Among the Impostors Read online

  Jackal boy seemed to be considering. Finally, he said, “Okay.”

  Luke scrambled up and pulled away. He rubbed the side of his face. He wasn’t sure if it was sore from hitting the tree or from being slammed against the ground. His hand came away wet.

  “I’m bleeding,” he said accusingly.

  “You’ll have to hide it,” jackal boy said. “Are you good at hiding?”

  Luke shrugged away the question. He knew jackal boy was really asking something else. But Luke wasn’t ready to answer.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” Luke asked.

  “Which one?” jackal boy asked. “If you look at the school records, I’m Scott Renault. Out here, I’m Jason.”

  “One of those names is fake,” Luke said.

  Somewhere in the woods, an owl hooted. Luke waited. Finally, jackal boy answered, softly, “Yes.”

  “Your friends all have fake names, too,” Luke said.

  “Yes.” No hesitation.

  “You’re all third children who have come out of hiding with fake I.D. cards,” Luke said.

  “Exnays,” jackal boy said.

  “Is that what that means?” Luke asked.

  “You didn’t know?” jackal boy asked. “Where have you been all your life?”

  Luke decided not to answer that question, either.

  ’And fonrols—” he started.

  “—are any third children, hiding or not.”

  “Why does everyone at school call each other those names?” Luke asked. “Is everyone here an exnay?”

  In the dark, Luke could barely see jackal boy shaking his head.

  “Haven’t kids called each other exnays and fonrols at the other schools you’ve been to? All the other places you’ve ever lived? Some say in the beginning the Government paid people to use ‘fonrol’ and ‘exnay’ as swear words. On TV, and stuff. Then those words were forbidden in public broadcast, which just meant that people used them more in private. They wanted to make sure that everyone thought of third children as terrible.”

  Luke wondered why Jen had never told him about that.

  “Maybe I’ve never been to any other schools,” Luke said cautiously. He’d said “maybe.” He could still deny everything if he wanted.

  Jackal boy laughed, openmouthed. His teeth glinted in the moonlight.

  “Why don’t you just come out and admit it?” he asked. “You’re an exnay, too. I know it.”

  Luke dodged the question.

  “Why do you harass me every night?” he asked. “When everyone else ignores me—”

  “It’s the procedure we developed for dealing with new boys,” jackal boy said. “And new girls, over at Harlow School for Girls. We’ve discovered it’s hard for shadow children when they first come out of hiding—they’re overwhelmed, traumatized. Think about it. They’ve spent their whole lives thinking it’s death to be seen, and suddenly they’re expected to interact with others all day long, to sit through classes with dozens of other kids, behave normally. They freak out.”

  “Did you?” Luke asked, trying to picture jackal boy as the new kid, just come out of hiding, scared of everything. His imagination failed him.

  “Me?” Jackal boy sounded surprised. “Sure. It was tough. The problem was, lots of exnays got so panicked, they’d do something really dumb—stand up and chant their real name, start screaming, ‘Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!’—you know, totally lose it. Now, Hendricks has a lot of disturbed kids, anyway—”

  “It does?” Luke asked.

  “Haven’t you noticed?” Jackal boy sounded amazed. “The autistic kids—the ones who rock and won’t look you in the eye—the phobic kids, we’ve got all sorts of troubled cases in there. Ever meet Rolly Sturgeon? There’s a psycho for you. So exnays can get away with some pretty wacky behavior at Hendricks. But the Population Police still got in a few good raids. That’s why a lot of us exnays got together and planned it all out. Every time a new kid arrives, we go into emergency mode until we can tell if he’s an exnay or not. We watch. We protect.” Luke remembered the hands pushing him down into the chair that first day, in his first class. “But we do it all in secret. We give the exnay plenty of breathing room. And we pick just one person to approach him. To be a friend.”

  Luke thought about having to chant, “I am a fonrol” fifty times, of having to do push-ups while everyone else laughed, of having to obey every single one of jackal boy’s sarcastic commands.

  “I thought friends were supposed to be nice to you,” Luke said bitterly. “Maybe that’s a word I don’t understand, either.”

