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"Don't answer," said Bernice. "Close the door!" We could hear him moving around in the main room; then he came into Bernice's room and scooped her up. He stood there holding her under the armpits. "Where's my little girl?" he said again, which made me cringe. I'd seen him do this before, not only to Bernice. He just loved girls' armpits. He'd corner you in behind the bean rows when you were doing slug and snail relocation and pretend to be helping you. Then along would come the hands. He was such a knob.
Bernice was scowling and wriggling. "I'm not your little girl," she said, which could mean: I'm not little, or I'm not yours, or even I'm not a girl. Burt took this as a joke.
"Then where's my little girl gone?" he repeated in a woebegone voice.
"Put me down," Bernice shouted. I felt sorry for her, and also I felt lucky -- because whatever I felt about Zeb, it wasn't embarrassment.
"I'd like to look at your place now," said Amanda. So the two of us went back down the stairs, leaving Bernice behind us, redder and angrier than ever. I did feel bad about that, but not bad enough to give up Amanda.
Lucerne wasn't pleased to find that Amanda had been added to our family, but I told her that Adam One had ordered it; so what could she do? "She'll have to sleep in your room," she said crossly.
"She won't mind," I said. "Will you, Amanda?"
"No, indeed," said Amanda. She had a very polite manner she could put on, as if she was the one doing you the favour. It grated on Lucerne.
"And she'll have to get rid of those flashy clothes," said Lucerne.
"But they aren't worn out yet," I said innocently. "We can't just throw them away! That would be wasteful!"
"We'll sell them," said Lucerne tightly. "We can certainly use the money."
"Amanda should get the money," I said. "They're her clothes."
"It's okay," said Amanda, softly but regally. "They didn't cost me anything." Then we went into my cubicle and sat on the bed, and laughed behind our hands.
When Zeb got back that evening, he had no comment at first. We all ate dinner together, and Zeb chewed away at the soybit and green bean casserole and watched Amanda with her graceful neck and silver fingers picking daintily away at what was on her plate. She hadn't yet taken off her gloves. Finally he said to her, "You're a sly little operator, aren't you?" It was his friendly voice, the one he used for saying, "Atta girl" at dominoes.
Lucerne, who was dishing him out a second helping, stiffened in mid-motion, the big spoon straight up in the air like some kind of metal detector. Amanda gazed at him straight-faced, with her eyes wide open. "Excuse me, sir?"
Zeb laughed. "You're very good," he said.
17
Having Amanda living with me was like having a sister, only better. She had Gardeners' clothing now, so she looked like the rest of us; and pretty soon she smelled like the rest of us too.
In the first week I showed her all around. I took her to the Vinegar Room, the Sewing Room, and up to the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmills gym. Mugi was in charge of that; we called him Mugi the Muscle because he only had one muscle left. Amanda made friends with him, though. She made friends with everyone by asking them the right way to do things.
Burt the Knob explained how to relocate the slugs and snails in the Garden by heaving them over the railing into the traffic, where they were supposed to crawl off and find new homes, though I knew they really got squashed. Katuro the Wrench, who fixed the leaks and took care of the water systems, showed her how the plumbing worked.
Philo the Fog didn't say much to her; he just smiled at her a lot. The older Gardeners said he'd transcended language and was travelling with the Spirit, though Amanda said he was just wasted. Stuart the Screw, who made our furniture out of recycled junk, didn't like people much, but he liked Amanda. "That girl's got a good eye for wood," he'd say.
Amanda didn't like sewing, but she pretended to, so Surya praised her. Rebecca called her sweetheart and said she had good food taste, and Nuala cooed over her singing in the Buds and Blooms Choir. Even Dry Witch Toby would brighten up when she saw Amanda coming. She was the hardest nut to crack, but Amanda took a sudden interest in mushrooms, and helped old Pilar stamp bees on the honey labels, and that pleased Toby, though she tried not to show it.
"Why are you sucking up so much?" I asked Amanda.
"It's how you find stuff out," she said.
We told each other a lot of things. I told her about my father and my house in the HelthWyzer Compound, and how my mother ran off with Zeb.
"I bet she had hot panties for him," said Amanda. We were whispering all of this in our cubicle, at night, with Zeb and Lucerne right nearby, so it was hard not to hear the sex noises they'd make. Before Amanda came I'd found all of that shameful, but now found it funny because Amanda did.
Amanda told me about the droughts in Texas -- how her parents had lost their Happicuppa coffee franchise and couldn't sell their house because no one would buy it, and how there were no jobs and they'd ended up in a refugee camp with old trailers and a lot of Tex-Mexicans. Then their trailer was demolished in one of the hurricanes and her father was killed by a piece of flying metal. A lot of people drowned, but she and her mother held on to a tree and got rescued by some men in a rowboat. They were thieves, said Amanda, looking for stuff they could lift, but they said they'd take Amanda and her mother to dry land and a shelter if they'd do a trade.
"What kind of trade?" I said.
"Just a trade," said Amanda.
The shelter was a football stadium with tents in it. There was a lot of trading going on: people would do anything for twenty dollars, Amanda said. Then her mother got sick from the drinking water, but Amanda didn't because she traded for sodas. And there was no medicine, so her mother died. "A lot of people shat to death," said Amanda. "You should have smelled that place."
