Children of Exile Read online

  The woman harrumphed, as if she could hear the doubt in my voice. But then she took Bobo by the hand, pulling him out into the aisle. I stuck close beside him, which meant that I blocked the way for the woman to walk toward the back door of the plane. She started toward the front instead, tugging Bobo with her. I snatched up Bobo’s and my knapsacks and followed along. No way was I letting him out of my sight.

  But the woman had a slow, halting gait, and Bobo dawdled, glancing back after every other step to make sure I was still there. This meant I had too much time to think between my longer-legged strides.

  What if I refuse to go with this woman? What if I say I don’t think it is safe for me or Bobo? What would I say that was based on? Her appearance?

  It was wrong to judge people based on how they looked.

  Or would I say it’s because she didn’t know the right past participle form of “grow”? Or because she was nicer to Bobo than she was to me?

  That made it seem like I was just jealous and petty and mean.

  Anyhow, what else could Bobo and I do besides going home with this woman? Who could I appeal to? It was always parents who were supposed to protect their kids, parents you were supposed to tell if you were afraid. Or some other trustworthy adult. But no Freds had come with us. The mean whiskery man and his friends didn’t even care if we had food. And anyway, I hadn’t seen a single one of them since we landed. If they’d cared at all, they would have stopped the stampede of adults grabbing kids.

  Bobo hesitated and glanced back at me beside the row of seats Edwy had sat in. I nodded reassuringly at Bobo, and he faced forward again and kept walking. I had to turn my head to the side to try to collect myself.

  That’s when I saw a paper crumpled on the floor in front of Edwy’s seat.

  It figures Edwy would leave trash behind, I thought. It figures he wouldn’t care about littering.

  I wanted to think of him that way. I didn’t want to think that even Edwy might been overcome and snatched up like Aili was. I didn’t want to think that this paper could be something he’d intended to hold on to that he’d lost, like Aili lost her red bow.

  I leaned over to pick up the paper, and it wasn’t a napkin or a sandwich wrapper. This paper felt stiff and official, and when I flattened it out, it held a long row of stern words in dark ink on the white paper:

  Be It Known:

  Under the terms of Addendum 468 to Agreement 5062, none of the people commonly known as “Freds” shall be allowed to return with the children. Their presence has been judged to be too provocative, and therefore dangerous. Instead, only those of the neutral third party hired to make the exchange shall be allowed to accompany said children. And all people of this neutral third party shall depart within twenty minutes of the last child being reunited with the last parent. As long as the parents and others of their ilk continue to meet the terms of Agreement 5062, they will then hold total sovereignty and control over . . .

  The paper was torn, so I couldn’t see what parents had control over. Their children, I guessed. This had to be the decree that had caused such panic back in Fredtown. Edwy being Edwy, he’d somehow managed to swipe a copy in all the chaos.

  But who would think Freds are dangerous? I wondered. And—provocative?

  I didn’t know what that word meant, but it sounded like “provoke.” The Freds always scolded Edwy for provoking trouble. They would never provoke anyone. They were always trying to stop trouble and resolve every problem in a peaceful way.

  Does Edwy understand what this means? I wondered. Did he see the rest of the decree, the part that was torn off?

  I remembered Edwy scratching graffiti into his airplane seat. It could have just been Edwy being Edwy, provoking trouble as usual.

  But what if it’s something important? I asked myself. Something about the part of this decree that’s missing?

  Quickly, before I could change my mind, I darted toward the seat Edwy had sat in. I pulled back the cloth covering and the padding beneath, to find words carved crookedly into the metal frame.

  I made out the first part: HEY, WORLD—

  It figures Edwy would think the whole world should pay attention to him, I thought, allowing myself a wry smile.

  But my smile faded when I deciphered the rest of the message:

  THESE PEOPLE AREN’T REAL EITHER

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Had Edwy meant that our real parents weren’t real? That they weren’t really ours, any more than the Fred-parents had been? How would he know that?

