“Tell that to… everybody. I’m so nervous I can barely walk straight. See?” He stumbled for her and took a few boneless steps before straightening up and walking straight beside her again. “I keep thinking it’s a bad idea. Have you heard that from anyone else?”
“Anika still wants the number five involved somehow. Like that. A couple others, angry about their schemes getting ignored.”
He stopped her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Jane applied for all those crazy kids. All of them? Can you fucking believe that?”
“You can’t split up the family,” Jemma said.
“It’s a big step,” he said, shaking his head. She wasn’t sure if she meant applying to adopt Kidney’s whole family, or his moving in with Father Jane, another unsolicited confidence he’d given her, on another walk like this one the week before. She did not understand their relationship, and though it sometimes helped her to fall asleep at night, picturing them in bed, or playing cards, or imagining that she was John Grampus reaching out, so slowly and hesitantly, to touch the unfamiliar and rather frightening boob, she didn’t want to think of it right now.
“As big as it gets,” Jemma agreed, an appropriate platitude, she thought, and she ducked into the stairwell. He didn’t follow her. She sat down on the stairs, put her head in her hands, and thought of the boobs, a hundred boobs and a hundred hands reaching out, hesitating and uncertain, to touch them. Go away, she said to them, and the kaleidoscope vision fractured and fell in on itself. Then it was dark behind her eyes but she could feel the people passing by outside the door, and feel John Grampus making his anxious way up to the roof. “Sometimes it’s hard to be alone,” she’d said to Rob, and he’d held her tighter in their bed, thinking she was complaining of loneliness.
It was the same old class — diffident and minimally instructive — until the kids started talking about their families. Juan was the only non-orphan. He sat back in the grass, looking deeply at every speaking face as they went around and around in a circle. They were supposed to be trying to levitate a pencil — not that Jemma could lift inanimate objects with her mind (she tried to float knives and soap and pins in the water but though she had lifted hundred-kilo Helena none of it would budge) but wasn’t it possible that their gifts were of another sort entirely than Jemma’s? Moving pencils, changing the color of grass, turning a candy mushroom to a real mushroom with a blink of the eye — maybe they couldn’t heal for the same reason that Jemma couldn’t shoot lasers out of her eyes: it was simply not for her to do it.
“We should have been able to pick,” Magnolia said. “What if I get some freak?”
“The angel listened to you, didn’t she?” said Josh.
“She could still give me a freak.”
“Maybe you want a freak,” said Jarvis. “You want a freak to freak with.”
“We should have been able to do our own,” said Ethel. “We’re old enough. We’ve been through enough. Jesus fucking Christ. Nobody bothered to ask us.”
“There was that whole three days of testimony…” Jemma started to say.
“Nobody asked the important questions,” Ethel said glumly.
“We’re jumping ship if they try to split us up,” said States’-Rights. He reached out toward Kidney, on the other side of the circle. She stuck out her tongue at him.
“We should just all stay together,” said Cindy Flemm. “Us thirteen.”
“And Rob,” said Magnolia. “He could stay.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?” Cindy asked, turning to Jemma.
“Like a really horrible skin condition,” Jemma said, but she hugged her.
“What’s going to happen?” Kidney asked of the sky.
“Nothing,” said Jarvis. “It’s the same as before. The same old shit, just different people stepping in it.”
“It’s going to be totally different,” Josh said confidently. “Everything’s going to change. You’re going to have a family. Haven’t you been listening to anything?” Jarvis only tapped on his ear, and smiled.
“Families come and go,” said Pickie, “but you remain, forever.” He snapped his finger. “Like that. That’s how quickly they are gone. Who cares about them, in the end? There is no other family besides brothers.”
“And sisters,” said Magnolia.
“Sisters are irrelevant,” Pickie said. The discussion degraded into an argument, boys against girls, then the under-tens against the over-tens, arguing not about brothers or sisters or families but the necessity of underwear, or icing, or whether it would be better if no one ever had to pee. Food flew. Jemma lay back in the grass again, watching cupcakes sail against another bright blue sky, imagining Rob in his calculus class, standing at the giant plasma board, striking glowing circles in the dark glass as he poked it with his finger and swept out curves and lines and figures. Everyone in the class had a button stuck on their head, and furthermore everyone in the hospital had one, had always had one set right between their eyebrows, red as a firetruck and tall as the eraser on a fresh pencil. They were reset buttons, or surprise buttons, placed to be pressed in case of potentially lethal boredom or disappointment.
“Are you all ready?” she asked innocently, after class, after another hour spent wandering on the ramp, after Carla drew her behind the branches of a huge fern on the fifth floor. She’d seen her on the ramp, on the roof — she drifted close enough during class to be struck by a piece of fat — and twice in the lobby, her long horse-face appearing in flashes through the nervous, milling crowd. “Are you following me?” Jemma had finally asked her, when she caught her lurking near the fern. Jemma was coming away from a visit with Sadie’s knitting circle, pockets full of hats and booties.
“I just wanted to ask,” Carla said. “I just wanted to say. I know, a long time ago — it seems so long ago, Jemma. A hundred years, and it hasn’t even been a hundred days. We didn’t always see the same about things. I’m sorry if I was ever… harsh… and I wanted to make sure. Everybody wants Ella but she belongs with me. Those people weren’t her family. They were kids. They hardly ever came to see her. It was me and Candy and Nicole, but mostly me. Candy and Nicole agree — we had a discussion. It was me. I have to get her.”
“I’m just going to press the button.”
“I’ve got some stuff. It’s not like anything else, and okay for a girl like you. I checked, of course. I can’t even describe how it makes you feel. There’s that, or anything else you can think of. Or something you can’t even think of — we’re all dreaming of new things. Every day there’s something new. I keep wondering why we didn’t think of all the possibilities, back before. Were we just too sad, to use our imaginations? But you know what I mean, right? You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Jemma said. “Sort of. Look, I just press the button. That’s it. Nothing more, just…” She pressed briskly on Carla’s forehead, right where her button should be.
“But she’ll listen to you,” Carla said.
“She listens to everybody,” Jemma said.
“Are you ready?” Jemma asked again of the crowd. It was eleven fifty-nine. She paused with her finger inches away from the button, wondering if she should take this opportunity to lead them in imagining how their lives would change after the Match. If anyone has any objections, she wanted to say, let him speak now or else. She stayed with her finger just inches from the button, asking silently of all the faces in the crowded council room, Do you know what this means, and asking the same thing of herself. She placed her other hand over her belly. For a few moments it was very quiet, until Maggie spoke from out of the crowd.
“What are you waiting for, genius?” she asked. “Don’t you know how to press a fucking button?”