One day Mrs. Whyte said, “Honor, you lived in the North; tell us about the leaves there.”
Then Honor thought Mrs. Whyte was asking her to tell the class about how leaves change color. “Every year they turn red, yellow, brown,” Honor told the class.
Mrs. Whyte shook her head and said, “Not anymore. Not anymore. Not by any means. Do trees change color, class?”
“No,” the class chorused. Some of the girls were covering their mouths with their hands. They were laughing at Honor for saying otherwise.
“But you’ve never even been to the Northern Islands,” sputtered Honor. “How do you know the trees are always green?”
“How do you know, class?” asked Mrs. Whyte.
For a long moment no one spoke. The girls seemed almost puzzled.
Then Hildegard raised her hand and held up the climatology textbook. “It says in the book: trees in the Northern Islands are green all year round.”
Now Mrs. Whyte smiled. She was not angry anymore. All the sunshine seemed to return to the room. “That is exactly right,” she said. “We know what trees look like in the North from our book. This is known as doing the reading,” she told Honor. “Those who do the reading need not exaggerate.”
“But I did see the—” Honor began.
“Search your memory,” said Mrs. Whyte.
How strange. As soon as Mrs. Whyte told Honor to search her memory, Honor’s memory failed her. There stood Mrs. Whyte, absolutely certain in front of her, and there sat the other girls, giggling and scoffing behind her. She could no longer remember seeing colorful leaves with her own eyes. She could only remember dreaming them.
“Do you remember when the leaves changed?” Honor asked her parents that night as she lay down to sleep.
“I think so,” said her mother.
“Do you remember the colors?”
“I remember the leaves fell from the trees,” said her father.
“But before they fell. Didn’t they turn colors?”
Her parents tried to remember, but they could not.
“They turned brown and died,” her father said. “I remember that.”
All three of them had trouble remembering the old life in the North. It was like forgetting a language they had once known. A few words remained, but they lost more and more each day.
History lessons were difficult. Honor had to memorize the events of the Peaceful Revolution from her textbook.
“After the Flood, disease, warfare, and famine decimated the human population. Then Earth Mother, the Provider, rose up. She was a simple schoolteacher, a cookie baker. She loved flowers and children and sunshine and song. She believed in Safety First. Her Peaceful Revolution was to protect and defend the islands that remained. Her program: to build seawalls and Safe cities, to Enclose the Polar Seas and establish New Weather in the North with regulated temperatures all year round. The First Glorious Year of Enclosure marked the securing of the Arctic Circle, the establishment of the new calendar, the new clock . . .” Honor recited the words to herself in the bathtub as she soaked in tepid water. “A new compact of—”
“Are you all right in there?” asked Pamela outside the door.
“Oh, you made me lose my place.” Honor sat up with a splash.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
Honor pulled the plug. She dried herself with a scratchy white towel and changed into her nightgown.
“I have to recite in history tomorrow,” she told her mother when she opened the door. “I need to practice.”
“It’s late,” said Pamela. “You need to go to bed.”
“Please. I need to get this right,” Honor begged, “or I’ll miss recess again.”
“Is that what they do? They punish you for forgetting your recitation?” Pamela looked shocked.
“They don’t call it punishment; they call it thinking time,” said Honor.
“What are you supposed to think?” asked Will, who was pinning up laundry to dry on a rack in the bedroom.
“You’re supposed to think about correcting your Inaccuracies,” said Honor. “Obviously.”
“Don’t take that tone of voice with me,” said Will.
Honor stayed up late and practiced her recitation. She sat up in her nightgown in the living room and she stared at the ceiling lamp above her head as she recited, “A new compact of nations, a new generation without . . .”
In the glass globe of the ceiling lamp, she saw a dead black spider with stiff, folded legs. Next to it, a living spider tried to climb up inside the slippery globe to escape. The spider inched upward only to fall back again, shrinking from the scorching heat of the lightbulb. Again and again, the spider tried to climb, but each time, he failed. Honor wanted to look away, but she could not. She needed to keep practicing, but she couldn’t think about the recitation with that spider struggling above her head.
