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"Oh," she said in a sorry voice. "My mother bought me one like that two years ago." So I liked her.
On the way to school, Wakulla said, What does your dad do, when did you get here, and so on, but she didn't mention any cults; and I said, How do you like the school, who are the teachers, and that got us safely there. The houses we were passing were all different styles, but with solarskins. They had the latest tech in the Compounds, which Lucerne had pointed out a lot. Really, Brenda, they're so much more truly green than those purist Gardeners so you don't have to worry about how much hot water you're using, and isn't it time you took another shower?
The high-school building was sparkling clean -- no graffiti, no pieces falling off, no smashed windows. It had a deep green lawn and some shrubs pruned into round balls, and a statue: "Florence Nightingale," it said on the plaque, "The Lady of the Lamp." But someone had changed the a to a u, so it said The Lady of the Lump.
"Jimmy did that," said Wakulla. "He's my lab partner in Nanoforms Biotech, he's always doing dumb things like that." She smiled: she had really white teeth. Lucerne had been saying how dingy my own teeth were and I needed a cosmetic dentist. She was already planning to redecorate our entire house, but she had some alterations planned for me as well.
At least I didn't have any cavities. The Gardeners were against refined sugar products and were strict about brushing, though you had to use a frayed twig because they hated the idea of putting either plastic or animal bristles inside their mouths.
The first morning at that school was very strange. I felt as if the classes were in a foreign language. All the subjects were different, the words were different, and then there were the computers and the paper notebooks. I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find -- you couldn't just wipe it away, not like a slate. I wanted to run into the washroom and wash my hands after touching the keyboards and pages; the danger had surely rubbed off on me.
Lucerne said that our so-called personal history -- the forcible abduction and so on -- would be kept confidential by the officials at the HelthWyzer Compound. But someone had leaked because the kids at the school all knew. At least they hadn't heard about Lucerne's sex-slave lust-mad pervert story. But I knew I'd lie about that if I had to, in order to protect Amanda, and Zeb, and Adam One, and even the ordinary Gardeners. We are all in one another's hands, Adam One used to say. I was beginning to find out what that meant.
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sp; At lunch hour a group gathered around me. Not a mean group, just curious. So, you lived with a cult? Weird! How crazy were they? They had a lot of questions. Meanwhile they were eating their lunches, and there was meat smell everywhere. Bacon. Fish sticks, 20 per cent real fish. Burgers -- they were called WyzeBurgers, and they were made of meat cultured on stretchy racks. So no animals had actually been killed. But it still smelled like meat. Amanda would've eaten the bacon to show she hadn't been brainwashed by the leaf-eaters, but I couldn't go that far. I peeled the bun off my WyzeBurger and tried to eat that, but it stank of dead animal.
"Like, how bad was it?" said Wakulla.
"It was just a greenie cult," I said.
"Like the Wolf Isaiahists," said one kid. "Were they terrorists?" They all leaned forward: they wanted horror stories.
"No. They were pacifists," I said. "We had to work on this rooftop garden." And I told them about the slug and snail relocation. It sounded so strange to me, when I told it.
"At least you didn't eat them," said one girl. "Some of those cults, they eat road kill."
"The Wolf Isaiahists do, for sure. It was on the Web."
"You lived in the pleebs, though. Cool." Then I realized I had an edge, because I'd lived in the pleeblands where none of them had ever been except maybe on a school trip, or dragged along with their slumming parents to the Tree of Life. So I could make up whatever I liked.
"You were child labour," one boy said. "A little enviroserf. Sexy!" They all laughed.
"Jimmy, don't be so dumb," said Wakulla. "It's okay," she said to me, "he always says stuff like that."
Jimmy grinned. "Did you worship cabbages?" he went on. "Oh Great Cabbage, I kiss your cabbagey cabbageness!" He went down on one knee and grabbed a handful of my pleated skirt. "Nice leaves, do they come off?"
"Don't be such a meat-breath," I said.
"A what?" he said, laughing. "A meat-breath?"
Then I had to explain how that was a harsh name to call someone, among the extreme greens. Like pig-eater. Like slug-face. This made Jimmy laugh more.
I saw the temptation. I saw it clearly. I would come up with more bizarre details about my cultish life, and then I would pretend that I thought all these things were as warped as the HelthWyzer kids did. That would be popular. But also I saw myself the way the Adams and the Eves would see me: with sadness, with disappointment. Adam One, and Toby, and Rebecca. And Pilar, even though she was dead. And even Zeb.
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. But I knew that already, because of Bernice.
Wakulla walked home with me, and Jimmy came too. He fooled around a lot -- made jokes, expected us to laugh -- and Wakulla did laugh, in a polite way. I could see that Jimmy had a big crush on her, though Wakulla told me later that she couldn't see Jimmy in any way other than as a friend.
Wakulla turned off halfway to go to her house, and Jimmy said he'd continue along with me because it was on the way. He was irritating when there was more than one other person: maybe he felt it was better to make a fool of yourself than to have other people do it for you. But when he wasn't putting on an act he was much nicer. I could tell he was sad underneath, because I was that way myself. We were sort of like twins in that way, or so I felt at the time. He was the first boy I'd ever really had for a friend.
"So, it must be weird for you, being here in a Compound, after the pleeblands," he said one day.
"Yeah," I said.
"Was your mom really tied to the bed by a deranged maniac?" Jimmy would come right out with stuff other people might think but would never say.
"Where did you hear that?" I said.
