Gravity Box and Other Spaces (41 page)

Jen wanted to leave, but she felt frozen in place.

“Hon, sometimes school doesn't let her out till—”

“Then she can quit school.”

Jen panicked. Warren smiled at her.

Melissa turned from the stove. “What did you say?”

“You didn't hear the first time?”

“Yes, I heard you.” Melissa frowned, turning her back to him.

“Pay attention. Problem in this family is no one pays attention. Listen, god damn it, when I say something. Now, what did I say? Just repeat it back.”

“You said Jennifer could quit school,” Melissa repeated.

“Now why'd you ask me to repeat it? You heard it.”

“I asked 'cause I couldn't believe it.”

Warren cocked his head to one side. “Oh? You think I'm kidding maybe?”

“I think you're upset and it has nothin' to do with Jen.”

“Or maybe you think I'm bein' cruel. Lord knows you've accused me of that before.”

“You've had a hard day,” Melissa said, sighing.

“Or maybe I'm just in the habit of makin' shit up to hear myself sound important.”

Jen swallowed. The more he cursed the angrier he became. She had seen this all her life and had never grown used to it.

Melissa looked at Warren and folded her arms. “Jennifer can't quit school. Will not.”

“Oh? I said she could. You know, you got a habit of trying to run everybody's life but your own. You try to tell me what to do; you order Jenny around—”

“I do not—”

“What's that? You sayin' now I'm a liar?”

“No, but you need to listen, Warren.”

“Then what did you say?” Warren got up and leaned on the edge of the table. “You come in and walk around here like a mousy little nothin' and don't say shit until somebody around here tries to order things contrary to what you got them. I say I want my dinner at five and you give me all kinds of reasons why you can't do it. I say it don't matter, Jenny can do it, she ain't got nothin' better to do all damn day, and you stick your mouth out and bite off some accusations. Who the hell do you think you are? If Jenny wants to quit school, then she can! If I want my goddamn dinner at a certain time, then I can too!”

“Then maybe you ought to make it yourself.”

“Now you've told me time and again to leave your kitchen alone. You say I mess everything up. Fine. You can't have it both ways. You got a right, the kitchen is yours. This is your domain, your responsibility. I don't mind givin' you your own head in here, suits me fine. How things oughta be. Now it's inconvenient for you to do your job, so you change the rules again. Make up your mind, will you?”

Melissa wiped the tears off her face. “Jennifer can't quit school.”

“I say she can.”

“I don't want to,” Jen said.

“She can't. She's only fifteen. Law says she has to go.”

“Fuck the law! This is a free country! Least, it used to be! If she don't want to go to school she don't have to!”

“I want to go to school,” Jen said.

“That wouldn't be right, hon,” Melissa said.

“What wouldn't?”

“Takin' her outta school just wouldn't be right.”

“I don't see why not. She can't handle it anyway. Chores are never finished. Things ain't done right. She's always nervous as a monkey and tired all the time. I never did think it was good for her.”

“Now that's not her fault.”

“I'm a liar again? Look at her! She looks about ready to cry! Tell me school ain't done this to her!”

“I—like—school—Daddy!”

Warren jabbed a finger at her. “You're talkin' outta turn, young lady. You know how I feel about that.”

“She wants to go to school, Warren.”

“She don't know what she wants! She's a child! Children don't know shit! That's why they're children!”

Jen headed for the doorway.

“Where the hell you think you're going?”

“Out.”

Warren grabbed her arm and spun around, hurling her against the refrigerator.

“No!” Melissa screamed. She pushed between Warren and Jen. Jen looked past her mother. Warren's face was twisted and stretched, eyes bulging, focused with fanatic intensity upon her.

Warren grabbed Melissa's shoulders and turned her, wrenching her off her feet.

Jen broke for the doorway.

“God damn it!”

Jen reached the end of the hallway and looked back. She saw her father straining through the doorway, arms outstretched. Melissa was holding Warren's leg with one arm, her free hand pulling at his pants.

Jen opened the door and fell through. She pulled the door shut and ran. She hit the sidewalk and kept going, momentum carrying her down the street even though night was coming on. She thought she heard someone calling her name. She ignored it and kept going.

The street was empty. Fortunately, most of the lights worked, throwing an orange wash over the cracked concrete, making black shadows in the doorways of the buildings. Jen sat in the shadowed arch doorway entrance of her old school which was now boarded up and long empty of students. She remembered attending classes here briefly when she was very young. The place had possessed an inviting odor of books and linoleum. In second grade it had been closed down, and everyone was transferred to
the giant polyversity that smelled of ozone, plastic, and antiseptic cleanser.

She had no say then, and it was obvious she couldn't change anything now. All her carefully constructed plans had collapsed. Everything to this point had been done to avoid exactly this. She had put everything in the right place, all so she did not have to run away.

Children ran away from home. She was
not
a child. She could play master-level chess, write code, and manage her own money. Yet when it came to the final stage, she simply could not get out of her home and be on her own,
be in control of her own destiny.
When all was said and done, she was not her own agent, not permitted to be her own master. She could be tossed around by any adult who claimed the authority to play with her life. To make matters worse, she had left the apartment empty-handed. The two hundred dollars collected that morning was in her backpack. If she returned for it she did not know what her father would do, or even if he would let her back in.

