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Each time I wiped my face with my sleeve, I just wept more, until finally I gave up and leaned against the well stones, my eyes stinging with each tear. My insides felt like they had just been scalded with boiling oil.
Dr. Woolthersham was right about one thing: I did not know what colorblindness was. I had never heard of such a thing. Such a defect. I couldn't even remember seeing “colorblind” in the dictionary. What could it mean? I could see that my tears were turning to rusty mud against my dust-coated hands. I could see where some anonymous girl had ripped the bland brown fabric on the side of my salawar. I could see the black and blue forming on my shins where the other girls had kicked me. How could I be colorblind if I could see these things?
All I did know as I wept into the grit was that being colorblind was something very, very bad. That I never should have been born. That I and everyone else in my life—the VanDeers, all the Naomi girls, Bhenji Nealingson—would have been better off if I simply did not exist. A new thought occurred to me, straightened my knees, stood me upright, turned me towards the depths of the well.
I remember thinking that this would have been simpler in America, where as a ward of the state, I had health insurance. Maybe not for the average ten year-old girl, but as an emancipated minor, I would have had more freedom. Freedom to go to the right kind of clinic and explain my situation. Freedom to get the right prescription for the right pill. Freedom enough for something quick and painless and final, the kind of solutions the vork clinics sold.
As it was, I had no health insurance. I dug my fingernails into the well's sunsoaked mortar, its porosity biting back at my fingertips. My heart squeezed each beat in agonized anticipation as I levered the tips of my toes against the well just a few inches above the ground. I clung to the lip with my small hands and pulled back on my arms, ready to climb back up to the ledge.
I threw my chest and arms over the edge of the well and kicked with my legs until I had propelled my bottom half over the top. I lay belly-down, nose up against mortar. Edging my face over one millimeter at a time, soon I peeked with one eye down into the silver blackness. It smelled like hot rain and unfinished basements.
My gaze followed the worn rope that held the weighted plastic bucket, from its anchor rusted into the well ledge all the way down into the water's dark-glinting surface. I wondered if anyone would hear me splash down. I inched over so that my head, shoulder and one knee dangled. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I never should have been born, I reminded myself, listening to the sobbing echoes of my never-should-have-been-breathed breaths. I could hear my lungs shaking, could feel my palms sweating into the stone at the thought of the task I had just assigned myself.
“What are you doing?” a voice asked.
Again surprise loosened my grip. I pitched sideways into the mouth of the well, clinging to the ledge with only one hand. Gravity swung my legs into the pit. I screamed. The resulting adrenaline rush nearly rocketed my heart out of place, filling my mouth with the sharp taste of light. My gripping hand slid, my weight pulling it open.
Two travelgloved hands caught my wrist. My body stopped short, yanking my joints upwards with the sudden change in vector. I clasped my other hand against those gloves and held on for dearest life, breathing in so sharply that the air stung. The well echoed with the hollow knocking of my sandals against its walls. The gloved hands began pulling me up and out. To help, I pressed my feet against the inner wall, an odd-angled walking. Once more I was belly-down on the ledge before rolling back into the dirt, my fall broken and guided by none other than Aidann Montgomery Parrish.
After allowing me a second to sit up, she repeated, “What are you doing?”
Throwing my back against the well, I pointed my chin to the sky and pinched my eyes shut. “What does it look like I'm doing?” I snapped, dragging my sleeve against my face again, shaking like the ends of a tuning fork.
“For someone who looked like she was trying to plummet to her death, you held my hand pretty tightly.”
I dropped my arm and looked sideways at her, noticing that her hair had grown a bit longer since last I had seen her. That smudge on her cheek had grown as well, now the size of a misshapen perks button. The rest of her face had a mottled gray look about it, and her eyelids were puffy and drooped. She sat down in the dirt beside me, her purse open and bulging with the fabric scrolls I now knew to call “contracts.”
“Maybe instead I should ask, 'Why?'“ Aidann said, stretching her legs out in front and leaning against the well. She tilted her head away from me, coughed twice and turned back.
Shamed, I looked at the dirt, kicked a rock with my toe. “I never should have been born,” I told her.
“Says who?”
“Says Dr. Woolthersham.”
She coughed again. “What makes him think he can say that?”
“He says I'm colorblind.”
She wrinkled her eyebrows. “Why'd he say that?”
“You know exams were today?”
She nodded. I told her the exam Woolthersham had given me, how I had picked the wrong thread, the unfortunate results, and how the other girls had hurt me.
“So I have to stay here until sunset, or else Dr. Woolthersham will make things worse for everybody. Like they don't already hate me enough.”
“That will lessen,” she said, “Dr. Woolthersham always picks on one or two girls whenever he's here, makes them his 'examples' for the day. In a few days, other girls who've been his examples might seek you out, be your friends.”
“I hate him,” I said, kicking at the dirt again.
