Children of Exile (14 page)

“The Freds made them give up Edwy for twelve years, didn't they?” I retorted, without even thinking about it.

I believe if I'd been close enough to the mother, she would have slapped me again. But I'd already yanked my suitcase away, toward my room. I was already three steps away.

I left the mother and the father just standing there, stricken.

Once I was in
the room Bobo and I shared, I unzipped my suitcase and slowly began lifting each item out. Somehow I knew the mother and the father would leave me alone. And it felt almost like a sacred ceremony for me, touching the things I'd last touched in Fredtown.

I didn't want it to end.

I piled books and school supplies in one corner, and clothing along the back wall. Here was the dress I'd worn the night of the school talent show; here were the heavy leggings I wore on the rare occasions when a cold wind swept down from the mountains into Fredtown. Here was the solar calculator I'd been so proud of receiving at the end of fifth grade—the Freds always said you had to prove you could work with numbers in your head before you could be trusted with owning a machine to do it for you. I'd always thought Edwy was better than me in math, but I'd earned my calculator first.

I reached the bottom of the suitcase too quickly. Even
after I emptied it, I kept it open. I knew I wasn't missing anything—everything I'd put into it back in Fredtown was already out and arranged along the walls of my new room. It didn't look like Edwy or his supposedly thieving family had stolen anything, and part of me wanted to go out and inform the father and mother of that. But I kept sitting there, kept running my hands along the suitcase's wrinkled lining, just in case there was some tiny item I'd forgotten about.

Something jabbed against my hand. It was something tucked under a loose edge of the lining. I tugged at the thing jabbing me—it was a piece of paper wrapped in on itself like a miniature cone.

From my Fred-parents?
I thought.

My heart beat faster. Of course they wouldn't have sent me back home—to a home they even suspected might still be dangerous—without giving me a way out. A safety net of sorts. This was probably some secret way of reaching them, some secret number to call in case of emergency. Never mind that I hadn't seen a single phone since I'd left Fredtown. Never mind that there might be complications calling someplace so far away. I would be able to unwrap this paper and look at their message and get in touch with them right away. Because this was an emergency.

My real mother slapped me!
I could tell my Fred-parents.
Something really bad happened here, and I think something
bad might happen again! I'm worried about Bobo!

And they would understand instantly. They would come and retrieve Bobo and me, and all the other kids, too. We could live the rest of our lives in Fredtown and we would always be safe.

With trembling hands, I began unrolling the tiny paper. Finally it lay flat in my hand. There were words written on the paper, words in handwriting I recognized instantly.

But the handwriting didn't belong to either of my Fred-parents.

It belonged to Edwy.

ONCE EVERYONE IN YOUR HOUSE IS ASLEEP TONIGHT, SNEAK OUT AND MEET ME. THERE'S SOMETHING I HAVE TO SHOW YOU.

I don't do
things like this,
I told myself.
I'm not a sneaky person.

It was night now, full dark. I was lying on the floor beside Bobo, and I could hear how his breathing had settled into the long, slow, contented pattern of sleep. I was pretty sure the mother and the father had fallen asleep too. Through the house's thin walls, I could hear two faltering versions of snoring—one more of a gasping snort, one deeper and gruff-sounding. Even in their sleep, the parents sounded angry.

And I was awake and trying to decide whether or not to sneak out and meet Edwy.

Back in Fredtown, I wouldn't have thought twice about Edwy's note. I would have crumpled it in my hand and thrown it away. I would have thought,
Oh, that Edwy! Trying to get me in trouble, just like him!

Back in Fredtown, Edwy wouldn't have sent me a note
like that. He would have known I couldn't be tempted to follow it.

But here . . .

What if Edwy found out more about the bad thing that happened before and might happen again? What if sneaking out is the only way I can find out what I need to know to protect Bobo?

Why wasn't right and wrong as easy as it had always seemed back in Fredtown?