  Or was he talking about somebody else entirely? The mean whiskery-faced man and his friends, maybe?

  I felt a jolt of memory, a reminder of the time when Edwy and I stopped being friends. He’d said awful things about his Fred-parents—how could I trust anything he said about our real ones? Or any adult?

  Edwy probably knew that I would get curious and eventually look at his graffiti. He was probably just messing with me, the way he always did. He probably didn’t know or understand any more than I did about Addendum 468 or Agreement 5062 or any of the weirdness around us.

  I decided I couldn’t let myself think about what Edwy may or may not have meant. But I did tuck the decree into my knapsack, alongside my book and the leftover food I still had.

  We walked past the other rows of seats and down the steps from the airplane: first the woman, then Bobo, then me. We descended into a clump of other parents and kids fleeing the plane—other kids who had hidden, probably; other parents who had maybe waited until the worst of the riot had stomped past before wading into the crowd.

  But all the commotion around us was like something happening in a dream, out of focus. I could barely get my eyes to scan properly to make sure it was safe to take the next step across the cracked tarmac.

  Sometimes when you’re scared, it’s because you’re making up things to be scared of in your own head. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I needed to focus on that principle of Fredtown. I needed to accept that Bobo and I were supposed to be here in our real hometown, with our real parents. I needed to make my brain stop thinking of the woman on the other side of Bobo as “the woman” and think of her as my mother instead.

  The Freds would want you to ask her what she wants to be called, I told myself. Mama? Mommy? Mother?

  How could I say any of those names to this woman?

  My brain rebelled. My mouth did too. I stayed silent.

  Behind me on the runway, I heard a roar—the airplane engine rumbling to life again.

  All people of this neutral third party shall depart within twenty minutes . . . , I thought. I looked back, catching a glimpse of smirking faces in the windows as the plane sped past. Within seconds it took off. The mean whiskered man and the others like him had followed the rule.

  Good riddance, I told myself. Those men hadn’t been any help anyway. But I really wanted to scream, No, wait! Take Bobo and me with you! Take us back to Fredtown!

  Bobo’s hand crept into mine. I knew he’d done it to comfort himself, but it steadied me, too. Bobo’s hand was so plump and warm and solid, so familiar in this unfamiliar place. As much as he could drive me crazy sometimes, he really was a sweet little boy. Maybe he was trying to comfort me.

  The woman looked at Bobo’s hand in mine.

  “You baby him,” she said, frowning.

  Anger like I’d never felt before surged through me. She didn’t even know Bobo; she didn’t know me. We were in a strange place, even if it was supposed to be home now. She was a stranger, even if she was supposed to be our mother.

  Did she expect me to yank my hand away from my own brother? To shove him away?

  “He’s only little,” I said. “Little children need—”

  Her hand darted out in a flash. I jerked back so the palm of her hand wouldn’t collide with my face.

  “Don’t you tell me what my own child needs,” she said. “Don’t you sass me.”

  She looked at her hand, still raised; she looked at Bobo betwee
n us. She let her hand drop.

  She almost slapped me, I thought. Would she have slapped me if I hadn’t moved?

  I reeled back, slammed by my own thoughts even though I’d dodged the slap of her hand. No adult had ever struck me—certainly not Fred-mama or Fred-daddy. Little kids, yes: There’s that phase at two or three where some kids feel powerless, and they lash out by biting or hitting. The Freds had told me again and again how to deal with that: Older kids and adults must never, ever, ever hit back. Kids need to learn as soon as possible that hitting isn’t the answer.

  My face burned, stinging almost as badly as if I really had been hit. I blinked back the tears that sprang to my eyes. And yet what I kept thinking was, Did Bobo see that woman try to hit me? Oh, please, let it be that he didn’t see that. Don’t let him know what happened. What almost happened. Don’t let him ever think that an adult might hit him. . . . Don’t let him be damaged by this. . . .