  “Being too nice to an exnay from the start only causes trouble,” jackal boy said. “They break down. They get weepy. They’re so happy to find a sympathetic ear that they tell everything, no matter who else can hear. No, exnays need the kind of friend who can toughen them up. Like I did for you.”

  Was that what had happened? Luke felt as overwhelmed and confused as he had his first day at Hendricks. Listening to jackal boy was like it used to be listening to Jen: They were both so sure of themselves, it was hard for Luke to figure out what he thought on his own.

  “How can you tell if a new kid is an exnay or not?” Luke asked, stalling.

  “We give them a test,” jackal boy said. “When they’re ready, we leave a door open and make sure they see it, we stare them right in the eye—we know exactly how an exnay would respond, compared with a typical agoraphobe, or a typical autistic kid.”

  “You’ve got everyone figured out, huh?” Luke said.

  “Sure,” jackal boy asked. “Can’t you tell?”

  Luke couldn’t answer that question. He was feeling panicky again. In a minute, he was going to have to make a decision. With Jen, it had been easy—he’d trusted her right away. But he was older now, more suspicious. He knew that she had been betrayed.

  And he could be, too.

  “So you gave me the usual test,” he said tentatively. “Did I pass?”

  “Depends on what you call passing,” jackal boy said. He sounded cagier now, like he wasn’t sure whose side Luke was on.

  Luke had run out of questions. Or—he had lots of questions, but none of them would help him decide whether to trust jackal boy and his friends with his secret. It would be so nice to be able to tell. But was it worth risking his life for?

  Had he already risked his life by following them into the woods?

  Luke didn’t like thinking things like that. He missed Jen all of a sudden. She was always good at turning his fear into a joke.

  “Did you know Jen?” he asked jackal boy abruptly.

  “Jen?” jackal boy said, his voice suddenly exuberant. “Jen Talbot? You knew her, too?”

  Luke nodded. “She was my, um, neighbor. I went over to her house whenever I could,” he said.

  “Wow,” jackal boy breathed. “Come on!”

  He grabbed Luke’s arm and pulled him back through the woods, all the time marveling, “I can’t believe you really met her. In person. It’s incredible. She’s legendary, you know—”

  The low-hanging tree limbs didn’t seem so frightening now. Luke and jackal boy simply ducked. Together. A couple times jackal boy held a branch out of the way so Luke could go first. A couple times Luke returned the favor. Jackal boy kept rushing Luke along. They burst back into the clearing where everyone else was still sitting, not even talking. They appeared to have nothing to do but wait for jackal boy.

  “Listen, you all!” jackal boy announced. “This is unbelievable! He knew Jen. He went to her house and everything!”

  There was a flurry of questions—“What was she like?” “Did she tell you about the rally?” “How did you know her?” Someone produced a bag of cookies and they all passed it around, like it was a party.

  It was a party. It was a party where they were accepting Luke into their group. Just because he knew Jen.

  Luke did his best to answer all the questions.

  “Jen was—amazing,” he said. “She wasn’
t scared of anything. Not the Population Police, not the Government, not anyone. Not even her parents.” Luke thought about how strange it was that Jen’s father worked for the Population Police. Mr. Talbot was like a double agent, trying to help third children instead of killing them. But he hadn’t been able to prevent his own daughter’s death. He’d just barely managed to keep the Population Police from finding out that she had been his daughter.

  Luke didn’t want to talk about Jen’s death, just her life.

  “She spent months planning the rally,” he said. “It was her statement, ‘I deserve to exist. We deserve to exist.’ She wanted as many third children there as possible. Out of hiding. She thought the Government would have to listen. She took everyone to the steps of the president’s house . . .” Luke remembered the fight they’d had when he’d refused to go. And how she’d forgiven him. He stopped talking, lost in grief.

  “The Government killed everyone at the rally,” Nina finished for him.

  Luke nodded blindly. He couldn’t ignore Jen’s death. He choked out, “Jen was a true hero. She was the bravest person I’ll ever know. And someday—someday everyone will know about her.”

