Children of Exile (11 page)

“We're the oldest kids there are,” I said, annoyed that he would treat this like a big deal. “It was like that in Fredtown, too. Remember?” I had to stop myself from adding
Have you forgotten everything from before yesterday?

Edwy shook his head impatiently, making his hair flop to the side.

“No,
listen
,” he said, like he actually cared what I thought. “They took you and me to Fredtown the day we were born. Because they didn't think we were safe here, right? If they really cared about kids' safety, wouldn't they have also taken the kids who were a year older than us, and two years older than us, and three years older than us, and so on and so on, all at the same time they took us?”

I'd never thought of that before. Not once.

“My family had a big party last night,” Edwy said. “To celebrate me coming home. And—all the other kids, too. And all these aunts and uncles came. My real mom and my real dad have, like, eight brothers and sisters apiece, and they all have kids, too, so it turns out I have, like, eleventy-billion cousins. It turns out I was related to half the kids in Fredtown!”

This almost made me giggle. This was so much what Edwy deserved.

“So you're the oldest cousin,” I said. “Big surprise.”

“No,” Edwy said, shaking his head again, more emphatically than ever. “I
wasn't.
I had cousins there who were
grown-ups—twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven—and then I had two or three cousins apiece at every age below mine. But between me and the twenty-five-year-olds—nothing.”

Maybe I'd been sitting in the shade too long. I suddenly felt like shivering.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Maybe that's just . . . a coincidence. Or something.”

I didn't even sound like I believed myself. I sounded spooked.

“Have
you
seen any kids older than us here?” he asked.

I thought about the people I'd seen on my long walk from the plane to the parents' house. I thought about the people I'd seen at the cinder-block church that morning.

“No,” I said. “I haven't.”

Edwy turned to face me directly.

“It wouldn't be just a coincidence for no babies to be born in my ginormous family for thirteen years,” he said. “Or in this entire town. Something happened. What was it? What happened to all the kids who were little kids when we were born?”

“I don't know,”
I told Edwy. “I don't know, but I'll try to find out.”

Edwy kept his eyes on me.

“Good,” he said fiercely.

Maybe we looked at each other too long. Maybe there was too much we weren't saying. But suddenly it was weird again between Edwy and me. I scrambled to my feet.

“I've got to go,” I said. “I have to take a sandwich to the father and help him sell apples all afternoon. My family is making me work too.”

“You never minded it when your Fred-parents made you work,” Edwy said.

I couldn't explain why it was different here. I wasn't going to tell Edwy about how the mother made me work while she gave Bobo sugar and cuddled him on her lap. I wasn't going to tell him how that made me feel.

“I've got to go,” I repeated. “I'll be in the market if you
want to find me later. And . . . I live on the street where lots of people's houses are just broken boxes.”

Edwy laughed, but not in a funny way.

“Half the town is like that!” he said.

“I guess,” I said.

I really had to get away from Edwy now. If I stayed any longer, I'd say too much. I'd say things no Fred would want me to say.

I pretended I really cared about hurrying lunch to the father. I almost ran down the path. But right before the creek curved, I looked back through the trees. I had a clear view of Edwy wading farther out into the creek, struggling against the current.

And for that moment, I almost felt like I understood Edwy.

I turned away and kept walking.

When I got to the part of the creek where it curved like a hairpin, I turned left, back toward the town. Almost immediately, I found myself on a street that might have been part of the marketplace. The first building I came to had a row of tables in front of it, and each table contained . . . well, were they parts of a car? Parts of some kind of machine? All of it looked vaguely mechanical, but also dirty and broken. Still, I spoke politely to the man sitting by the nearest table: “Good afternoon, sir.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, but didn't respond.

Didn't he hear me?
I wondered.
Should I speak again more loudly? What if his ears don't work, the same way that the father's eyes don't work?

But he was looking right at me. Even if he hadn't heard my words, he would have seen my lips move.

Could he possibly be both deaf and blind?

It seemed like he had both heard and seen me. It seemed like his narrowed eyes were his reply.

He's never seen me before in my life!
I thought.
Why would he glare at me like that?

A small child came racing out of the house behind him. It was Meki, one of the toddler twins who'd lived next door to me back in Fredtown.

“Wo-si!” Meki cried delightedly, running toward me.

The man intercepted her.

“Get back in the house,” he growled, shoving her behind him.

“But—Wo-si! Love Wo-si!” Meki began to wail and struggle against his grip.

The man glared harder at me.

“Get away from here,” he said. “Get off my property.”

My knees began to tremble.

“Meki—I'll see you later,” I said quickly, in a voice that also trembled. “Remember, you need to obey your . . . your father.”

I forced my legs to move. I forced myself to walk away from Meki's sobs.

All she was going to do was run out and give me a hug!
I thought, thoroughly puzzled.
Why wouldn't he want her to hug me?

I remembered the grown-ups' glares at the church service that morning. I remembered the way the father had said, after feeling my face,
She's got
that
kind of nose?
I remembered the mother lying about what color eyes I have.

Is there something wrong with how I look?
I wondered.
Something that nobody ever noticed back in Fredtown?

Back in Fredtown, the Freds always said that it didn't matter how anyone looked. What mattered was what you did, how you behaved, how you treated other people.

But I just nodded abruptly to the next several people I passed. They were all adults, and I didn't trust my voice to try out greetings with them. Some of the people glared back at me; some moved their heads in a way that might have been a return greeting.

After the sixth or seventh person, I realized that all the people with brown eyes glared at me but all the people with green eyes nodded, even if it was the barest movement possible.