  I looked down, and Bobo’s head wasn’t turned toward me. His face and his eyes were pointed straight ahead. Maybe he hadn’t heard what the woman and I had said—maybe for him it just blended in with the sound of children crying around us. Maybe he hadn’t felt me jerking away from the woman.

  I looked back at the woman. We had a procedure in Fredtown: Whenever you felt that someone had wronged you, you talked it over with a trusted adult, and then you talked it over with the person who’d offended you. And then, after all that, if you still felt the slightest bit upset, you repeated the whole process again and again, until you were just tired of being mad.

  Edwy was the only person I’d ever been mad at that I hadn’t done that with.

  But I couldn’t tell this woman, You wronged me just now, because Bobo might hear. I couldn’t say, You hurt my feelings and gave me the impression that you don’t value my viewpoint, that you don’t value me. I couldn’t say anything.

  Fredtown felt farther away than ever.

  Bobo stopped walking.

  “That looks like a mask,” he said. “Why would a building wear a mask?”

  He pointed to a structure far ahead of us, which I had taken for the airport terminal. Maybe it was a row of stores instead. But I’d never seen stores like this: Where there should have been windows displaying the most tantalizing wares, this structure had interlocking metal bars across the front, keeping everybody out.

  The metal bars didn’t look like a mask to me. They looked like a cage.

  “All the stores are shut down,” the woman said. “It’s a holiday. The day we get our children back. The day we’ve been waiting for for the past twelve years.”

  She shot a glance at me, as if she was daring me to argue.

  “But to put a building in a mask . . . ,” Bobo said. He could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. When he got an idea stuck in his head, it was the hardest thing in the world to talk him out of it. His expression brightened. “Is there going to be a party? Does everyone get to wear a costume?”

  “You talking about those metal gates?” the woman asked. “That’s so the stores don’t get robbed while the owners are away. That’s all. It’s because of thieves.”

  “People aren’t supposed to take things that don’t belong to them,” Bobo said in the singsongy voice he’d used for repeating rules and principles back in Fredtown.

  “That’s right,” the woman said, patting his head.

  We didn’t need metal gates and cages to keep people from stealing back in Fredtown, I thought. I pressed my lips together hard so I wouldn’t slip and actually say that.

  Would the woman try again to slap me if I said anything?

  “Now come along,” the woman said, tugging on Bobo’s arm. Her hand slid down his wrist; it looked like she wanted to hold his right hand while I held his left.

  But Bobo pulled away. He cowered against me and whined, “My legs are tired. Carry me, Rosi.”

  We hadn’t even walked the length of a soccer pitch—not even the miniature soccer pitches Bobo played on. I’d seen him run that distance, back and forth and back and forth, dozens of times without stopping. Without even breathing hard.

  His legs couldn’t have been tired, and normally I would have said so. I would have told him he was perfectly capable of walking on his own. Instead, I bent down and was about to pick him up when the woman said, “No, no, I’ll carry you, Bobo. I haven’t gotten to carry you since the day you were born.”

  I thought Bobo might dodge her again, but he let her lift him up.

  “You knew me the day I was born?” he asked, seeming enchanted by the notion.

  Obviously he didn’t understand what it meant that this woman was our real mother.

  “Don’t you mean you haven’t carried Bobo since he was a few days old?” I asked her. “The Freds always said Edwy and I were the only ones taken to Fredtown on the very day of our birth.”

  Was I trying to get her to speak of my birth just as wistfully as she did Bobo’s? Was I trying to get her to solve the mystery of why Edwy’s and my removal to Fredtown had been different from every other child’s? Was I just showing off? I’m not sure. Everything in my head and heart was jumbled.

  The woman gave me such a sharp glance, it felt like a knife cutting through the air.

  “I only saw Bobo that first day,” she said. “A Fred took him right from my arms. I don’t know where the Freds took him the next day, or the day after that. My own child, and I knew nothing. The Freds were everywhere back then. People said they could sniff out a woman giving birth anywhere, no matter how she tried to hide.”

