Children of the Uprising Collection Page 3

  Even though he was a Two and was supposed to have superior genes, Jude was useless at running, throwing, catching, kicking, and anything else that required coordination. He wasn’t much better at the things that didn’t require coordination; at school, he regularly scored in the bottom percentiles because he could never finish the daily tests in the allotted time frames. Worst of all, he was terrible at making friends; even among his fellow losers, he was avoided. His parents noticed. For a few years, they took him to doctors, who injected him with medicine that was supposed to make him stronger, faster, smarter, and more likable. Those attempts always ended in disappointment and frightening side effects, like the time Jude found a long black hair growing from his left eyeball. For the past two years, he’d been living as a piece of old furniture in the house: tolerated but wholly unwanted.

  So that was that. His mother did at least say goodbye, though it was rushed because the two female guards were already on either side of him, pulling him through the door. He tried to get one last look at his father’s face, but he was looking down at his watch.

  The guards put Jude in a driverless little white transport with bars on the windows and shut the door. He rode alone to the place he’d spend the next seven years of his life: Fox County Juvenile Detention Center. It was so rare that Jude was alone, truly alone, that he didn’t quite know what to do. He realized he could cry if he wanted to, so he did. Then he realized that with his hands tied behind his back, he wouldn’t be able to wipe his tears before he saw the guards who would collect him on the other side.

  Who cares?

  It wasn’t a typical thought for Jude, but this wasn’t a typical situation. He said it aloud, to no one, and then again, louder and louder until he was roaring it: “Who cares?”

  It wasn’t until he kicked the floorboards of the transport that it pulled over to the shoulder quick enough to knock Jude’s head against the window. “Please stay calm,” said a robot voice, disguised as a young woman’s. “Transport will resume when blood pressure returns to your body’s average rate. Please take five calming breaths.”

  Feeling the bruise forming on the side of his head, he leaned back and rested on the seat. He inhaled. He exhaled.

  It only took a few days for him to stop looking forward to meal times. So far, he’d choked down moldy biscuits, soggy mushrooms, and uncooked corn on the cob. Most of the food he’d come into contact with looked like it had seen its first birthday come and go. But Jude had made the decision that he wanted to stay alive. He’d only been alive for eleven years, and even though he wasn’t sure what the point of it was, he at least wanted the chance to find out. He came up with a strategy for getting food into his stomach without dry-heaving, and after a few days, when the soreness in his right hand where they’d implanted a tracking chip had worn away, he decided to try out his idea. He held a white plastic spork in his right hand, and he focused on the clock hung high on the cheap drywall.

  Albin Kopecky placed his tray across from Jude and lifted one leg over the long bench to sit, but Jude’s gaze didn’t leave the clock. “What’s up, Reeder?”

  “Shh.”

  The slight hand hit twelve, and Jude’s spork moved like a hummingbird from his plate to his mouth. With his shoulders hunched over the table and his spine in the shape of a C, he ate, hardly chewing, hardly breathing, until the hand returned back to twelve.

  Kopecky gave a chuckle and glanced over either shoulder. “It ain’t a race, y’know.”

  A whole minute to spare, so why not? “It’s my new system. You get the calories, but not the taste. You eat in intervals, one minute on, one minute off for four minutes.”

  “You look like a lunatic.”

  “I don’t care. And anyway, you should probably start trying it out, ’cause they’ll probably make it mandatory soon.” He nodded toward the camera over his left shoulder, but his eyes were on the clock. “Excuse me.”

  “What do you—”

  But Jude was already speed-eating again, pieces of boiled celery flying down his throat. Kopecky swore softly, bowing his head and avoiding the eyes of all who’d turned their heads. Jude stopped when his food was gone, with six seconds to spare. He blotted the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

  “What do I mean by that? I mean that I’m doing this for my sensitive taste buds”—an eye-roll from Kopecky—“but I realize it’s very efficient. It won’t be long now until the administration understands what I’m doing, adjusts for less rest time, and normalizes it.”

  “Yeah? They gonna make us talk like pussies, too?”

  Jude blinked. “One: they give us twenty-five minutes for lunch, and I finish in four. That’s twenty-one wasted minutes when I could be making house numbers or license plates or road signs. They’d be stupid if they missed that, and they aren’t. Two: if you wanted to critique me and use expletives, why did you come over at all?”

  Kopecky exhaled. “I dunno. Guess I’ll get going.” He grabbed the tray with both hands and hovered it an inch above the table. He looked over Jude’s shoulders at the crowded cafeteria. Jude once again heard the low rumble of conversation, like gravel under tires, and he turned around to look at Kopecky’s view. There were some small holes between groups of friends and allies, but no place where a person could eat alone.

  The tray popped back down. “Well, why should I go? I’m here now.”

  Jude leaned over his empty plate. “Nobody likes you.”

  “So what? Nobody likes you neither.”

  “I know.”

  “You seem used to it, though.”

  “Yes. You’ll get used to it too.”

  “I been here for nine years, kid,” said Kopecky. “I never did yet.”

  “You’ve been eating alone for nine years? Not by choice? How?”

  “They’re scared of me. Why I’m here.”