I'm not supposed to care if someone has green or brown eyes!
I told myself.
Or any other color!

I didn't think I'd seen anyone with any different eye color—though maybe the missionary at my mother's church had eyes that were more solidly black. . . .

Stop noticing eyes!
I commanded myself.
Look for . . . look for whether or not you see anyone older than twelve but younger than twenty-five. Remember? You promised Edwy you'd find out about the people in that age group. What if it turns out that he's wrong and there are people that age all over the place?

I didn't know how you could tell if someone was twenty- three or twenty-four rather than twenty-five. I'd never seen anyone who was older than twelve but younger than twenty. Back in Fredtown even the youngest teacher had been in his twenties. Almost all the Freds had been either parents or grandparents. The older Fred-parents—like mine—tended to be a little thicker around the middle than the younger ones; the Fred-grandparents were mostly gray-haired but still spry enough to chase after toddler grandchildren.

Not that I was supposed to be categorizing people based on their appearance. The Fred-grandparents were patient and kind and wise; the Fred-parents were too, but they were busier, and they were only patient up to the point when they would insist, “Yes, but regardless, it's time for you to go to school,” or “Yes, we can do that later, after we all work together to fix dinner. . . .”

I could hear my Fred-parents' voices in my head speaking those words—those and all the other lines they used to gently redirect Bobo and me to what we were supposed to be doing, rather than what we wanted to do.

I was in danger again of making myself cry. It was too hard to think of my Fred-parents while people were glaring at me.

Stop looking at the people!
I told myself.
Look at . . . the buildings! The streetscape!

This was also different from anything in Fredtown. I was on a sidewalk now, but it buckled, as if the ground itself had heaved upward and was fighting against the concrete. I kept tripping, usually when someone glared at me. (
No, no—stop noticing!
) No one could safely run here, not without risking a face-plant with every other step.

The sidewalk and the street also meandered—off to the right, to avoid a pipe spewing greenish water (
Don't think about the germs and contaminants that might be in that water! Just don't step in it!
); then to the left, to dodge around a spot where the bricks and tiles from a broken-down house spilled out into the street. I missed the grid system and perfect right angles and tidy buildings of Fredtown all the more. In Fredtown you could always tell which direction you were going—north or south or east or west. Here, because the sun was precisely overhead, beating down on my neck and face,
I couldn't even guess which direction the street was turning, which way I was walking, where I was going.

That bothered me more than I ever would have guessed.

Eventually the street opened up into an area where the buildings on one side stood far apart from those on the other. I might have called it a square or a plaza if the boundaries hadn't been so uneven, if I'd been able to see the area as a whole. But everyone was crowded in so tightly that I could barely see past the backs and heads of the people around me. I was trapped between the brown tunic of a large woman in front of me and the hurrying legs of a man behind me. I caught a glimpse of piled scarves to my right and piled oranges to my left.

This
was the marketplace. It had to be.

I let the crowd carry me forward. I held the cloth-wrapped sandwiches higher so they wouldn't be crushed. The people around me shoved and elbowed their way forward without even once saying
Excuse me
or
I'm so sorry—did I step on your toes?
I was glad I hadn't brought Bobo with me, glad I wasn't responsible for keeping him from being trampled or smashed between taller adults. (
Though what if I myself got crushed or trampled?
) I kept an eye out for apples and the father. But I ended up circling the marketplace three times before I saw him. He was off to the side, sitting with his back against a wall. His sightless eyes squinted fiercely at
the crowd. He kept his one hand atop a pyramid of apples.

I didn't know how long he'd been sitting there, but it looked like he hadn't sold a single apple.

He can't see,
I reminded myself.
He probably doesn't even realize that his squint looks mean and scares people away. He probably doesn't know that he's too far away from the crowd of shoppers.

I made myself walk over to him.

“There's a space over there you could move to,” I told him, pointing. Then I remembered that he couldn't see, and I dropped my arm. “Over there, more people would see your apples and you could sell them more quickly—”

“I have to lean against the wall,” he growled at me. “It keeps my back from hurting so bad.”

On top of everything else, he had problems with his back?

“I—I brought you a sandwich,” I stammered, as if that were a way to apologize. “She—the mother—she made it for you.”

The father grunted, twisted his face into an even uglier expression, and held out his hand. As soon as I placed a sandwich in his hand, he put his hand back on the top apple. Rather than bringing his hand to his mouth so he could eat, he leaned his head down to the sandwich.

Saliva from his mouth dripped down onto the apples.

“I—I'll watch the apples for you while you eat,” I said. I forced myself to sit down beside him. “You don't have to
worry about anybody stealing from you while I'm here.”

“I always have to worry about people stealing from me,” he muttered back to me. A few half-chewed crumbs from his mouth spewed out onto the apples. “What could you do to fight off thieves? You're a girl.”

What did that have to do with anything?

I wanted to say,
What could you do? You're blind.
But that was evil and wrong and mean.

“I could scream for help,” I said. “I could yell for the police.”

The father snorted.

“Who'd help someone like you?” he asked. He waved the sandwich like he was scolding me. “Who'd help
us
?”

It almost made me happy that he used the word “us.” Maybe he just needed to be cheered up; maybe he just needed to learn to trust people.

I didn't answer his question. Not directly.

“Is that sandwich good?” I asked. “The mother made one for me, too, but I'm not very hungry. You can have it too, if you want.”

The father grimaced, as if my question had made the sandwich taste bad.

“Don't bother acting all goody-goody like that,” he said. “You'll learn. Around here, you take what food you can get.”