  The others nodded solemnly. They know how I feel, Luke marveled. And then, in spite of his grief, he felt a shot of joy: I am one of them. I belong.

  After that, somehow, he was able to tell happy stories about Jen. He had the whole crowd laughing when he described how Jen had dusted for his fingerprints the first time he’d gone to her house.

  “She wanted to make sure I was . . .” Luke hesitated. He had been about to say “another shadow child, like her.” But that wasn’t how he wanted to reveal his secret, just letting it slip out like it didn’t matter. He finished lamely, “She wanted to make sure I was who I said I was.”

  “So,” jackal boy said, lounging against a tree. “Who are you, anyway? What’s your real name, Tee’?”

  Luke looked at the circle of faces surrounding him. Jackal boy’s question had silenced the laughter. Or maybe it was Luke’s sudden stammering. Now everyone was watching Luke expectantly. An owl hooted somewhere deeper in the woods, and it was like a signal. Finally. It was time to tell.

  “L—” Luke started. But the word stuck in his throat. All those nights he’d whispered his name, all those times he’d longed to speak his name aloud—and now he couldn’t.

  Some of the dry cookie crumbs slid back on his tongue and he started coughing, choking. One of the other boys had to pound him on the back before Luke got his breath back.

  “Lee Grant,” Luke said, as soon as he could speak again. His urge to confess was gone. “My name is Lee Grant.”

  “Sure,” jackal boy kidded him. “Whatever you say.”

  And then Luke felt foolish. Jackal boy had revealed his real name. Why couldn’t Luke reveal his?

  Because, Luke thought with a chill, I didn’t decide to belong. Jackal boy decided for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Belonging to jackal boy’s group made all the difference in the world. It began that night. Luke didn’t have to creep back from the woods by himself, praying nobody noticed. He went with the others, as part of the crowd. They strutted down the hall, not even trying to be quiet.

  “What if someone hears?” Luke ventured.

  “Who cares?” jackal boy replied. “Indoctrination’s almost over. If there are any teachers around, they’ll just think we left early to man our hall monitor posts.”

  They were in a brighter end of the hall now. Jackal boy got a good look at Luke’s face and whistled.

  “You really did get all bloody. Come on. I’ll take you to the nurse.”

  Jackal boy led Luke to an unfamiliar office, one he’d seen only once before, when he was searching for windows.

  “My friend walked into the wall, coming out of Indoctrination,” Jackal boy told the woman who answered the door. “Stupid, huh? Can you give him a bandage?”

  “My, my, you boys. You never look where you’re going,” the woman fussed. She was old and wrinkled, like the pictures Luke had seen of grandmothers. She puttered around getting antiseptic and gauze and tape. Then she dabbed at Luke’s cheek with a wet cloth. “This is an awfully rough abrasion. Which wall did you run into, dear?”

  Jackal boy saved Luke from having to answer.

  “Oh, he didn’t get bloody from the wall,” jackal boy explained. “He kind of bounced off the wall and fell down. Then he scraped his face on the carpet. Someone might have kicked him by mistake, too.”

  Luke’s mother would have listened to an excuse like that and then said, “Okay. Now. What really happened?” But this woman only nodded and tsk-tsked a little more.

  The antiseptic stung, and Luke had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. But the woman was quick, and his face was neatly bandaged before he knew it.

  “Write your name and the time down in the log on your way out,” the woman said. “And be more careful the next time, all right?”

  Jackal boy even wrote Luke’s name for him.

  Up in their room, jackal boy stretched and yawned and proclaimed, “I don’t feel like dealing with the new kid tonight. Let’s just leave him alone. Okay, guys? He’s getting boring, anyway.”

  Luke thought some of his other roommates looked disappointed, but nobody complained.

  In the morning, jackal boy said, “You can have breakfast with us. We have our own table. Hall monitor privileges.”

  “But I’m not a hall monitor,” Luke said.

  “The teachers won’t notice,” jackal boy said. “And maybe you will be soon.”