  The way she said “Fred” was like how someone back in Fredtown might say “poison” or “evil” or “villain” or “hate” when they were trying to make a story scary on purpose. When they were pretending there were bad things in the world.

  Freds weren’t bad. Freds were good.

  I recoiled, and made a noise that might have been a whimper. I wanted to say, No, no, you don’t understand! The Freds only did that because they had to, because they wanted to keep us children safe. . . . But the words stuck in my throat.

  “What kind of a baby was I?” Bobo asked, as if that was all he cared about.

  The woman nuzzled her face down into Bobo’s curls, just like Fred-mama, Fred-daddy, and I myself had done a thousand times since Bobo was born. Or—since he’d arrived in Fredtown.

  “Oh, Bobo, you were the sweetest little baby I’d ever seen,” she said. She caught me watching and her cheeks flushed, as if she knew she was really supposed to say, I mean, you and your sister were the two sweetest babies I’d ever seen. The two of you are both my favorites. Of course I can’t choose between you.

  That’s the kind of thing Fred-mama or Fred-daddy would have said. They would have corrected themselves instantly. They were as good at that “favorite” thing as Mrs. Osemwe, the Fredtown school principal.

  This woman just narrowed her eyes at me and repeated, “Yes, Bobo, you were the sweetest baby ever.”

  Bobo’s legs dangled awkwardly on either side of the woman’s hips. Pure meanness crawled into me, and I wanted to say, You don’t even know how to carry a little kid, do you? You don’t know how to be a mother at all. Because you haven’t been one the past twelve years. Not for real.

  Was this what it felt like to be Edwy? To want nothing so much as to say and do bad things?

  You don’t want to hurt Bobo, I reminded myself. You want him to stay good and sweet and innocent and unharmed more than you want this woman to know how mad you are.

  And . . . I still did want her to like me. I wanted her to see that she’d been wrong to act so mean. Wrong to try to slap me.

  I pressed my lips together even harder. I imagined even a crowbar couldn’t open them.

  The woman started walking again, and I followed her. We got to the other side of the caged-in building, and a wide street lay before us. Other parents and children were piling into cars and funny little bicycle cabs; motor scooters wove through the crowd with as many as four or five people crowd
ed onto the seat. I even saw one laughing couple clutching a baby and jumping onto a skateboard.

  Nobody wore a helmet. Any Fred I knew would have been horrified. They would have said everything but the cars were unsafe. (And maybe the cars, too, if there weren’t seat belts. Which nobody seemed to be using.)

  But Bobo loved anything with wheels. His eyes glowed and he bounced up and down in the woman’s arms.

  “What do we get to ride in?” he asked eagerly.

  The woman frowned and shot me another glance that might as well have come with words attached: You keep your mouth shut, young lady. I don’t want to hear anything out of you.

  “We live close by,” she told Bobo. “We don’t need to do anything but walk.”

  We kept going, dodging cars and scooters and bicycles. I started feeling glad that the woman was carrying Bobo, because then I didn’t have to worry about him getting run over. There didn’t seem to be traffic laws, or if there were, they were no more complicated than Try not to get killed.

  This place was nothing like Fredtown. Fredtown was clean and orderly, simple but tidy. This place was a lovely fountain marred by a rust stain across the marble; it was a nice-enough house next door to one with a collapsed roof and vines growing out of the chimney; it was ice-cream wrappers and chewing gum and what might have even been dog droppings all along the cracked sidewalk.

  This was supposed to be home?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The house we were going to wasn’t close. The woman and I both wore ourselves out taking turns carrying Bobo before she finally stopped in front of a door and pulled out a key. The door and the wall it stood in looked like there should be no need for keys or locks—they looked like you should have been able to give the wood one good push and knock the whole shack over: all four shaky walls and the rusted tin roof too.

  The Freds say any house can become a home when there’s a loving family, I told myself. The Freds say if you don’t like your surroundings, it’s your job to brighten them. Maybe I should volunteer to paint.