fredtown,” Edwy complained.

“I know,” I said, even though I hadn't actually dared to ask many questions. I was kind of impressed that Edwy had.

“And . . . making me fish?” Edwy added. “That's really to punish me. Because they said I had to stop asking questions, and I didn't.”

That didn't surprise me. I watched Edwy pull his line closer.

“Something bad happened here,” Edwy said. “I can tell. And that's what no one will talk about.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say,
Well, duh! For twelve years they kept telling us it was too dangerous for us to live
with our own parents. Of course something bad happened!

Instead I said, “The father—I mean, my real father—he's blind and he's missing one arm. And I know he wasn't always like that, because the mother said so. And he thinks there's something wrong with my nose.”

I winced, because that was like asking Edwy to say,
There
is
something wrong with your nose! It's ugly! Your whole face is ugly!

That was how Edwy talked back in Fredtown, before I started avoiding him. Sometimes the Freds heard him and had long, stern talks about what was and wasn't appropriate to say about other people. But most of the time Edwy waited to say things like that when none of the Freds were listening.

Edwy stared down into the water.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered.

Had Edwy really just said that? Edwy?

Somehow that made it possible for me to inch toward the topics I really wanted to ask about.

“I . . . I found an official decree on the floor of the airplane,” I said, carefully avoiding the issue of which row of seats I'd found it in. I really wanted to say,
I know you stole it! I know what you're like!
But I struggled to keep my voice calm and neutral. “The bottom part was torn, so I don't know what it said after the part about the men on the plane leaving right away so our parents have total control over . . . something.
Did you see that paper, that decree? Did you read any more of it than I did?”

I expected Edwy to protest,
What are you accusing me of? You're the one who saw the decree, not me! Did
you
steal it? Did goody-goody Rosi actually do something wrong?

But he just shook his head and muttered, “No, it was torn when I saw it too. I didn't see the rest of it. I wish I had. I wish I knew . . .”

“Everything,” I whispered.

Edwy nodded. Our eyes met, his only a shade darker than mine.

I'd never noticed before how much our eyes were alike.

“Also . . . , I saw what you carved into your seat on that airplane,” I said.

Edwy's expression turned into a defensive glare.

“Nobody said that wasn't allowed!” he protested. It was almost comforting how much he sounded like the Edwy I'd known back in Fredtown, the one who was so good at coming up with excuses.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

“I'm not going to
tattle
,” I said. “I just wanted to know . . . What did you mean? ‘Those people aren't real either'? Did your Fred-parents tell you—”

“You know I wouldn't trust anything a Fred told me,” Edwy said. “I hate them! They're all frauds and liars and . . .”

I felt my face harden into a glare to match his. It was unbearable to hear him say such awful things about the Freds when I missed them so much. Especially after the people back at my mother's church had called the Freds evil. But Edwy's criticism was worse, because he'd actually known the Freds. Even when he misbehaved, even when he was rude on purpose, they had never been anything but kind.

“Never mind,” Edwy said, his voice softening. He gazed off toward the other side of the creek. “Even you have to admit there was something wrong with those men on the plane. You had to have hated them as much as I did.”

“I don't
hate
anyone,” I said automatically. This would have been the Fred-approved response—we were only supposed to hate things like cruelty, and thistles and thorns. Not people. But I instantly regretted my words. Saying what the Freds wanted me to say usually just made Edwy mad. I winced again. “But I
kind of
agree. Those men on the plane were . . .”

“Terrible,” Edwy finished for me. “And . . . hiding something. Fake.”

Not real either,
I thought. His words carved into the seat had been about the men on the plane, not our real parents. I felt disappointed somehow. As if I'd been counting on Edwy to explain everything. To solve all my problems.

“You thought scratching graffiti into an airplane seat and addressing it ‘Hey, world' was going to change anything?” I
asked. I sounded as bitter and complaining as Edwy ever did back in Fredtown.

He shrugged.

“I thought maybe someday
someone
might see it, someone might decide to help us. . . .”

Maybe the Freds had been more successful raising Edwy than any of them thought. He actually sounded hopeful. Idealistic.

I wished I could still feel that way.

“Doesn't it seem like every adult we've ever known is hiding something?” I asked. “Because they're the adults and we're the kids. Because we're not old enough yet to be told everything. Because . . .”

It struck me that only Freds gave those reasons. The men on the plane had just seemed to regard us kids as too much bother.

And my parents?
I wondered.
What are their reasons for . . . being like they are?

“Yeah!” Edwy said, as if he liked my question. He kicked at a clump of mud half submerged in the water. “I thought everything would be different here.”

“It is,” I muttered.

“No, more different,” Edwy said impatiently. “Like . . . have you noticed that there aren't any kids older than us here either?”