“Listen, you all!” jackal boy announced. ‘This is unbelievable! He knew Jen. He went to her house and everything!”
There was a flurry of questions—”What was she like?” “Did she tell you about the rally?” “How did you know her?” Someone produced a bag of cookies and they all passed it around, like it was a party.
It was a party. It was a party where they were accepting Luke into their group. Just because he knew Jen.
Luke did his best to answer all the questions.
“Jen was — amazing,” he said. “She wasn’t scared of anything. Not the Population Police, not the Government, not anyone. Not even her parents.” Luke thought about how strange it was that Jen’s father worked for the Population Police. Mr. Talbot was like a double agent, trying to help third children instead of killing them. But he hadn’t been able to prevent his own daughter’s death. He’d just barely managed to keep the Population Police from finding out that she had been his daughter.
Luke didn’t want to talk about Jen’s death, just her life.
“She spent months planning the rally,” he said. “It was her statement, ‘I deserve to exist We deserve to exist’ She wanted as many third children there as possible. Out of hiding. She thought the Government would have to listen. She took everyone to the steps of the president’s house…” Luke remembered the fight they’d had when he’d refused to go. And how she’d forgiven him. He stopped talking, lost in grief
“The Government killed everyone at the rally,” Nina finished for him.
Luke nodded blindly. He couldn’t ignore Jen’s death. He choked out, “Jen was a true hero. She was the bravest person I’ll ever know. And someday — someday everyone will know about her.”
The others nodded solemnly. They know how I feel, Luke marveled. And then, in spite of his grief, he felt a shot of joy: I am one of them. I belong.
After that, somehow, he was able to tell happy stories about Jen. He had the whole crowd laughing when he described how Jen had dusted for his fingerprints the first time he’d gone to her house.
“She wanted to make sure I was..“ Luke hesitated. He had been about to say “another shadow child, like her.” But that wasn’t how he wanted to reveal his secret, just letting it slip out like it didn’t matter. He finished lamely, “She wanted to make sure I was who I said I was.”
“So,” jackal boy said, lounging against a tree. “Who are you, anyway? What’s your real name, ‘Lee’?”
Luke looked at the circle of faces surrounding him. Jackal boy’s question had silenced the laughter. Or maybe it was Luke’s sudden stammering. Now everyone was watching Luke expectantly. An owl hooted somewhere deeper in the woods, and it was like a signal. Finally It was time to tell.
“L—” Luke started. But the word stuck in his throat All those nights he’d whispered his name, all those times he’d longed to speak his name aloud — and now he couldn’t.
Some of the dry cookie crumbs slid back on his tongue and he started coughing, choking. One of the other boys had to pound him on the back before Luke got his breath back.
“Lee Grant,” Luke said, as soon as he could speak again. His urge to confess was gone. “My name is Lee Grant”
“Sure,” jackal boy kidded him. “Whatever you say”
And then Luke felt foolish. Jackal boy had revealed his real name. Why couldn’t Luke reveal his?
Because, Luke thought with a chill, I didn’t decide to belong. Jackal boy decided for me.
Twenty Two
Belonging to jackal boy’s group made all the difference in the world. It began that night. Luke didn’t have to creep back from the woods by himself, praying nobody noticed. He went with the others, as part of the crowd. They strutted down the hall, not even trying to be quiet.
“What if someone hears?” Luke ventured.
“Who cares?” jackal boy replied. “Indoctrination’s almost over. If there are any teachers around, they’ll just think we left early to man our hall monitor posts.”
They were in a brighter end of the hall now. Jackal boy got a good look at Luke’s face and whistled.
“You really did get all bloody. Come on. I’ll take you to the nurse.”
Jackal boy led Luke to an unfamiliar office, one he’d seen only once before, when he was searching for windows.
“My friend walked into the wall, coming out of Indoctrination,” Jackal boy told the woman who answered the door. “Stupid, huh? Can you give him a bandage?”
“My, my, you boys. You never look where you’re going,” the woman fussed. She was old and wrinkled, like the pictures Luke had seen of grandmothers. She puttered around getting antiseptic and gauze and tape. Then she dabbed at Luke’s cheek with a wet cloth. “This is an awfully rough abrasion. Which wall did you run into, dear?”
Jackal boy saved Luke from having to answer.
“Oh, he didn’t get bloody from the wall,” jackal boy explained. “He kind of bounced off the wall and fell down. Then he scraped his face on the carpet. Someone might have kicked him by mistake, too.”
Luke’s mother would have listened to an excuse like that and then said, “Okay. Now. What really happened?” But this woman only nodded and tsk-tsked a little more.
The antiseptic stung, and Luke had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. But the woman was quick, and his face was neatly bandaged before he knew it.
“Write your name and the time down in the log on your way out,” the woman said. ‘And be more careful the next time, all right?”
Jackal boy even wrote Luke’s name for him.
Up in their room, jackal boy stretched and yawned and proclaimed, “1 don’t feel like dealing with the new kid tonight Let’s just leave him alone. Okay, guys? He’s getting boring, anyway”
Luke thought some of his other roommates looked disappointed, but nobody complained.
In the morning, jackal boy said, “You can have breakfast with us. We have our own table. Hall monitor privileges.”
“But I’m not a hall monitor,” Luke said.
“The teachers won’t notice,” jackal boy said. “And maybe you will be soon.”
So Luke sat at a table with other boys. For once he didn’t have to force himself to choke down his oatmeal. It practically tasted good. And for the first time, Luke got a good look around the dining hall without feeling like he had to glance quickly and furtively With clean white walls and a peaked ceiling, it really wasn’t such a bad place.
“Can I ask you some questions? Here, I mean,” Luke said to jackal boy.
“As long as you’re not acting like a real exnay,” jackal boy said brusquely, as if he were truly swearing at Luke. But Luke caught the double meaning. It was a brilliant code.
“Why is this school like this?” Luke began. “1 mean, with no windows, and the strange boys… and the teachers who don’t seem to notice us unless we do something wrong. And even then, they just say, ‘Two demerits.’ I don’t even know what that means.”
Jackal boy pushed back his oatmeal and smirked.
“Confusing, huh?” he asked mockingly. But he started explaining, anyway. “Hendricks began as an educational experiment. Back when there were the famines, people had debates about whether the undesirables in society deserved food when so many were starving. They let all the criminals die, but a bunch of bleeding-heart, sympathetic types said it was cruel not to feed people with mental illnesses, physical disabilities, that kind of thing.
One man stepped forward and offered his family’s estate to be two schools for troubled kids. Hendricks for boys and Harlow for girls. He said he’d feed them, too — you see how well he’s doing.” Jackal boy made a face at the oatmeal. “They built the schools without windows because Mr. Hendricks had the idea that kids with agoraphobia — the ones scared of wide-open spaces — would be better off not even seeing the outdoors. He thought they’d start longing for what they couldn’t see. And he thought having windows would just overstimulate the autistic kids. But he also thought it’d be good to bring in some normal kids. Like role models.”