On the way out, I open the hall closet and there’s a tangle of wires and silvery things along them like Christmas tree lights. At first Marietta tries to keep the door shut as if she doesn’t want me to see them, but then she says she trusts me as much as anybody she ever knew so she says, “Take a good look.”
I say, “I don’t know what it is, anyway.”
She says, “Time machine,” and starts laughing hysterically. And then we both laugh so hard we fall on the floor and I don’t know what’s the truth and what isn’t, except maybe I do.
I’m glad we went there. I don’t need to feel jealous after all. Even though Mom would probably like living like that, I wouldn’t.
The police hang on to those new people to see if any of them are guilty of anything at all and also as a sort of punishment, I suppose for being rich and taking up all the best places. That means Marietta and I have even more time together.
The lumber mill now has three night watchmen. They’re sitting right next to the biggest piles of lumber. The fish hatchery has people practically in with the fish.
But then—again in the middle of the night—all the new people disappear. The grown-ups, that is. So then we know who did the fish and lumber. But now there’s nobody to blame but their children. Some townspeople are so angry they want to put them in jail, too. Most of the townspeople don’t go that far, though. My parents and lots of others say they won’t let that happen. Besides, now that they know Marietta they like her.
But it’s not safe for the new kids to walk the streets anymore—two kids got beat up by a gang of boys and they weren’t even the new kids, they were just blond and tall and skinny. Mom dyes Marietta’s hair black so she’ll be safer. Some of the other new kids do that too.
Marietta looks good with dark hair. That doesn’t cheer her up, though. All those kids feel terrible. Naturally. But it’s odd, they keep saying they’re not surprised, they just wondered when it would happen.
We talk a lot in bed at night and Mom doesn’t tell us to shut up until it gets really late.
“How can your parents leave you like this?”
“We’re not allowed to say, but it’s for our own good.”
“Parents always say that.”
I try to cheer up Marietta. We go to lots of movies. She does like the Tarzan and John Carter books and there are lots of those to go through yet. Mom gives her valerian and chamomile tea almost every night. At first Marietta didn’t want hugs from my mom, but now she does.
I go around wearing her expensive sweaters and I wear her white jacket when she wears her shiny black one. That turns out to be a big mistake because I get taken for one of them. I’m as tall and skinny as they are. And here I am, wearing fancy clothes like they always do. And here we are, Marietta and me, one of us with dyed black hair and me, a darker blond than they are but that doesn’t matter to this bunch. They’re not high school boys. I don’t know who they are but they’re grown men—waiting for us after the movie.
They don’t think Marietta is one of the new people—they think
They push her aside—so hard they knock her down—and come after me. They yank at Marietta’s jacket so hard the zipper breaks, and then pull the sweater up over my face so I don’t see what happens next. All I know is they suddenly stop and Marietta is pulling the sweater down so I can see. She yells, “Run,” and we do. When I look back I see all three of them collapsed on the ground.
“Don’t stop.” Marietta grabs my arm and pulls me along with her.
“What did you do?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
We run all the way home and collapse in our front hall. That white jacket is lost and ruined out there somewhere and the sweater is all pulled out of shape.
Marietta right away says, “Don’t tell.”
“How did you do that?”
“I thought you had those here. Tazers. Don’t you? This is just a different form.”
“Where is your tazer?”
“I’m not supposed to say. See, where I come from it’s not safe anymore since the revolt of . . . My drones—I mean my parents—they wanted me to be able to defend myself. Besides, they thought everybody here had guns.”
“Where is it? You can tell me.”
“Here.” She points to her earlobe. (There’s not even a mark that I can see.) “I have some control over the direction.” She twists her earlobe. “I can even point it back.”
I touch it, but I don’t feel anything.
“They left us here, my drones. They said they would if anything happened. And things did happen. I guess it
She’s about to tell me more but Mom comes in right then and finds us sitting on the floor, and me, all bedraggled and the sweater ruined. She gets really upset when she hears about it. (We don’t tell her the tazer part.) She insists that she’s going to dye my hair that very night no matter how long it takes, and I have to stop wearing Marietta’s nice clothes.
For once I agree with her. I let her do all that, even though I know the kids at school will tease me.
I wonder if those men are going to tell what happened to them? Maybe not, though, because they were breaking the law.
I’m going to stick close to Marietta from now on. I feel safe with her.
Most of those new kids are physically awkward—like Huxley trying to be on the basketball team—but Marietta isn’t so bad. She says it’s because her parents didn’t believe in the education boxes most kids had. She says those were like being inside a TV set. But she kept calling hers “Mommy” by mistake and that upset her mother so much she actually had her playing outside even though the air wasn’t that good anymore and even when it was too hot.
She’s been telling me everything, even about the air-conditioned sweater her mom got her.
She says, “Even so, it was getting worse and worse. Food riots sometimes. I know this is best for us. But we have to be so careful and not change anything. Nobody knows what would happen if we upset things. Shoe Dad, I might not even exist. I’d go
And then Huxley gets in trouble and that changes everything. He didn’t dye his hair like the others did. It might not have worked anyway. Three men attack him; maybe the same three that came after us. (You’d think they’d learn.) Marietta and I have to guess what happened: that he not only used his tazer, but tied up the men when they were down. Dragged them into the woods. Then he walked all the way home with bruises all over. Nobody found out about the men out in the woods till two days later. It rained all the next day and one of the men suffocated with his head in the mud. Marietta and I know Huxley didn’t use his tazer until he was practically all beat up. He was trying so hard not to cause any changes in the people living here but then he caused more of a problem.
The townspeople are blaming him. Of course they are. Besides, who knows what story those men told? So the police come to arrest him, but he takes off. They even shoot at him, but he gets away. We don’t know if he got shot or not.
All the new kids are even scareder than they already were. About going “poof.” They keep saying, “It’s gotta be even worse than that butterfly back in the Jurassic era.” I don’t know what they mean by that.
They stand there staring at nothing, as if thinking: Any minute and I never existed. They stop in mid sentence as if: Is it right now that I disappear?
On the other hand, they could disappear by going back home. We’d never know which it was. Marietta hangs on to me whenever she can. It’s as if she thinks as long as she has a good grip on my arm, she won’t disappear. It’s a bother but I let her.
I know where Huxley isn’t. He’s not at that place where the bums used to go and where the boys go to smoke. That’s too easy. But I do know where he could be. I don’t even tell Marietta. I get up real early before anybody is up. I make a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and take some nuts and apples and go. Good that Huxley and I never got together or the cops would be watching me.
So I head out into the woods. It’s a good place to get lost since there are so many crisscrossing paths and