“He can't be a happy man,” Aidann said, pursing her lips and nodding as if we were in complete agreement. “But colorblind?”
Furrowing her brow once more, she reached into her purse and pulled out another HandRight. Tapping the stylus to get the screen to bloom, she said, “Lucky I didn't need to ditch this.”
The silver rush of approaching death was waning. Sniffling, I looked over Adiann's shoulder as she tapped in a search for information on the term “colorblind.” A few selections came up. First she tapped her stylus on “Definition”:
“Unable to distinguish certain colors,” I read aloud.
Aidann went on to read the details that followed, her voice surefooted over the longer words that would have tripped my tongue. “Some effects of aging and other ocular pathologies can result in disturbance of color vision. However, most significant color deficiencies are permanent and congenital.”
“That means you're born with it?” I asked.
Aidann nodded and read on. “The most common types of congenital defective color vision, the red-green deficiencies, are due to recessive hereditary traits on sex-linked X chromosomes. Men are mainly affected because men have only one X and a Y chromosome, while women have two X chromosomes. If a man's one X chromosome is color defective, he will be color deficient, where as a woman must inherit two color defective X chromosomes to be color deficient.”
After which followed a simple “family tree” diagram of brightly colored globes (for females) and cubes (for males) showing how colorblindness is passed from generation to generation. Beneath that, the page offered an option to “test yourself for colorblindness with the Ishihara test.”
Her eyelids tense with determination, Aidann winked twice at the link, and the screen held a circle filled with little dots. Below the circle, the page asked, “What do you see?” Under that was a field in which one could tap an answer with one's stylus.
If I squinted against the sun glare, I could see that some of the dots formed a number. “Seven,” I prompted Aidann, who entered my reply.
The dots cleared and a smiley face appeared. “You do not have the extremely rare S-cone deficiency! This means that you can distinguish between the colors yellow and blue.” Some more information followed about the percentage of the population afflicted with this rare kind of colorblindness, where on the X chromosome this defect was located, and so on.
Beneath that was another option. I pointed to it, attempting aloud, “Check for do—, check for dee-eew—”
“Deutan/protan type (red/green) colorblindness.” Aidann read.
She selected that, and another burst of dots appeared. I squinted at it. I tilted my head to the right, then to the left. I rubbed my eyes, reopened them. I pushed my nose closer to the image to get a better look.
“Well?” Aidann asked, her stylus above the entry field.
“Nothing,” I said, swallowing anxiously, “just a bunch of brown dots.”
Looking sidelong at me, Aidann then entered “brown dots.” A new image appeared, this one of a yellow cartoon face with black eyes, its black mouth squished off to the side in concern. This one also had hands and was holding up an eye chart and a stylized double-helix, pulsing red, like an animated stomach would have in an advertisement for digestive aids.
“You may have deutananomalous or protananomalous color vision (red-green deficiency). Please visit your eye care professional for exact diagnosis and remediation of the X chromosome.” This was followed by ad banners for several genetics labs in South America that offered re-keying services for congenital disabilities like asthma, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorder—and colorblindness. Beneath that was a blob of tiny, flat-print legal-ese, liberally disclaiming the site owners' and managers' responsibility for everything and anything into all perpetuity thereon.
“But I could tell that those 'carrier' globes and cubes were red in the diagram,” I protested, “plus it said that only boys get colorblindness.”
“It doesn't say you can't see any red or green,” Aidann answered. “It just says you have a deficiency, like you have trouble telling the difference between shades of pink or green and gray or brown. And it said point-oh-five percent of girls can be protan/deutan deficient,” Aidann said.
“Lucky me.” I sneered.
“Think of it this way: you're special.”
Folding my arms over my chest and dropping my chin, I grumbled, “I don't feel so special.”
Aidann, meanwhile, had returned to “How does one inherit colorblindness.” “This says you have to have two colorblind parents or a colorblind father and a carrier mother.”
“I don't have parents. I'm an unclaimed embryo.”
“Everybody has parents,” Aidann said. “Or, at least one if you're a clone. This just means that you have a better chance of finding yours than any other person in your situation.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Do the math,” Aidann said with an encouraging inflection that rarely accompanies that particular phrase. “You've already eliminated ninety-five percent of the males and ninety-nine-point-nine-five percent of the females. That narrows your search.”
“But wouldn't people with colorblindness get it fixed? Get re-keyed?” I asked.
“Not the whole world can afford genetic reengineering.” Aidann said, looking at the HandRight.
“But not the whole world can afford to go to places like Second Chance Reproductive Rights Center, either,” I said, feasting on self-pity. “If they could have afforded to start me, then they could have afforded to fix their colorblindness.”
“Maybe they only had enough money to start you,” Aidann suggested. “They could've chosen to get re-keyed or have you. They picked you.”
“Then they picked not to come get me,” I sulked. “Some choice.”
“Maybe their money ran out. Maybe they were in an accident. Maybe something happened and they just couldn't find you.”
