The Other Side of the Island (11 page)
Read The Other Side of the Island Online
Authors: Allegra Goodman
Tags: #Nature & the Natural World, #Social Issues, #Families, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #Individuality, #Fantasy & Magic, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Family Life, #Weather, #Peer Pressure, #Islands, #General, #Domestic fiction
Despite this, Will said, “Maybe we’ll find something different this time.” They were walking through an aisle of jelly. As far as Honor could see, as high as the ceiling were little jars of grape jelly. But Will was looking carefully. “Keep your eyes open,” he told Honor. “You never know.”
Quintilian was running around. He kept darting up the aisle and bumping into other customers.
“Stop him.” Honor was embarrassed.
Will paid no attention. His eyes were fixed on a small jar on the bottom shelf. “Aha! Got one!” There it was, a tiny golden orange jar in the midst of all that purple. Will snatched it up. “Apricot preserves,” he whispered to Honor. There must have been an inventory error in the Central Computer. Something so rare was never intended for the general public, but there was the jar with a regular price sticker: four points, just like the grape jelly. The orderlies at the cash registers would never look at what was in the jar, only the price. If you found something like that in the Central Store, you could keep it. “This will be for Mommy’s birthday.”
Will had a faraway look in his eyes. “I can’t even remember the taste of apricots,” he said.
To Honor the Central Store was like a palace. When they took the elevator up to the seventh floor, it was like going up to a beautiful fairground. There were booths with fresh popcorn popping and lollipops on sticks. There was a booth that sold little Corporation flags in green and blue, and there was a photo booth where you could get your picture taken and then framed—or even inserted into a glitter globe filled with water. You shook the globe and glitter swooshed up over your photo like confetti.
“Could we?” Honor begged, even though she knew they could not afford it.
At the back of the seventh floor was the gift-wrapping booth. Pamela stood behind such a high counter that Will had to lift Quintilian up to see, and Honor had to stand on tiptoe. Honor shuddered. Several of the workers with her mother were skilled orderlies.
Colorful sample boxes decorated the wall behind Pamela and the other workers. There were boxes wrapped with long curling ribbons and boxes wrapped for weddings in brown and silver, and some, for new babies, even had little toys or rattles tied onto the ribbons. Each sample had a number for customers to choose. Below, under the counter, were rolls of wrapping paper and ribbon.
“Oh, could I have a piece?” Honor whispered to her mother. Pamela was standing with her scissors just about to cut from a roll of luscious gold satin, and, almost without thinking, she snipped an extra piece for Honor, who pocketed it before anyone saw.
“I want one! I want one!” shouted Quintilian. Will set him down on the floor, but the supervisor came rushing over as Quintilian protested, “She got one.”
“No free samples,” the supervisor said. She was a scrunch-faced woman with silver-rimmed glasses. “Turn out your pockets,” she told Honor.
Honor simply handed over the ribbon. The supervisor took the snip of ribbon and measured it against the long steel ruler embedded in the counter. “Two points,” she told Will, and he had to take out his coupon book. Now he had two points less for everything else that week.
Now that Pamela and Will were both working, Honor and Quintilian walked home by themselves from the bus stop. They trudged home together in the heat, and when Quintilian got tired, Honor played I Spy with him. “I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with a T.”
“Tower!” shouted Quintilian, pointing to the neighborhood watchtower.
“No, don’t point,” Honor whispered. “Never point at watchtowers. I meant tree. Now let’s try another one. I spy, with my little eye . . .”
“I’m too tired,” said Quintilian.
“Just a little farther,” Honor said. She felt for the key to the town house in her skirt pocket.
By the time they got to the door, Quintilian was hopping, suddenly remembering he had to use the bathroom. Honor turned the key in the lock. They were blinded at first, entering the dark house after the white sunshine outside, but they did not turn on the lights. The lights were off to save energy and keep the heat down.
Quintilian ran to the bathroom, and Honor checked the apartment as her father had taught her. She looked up and down. She glanced at the kitchen counters and the toy basket and then checked the trunks in the bedrooms to see if there had been a visit from the Neighborhood Watch.