I sighed—too loudly. For a moment Bobo's breathing stuttered, and I was afraid I'd awakened him. Then he rolled toward me, hugged my shoulder in his sleep, and went back to breathing evenly.

Maybe Bobo holding on to me should have made me think,
I can't sneak out now! I have to stay with Bobo!

But his arm flung so trustingly across my shoulder reminded me how much he depended on me, how much my Fred-parents were relying on me to take care of him and all the other children. It wasn't conceited to think that after the Freds had found out that none of them would be allowed to come home with us, I was their only hope. It was just . . . reality.

Silently I eased Bobo's arm off me and slid out from under the blanket. I didn't want Bobo waking up and realizing I was gone, so I grabbed a pile of my clothes from beside the
wall and stuffed them under the blanket in a vaguely Rosi-shaped way. The deception wouldn't be very convincing if Bobo woke up and started talking to me—or if the mother came into the room and turned on a light. But it would trick anyone who glanced quickly and sleepily at the shape under the blanket. It would give Bobo something to cuddle against and feel comforted by until I came back.

Home is turning me into a sneaky person,
I thought.

I tiptoed out of the room. After every step I paused and listened, because it wasn't too late to turn back. What if the father's enhanced hearing worked equally well whether he was asleep or awake?

The snores from the back of the house kept coming, gruff and angry.

I reached the front door and eased the latch open. I inched the door apart from the doorframe.

The hinges creaked and I froze, straining my ears to listen for snores.

Still there, still angry . . .

I stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind me.

Edwy was waiting in the shadows.

“I was about to give up,” he whispered.

“I had to make sure everyone was asleep,” I whispered back.

“You would,” Edwy said.

At first I took that as an insult—Edwy acting disgusted that I was careful and meticulous, just as he was always disgusted back in Fredtown when I did my homework properly and made him look bad for scrawling down any old answer.

I almost turned around and went back into the house. But then he stepped out of the shadows and his eyes glinted for a moment in the dim moonlight. And there was something in his gaze that I'd never noticed before—admiration? trust?

Whatever it was made me step up beside Edwy. But I also put a finger to my lips.

“We shouldn't talk unless we have to,” I whispered.

Edwy nodded. He handed me a pair of socks and pantomimed putting them over his shoes.

Oh, to muffle the sounds of our footsteps . . .

Edwy was good at being sneaky. He had a lot more practice at it than I did.

I slipped the socks over my own shoes. I thought about how Fred-mama would have fretted about holes growing in the socks, about wasting precious resources.

It's not a waste if this helps protect Bobo and the other kids,
I thought with a firmness that surprised me. I felt like I was talking back to Fred-mama from a distance of thousands of kilometers.

Edwy and I crept forward, through the near-total darkness,
along the street full of tumbledown houses. We reached the creek and turned right, the opposite way from downtown.

“Nobody lives near the creek, so I think it's safe to talk now,” Edwy whispered.

I could have said,
So what are you showing me?
I could have said,
Why couldn't this have waited until tomorrow?
I could have said,
Have you ever heard of a parent slapping a child? Have you ever heard of anyone treating someone differently just because of the color of her eyes?
But Fred customs required a clearing of the air after any insult or slight, and somehow I couldn't let go of every bit of Fredtown behavior.

“I'm sorry the . . . my . . . the adults never thanked you for bringing the suitcases,” I said. “I'm sorry they acted so mean about your family.”

Edwy shrugged, a motion I could barely see in the darkness.

“That's okay,” he said. “They were right. My family did steal your suitcases. I just stole them back.”

I gasped. But Edwy grinned, his teeth gleaming white in the moonlight.

“Edwy, that's not funny!” I said. “You need to tell someone! I know you wouldn't want to tattle, but you shouldn't have to live in an environment like that! You have a right to—to—”

“Rosi, Rosi, Rosi,” Edwy said, still grinning. I didn't
know if he meant to sound like my Fred-parents or not, but it made my heart ache a little. “We're not in Fredtown anymore. Who would I tell? I mean, who else? I just told you.”

