I didn't know the microwave had buzzed until Mom set food in front of me. I looked up, arid Lisa had already finished eating. I hated it when Morn did stuff like that. Like she was pretending she was a good little mommy, taking care of her kids instead of a Skoag gropie who didn't give a damn. In the drug classes at school, they called that "ingratiating behavior" and said junkies and alkies used it to fool their families into thinking they were changing, especially if the families were close to sending them to a cure station. It didn't fool me. I crumpled up the paper and gave it to Lisa to play with, and ate dinner.
Two nights later, the man came. Maybe he thought no one would notice a grey government sedan pulled up in front of a slummy house at midnight. I heard someone nearly fall down the ramp, and when he knocked, I opened the door on its chain.
"Yeah," I said, but my stomach was shaking. Skoag slime dependency wasn't supposed to show up in pee tests. That's what all the kids said, and I'd always believed it was true, but what if they'd changed the test and knew from Mom's pee that she was a gropie? But I tried not to let any of that show on my face as I stared out the crack at the government man.
"I have to come in," he said, whispery. "I have to talk to your mother." "Too bad," I said, being tough. "She's deaf. You can write it down, or you can tell it to me, but you can't talk to her."
"I can sign," he said nervously, echoing with his fingers.
"She can't," I said, and started to close the door.
"Please," he said, not quite shoving his foot in the crack, but leaning on the door to keep it open. "It's about the dead Skoag. Lavender. And it's important, kid."
We stared at each other.
"Look, kid," he finally said. His voice came out normal, not whispery, but real tired. "I can come back with cops tomorrow and kick this door in and drag you out. It's that important. Or you can let me in now, and we'll keep this quiet."
My mom reached past me and undid the chain and the man came in. I hadn't even known she was awake. She looked awful, with her scarred face shining in the streetlamp light leaking in the door. All except for her hair, which was as pretty as ever. She clicked on the light and shut the door behind him. He looked around and said, "Oh, Jesus Christ." It was the first time I'd ever heard a grown man say it like a prayer. Then he sat down at our table, and started signing to my Mom.
He wasn't an aid man, or a drug man, but a real, high up, government man. The second surprise was that my Mom signed back to him. I suddenly remembered I hadn't seen the signing books around in a while. Probably in her room. Ingratiating behavior. I wondered what she'd been signing to Lisa while I was away at school each day. Then I forgot that and paid attention to what he was saying. He talked out loud as he signed, like it helped him keep his place or something.
"Lavender's… people… are very angry… about his death. He was… important Skoag (the sign for Skoag was to put your fingers on your forehead and make your hand do pushups, like a pulsing membrane). Not exile… but like a priest… or civil rights worker."
He went on about how important Lavender had been, how he had come in the hopes of reconciling the exiles and instead he started sharing their beliefs, and then went further than they did. It didn't match what Lavender had told me, but I kept my mouth shut. The heart of it was that news of his death had finally reached his home planet, and a lot of Skoags were very upset. The way he said it, I didn't know if the message had just taken that long to get there, or if the exiled Skoags had kept killing Lavender a secret. But I still kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the planet Skoags were going to send someone to look into it, and our government had agreed to co-operate fully. Including letting the Skoag talk to my Mom and me. I felt like telling him it was up to us whether we met the Skoags. But I didn't. He went on about how this was a real opportunity for Humans to establish diplomatic relations with the Skoag planet, and it might be our first step toward deep space, and the U.S. could lead the way, and all that shit. Then he suggested the first thing we'd have to do was move.
That's when I opened my mouth. "No," I said, firmly, and was surprised when my Mom repeated it, "No," very clear.
He talked a lot about why we had to move. The Skoag ambassador or whatever was coming, probably within two or three years. (I was surprised they didn't know exactly when, but they didn't.) And we had to be somewhere nice, so the U.S. wouldn't be embarrassed, and somewhere safe, so no terrorists would try to kidnap us or kill us, and somewhere more official, where advisors could tell us what to say to the Skoags.
He was still explaining at four in the morning, when Mom stood up, said, «NO» very emphatically, and then walked back to her bedroom and shut the door.
He stared at the door. Then he sighed, and rumpled up his hair. "This is a big mistake," he said. And he shook his head. "A damn big mistake that we're all going to hate remembering. You're going to blow it for all of us, kid, for the whole damn human race. Shit. Well, I guess we work around it, then."
So he left.
For a while I lay awake, wondering if there really was danger, if our neighbors would turn on us or terrorists would bomb us. But then I decided that at least terrorists wouldn't try to take Lisa away from me and put her in special school or a home while they treated Mom for being a gropie. That would happen for sure if they moved us, because there'd be no way to hide Mom's addiction. That was why Mom said no, too. She was afraid of losing her Skoag slime source. As for me, I could never leave the only place I'd ever shared with Lavender. I stared at the spot where he'd died. The chalk marks were years gone, but I could still see them.
The government man was trickier than I thought. A month later our neighborhood was picked for Facelift Funding. All owners were given eighteen months to upgrade or lose the funding. So our walls got spraysulated and paneled, and they foamed the floor and put in carpet-heat and a tiny insta-hot unit under the sink. Then the old furnace room became part of our apartment, as a second bedroom.
The whole neighborhood changed. They jackhammered up squares of sidewalk and put in skinny little trees, and all the buildings got new siding. They hauled away the trash heap from behind the building, including our old linoleum. They put in a tiny fenced play yard, with organo-turf and big plastic climbing toys. They put flower boxes around the streetlamps. I hated it. They were trying to cover us up, trying to say, these aren't poor people living in their own trash, these are nice folks like in the readers at school. The daddys and mommys have jobs, they go to church and their kids drink white milk and eat brown bread. I hated it, but Lisa loved it. She kept picking the flowers and bringing them to Mom. Mom always put them in a vase, just like Lavender's flowers. Sometimes I wanted to smash it.
I came home from school one day, and a moving van was just pulling away. Scared hell out of me. Had Mom decided to move after all, had she kidnapped Lisa and left? But she was there. «Govamin» she said disgustedly, and stood there like there was no place to sit.
All our old stuff was gone. Even the cupboards and fridge were different, and the cooker was huge, with hot beverage taps on the side. My couch was gone, the friendly smell of mice gone with it. The new one matched the fat chair beside it. The stereo was about as big as a loaf of bread, but it was a real wall-shaker. There was a vid-box, a keyboard console and a mini-dish. Guess the government wanted us to look good.