“Could you get him out? Could you unscrew the globe?” she begged her father.
He stood on a chair and he could reach, but the globe was hot and screwed in tight. “I’m afraid I’ll break the glass if I try to force it loose,” Will said.
“He’s going to die in there,” said Honor.
“Maybe if we turn off the light, he’ll have a better chance,” said Pamela.
“That’s right. He’ll make his escape in the dark,” Will said.
“No, he won’t. You’re just saying that,” said Honor. “You just want me to go to bed.”
In the morning, Honor dressed for school and trudged downstairs, imagining the humiliation to come.
“It’s not so bad,” said Pamela encouragingly. “Just remember: ‘a new compact of nations, a generation without fear, a world of Safety and Order.’”
“Why don’t you recite it yourself, then?” Honor grumbled. She hated the hot morning. She hated the soggy cereal in her bowl. She tried to keep her head down and avoid looking at the light fixture. She didn’t want to know, and yet she had to see.
Just as she left the house, she looked. She saw that she and her father had both guessed wrong. The spider wasn’t dead, and he had not escaped either. He was still struggling against the glass.
All day Honor sat at her desk and wished she were home. Not home in the hot town house, home in the North, in the strange wild places. Home where her parents paddled boats through marshy fields and the ruins of old buildings. Home where ducks nested in drowned fairgrounds. In her homesickness a memory returned to her. She was sitting in a boat and trailing her hand in the water. Beneath the surface she saw something glint and shine. She saw the head of a horse adorned with gold and jewels.
“This was called a carousel,” Will told Honor.
“Look at the mirrors,” said Pamela, pointing at the spotted silver gleaming underwater.
“Children rode on these painted animals. See the lion? And the white swan? I’m not sure what this one is called. What’s this orange one?” Will asked Pamela.
Honor reached through the water to caress the mysterious painted creature with black and orange stripes. Water rippled over his long, sinewy body. She tried to touch his sparkling eye.
Honor rarely dreamed now of the cool mornings in the North and scarlet trees. She could no longer picture the wild sky with its Unpredictable colors, changeable and always new. The sky she saw now was only one color at a time, and those colors changed each hour, according to the clock. In the City, a golden yellow sky was pure yellow without any other hue mixed in. When the sky was blue, it was Sky Blue, exactly like the crayon in the box.
As the clock on the wall ticked away, Honor sensed her classmates waiting too. They loved to hear Honor lose her place in recitations. The other girls lived on high ground in the City, in tall apartment buildings waves could never touch. They lived in villas in the mountains with flowering gardens and turquoise sprinkler pools. Honor saw these places as she rode the bus. The other girls visited each other after school, but they would never visit her. “Did you know?” they whispered to one another. “She lives by the shore.” The girls were always polite to her in class when Mrs. Whyte was looking, because politeness was the rule, but they taunted Honor the minute the teacher’s back was turned.
“Shorebird, shorebird,” they chanted softly.
The moment came. The whole class waited as Honor stood trembling by the board.
“Take your time,” said Mrs. Whyte.
“After the Flood, disease, warfare, and famine . . .”
“Use your whole voice,” said Mrs. Whyte.
“. . . decimated the human population. Then Earth Mother, the Provider, rose up. She was a simple schoolteacher, a cookie baker. She loved flowers and children and sunshine and song. She believed in . . .”
Honor looked out at her classmates in their identical school uniforms. Everyone sat perfectly, heads up, backs straight. Everyone held still, except that in the second row, Hester was slowly, slowly crossing her eyes. Honor looked away quickly, but she’d lost her place. “She believed in . . .” All she could think was that Hester’s dark eyes were drawing closer and closer together.
“Believed in what?” Mrs. Whyte asked.
Honor had no idea.
“Search your memory,” said Mrs. Whyte.