No, he would let her in; she had something he wanted. The looks he had been giving her this last year were unmistakable. He had not yet acted on it, but Jen knew it was only a matter of time before he convinced himself that he had a right to her body, too. If it were not for that, Jen might have been able to wait another few years till her majority to leave legally and openly. Of course, it wasn't much safer sitting alone in an empty doorway on an abandoned street. Jen loathed this world.

She glanced up. A couple of the lights visible in the sky were not stars. Orbitals. Habitats. Satellite factories. Jen felt a bitter longing. That's where she wanted to be, and there was no way she could get there. No one—no adult—was going to let her.

Footsteps drew her attention back to the street. Three people walked down the center. They seemed to spot her just after she saw them and veered her way. Jen pressed her hands to the stone steps, preparing to push away and run. She hesitated; the taller of them seemed familiar. They stopped at the foot of the steps, two boys and a girl.

“Are you waiting for someone or just taking in the air?” the tall one asked. His accent was fake British layered over street-drawl; it had a pleasant effect. Jen recognized him, then. She had nearly landed on him that morning.

“Leave me alone,” Jen said simply.

“Ah. You're meditating. I see.” He looked at the other two and smiled. “Come with us. We're headed for the union meet.”

Jen frowned. “Union—?”

“Youth Union of National Guarantees. You ain't heard?”

Jen thought for a moment. “The coalition for the rights of minors, the one with the constitution and the political action platform?”

“Among other things,” he said. “You
have
heard.”

Jen nodded. “I didn't believe it.”

“I'm Cantril Foster and these are the members of my corporation.” He pointed to them. “Bigelow-Jigolo and Sonya.”

She nodded to them. “I'm Jen.”

“We're on our way as delegates to the cause,” Cantril said. “Come with us. Every warm body helps get the message through.”

Jen smiled despite her fear. She weighed her options. If she did not go willingly they could force her, though she did not think they would. It was a better option at least than staying out here alone.

“Sure.” They walked together for a few blocks. Jen began to feel calmer, safer.

“What's the meeting about?” she asked.

“Organization,” Bigelow-Jigolo said.

“Power,” Sonya added.

“Petitions, assertions, and acquisitions,” Cantril said. “The disenfranchised demanding franchise. Shit like that.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

He nodded. “And you can't do shit, can you? You have to escape through the window from your own home and sit and brood in dangerous places, eh? Or do you come here often and I just ain't noticed?” She frowned at him, and he laughed.

“She's scared, Cantril; leave her alone,” Sonya said.

“We're all scared,” Cantril said, “that's no distinction. When you're scared enough to run, you're scared enough to change something—that's distinction. That's power.”

They rounded a corner and ahead Jen heard a low watery sound that half a block closer she recognized as a crowd. A big crowd. She felt herself growing anxious, excited despite her fear—or maybe because of it—and craned her neck to see more.

They walked faster, around a corner, and came to an abandoned park that angled away from one of the spaceport walls. A fence had been thrown up around it and signs posted prohibiting public use, but the gates were open and the field was illuminated with bright yellow-blue lights that bled onto the surrounding derelict buildings and asphalt.

Cantril's group hit the edge of the crowd and people parted like water, giving them way and then filling in behind them. Jen saw faces glaring at them, smiling at
them, curious, ambivalent, suspicious, but all young, all kids, though many looked years older than they ought.

Many wore colors, makeshift uniforms identifying them as part of a group. She saw tattoos on faces and torsos. One group was naked, their entire bodies covered with colorful designs warped around inset jewels, symbols scarring flesh. Bald kids, kids with waist-length braids, one bunch with circuitry layered over their skulls, down their jaws, disappearing into white jumpsuits. Black, Hispanic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Nordic, Mediterranean, and racial types mixed to the point that origin was lost, heritages obscured by generations of breeding with whoever was available. She saw banners held up declaring “Youth Rights Now,” “Take the Mandate from The Motherfuckers,” or “Eat Our Shit and Pass Cookies” to “Burn Racist Puppyfuckers.” There were kids who looked barely twelve years old whose faces were creased with rage and others much older who seemed as peaceful and devoid of rage as newborns.

They all seemed like a half-formed idea of what civilizations should be, instead of just the products of cultural insistence that had no real direction, no real goal. The crowd was caught between innocence and ignorance, on their way to being something and then left unfinished by their creators after forming in unwanted shapes, like fetal material un-aborted but cast away after all, unwanted, unusable, un-absorbable.

As Jen plunged deeper into the assembly she could feel its frenetic vitality. She heard arguments, saw a few fights, watched a group of girls gathered around a beat-up portable computer hammering out a petition, debating points, changing phraseology. There was nothing dead here, nothing that felt like defeat or disillusion. Maybe
civilization had abandoned them, but to Jen it looked as if civilization was being built here. She could not take it all in—one trio of bald, black-clad boys were screaming incoherently at a gang of blacks who stood a few meters away grinning at them and making jokes while twenty steps away a girl in a toga was carefully explaining the principles of Jeffersonian Republicanism to fifteen or twenty Vietnamese. Leaflets littered the field. Jen snatched one up. “Do you understand what the Vote is? Do you know how to rate a candidate and how to deconstruct campaign rhetoric? Do you know how to press a point with someone who doesn't respect you? The following are twenty points to help you in the war for the franchise—”

“Attention!”

Jen looked up at the bleachers and saw a girl with long black braids, wearing red synth-leather, waving a clipboard.

“Everybody, attention!” she called. “We've got some platform suggestions that we think we'll go with. Now, we don't want to put everything in one upload, so all of these have to be given serious consideration and several chosen for action, possibly all of them.”