Amber House: Neverwas (7 page)

I must have given him one of those uncomprehending looks,

because he nodded in the direction of the store. “Oh,” I said, “no,

Sam just likes hardware stores.”

“Hey! No kidding?” he said to Sam. “Me too!” And Sam

beamed.

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so I turned Sam in

the direction the crowd was moving, and started to walk. The

main street of Severna, a short stretch of older, mostly wooden

commercial buildings, was a block north. “We’re heading to

the drugstore.”

6 O

“Candy counter?” Richard guessed as he fell in alongside us.

“Congrats, by the way, on your admission to S.I.”

S.I. — Saint Ignatius Academy — was the incredibly exclu-

sive prep school he attended to which my parents had absolutely

insisted
I apply. I shrugged a little. “I don’t think my mother gave them much choice.”

He smiled. “I don’t think my dad did, either.”

The senator is pulling strings for me?
I wondered why. I knew, of course, that an A-list prep like S.I. had to have some good reason

to accept a B-list student like me, but nobody’d told me it was

the senator.
That would do it.

The flow of people just ahead had pooled into a crowd eddy-

ing on the sidewalk and spilling over into the street. Everyone

seemed to be staring at something happening below the mar-

quee of the Palace Cinema. As we neared the drug store on the

corner, I heard chanting, and the buzzing voice of someone

speaking into an amplifier.

Richard halted us by the entryway to Lane’s Pharmacy.

“You’re not headed into that mess, are you?” he asked.

I smiled, because his voice had that same well-intentioned ris-

ing note of worry my mother’s always had. “No,” I said. “Going

inside to get my chocolate fix.”

“Addict.” He grinned and backed away, waving, heading off to

join the “mess” he’d just warned us against. Sam and I stood in

the pharmacy entrance and watched him melt into the crowd.

Then Sam said, “I wanna see.” He started walking and I fol-

lowed after. I wanted to see too.

At the back of the crowd, Sammy pulled one of his signature

weave-through-the-legs disappearances. “Sam, stop!” I ordered,

but missed snagging the hood of his coat by millimeters. I began

to apologize my way forward, squeezing around the bulk of win-

ter coats and scarves: “Sorry, can I get past? Have to catch my

little brother.”

o7

I found him at the very front, his toes hanging over the edge

of the curb. I got a firm grip on that hood. “Sam. You can’t go

running off like that.”

He was pointing at the scene across the street. “See him,

Sarah?”

“See who?” I lifted my eyes to look just as a policeman

stepped directly in front of me, his back a solid wall. Black-

booted, helmeted, and uniformed. Massive in what I guessed

was a bulletproof vest. His right hand gripped a shiny black

baton. “Who, Sam?” I repeated, leaning to see around the police-

man’s body.

Sammy pointed again. “There!”

A man came running down the street in front of the crowd,

then, shouting words I could only partially hear —
something,

something
“move”
something something
“pepper cans.” The policeman took a half step forward, and I was actually afraid for a

moment that he was going to strike the man with his baton. But

the man continued past, still yelling.

“What did he say?” I asked aloud, feeling I should take Sam

and go. “What’s happening?” The officer swiveled his head to

look at me, anonymous inside the chitinous shell of his helmet.

“Protest.” His voice squeezed from his helmet electronically.

“A young lady shouldn’t be here.”

I hated that kind of “you’re not doing what a nice girl ought

to” stuff. “If I see any young ladies,” I said brightly, “I’ll let them know.” I could feel his eyes narrowing behind the black face-plate; it gave me a queasy sensation in my stomach, but I

continued to smile up at him. Fortunately, Sammy gave me an

excuse to look away.

“Jackson! Jackson!” He was making little leaps, waving an

arm in the air.

The crowd surged left to make a path for a mounted police-

man, and I finally got a look at what everyone was staring at:

8 O

Two lines of people stood with interlocking arms across the

entrance to the theater. I scanned the faces until I found Jackson

near the right-hand side, between two other men. The man

to his left looked terrified. I saw his warm breath pulsing

in fast clouds from his mouth, his clenched fist mashing an

incongruously cheerful yellow handkerchief. Jackson was calm,

determined.

“JACK-SON!” Sam called with all his might.

Jackson’s head jerked. He looked around, confused, worried,

trying to track that bird voice. His eyes connected with mine

and widened.

The sounds of the crowd grew louder, higher-pitched. I heard

snarling and spotted three German shepherds straining against

their leashes. Little pops sounded; round metal objects arced

overhead, leaking trails of smoke and landing in the street to

spew a thickening cloud.

That’s when people started screaming. And running.

All around me, the crowd churned, scattering in every direc-

tion. I lost my grip on Sammy’s hood. The edges of the smoke

reached us. My eyes burned. I started coughing, doubled over,

the spasm going on and on until I was choking on it, unable to

catch my breath.

A hand caught my wrist. I looked up through tear-filled eyes

to see Richard holding Sammy on one shoulder, up above the worst

of the gas. “You two shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Come on!”

He tugged me into motion as a wave of black-suited police ran

down the street. Two officers held the nozzle of a fire hose gush-

ing water at the lines of protestors in front of the Palace. I

stumbled after Richard, wondering why anybody thought these

people deserved to be hosed down in the below-freezing

December weather.

I staggered the long block back toward the hardware store.

There I had to stop. I leaned against a blank wall and threw up.

o9

A handkerchief appeared in my line of view. “You gonna make it,

Parsons?” Richard said.

“I think so,” I said. I waved the hanky off. “I can’t take that

from you.”

“Yes, you can,” he said. “It’s fresh from my drawer, where I

have five hundred more.”