“Just look to see if something is missing or out of place,” her father had told her.
“What should I do if something is missing?” Honor asked.
“Nothing,” her father said quickly. “Oh, you don’t do anything.”
“Shouldn’t I call Safety Officers?” Honor asked.
“No, no,” her mother told her then. “Don’t call anyone.”
“Why should I check the whole house if I’m not going to tell anyone when something is wrong?” Honor demanded.
“You’ll tell us,” her father said. He was so serious about it that Honor usually did check. But as far as she could tell, nothing in the house ever disappeared.
Honor poured two cups of milk, and she and Quintilian ate oatmeal cookies for their snack. The cookies contained a special chemical to prevent them from becoming soggy in the damp island air, and this chemical made them so hard they were difficult to bite or even break in half. In those days the oatmeal cookies had no raisins and little sugar because of Health Reasons, but the children were used to them.
After snack, Honor sat at the table and did her homework. She no longer had time to play outside with the neighborhood girls. She had to solve word problems and copy research papers. She had to take home a volume of The Encyclopedia of Ancient Animals and copy the entire article on penguins. The emperor penguin was the size of a child. It was the largest penguin and lived in Antarctica. . . .
While she worked at the table, Honor tried to keep Quintilian busy. She could not send him outside by himself. The one time she’d tried, he’d wandered off and the Neighborhood Watch had brought him back with a warning. His favorite game was cutting up the weekly newspaper with scissors and folding the pages to make hats and boats. No one could read the Colony News after he was done with it, but that didn’t matter, because the news was nearly the same each week and always good. Generally, the headlines read: New Five-Year Plan a Success or Litter: A Thing of the Past. Then there was a color chart on the front page to show how litter disappeared or how New Weather was spreading over the world.
There were no weather reports in the newspaper. They were broadcast every hour from the tops of buildings in the City. Three short beeps, then a long one and a man’s voice with the climate advisories. From inside the house, Honor couldn’t make out every word, so the bulletins sounded something like: “. . . Colony Early Weather Warning . . . if this were an emergency . . . please . . . without delay . . . humidity will be . . . no chance of . . . otherwise unchanged . . .”
The two of them were sitting in this way in the living room when Honor heard a knock. She ran to the door immediately and opened it wide, as children were taught, and two Safety Officers stepped inside. They were wearing green jumpsuits and they carried drawstring sacks. They had no orderlies with them, but they were holding a grim-faced dog by the collar. Quintilian jumped up. He was afraid of dogs. He would have climbed on the table if Honor had let him.
“Lady of the house?” asked the first officer.
“Not home, sir,” said Honor, holding Quintilian by the arm.
“Both parents at work?” asked the second officer.
“Yes, sir.”
The dog was straining toward the kitchen. It was a brown search dog with vicious teeth, pointy ears, and yellow eyes.
“Mind if we take a look?” asked the first officer.
“Yes, sir,” whispered Honor, because she did mind, very much. People got searched sometimes because of Safety Measures. Neighbors had been searched a year before; that didn’t mean there was anything wrong. She kept telling herself this as she clutched Quintilian.
The dog broke away, lunging for the kitchen, and the Safety Officers rushed after him. Honor heard them opening the cabinets, the dog panting, pots and pans clamoring onto the floor. Glass shattered.
“Watch the pieces,” one man warned the other. “Off. Get off,” he ordered the dog. Honor heard the crunch of the broken glass beneath heavy boots.
The dog thundered up the stairs with the men behind. Honor could hear the scuffle and clatter of the dog’s sharp-clawed feet. She knew better than to follow, and she held Quintilian back. What were they looking for? Her heart raced as she thought of her mother’s drawing book and pencils underneath the frayed carpet, the seashells hidden in the light fixture. But when the men came down, their bags looked empty. The dog was dragging the plaid winter blanket in his mouth. The men tried to rip it away, but the dog wouldn’t let go until they threatened him with a stick. Even then, he circled and snarled at the old blanket until one Safety Officer dragged him outside. The other stood and filled out his paperwork. He looked hard at Honor.