Honor hung her head. When she looked up, Hester was smiling at her again. Her eyes were in the right places.
“Honor,” said Mrs. Whyte. “Once again, you are unprepared.”
“But I—”
“Are you contradicting me?” asked Mrs. Whyte.
“No,” said Honor.
“You need a simpler text,” said Mrs. Whyte. “Can you read this?” She handed Honor a card with just a few lines printed on it. “Can you remember this?”
Honor nodded.
“Recite it with your whole voice.”
No, Honor thought when she saw the nursery rhyme. Please don’t make me.
“Let’s hear it,” snapped Mrs. Whyte.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,” Honor recited. “The earth is on fire. Your children will burn.”
“And the next one.” Mrs. Whyte handed Honor another card.
Honor took a breath. “Atmosphere is falling down, falling down, falling down . . .”
“I believe this is a song,” Mrs. Whyte reminded her.
“Atmosphere is falling down. My fair lady,” Honor sang haltingly.
Then her classmates could not cover their giggles any longer. Their laughter rang through the classroom.
“Take the sky and close it up, close it up, close it up. Take the sky and close it up. My fair lady,” sang Honor. The other girls put their heads down on their desks and laughed until they cried.
Mrs. Whyte let them laugh. She did not say a word, but let the laughter come until Honor’s cheeks burned.
At recess Honor wandered alone. The whole Lower School had recess together on the Lower Playground while the teachers sat and talked at picnic tables in the shade. Honor’s classmates gossiped, whispering to each other as they walked in pairs. She stayed as far away from them as possible.
She stood by the playground fence and stared at the orderlies pruning bushes on the other side. The orderlies wore white jumpsuits and hats on their bald heads. They looked neither happy nor sad, because they had no eyebrows.
“Hello,” she said through the fence. The orderlies didn’t even glance at her.
“My name is Honor,” she said, and then asked the nearer orderly, “What’s your name?”
Out of nowhere, Mrs. Whyte was upon her, taking her by the hand and hurrying her away. “Too close. Too close!”
“Why?” Honor asked.
Mrs. Whyte was fuming, muttering, “Ten years old and speaking to the . . . Haven’t your parents told you never to talk to orderlies?”
Honor shook her head. “We didn’t have orderlies where we lived.”
“It’s as if you’ve been raised by wolves,” exclaimed Mrs. Whyte.
“I just wanted to know their names,” said Honor.
Mrs. Whyte turned on her. “They don’t have names. Run along. Find an activity.”
Honor stood at the edge of the field and watched the boys running and kicking an orange ball. Her parents had never told her to stay away from orderlies, only not to stare.
She wandered over to a dusty place under the trees. Two girls swung a rope and the rest took turns jumping in. The first chanted as she jumped:
“A my name is Alice, and I am an engineer. My husband’s name is Abner, and we bring back aluminum.”
Then she jumped out and the next girl jumped in, chanting:
“B my name is Brodie, and I am an engineer. My husband’s name is Berthold, and we bring back beryllium.”
They kept going as far as they could through the alphabet. Honor didn’t ask to play. If you forgot an element, the game had to start all over again and the girls got annoyed.
She walked to the empty sandbox. The girls never went there. They were all afraid of sand because they thought it came from the shore. Honor had seen her classmates shudder as they walked past, especially if some sand had drifted onto the grass. “Ooh, don’t go near the sand. It’s filthy! It’s got bugs! It’s got fleas! You’ll get sand in your pants!”
Honor sat on the wooden edge of the sandbox. She began to trail her fingers in the smooth white sand. She scooped the sand up in her hands and let it fall away again.
“There’s no bottom,” said a boy standing at the edge. It was Helix Thompson, a kid with long blond hair that always fell in his eyes. His eyes were either dark brown or black. His hair was always falling over his face, so it was hard to tell. Helix stepped into the sandbox. He dangled a magnet from a string over the surface of the sand. “This is a metal detector,” Helix said.