“Maybe he could even give us some food from his school,” Nina said. “Maybe they feed the boys better than they feed the girls.”
She felt more cheerful now. Everything could work out. She waited for Percy or Matthias to volunteer to be the one to sneak into the boys’ school. Matthias was closer to Lee Grant’s age—if Matthias pretended to be a new student, he’d be more likely to get placed in the same classes as Lee. But Nina thought Percy was smarter—he would know what to do, how to trick Lee into telling him everything.
But neither Percy nor Matthias spoke up. Surprised, Nina looked from one boy to the other—and discovered they were both staring at her.
“Well?” she said. “Which one of you is going to do it?”
Percy waited a while longer, then shook his head in disgust, as if he couldn’t believe Nina hadn’t figured everything out.
“You’re the only one who knows what this Lee Grant looks like. You’re the only one he knows, the only one he’d be likely to trust. It’s got to be you,” he said.
“But I’m a girl!” Nina said. “It’s a boys’ school!”
“You can tuck your hair up in my cap,” Percy said. “You can wear Matthias’s clothes. You can pretend.”
Nina gawked at him. She imagined herself in Matthias’s ragged shirt and patched jeans, standing amidst the Hendricks boys in their fancy clothes. She’d be noticed in an instant, thrown out in a flash.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m not like all of you. I’ve never had to . . . to live by my wits. If anyone stops me, I won’t know what to say. That’s why . . .” At the last minute, she managed to stop herself from spilling everything. That’s why I didn’t know what to do when the hating man asked me to betray you. That’s why I almost did betray you. Instead she finished lamely, “That’s why someone else should go instead of me. You can’t trust me.”
“We trust you,” Alia said softly.
How could Nina disagree with that?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was dusk. The way the shadows slanted through the trees reminded Nina of a dozen other dusks she’d spent in the woods, when she and her friends had sneaked out to meet Jason and his buddies. Once again she was crouched behind a tree, watching and waiting. Once again she was listening for the snap of a twig, the approach of danger. Once again her heart was pounding in her chest, her every nerve ending was alert with the thrill of the risk she was about to take.
But this time she was preparing to sneak out of the woods, not into it. She pulled Matthias’s cap a little lower over her eyes and peeked around the tree. She had picked dusk as the safest time for her mission. She was hoping that the boys’ school, like the girls’ school, had dull indoctrination sessions in the evening, which students slept through or sneaked out of. Surely she could spy on the indoctrination session, locate Lee Grant, and pull him aside as everyone was leaving. She hoped. She’d been making plans all day long.
What she hadn’t counted on was how much the shadows spooked her. Not just the shadows in the trees, but the shadows that stretched across the long, long lawn between the woods and Hendricks School for Boys. If she was going to find Lee Grant, she’d have to run across those shadows, out in the open, out where someone might see.
It had been one thing to walk across the Harlow School lawn to the woods with Sally and Bonner on either side of her, giggling nervously all the way. She knew now that they had not actually expected to face real danger—only some pale imitation of it, nothing that couldn’t be waved away with an I.D. card.
Nina knew she had been frightened, too, walking out in the open with Alia after they were questioned by the two policemen on the bridge. But Alia had rescued her so magically from the policemen that Nina knew she had a false sense of confidence—no matter what happened, Alia or Percy or Matthias could save her.
But the other three weren’t going into Hendricks School with her now. She was completely alone.
Now I know why Gran believed in God, Nina thought. God? Can you help me, too?
Nina inched forward, to the edge of the woods, then threw herself into a desperate run across the lawn.
She reached the side of the building more quickly than she’d expected. She realized she’d kept her eyes squeezed shut for most of her run. She was lucky she hadn’t smashed into the building. She turned around and looked back and couldn’t believe she’d come all that distance, through all those shadows. She took a deep breath and clutched her fingers on to one of the bricks in the wall of the school, as if that could hold her steady.
“A door,” she whispered to herself. “I need to find a door.”
Sliding the palms of her hands along the wall, she moved forward, looking ahead. By the time she reached the corner, her fingertips felt ragged from the rough bricks. She didn’t seem to be thinking very well. Had she missed noticing a door? Or was there one entire side of the school without any entrance at all?
Rather than turning around, she turned the corner. And there was solid metal, with a metal knob sticking out. A door and a doorknob. Just what she’d been looking for.
Without giving herself time to lose her nerve, she grabbed the knob, turned, and pulled.
A dark hallway gaped before her. She stepped into the school. The door slid shut behind her.
If Nina’s heart had been pounding before, it was beating away at triple time now. Every nerve ending in her body seemed to be screaming, “Alert! Alert! Danger! Danger! Turn around and go back to safety!”
Nina was surprised her brain could still override the warning, could still make her feet slide forward. She stumbled but didn’t fall, and kept moving.
The dark hall ended in a T with another dark hall. Nina turned right at first, hesitated, then turned around. Over the pounding in her ears she could hear shrieks and screams coming from the opposite direction. Somewhere down that hall boys were laughing and yelling at the top of their lungs.
It didn’t sound at all like the indoctrination lectures Nina was familiar with—some dry, dusty old teacher droning on uselessly at the front of the room. This sounded like . . . like fun.