  So Luke sat at a table with other boys. For once he didn’t have to force himself to choke down his oatmeal. It practically tasted good. And for the first time, Luke got a good look around the dining hall without feeling like he had to glance quickly and furtively. With clean white walls and a peaked ceiling, it really wasn’t such a bad place.

  “Can I ask you some questions? Here, I mean,” Luke said to jackal boy.

  ’As long as you’re not acting like a real exnay,” jackal boy said brusquely, as if he were truly swearing at Luke. But Luke caught the double meaning. It was a brilliant code.

  “Why is this school like this?” Luke began. “I mean, with no windows, and the strange boys . . . and the teachers who don’t seem to notice us unless we do something wrong. And even then, they just say, ‘Two demerits.’ I don’t even know what that means.”

  Jackal boy pushed back his oatmeal and smirked.

  “Confusing, huh?” he asked mockingly. But he started explaining, anyway. “Hendricks began as an educational experiment. Back when there were the famines, people had debates about whether the undesirables in society deserved food when so many were starving. They let all the criminals die, but a bunch of bleeding-heart, sympathetic types said it was cruel not to feed people with mental illnesses, physical disabilities, that kind of thing. One man stepped forward and offered his family’s estate to be two schools for troubled kids. Hendricks for boys and Harlow for girls. He said he’d feed them, too—you see how well he’s doing.” Jackal boy made a face at the oatmeal. “They built the schools without windows because Mr. Hendricks had the idea that kids with agoraphobia—the ones scared of wide-open spaces—would be better off not even seeing the outdoors. He thought they’d start longing for what they couldn’t see. And he thought having windows would just overstimulate the autistic kids. But he also thought it’d be good to bring in some normal kids. Like role models.”

  Luke tried to absorb all of that. He thought about how differently jackal boy acted when he was explaining something, compared with how Jen had always been. Jen was always outraged, indignant over every little injustice. He could just hear her voice, rising in disgust: “Can you believe it? Isn’t that terrible?”

  Jackal boy just sounded secretly amused, almost haughty. Too bad. Poor kids. Who cares?

  Luke swallowed another bite of lumpy oatmeal.

  “And the teachers?” he prompted. “Why ar
en’t they more . . . um . . .”

  “Involved? Aware? Semi-intelligent?” jackal boy offered.

  “Yeah. All the adults. Like, the nurse last night didn’t seem very smart. And what’s-her-name, in the office, when I was in there the first day, it was like all the students were just a pain to her.”

  “Think about it,” jackal boy said. “If you were a grownup, and you could get a job anywhere else, would you work here? We got the dregs, man, the real dregs.”

  Luke didn’t know anything about grown-up jobs. He’d never thought he would be able to come out of hiding to have one.

  Jackal boy was smirking again. “But it serves our purposes, all right, to have teachers who are just one step up from leckers. We can do just about anything we want. Got it?”

  He looked around at his cohorts, the hall monitors, and soon they were all smirking, too.

  Luke wanted to object to that word, “lecker.” Just because someone came from the country, that didn’t make him dumb. Did it?

  Something else bothered Luke, too.

  “But I wanted to learn a lot at Hendricks,” he said. “Math and science and how to speak other languages . . .. I’ve been here a month and I haven’t learned a thing. I don’t even know if I’m going to the right classes. I wanted to—” he broke off at the last minute because he remembered he couldn’t talk about being an exnay. He couldn’t say that he wanted to learn everything he could to help make third children legal again.

  Jackal boy was laughing anyway.

  “Oh, right, we’re all here to learn,” he said, rolling his eyes. This made his friends laugh, too. “Just stick close to me,” jackal boy continued. “That’s how you learn what you need to know. Forget the classes. And if you’re worried about grades—don’t you think I know how to fix that, too? How do you think we all got on the honor roll?”

  Luke didn’t know. He didn’t even know what the honor roll was.

  But when the bell rang for the first class, he left the dining hall with jackal boy and his gang. He felt safe now, traveling in a pack. All the hall monitors he passed gave him knowing looks, with secret nods that nobody else could have noticed.