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
The Other Side of the Island (5 page)
“What are you detecting?” Honor asked wearily.
“Anything with iron. Screws, nails, ancient tools,” said Helix. “I scan the surface with my magnet. Then I sift the sand through my fingers.”
“Let me see.”
They bent over the magnet together. “If you had a magnet like this, you could make a metal detector,” Helix said.
“How many points are they?” Honor asked.
“I don’t know. Why? Are you poor?” Helix asked with sudden interest.
Honor hesitated. Then she said, “Yes, I’m poor and I live by the shore.”
“Are you a refugee?” asked Helix.
Honor wasn’t sure what a refugee was, but she was too proud to let on. “Maybe,” she said. “I hate school,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to be a refugee to hate school,” said Helix.
The next day at recess Helix was looking for Honor. He dug into his pocket and took out a big magnet tied to a piece of string. “This one’s for you,” he said. Together they walked across the playground, trying to detect scrap metal. Honor found a rusty nail.
“Beginner’s luck,” said Helix, and they kept walking.
“Your father works for my father,” Helix said. “They work in the same building.”
“The Central Computer Building?”
Helix nodded. “What island are you from?”
“I don’t think it had a number.”
“You came from a numberless island?” Helix was fascinated.
Honor nodded. “In the North.”
“But nobody can live on a numberless island. You were evacuated, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Honor.
“What was it like? How did they find you? Did Retrievers come for you?”
Honor didn’t answer.
“Why were your parents sent here?”
“The same reason everyone else was,” snapped Honor. The Colonies were the only islands with official numbers. They were the only islands where the Corporation permitted people to live.
“But why to this island?”
“For work,” Honor said.
Helix looked at her skeptically. They were standing under a tree, but even in the shade the sun beat down on their shoulders. Their hair was wet with sweat under their sun hats. “If they were sent for work,” Helix said, “then why hasn’t your mother been chosen for employment?”
“When are you going to get a job?” Honor asked her mother that night. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, and her parents were cooking chicken and rice in a pot.
Pamela didn’t answer.
“Everyone else has a job,” said Honor.
Pamela looked at Will. Then she said, “Sometimes the Corporation has too many engineers in one place.”
“They wouldn’t send you here if there were too many engineers on the island already,” Honor pointed out. “Don’t you want to find work?”
“Of course I do,” Pamela said.
“If you get a job, we could move. We could afford to live on higher ground.”
“Yes, I realize that,” said Pamela. “I want a job very much. I have gone to the City every day and applied at every office.”
“Then why won’t they give you one?”
“Well, in my case,” Pamela said, “it’s because we’re going to have a baby.”
Honor stared at her parents in horror.
“You’re going to have a brother or a sister,” said Will. Honor gasped. Brother and sister were swear words.
“We’re having the baby in month seven,” said Pamela.
“How?” Honor demanded. She was dumbfounded. A mother, a father, and a child made a family. Families came in threes. She had never heard of a family of four.
“The baby will be interesting,” said her mother, “and it will grow and go to school like you.”
“No one at school has babies at home,” Honor said.
For just a second her father looked angry. “What do you care?”
“We aren’t like other people,” said her mother.
“Who are we like, then?” Honor asked.
Her parents laughed.
Then Honor ran out the back door to the rocky place where her father had planted bananas, and she crouched down under their broad green leaves and cried.
Her father came out after her, but she pushed him away. She kept crying until her mother bent down and whispered that she had to come inside. If she kept making so much noise, the Neighborhood Watch was sure to hear. She went inside and dried her tears. She sat silently at dinner.
“I’m sorry we laughed,” her father said.
“A baby is wonderful,” said Pamela. “You’ll see.”
“We’ll find a better house. We aren’t going to live here forever, you know,” her father said.
Her parents didn’t understand. After the baby, her family would never fit in. Other families were three, and hers would be four. Other families were the right number, and hers would be too big.
Honor decided she wouldn’t tell anyone at school about the baby. Not even Helix. But he surprised her. They were standing on a picnic table and taking turns jumping off. They laid sticks down on the ground to measure how far they jumped.
Honor was poised to jump off the table when Helix said, “I heard my father say your mother is going to have a baby.”
Honor had been so close to jumping that she lost her balance and fell in a heap in the dirt. “Now look what you made me do.”
“Sorry,” said Helix, and he climbed onto the table for his turn.
She scrambled back up. “No, it’s still my turn. That doesn’t count.”
“Is it true?”
“Shh.”
“It’s a secret?”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“Why?”
From her perch on the table Honor watched as Helena, Hortense, and Hiroko strolled past. “Because I have enough trouble already! I live by the shore. No one will come to my house.”
“You can come to our house,” said Helix.
Honor thought he was just feeling sorry for her. “I don’t want to,” she said.
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“We have a sprinkler pool.”
“I’ll ask my parents,” Honor said.
Honor could keep the baby a secret at school, but at the town houses, everyone noticed that Pamela was getting bigger. Honor was glad that none of the neighbor children went to the Old Colony School.
Sometimes before dinner she played with the girls from the other town houses. They were children of the island’s First People, girls with tanned skin and brown eyes. Their names were Felicia, Gina, and Hattie. Honor envied their smooth black hair.
There were basketball hoops in the paved lot in front of the town houses. Honor and the other girls played basketball, and a group of boys kicked a soccer ball. They played a wild game called Forecaster where one boy pelted the others with a ball. The game was Not Allowed, because the word Forecaster was Unacceptable. Whenever the boys got caught by the Neighborhood Watch, they had to rake and sweep and break down boxes for recycling.