He caught my hand and pressed the hanky into it. I wiped my

eyes and mouth. “What was that?” I managed between fits of

coughing. “Why’d they do that?”

“Protest,” Richard said. “The police chief takes it personally.”

He set my brother down and put Sam’s little hand in mine. “You

take your sister home, all right, Sammy? I’ve got to go back.”

“What were they protesting?” I asked.

“The Palace still restricts blacks to the balcony.”

I felt nauseated all over again. Severna might look like any

small town in Astoria, but it was part of a society that was com-

pletely alien to me. I was in a country that still justified “separate but equal” facilities for the races. Not that “separate” had ever

actually been “equal.”

I hadn’t ever seen the full depth of its ugliness before — not

this starkly, this violently. It was hard for me to believe that

there were still places in the world that practiced institutional-

ized racism in the twenty-first century. That it still happened in

this place, my family’s homeland. My home now. The American

Confederation of States.

CH A P T ER TWO

K

The walk home was a misery. The cloud of gas had triggered a

monster headache all up the back of my skull. My eyes burned

and my throat felt like a skinned knee. Plus, my feet, hands, and

ears were going numb in the cold.

Most of the distance, we followed a path that wound through

the park on the southwest side of town and ended across the road

from the northeast corner of the estate. A tree-hidden gate let us

inside the fence, where another coughing jag sent me stumbling.

I stopped to bend over and wheeze.

Little mittened hands cupped my face. “You all right, Sarah?”

Sam’s eyes were wide.

“I’m fine,” I gasped. I’d been coughing so hard, tears were

leaking down my cheeks. I caught my breath, brushed the tears

off. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He smiled. He had a thing about
thank-you
s and
welcome
s. One social ritual he’d definitely mastered. I noticed the tip of his nose was pink and his cheeks had a chapped red

look. I wanted to get him inside, someplace warm. And safe.

Some place back home in Astoria.

“
You
all right, bud?” I mentally cursed myself for not being

more concerned about him before this.

“Didn’t you see?” He spun round, suddenly excited. He held

his arms straight up. “That boy who likes hardware stores lifted

me way, way high. He was so strong, Sarah. That ol’ smoke

didn’t get me.”

o11

I pulled his hood back over his head. “Thank goodness for that

boy, then, huh?” Sam nodded and trotted ahead a little to crunch

through an ice-crusted puddle. He turned and waited for me to

catch up with him so we could walk together on the narrow dirt

trail that cut across a pasture toward the stables.

“Sarah, why were all those people so
mad
?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain, bud, maybe even harder to

understand. A lot of people around here think people who aren’t

white aren’t as good as the white people and don’t deserve the

same rights, the same respect.”

“Even
Jackson
?” he asked, his voice tight with outrage.

“Even Jackson, even Rose. Even Dr. Chen and Mrs. Jimenez

back home.”

“That’s crazy, Sarah. Why d’they think a crazy thing like that?”

“I don’t really have an answer for that. You know that the

South fought a war a long time ago against England so they could

keep owning slaves? And that they had slaves in this country till

just before Gramma was born?” He nodded. “I think maybe

when you force another person to be a slave, you have to make

up a reason why you’re so much better than he is that you get to

own
him. You have to believe that he isn’t really a person at all.”

I shook my head. “They thought that for such a long time around

here, they just — they just can’t stop thinking it. It’s like part of who they are. They won’t give it up.”

It had been such a short time, in the scheme of things, that

slavery had been ended — less than a century. And the infamous

“black codes” — the South’s official limitations on its black citi-

zens’ basic liberties — weren’t repealed until the 1980s. In the

thirty years since, the races had continued to be kept separate

and very much unequal.

“They’re pretty stupid, Sarah.”

I laughed. It wasn’t often that Sam criticized anyone, but

12 O

when he did, it was a straight shot. “Yeah, bud. They are. And,

you know, they sort of think that way about women too — that

women aren’t as smart or as good as men.”

Sam, God bless him, just shook his head, disgusted. “That boy

who likes hardware stores doesn’t think that, does he?”

“No, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. And neither does his dad.

Not everybody around here thinks that way. But too many peo-

ple still do.”

Sam stopped still a moment, a puzzled furrow in his brow.

“Why is it so much worse now, Sarah?”

The question hit me with peculiar force. For half a moment, I

had some sense he wasn’t talking about Astoria. I shook my head,

lifted my shoulders a little. “I don’t know, bud. The place we

came from was just better.”

“But Maggie’s here. And we love Maggie.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “we love Maggie.”

He nodded and started walking again.

Sam hadn’t really known Maggie before Gramma’s funeral.

She’d been in South America for several years, working as a

teacher at a school that specialized in helping to mainstream

teenagers with cognitive disabilities. So the first time she and

Sam had met since he was a baby was at the funeral, and it had

been typically Sammy-odd. “This is your aunt Maggie,” Mom

had told him.

Sam looked at Maggie with really wide eyes and said, “Oh.

You got big.”

Which made me think that Mom maybe shouldn’t have

referred to Maggie as “my baby sister” quite so often. But Maggie

just nodded seriously and said. “I got big.”

Then Sam had tucked his hand into hers and said, “But we can

still be friends.”

And Maggie smiled and said, “We can still be friends.”

o13

Which — they had been. They’d clicked instantly. Made me

kind of jealous, really. Sammy had always been my best buddy.

We walked out of the little woods just northeast of Amber

House. I paused for a minute, eyeing my new home. Winter-

bare trees and shrubs formed a barricade of spider legs around

the house. It stood silhouetted against the southern horizon as if

it were the last solid structure between us and what lay forever

beyond.