Nina crept back toward the noise, picking up speed when she realized there was no way anyone could hear her footsteps over all that commotion. Finally she reached a lit doorway that was obviously the source of all the noise. She peeked cautiously around the corner, sticking her head out just far enough to see past the doorframe.
It was a huge room, like the dining area back at Harlow School for Girls. Nina saw tables and chairs stacked against the wall—this probably was the dining room for the boys’ school, but it’d been converted tonight, with boys running around chasing dozens of rubber balls across the floor.
“Kick it here!”
“No, no, I’m open!”
“Throw me the ball!”
Nina closed her eyes and slipped back out of sight around the corner of the doorframe. The boys’ game had thrown her back into a memory from years before:
It was summertime. The apartment was stifling, so Aunty Lystra yanked up the windows behind the blinds, letting in little, useless whispers of breeze. But the open windows also made the noise from the street below distinct for the first time in Nina’s memory. She heard little-kid voices chanting, “One potato, two potato, three potato, four . . .” She heard the thud of something—a rope?—and jumping feet hitting pavement, and voices singing, “Mama called the doctor and the doctor said . . .” Nina stood in the middle of her hot little apartment, and an expression of wonder broke over her face. “There . . . there are other kids out there,” she stammered in amazement. ‘And they’re playing. They’re being loud, and it’s okay. Nobody’s yelling at them. Can I . . .” But the question died in her throat, because she saw the answer in Gran’s eyes, in the eyes of every single one of her aunties. Other kids could play outside together and be loud. Nina couldn’t. Nina would never be allowed to be like other kids.
Nina slid weakly to the floor.
How was it that
the boys at Hendricks School were allowed to have fun? Nina remembered how the Harlow girls had sat like little mice through all their classes, squeaking down the hall in terror, ready to dart back into hiding at the slightest threat. It had taken Nina days to get up the nerve to whisper to Sally and Bonner in the dark of their room at night. She couldn’t imagine yelling with them, throwing her voice across a crowded, brightly lit room.
But that was what the boys were doing.
Nina turned her head and looked again. This time she held back her sense of astonishment enough to peer at faces. Was Lee Grant in that group of wild, screaming boys?
Nina’s eyes skipped from boy to boy—too small, too tall, too dark, too fair. . . . Was she even capable of remembering what Lee looked like?
Then someone yelled, “Good, good, just pick it up faster,” and she recognized the voice. Maybe. She snapped her gaze over to the boy who had yelled. He was standing off to the side, swinging his arms and directing the other boys. He looked taller than Nina remembered Lee being, but maybe he had grown in the past few months. Something else was different about him, too—she couldn’t quite tell what it was, but the difference was great enough that she hesitated, wondering if she’d made a mistake. Maybe this boy looked more relaxed than the Lee she remembered, maybe he grinned more confidently.
She didn’t remember ever seeing Lee grin before. She couldn’t imagine the Lee she’d known cheering so proudly, “That’s it! That’s it! You scored!”
Or slapping another boy’s back so triumphantly.
Nina drew back from the door, shaken. She sat still for a long while, letting the noise from the boys’ games spill over her.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t go up to this strange boy to ask for help. He wasn’t the boy she remembered—even if he was Lee Grant, she hadn’t known him well enough, or he’d changed too much for her to trust him. This boy positively swaggered—he seemed as overconfident as the hating man.
Or Jason.
Nina moved farther from the door, creeping backward down the hall. She reached the other hall she’d come down and practically crawled to the door to the outside. She raised her body only high enough to turn the knob, and dropped out to the ground.
The last light of dusk was slipping away now. The woods were one huge shadow off to the left. Nina couldn’t bear the thought of facing Percy, Matthias, and Alia now. Blindly she inched straight out from the school, toward another clump of shadowy plants. Maybe she could hide there, tell the others about her cowardice in the morning.
Nina reached the edge of the shadows. Something squished beneath her feet, and she wrinkled her nose in disgust. Then she sniffed.
Tomato. Suddenly the air around her smelled like tomato.
Nina reached down, groping in the dark. She felt prickly stems, delicate flowers, pointy leaves. And then she felt small, round balls. She jerked on one of the balls, pulling it off the plant. She brought the round ball up to her mouth, bit into it cautiously.
The taste of fresh tomato exploded in her mouth. Nina dropped the tomato in amazement. She took off running for the woods, forgetting all caution in her delight.
“Alia! Percy! Matthias!” she yelled. “I found a garden! We’re saved!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
They came back with the flashlight, all four of them. None of them was cautious. They shone the light from plant to plant—“Look at all the tomatoes!” ‘And cabbages—” “Are those green beans?” Matthias made a wondrous discovery when he tripped over a root and accidentally upended a leafy plant. A huge potato hung from the bottom of it, pulled from its hiding place in the dirt. After that, Nina pulled up other plants and found more potatoes. They gobbled them raw and didn’t care. They also found underground carrots, which they ate without even cleaning.
When they’d feasted until they were full, Percy shone the light around at the toppled plants, the discarded stems, the footprints in the dirt.
“Someone’s going to know,” he said.