“Do you know what you are saying when you use the word Forecaster?” Mr. Pratt demanded once. “The Forecaster is a madman. He’d drown you as soon as look at you. He worships Old Weather. He thinks the world was better off before. And all he wants is for you to disobey. Take these brooms and sweep the steps.” He gestured to the cement stairs from the empty lot to the town houses.
The boys hung their heads and accepted their punishment, but after some weeks had passed, they played Forecaster again. The girls could hear them using the F-word as they slammed the ball into each other. “I’m gonna forecast you!” At a safe distance, a cluster of little girls jumped rope. If the little girls found a bit of chalk, they’d draw hopscotch squares on the asphalt. They’d play clapping games, chanting:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see an elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence
He jumped so high, high, high
He reached the sky, sky, sky
And didn’t come back, back, back
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly.
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see an elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence
He jumped so high, high, high
He reached the sky, sky, sky
And didn’t come back, back, back
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly.
The girls had seen pictures of the elephants that had once roamed the wild grasslands, but no one knew exactly what July had been on the old calendar. The older girls argued about it. Hattie thought July had been a summer month at the end of the year, but Honor was sure July had been a winter month. Why else would Miss Mary be buttoned up in back? She must have been cold. Honor imagined cool breezes way up in the July sky. What a beautiful word. She wished the impossible: that her parents could name the baby July.
FIVE
THE AFTERNOON THEY WENT TO HELIX’S HOUSE, HONOR’S
family took the bus high up the slope of the volcano. Helix had the loveliest house Honor had ever seen. The outside was white, and the roof was tiled with blue-green tiles like the scales of a dragon. When Helix’s mother opened the door, Honor felt the breeze of cooling units. She could see right through the living room to a white courtyard blooming lavender and pale pink with flowering trees. There was the tiled sprinkler pool shining in the center of the courtyard.
family took the bus high up the slope of the volcano. Helix had the loveliest house Honor had ever seen. The outside was white, and the roof was tiled with blue-green tiles like the scales of a dragon. When Helix’s mother opened the door, Honor felt the breeze of cooling units. She could see right through the living room to a white courtyard blooming lavender and pale pink with flowering trees. There was the tiled sprinkler pool shining in the center of the courtyard.
All afternoon she and Helix played in the sprinkler pool. The water was knee-deep and the fountain in the center pelted them with droplets. Helix’s parents, the Thompsons, sat with Honor’s parents in chairs outside and sipped drinks in little glasses. As usual, the grown-ups talked about the weather and the Corporation and the New Five-Year Plan for extending Enclosure into the Tranquil Sea.
When Honor and Helix got hungry, they wrapped themselves in big white towels and padded into the kitchen. Helix opened the refrigerator and Honor saw apples and oranges and packages of cheese and every kind of juice, even blueberry juice. When Helix opened the cupboard, there were chocolate cookies and date bars and dried apricots and pretzels and animal crackers. Helix took a fistful of animal crackers for himself and a fistful for Honor.
“Are you High Level?” she asked Helix.
“Yup,” said Helix with his mouth full. “My parents are members of the Corporation.”
“Oh,” said Honor. Her parents were not members of the Corporation. There were never animal crackers at her house.
“My father is working in Future Planning,” Helix boasted. “He’s designing future weather in the Tranquil Sea. And my mother—”
“It’s starting to rain,” interrupted Honor.
The two of them looked through the kitchen window. The sky was dark. Leaves and napkins whipped around in the wind outside. The adults raced inside with their drinks.
“They weren’t predicting a storm,” Honor’s mother said.
“They’re usually very good here. Usually you get at least a day’s warning,” said Mr. Thompson. “But every once in a while . . .”
“Yes, every once in a while the weather is Unpredictable,” said Will.
The windows in the airy house began to rattle. Honor felt a prickle of fear.
Mrs. Thompson reassured them, “We have a safe room.”
“I wish we did,” Pamela said.
“Wouldn’t make much of a difference,” Will pointed out. “We’re too close to the shore.”
“Why don’t you all follow me.” Mr. Thompson opened a door in the living room and showed them a stairway. “It’s just a few steps down.”
Then the lights went out.
In the dim light of the windows, they descended the stairs into a dark room. Mrs. Thompson fumbled and found a flashlight, which she turned on. Then Honor saw that the room was lined with shelves, and on the shelves were neatly stacked boxes of crackers and cookies and cans of tuna fish and vegetables and juice. There was a whole shelf full of flashlights and packages of batteries. There were shelves of games and puzzles. Lower shelves held rolled-up sleeping bags and even pillows. Through an open door, Honor saw that the safe room had its own bathroom with a toilet and a bathtub and stacks of white towels.
“You have everything,” whispered Honor, and her parents and the Thompsons laughed.
“I’ve even got my old fiddle down here,” said Mr. Thompson.
“Will you play for us?” asked Pamela.
“If I had my harmonica, I’d play with you,” said Will. “The Postal Service got that when we moved here.”
“Won’t you play us a song?” Pamela asked again.
“Oh, I can’t play for you,” said Mr. Thompson. “I’m so out of practice. I haven’t played in years. If I did, I’d have to play new music in the Colony Orchestra. I just couldn’t . . .” He glanced at Honor and Helix where they sat on the floor drinking apple juice from cans. “I just don’t have the time.”
The apple juice tasted like metal, but Honor liked it.
“How long do they last, in general?” her father asked Mr. Thompson.
“We’ve only had one bad storm, and that was years ago,” Mr. Thompson said.
“At least three years ago,” Mrs. Thompson said. “The last one went on about two days. We had some broken windows. Broken tiles on the roof. A lot of trees came down.”
“The trees blocked the roads,” said Mr. Thompson. “Most of the shore was underwater.”
Honor tensed.
“That was before they built the seawall,” Mr. Thompson added quickly.
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