She hated the little thing. Even dead, she hated it.
“This is Tony,” Mr. Benson said. “And guess what, he isn’t one of the plague kids. Just some poor boy born with a birth defect. About three percent of newborns are born this way every year. It causes one out of five infant deaths.”
Tony, some of the kids chuckled. They thought it weird it had a name.
“We used to believe embryos developed in isolation in the uterus,” the teacher said. “Then back in the Sixties, a company sold thalidomide to pregnant women in Germany to help them with morning sickness. Ten thousand kids born with deformed limbs. Half died. What did scientists learn from that? Anybody?”
“A medicine a lady takes can hurt her baby even if it don’t hurt her,” Jake said.
“Bingo,” Mr. Benson said. “Medicine, toxins, viruses, we call these things environmental factors. Most times, though, doctors have no idea why a baby like Tony is born. It just happens, like a dice roll. So is Tony a monster? What about a kid who’s retarded, or born with legs that don’t work? Is a kid in a wheelchair a monster too? A baby born deaf or blind?”
He got no takers. The class sat quiet and thoughtful. Satisfied, Mr. Benson carried the jar back to the cabinet. More gasps as baby Tony bobbed in the fluid, like he was trying to get out.
The teacher frowned as he returned the jar to its shelf. “I’m surprised just this upsets you. If this gets you so worked up, how will you live with the plague children? When they’re adults, they’ll have the same rights as you. They’ll live among you.”
Amy stiffened at her desk, neck clenched with tension at the idea. A question formed in her mind. “What if we don’t want to live with them?”
Mr. Benson pointed at the jar. “This baby is you. And something not you. If Tony had survived, he would be different, yes. But he would be you.”
“I think we have a responsibility to them,” Jake said.
“Who’s we?” Amy said.
His contradicting her had stung a little, but she knew how Jake had his own mind and liked to argue. He wore leather jackets, black T-shirts advertising obscure bands, ripped jeans. Troy and Michelle, his best friends, were Black. He was popular because being unpopular didn’t scare him. Amy liked him for that, the way he flouted junior high’s iron rules. The way he refused to suck up to her like the other boys all did.
“You know who I mean,” he said. “The human race. We made them, and that gives us responsibility. It’s that simple.”
“I didn’t make anything. The older generation did. Why are they my problem?”
“Because they have it bad. We all know they do. Imagine being one of them.”
“I don’t want things to be bad for them,” Amy said. “I really don’t. I just don’t want them around me. Why does that make me a bad person?”
“I never said it makes you a bad person,” Jake said.
Archie Gaines raised his hand. “Amy has a good point, Mr. Benson. They’re a mess to stomach, looking at them. I mean, I can live with it, I guess. But all this love and understanding is a lot to ask.”
“Fair enough,” Mr. Benson said.
Archie turned to look back at Amy. She nodded her thanks. His face lit up with a leering smile. He believed he’d rescued her and now she owed him. She gave him a practiced frown to shut down his hopes. He turned away as if slapped.
“I’m just curious about them,” Jake said. “More curious than scared. It’s like you said, Mr. Benson. However they look, they’re still our brothers. I wouldn’t refuse help to a blind man, I guess I wouldn’t to a plague kid neither.”
The teacher nodded. “Okay. Good. That’s enough discussion for today. We’re getting somewhere, don’t you think? Again, my goal for you kids this year is two things. One is to get used to the plague kids. Distinguishing between a book and its cover. The other is to learn how to avoid making more of them.”
Jake turned to Amy and winked. Her cheeks burned, all her annoyance with him forgotten.
She hoped there was a lot more sex ed and a lot less monster talk in her future. While Mr. Benson droned on, she glanced through the first few pages of her book. A chapter headline caught her eye: KISSING.
She already knew the law regarding sex. Germ or no germ, the legal age of consent was still fourteen in the State of Georgia. But another law said if you wanted to have sex, you had to get tested for the germ first. If you were under eighteen, your parents had to give written consent for the testing.
Kissing, though, that you could do without any fuss. It said so right here in black and white. You could do it all you wanted. Her scalp tingled at the thought. She tugged at her hair and savored the stabbing needles.
She risked a hungering glance at Jake’s handsome profile. Though she wanted to go further than that, a lot further, she could never do more than kissing. She could never know what it’d be like to scratch the real itch.
Nobody but her mama knew Amy was a plague child.
A Preview of The Ship
London burned for three weeks. And then it got worse…
Lalla has grown up sheltered from the chaos amid the ruins of civilization. But things are getting more dangerous outside. People are killing each other for husks of bread, and the police are detaining anyone without an identification card. On her sixteenth birthday, Lalla’s father decides it’s time to use their escape route—a ship he’s built that is big enough to save only five hundred people.
But the utopia her father has created isn’t everything it appears. There’s more food than anyone can eat, but nothing grows; more clothes than anyone can wear, but no way to mend them; and no one can tell her where they are going.
the manifest is full we leaveRight up until the day we boarded, I wondered whether the ship was just a myth. There were so many myths in my life then. The display cases in the British Museum were full of them, and the street prophets crowding the pavements outside ranted new ones at my mother and me every time we walked past. From time to time, there was a government raid and, for a few days, the streets would be empty, except for the one prophet who always survived. He sat on the corner of Bedford Square and Gower Street, filthy in worn denim, holding up a board that said, “God has forgotten us.” I don’t know why the troops left him. Perhaps they agreed with him; in any case, he must have had a card. He was still there when we left, sailing past the car window as though he were the one on water. It was my sixteenth birthday.
I was born at the end of the world, although I did not know it at the time. While I fretted at my mother’s breast, demanding more milk than she was able to give me, great cargo ships sailed out of countries far, far away, carrying people from lands that were sinking, or burning, or whose natural bounty had been exhausted. While I took my first stumbling steps, cities across the world that had once housed great industries crumbled into dust, and pleasure islands that had been raised from the oceans melted back into them as though they had never existed. And as I began to talk, the people in the surviving corners of civilisation fell silent, and plugged their ears and their hearts while the earth was plundered for its last scrapings of energy, of fertility. Of life.