  Jude considered this a moment. Everyone needed a friend, his mother had always said, but needing something and having it were different things. He could just as easily turn people into friends as he could turn them into rabbits. He’d never even been through a real Emotion Talk, although they frequently practiced the script in school. It went like this: Do you need to talk? Tell me more. What can you do to stop this? I’m glad we talked. The emotional kid could say whatever they liked, but the friend had to stick to the script. You never know when you can make things worse. Not that Jude ever got the chance. Whatever this boy had done, it seemed silly to waste this opportunity to force someone into getting to know him.

  “I’m Jude.”

  “I know. You’re the artist.”

  Jude frowned. “Well, no…”

  “No? Your teacher tell you to meet her there at the wall?”

  Jude’s back straightened. “The principal.”

  Kopecky clapped once and threw his head back. “Ha! They set you up!”

  “It was a mistake. I’ll be out of here as soon as they reach Mr. Richards to testify that I did not—”

  “Buddy, Mr. Richards went back to his own miserable life after he followed those orders to get you locked up.” He took a bite of mashed potatoes the consistency of melted ice cream without grimacing. “Happens all the time. Who’d you piss off?”

  “What?”

  “Someone had it out for you. Usually it’s schools weeding out the kids they know will end up here in a few years anyway. Sometimes parents. So who hated you?”

  Jude’s mouth hung open. He had done exactly nothing except what Mr. Richards asked him to do. The message that had flashed on his watch was Meet me at this address at 9 tonight. Yes, it had seemed odd and it was after curfew, but why would he have questioned it? If he'd learned one lesson in school, it was that you didn’t question things adults told you to do.

  Kopecky slurped up the last of his potatoes and then set his spork down. “Do you need to talk?”

  Jude inspected Kopecky’s face for signs of deviousness, but saw nothing he recognized, as usual. Yes, he wanted to talk. He wanted to tell someone tha
t he was sure Kopecky was wrong but that he was also terrified Kopecky was right. He wanted to talk about how his parents were happy to be rid of him, how the last word he’d heard from his mother’s lips was a flat ’bye, and how he couldn’t remember the last time his father had spoken to him and not about him. He wanted to tell Kopecky he wasn’t really used to people not liking him, either, and that he had no idea why he felt this nonsensical desire to stay alive. He hoped he’d be able to get out of here, since he was innocent, maybe even advocate for himself the next time he had a hearing. Maybe then his parents would be proud of him. Maybe they’d get to have another baby anyway, and then he could have a brother. He wanted to tell Kopecky all of this, but the soreness of his right hand was distracting him, and they seemed to have next to nothing in common anyway. He wouldn’t understand. Best to play it safe. “No. But thank you for asking.”

  Chapter Five

  “I don’t understand.”

  Samara sat with her hands folded on her lap under the chilly stainless-steel table. The employment officers exchanged looks, perhaps not having rehearsed an alternative message. They looked like male and female versions of each other, each in a crisp uniform with gold buttons gleaming on dark blue wool. Matching hairstyles, each with a large swoop at the front, though his was cropped short in the back and hers was gathered tight into a second swoop of a bun. The man tapped his pristine fingernails.

  “Samara, what we’re saying is that we’re proud of the employment offer we made to you. You deserve it. Our concern is in your potential for actual employment. Schools do not generally hire teachers that do not meet all the standard requirements.”

  “Yes, I worried about that too. But I wasn’t able to attend a Tier-Two or above high school, because I went to a Tier-Five middle school. And elementary school. And preschool…”

  “Of course,” the female said with a wave of her hand. “It is a difficult situation. But we stand by our system. It does not make mistakes. You will be working in education, Miss Shepherd. The question is, where?”

  Samara leaned forward. “Why am I here?”

  “We’re offering you a choice. You can either work in a school or in an alternative environment. In the school, you’d be responsible for cleanliness. Bathrooms, hallways, the cafeteria, anyplace where students learn.”

  A janitor. Unregistered work. Samara saw her imagined future—the one where she had students and a big desk and a bag of papers to take home every night—fly away from her suddenly, like a ball thrown into the distance. One minute it’s solid reality, the next, a speck in the sky.

  “In the alternative environment, you’ll be responsible for student learning.”

  “What’s this alternative environment?”

  “A prison for young boys.”

  “When do I start?”

  She spent the bus ride home trying to sit like the employment officers—back straight, shoulders together but relaxed—and reviewed her packet of information on classroom management. Managers, she read, usually spent two years in formal training, but since the Fox County Detention Center had an immediate opening, she’d taken the final test right there at the employment center…with a sheet of answers just to the left of her paper. They must have needed someone badly.

  When she was sure she’d memorized where to go and when, she leaned the side of her forehead on the bus window and looked out, but she didn’t see anything in particular. Her mind was on her future students. She’d never been in a prison before, though she’d heard plenty of stories of those who ended up there. In recent years, they’d been taking women who’d had one child already but were pregnant again and refused to have an abortion. There had been one such woman at her mother’s workplace. Two men in shiny blue uniforms came and put a bag over the woman’s head. That afternoon, she got an abortion and a ten-year sentence.