My heart seemed to skip a beat. Edwy meant that he'd chosen me as his confidant, as the person he trusted to help him right a wrong. He was treating me like a grown-up, like a Fred.

I felt the burden of responsibility. How could either of us fix a problem like this?

How could we fix anything about our hometown when we didn't understand what had happened here?

“Every child has the right to grow up in safety and security, without fear and without lies,” I said numbly, quoting another principle of Fredtown.

“Yeah, well, if nobody lies to us and nobody tells us the truth either,
that
just leaves us—what was that word the man on the plane used? It leaves us stupid,” Edwy said. “It makes us dumb, stupid idiots.”

I cringed, hearing him say those words.

“Ignorant,” I corrected him. “Just because we don't know things, that doesn't mean our brains don't work. It doesn't mean we can't
learn
what we need to know.”

Edwy just looked at me.

“Either way, do
you
think we're safe and secure here?” he asked.

Fredtown customs required being optimistic and looking on the bright side and making the best of things. But somehow, sneaking around in the dark seemed to give me permission to tell Edwy the truth. It wasn't just the darkness that scared me.

“No,” I whispered.

“That's what I think too,” Edwy whispered back.

What could I say to that? For a while we walked along the creek without speaking. The path seemed oddly overgrown. The moon kept disappearing behind the roiling clouds in the sky, and for long moments we could only feel our way tentatively, grasping for tree trunks and branches.

“I gave up on the fishing this afternoon,” Edwy finally whispered. “Why bother doing something you know you're going to fail at?”

“Because you can never know for sure,” I argued. “Because—”

“Rosi,
listen
,” Edwy said, and something in his voice silenced me. In the darkness, when I wasn't looking directly at him, he sounded almost as young as Bobo. I could relate to him the way I had when he was younger and we were best friends.

“I'm listening,” I said.

Edwy nodded impatiently.

“Anyhow, this afternoon, I knew it was too soon to go
home, because then everyone would know I'd given up,” he said. “So I started looking around. I wanted to see everything in this town with my own eyes.”

I could respect that. I didn't remind him it fit with the Fredtown principle about paying attention so you'd learn something every day.

“I saw the places where all the houses are nice and you could just tell that everybody had a lot of money,” he said. “Even if they stole it.”

Maybe he was trying to make me laugh. But I didn't.

“I saw places where the houses were poor and falling down, and the people walking around didn't even seem to own shoes,” he said.

Like where Bobo and I live,
I thought. I hadn't realized I should be grateful that at least we had shoes.

“And then I saw . . . this,” Edwy said.

He took my shoulder and aimed me away from the creek and the sheltering line of trees.

All I could see was darkness. I put my hands out in front of my face and felt only empty air.

“Edwy, there's nothing here,” I said.

“We're walking on ash now,” he said. “Feel it.”

He took my arm and—with more gentleness than I would have thought him capable of—pulled me down into a crouch so I could touch my fingers to the ground.

It did feel like ash beneath my fingertips. Old, cold, dead ash.

“Wait for the moon to come back out,” Edwy whispered. “You'll see. The ash, the burned place—it goes on and on. . . .”

I shivered just at the tone of his voice. The glow of the moon was muted, right at the edge of a cloud. Very slowly, the cloud began to slip away, releasing more light. I saw hillocks and shadowy bumps ahead of us.

“There was a house that burned back in Fredtown, remember?” I told Edwy. “Someone forgot to blow out a candle. But the family was safe because they had smoke detectors. And we started having Fire Safety Day at school every year after that.”

I wondered if my house here had smoke detectors. Probably not. I would have to talk to the mother and the father about that.

“
One
house in Fredtown burned,” Edwy said. “And the family rebuilt it right away. My Fred-dad was the architect, so I heard all about the plans. That was a long time ago. I bet you can't even remember which house it was now.”