“They’re coming home when?” he asked her.
“My parents?”
“You’ll expect them when.”
“Hour six,” she said.
He wrote this down. Then he said, “It’s well past six now. Good night.”
After the men left, Honor and Quintilian stood, frozen. Honor imagined the men striding down the walk, tramping down the cement steps past other houses, through the empty asphalt lot in front of the buildings. She pictured them jumping into their Safety Vehicle and speeding off. Only then did she let go of Quintilian. The two of them raced upstairs.
Sheets had been ripped from the beds. The closets and trunks were empty and all the clothes heaped on the floor. The dog had worried the frayed carpet and gnawed the ends, but when Honor felt for it, she could touch her mother’s book. In the hallway, the light fixture was undisturbed. She sank down on the floor and rested her head on her knees. She strained to hear her father walking to the door with his keys jingling in his pocket, but she couldn’t hear anything. She prayed for her mother to come. How could they leave her and Quintilian all alone? If it was already past six, where were they? Don’t ever be afraid, she thought. That’s what they’re hoping for.
“I want Mommy and Daddy,” whimpered Quintilian.
“They’ll be back soon,” said Honor.
“Now.”
“You’ll have to wait,” said Honor.
“What can I do?” Quintilian begged.
She scrambled to her feet. “We’ll clean up.” The children stuffed the clothes back into the closets. They made the beds. Finally, they tried to clean the kitchen. “Oh, the jam!” said Honor. The broken glass on the floor was the special jar of apricot preserves. “Don’t come in!” she warned Quintilian. “You’ll cut yourself.”
She crouched down and tried to scoop up the apricots, but the jam was too runny. She mopped it all up instead.
They cleaned as best they could and ate bread and butter for dinner. The clock on the oven was broken, but she could tell time by the color of the sky. Like the stars and moon, sunset came from a projection booth in the City. With its powerful beam, the projection booth sent sky colors overhead. In hour six the sky was palest orange, in hour seven pink. A green flash signaled evening curfew at hour eight. Hour eight was lavender, also called Twilight. After that, night colors filled the sky: purple and indigo. Honor knew from the deep purple in the window that it was now past eight. “Let’s go to bed,” she told Quintilian.
“No!”
She began to drag him up the stairs, but he broke away. He cried himself to sleep on the couch and Honor lay down next to him.
Late, late that night, the key turned in the lock. Honor started up as Will and Pamela slipped inside. She thought, at first, that she was dreaming. Was that really her father walking in the door with his shirt so rumpled and sweaty? Was that her mother with her hair loose and the strap of her purse broken? She ran to them. “Where have you been? What took you so long?”
“We were held up,” said Will.
“Who did that?” Honor pointed to her mother’s purse.
“Shh,” she said. “You’ll wake Quintilian.”
“We got robbed on the way home,” Will whispered.
“And our house got searched while you were gone! What did you do?”
“We’ve done nothing wrong,” Pamela said quietly.
“You’re lying,” Honor cried. “You do everything wrong. You wear the wrong clothes. You live in the wrong place. You say the wrong things.” She turned on her father. “You buy the wrong jam.” Tears welled in her eyes. “You break curfew! You’re Unpredictable.”
“That’s enough,” said Pamela. She picked up Quintilian and began carrying him upstairs. “Time for bed.”
“I’m not going,” said Honor. But her father took her by the hand and dragged her upstairs anyway. She said she wouldn’t brush her teeth. She told her parents she wouldn’t put on her pajamas, but in the end she did. She hung up her school uniform. She only had one other.
Her father bent down to kiss her good night.
Tears started again in Honor’s eyes. “Why can’t you just follow the rules?” she demanded.
Her father whispered, “The question is—whose rules?”
“What do you mean, whose rules? Her rules.”
“Is she your parents?” Will asked Honor. “Does she tuck you in at night? You have a mother. You have a father. We’re the ones who raise you; we’re the ones who love you. Don’t forget.”
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