Nina raked her fingers through the soil, erasing a footprint.
“We’ll cover our tracks,” she said. “Like we did in the woods.”
They went back and forth, carrying all the uprooted plants out to the woods to hide. They buried the smashed tomatoes they’d carelessly knocked to the ground; they picked up every stray leaf and discarded stem.
“There,” Percy said, letting one last clod of dirt filter through his fingers, covering one last trampled plant. “Is this how it looked before?”
Nina shone the flashlight back and forth. The globes of red and green looked eerie on the tomato vines. The leaves of the remaining potato plants cast shadows over the holes they’d covered so carefully.
“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. It was hard to remember what the garden had looked like in the beginning; she’d been so hungry and so overjoyed at the prospect of eating. “I think next time we’ll have to be more careful.”
She traipsed back to the woods with the other three kids. All of them were subdued suddenly, worn out after their burst of excitement.
After that, one of them went to the garden every night and picked a day’s worth of food. They tried to pick no more than one tomato from each plant and dig up no more than one potato from each row. They stayed away from the cabbages because picking a huge cabbage head would leave a gaping hole that anyone might notice. But there was still plenty of food to eat. Nina just wished some of the plants grew bread or fruit—she was getting sick of vegetables.
“If we could even cook the potatoes—,” she complained one evening over raw green beans.
“Someone would see the fire,” Matthias said. “They’d find us.”
Percy shrugged. ‘At least we have food.”
Nina sighed. She wished one of the others would gripe even once—about the discomfort of sleeping on roots and itchy leaves, about the rain that had fallen on them half of one night, about the muddy taste of the water they drank from the stream. But the way they acted, you’d think the woods was a palace, you’d think the raw vegetables were gourmet food. She wondered yet again about their lives before the Population Police had captured them.
“What did you eat in the city, when you were living on the streets?” she asked.
“Same kind of food as everyone else,” Percy said, brushing dirt from a carrot.
“Sometimes we’d find doughnuts in the garbage outside a bakery,” Alia said dreamily, as if that were one of her dearest memories.
Nina shuddered. “Didn’t you make any money from selling fake I.D.’s?” she asked. “How did you manage to do that, anyway?”
“Let’s just say it was a nonprofit operation,” Matthias said. ‘Anybody mind if I have the last potato?”
Nina could tell when she’d had a door slammed in her face. Matthias had as good as said, “Don’t ask any more questions.” She did, anyway.
“Do you think you could start doing that again?” she asked. “And I could help you. Why didn’t you think you could go back to the city and live on the streets again? I could come with you—we could work together. . . . Maybe we could even find doughnuts again.” She grinned a little at Alia. Suddenly it all seemed possible—even eating doughnuts out of the garbage. The woods and the raw vegetables were only temporary. They had to make some plans beyond the next day. When the garden died . . . when winter came . . . they had to be ready.
“We were arrested when we lived in the city, remember?” Percy said harshly. “Someone betrayed us. We don’t know who. So—we can’t go back. We wouldn’t know who to trust.”
Nina blinked back tears she didn’t want the others to see. She stood up.
“I’ll go to the garden tonight,” she mumbled. “It’s my turn.”
Listlessly she threaded her way between trees, stepped out onto the lawn that led to the garden. She’d forgotten the flashlight, but it didn’t matter. It was still early for a trip to the garden. The shadow from the boys’ school was only beginning to s
tretch across the lawn. The red tomatoes gleamed in the last glow of twilight.
“Tomatoes, potatoes, beans, and carrots,” Nina muttered to herself. By comparison, even doughnuts plucked from a trash Dumpster sounded good. She reached the edge of the garden and picked her first vegetable: a cucumber, just for variety’s sake.
Knowing that someone had betrayed the other three kids made her feel worse than ever. Even if their story came out only in bits and pieces, she felt more like she understood them now. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to trust her in the beginning, when the hating man first put her in the prison cell with them. Maybe she should tell them about the rest of her story, after Jason betrayed her. Maybe she should tell them about the hating man wanting her to betray them. Maybe then . . .
Nina didn’t know what would happen if she told the others everything. Maybe it would just give them something to betray her with.
The world seemed to contain entirely too many betrayals.
Nina pulled an ear of corn from one of the stalks at the edge of the garden. She pulled back the husks, wondering if the cob inside actually contained something worth eating. None of the corn so far had been edible, but Nina still had hope. She brought the tiny nubs of grain up to her mouth, bit, and chewed thoughtfully. Not bad. She looked toward the next row of cornstalks, hoping for bigger ears.
Then she froze.
There in the cornstalks, his face distorted with anger, a boy stood glowering at her.
“You!” he hissed. “You’re the one who’s been stealing from my garden!”
“No, wait, I can explain—”
But the boy rushed forward, grabbed her by her wrists. Another boy joined him from behind and clutched Nina’s right arm. Nina looked from one to the other. She recognized them both now.
“Lee! Trey!” she screamed. “Don’t you remember me? I’m Nina. I used to meet you in the woods—”
“Yeah. And then you helped Jason try to betray us,” Lee snarled back.
“I didn’t! I didn’t!” Nina screamed.