  She knew nothing of boys and what they’d have done to deserve imprisonment, save for the one taken away in cuffs for painting the nun. She’d probably meet him.

  A ray of electricity ran under her skin, like her body had realized this just before her brain. Of course she would. Why wouldn’t she? He was caught in Fox County and sentenced here too. Surely there was only one center in the county where he could have gone. Imagine! All those times looking out the window and seeing the wall with another painting on it, trying to figure out what he was trying to say, running her eyes over the lines, the color, the depth that he somehow managed to create with just bricks and paint—then to be his teacher! No, Manager, remember.

  She’d even seen him once. It was a bit like seeing Santa Claus, she guessed, back when people celebrated Christmas. She’d woken in the middle of the night, not to an alarm but to a feeling, like her dream had ended and the credits rolled and it was just time to leave the theater. She had looked out her unit’s window on a whim and saw something new—a cat with the flag of the Ones in its teeth. It wasn’t until she’d had a good look at the cat that she saw the boy looking at the wall and twirling a paintbrush in one hand. He must have been big for his age because she didn’t think he was a kid. Then again, lots of kids were bigger than they were in the movies, and that was really the only place one saw children. He was tall and slightly thick with darker skin than usual, and he’d seemed to be in perpetual motion while he worked—swaying, twirling, darting close to and away from the bricks. Though it had been the only time Samara had really seen him, she felt like she knew him.

  Every painting that appeared by his hand felt like it was just for her. The wall was there to identify with her, like the time she’d gotten into a fight with her best friend, Georgia, and felt so alone, then looked out her window to see hands reaching toward each other in a swirl of colors. It was there to mock her, recognizing the false parts of her with shrewd precision, like the few weeks she’d spent more time playing games than talking to her family, then saw a painting of a young child staring down at his watch against a collage of all the beautiful elements of nature; dazzling clouds and shockingly green trees. For the past three years, the paintings on the walls had been her source of comfort, and she cheered the artist on as if he were a close friend. As far as she was concerned, he was.

  The bus stopped, and Samara stepped into the street in a very different world than the one she’d just been in. There, in the Two neighborhood, the sidewalks were white, with clean-cut green hedges marking the medians between the pedestrian, bike, and vehicle lanes. Sculptures of life-sized bronze bodies stood intermittently along the hedges. Artists—assigned to the profession—had undoubtedly created them. The bronze citizens were all doing something to represent Metrics values—one flexing his biceps for Resilience, one sitting and staring at the ground for Silence, one standing at attention for Obedience. Here, where the Fives lived, the wind stank of smoke and blew crumpled trash along the gray pavement.

  Mrs. Harris squatted on a plastic stool in front of her convenience store just in front of the bus stop. She saw Samara and called, “Your dad was lookin’ for you! Where you go?”

  “I had a meeting.” Samara’s brow furrowed. “He knew about it.”

  “Maybe he forgot.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Harris.”

  Samara walked briskly back to the apartment, huffing not with exertion but with annoyance. The day a girl found out how she would spend every day of the rest of her life was a day for a thoughtful stroll, maybe along the side of the street with the sidewalk. Instead, she was rushing home, probably because Mom wasn’t back yet and Dad had forgotten the temperature to bake a potato.

  She heaved open the door, ran up the steps, touched the doorknob, and stopped. She had to catch her breath a moment to be sure, but after a few seconds, she was certain. Her father was crying on the other side.

  She made a fuss of finding the right key and putting it into the door in hopes that her dad would hear the jingle of the metal and pull himself together. But when she finally walked in, he was still struggling to steady his breath. He walked over to her and pulled her into
a hug before she had a chance to hang her bag on the hook.

  “I’m so glad you’re home,” he said.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  Her dad squeezed tighter. Then he broke away. “While you were away, some Metrics officials came to the door. They told us that our employment needed to change to compensate for yours. With Mom and me in Five jobs and you working in a Three position, our household income would…” He picked up the first page of a neat little packet sitting on the table and read, “…‘exceed the limits of our Tier.’ So they had to take one of us to work outside the city.”

  “They took Mom?”

  Her dad sniffled. “I wanted them to take me, but they did it based on citizenship score. I don’t know how hers could be lower. We have the same friends. It must be someone at her work that’s brought her down.”

  Samara could hear herself breathe. “Do you know where she is exactly?”

  “Near Fallwood, they said. Where the berry farms are. She’ll pick blueberries until the harvest is over. Then she’ll be moved somewhere else. She’s allowed to keep her watch, even though reception isn’t great out there. She says she’ll let us know when she gets there.”

  Samara said nothing and looked at a scuff mark on the linoleum.

  “It’s not forever. Just until you apply for a spouse and get married. She can come back when you’re in a house of your own.”

  “Not until then?”

  “Well, we could pay a fee. It’s expensive, though. Basically a year’s worth of income for the three of us put together.”

  Samara perked up. “Maybe I’ll get a bonus or something! I’ll work hard and get a raise.”

  Her dad hugged her again. “This isn’t your fault, you know. Your mother and I don’t blame you,” he said, but then he stood, walked into the room he had shared with his wife, and left Samara standing by the front door alone.