I thought of Mrs. VanDeer, saying, “A life that is allowed to continue only because of corrupted information can only end up corrupted itself.” Maybe the corruption prevented me from being found, even if someone were looking for me. I'd never thought of that before. I listened to my breathing, quieting between hiccups.
Aidann lifted her eyes to the sky and shrugged. “Who knows? Whatever happened then, you're here for a reason now.”
I followed her gaze. A bird circled above us. “What reason?” I snuffled.
“Because you're supposed to be,” she answered simply, still looking skyward.
“What kind of reason is that?” I asked, the petulance fading from my inflections.
“The best kind,” she said, smiling her ghost of a smile.
“How can you believe that?”
Just then, across the courtyard I heard the sweatshop door spring open. Class-change time. Other doors within the compound opened and released the other two sets of students, all headed for the well, bringing their choler, doubtless to direct it back at me again. My shins and arms still throbbed. The shaking that had just begun to quell resurfaced.
“They're going to kick me again,” I said, “but if I leave, Bhenji Nealingson gets in trouble.”
Aidann nodded, the delicate muscles around her eyes crystallizing with calm. She stood. “Then we stay here.”
I shook my head. “You don't have to stay.”
The girls were growing closer, pointing, glaring at me, spitting into the dirt in disgust.
“You're right,” Aidann said, reaching for my hand. “I don't.”
After only a moment's hesitation, I allowed her to take my fingers in hers. She pulled me to my feet, and I stepped closer to her side, gripping her elbow with my other hand. My hand in Aidann's glove flashed cold with fear as my whole body tensed for the upcoming fight.
Looking up at Aidann, I whispered, “Is this when I'm supposed to remember how the earth looks from space?”
Aidann's eye muscles pinched with brief confusion before recollection smoothed them again. I think I remember that she blushed then.
“It is,” she said.
I nodded and faced the crowd. My breath trembled like a puddle in an earthquake.
“Look!” someone shouted. “Aidann and Jane! Is it 'defect awareness day' or something?”
“Are you the disease twins? Or is Rozbeh-Bedros recruiting more charity cases for their drugs?”
“Sickyitty-sick-sick!” another mocked.
“Deefs! Sickos! Get vorked!”
The cloud of dust given life by the approaching sandals began to hit my nostrils, filling them with a mist of grit. I tried breathing through my mouth and found myself coughing.
“See?” another girl pointed rudely, “Jane's got it too!”
A chorus of “eeew”s ensued.
Another girl squealed, “Yeeuch! Don't touch them!”
My ten-year-old heart began to bleed at this, at hearing myself declared such a slimy wart on the face of the Naomi social structure, not just by Woolthersham, but by those peers I just had started to call my friends.
Aidann squeezed my hand. I tried to envision with my mind's eye the blue of the seas as seen through the SOF portal. I tried to picture the wispy veils of cloud cover, the vacuum-black setting presenting that luminous jewel called Earth—dainty, distant, harmless. I tried, but it was not enough to block out the present reality: the shroud of gravel and dust being kicked at me, the verbal stones hurled at my faultiness, the raking prongs of adolescent cruelty. I could no longer tell which was worse: being kicked and beaten by their angry hands and feet, or having my self-worth ripped to tatters at the words “sicko,” “deef,” “disease-head.” I thought they would never leave. When I started crying again, I had to endure the added humiliation of being called “baby.”
Finally, they began to trickle away, taking their insults with them, leaving their damage behind. The bottom of my stomach felt black and empty.
“I can't stand it!” I sobbed, falling bum-first back into the dirt. “I'm not like you, okay, Aidann? I can't imagine myself away from this. If someone hits me, I want to hit back. If someone hates me, I hate them back.”
Aidann gave me time enough to wipe my face before she sat down beside me, asking, “Do you want to hate them?”
“What do you mean?” I snapped. “They hated me first.”
“But is that what you want?”
I thought this over for a moment before dropping my gaze to my knees. “No,” I said bitterly. “They can hit me all they like, if they'd just love me.”
Next to me, I could feel Aidann freeze, as if this declaration were a flatline.
“Don't say that,” she said in a voice icy enough to force me to look up at her, confused.
“Don't say that,” she repeated, looking down at her legs extended in front of her.
I kicked petulantly at the stones that had landed around us. “Why should you care?”
Her lips pulled tight. She blinked twice with slow calculation. Her frown deepened, and she closed her eyes completely. “I used to think I had to do anything so people would love me,” she began just before reopening her eyes. “I used to do whatever my mom told me to do. She told me to clean the house while she was out. If it was clean enough, she wouldn't hit me sometimes. I thought that meant she loved me.
“She'd have friends over at night—grown-ups. They'd all go into her room and shut the door while I sat in the living room and watched casts. Sometimes one of the guy friends would come out and sit on the couch with me. They'd smell like weird smoke and gin—like the smells coming from my mom's room. These guys would tell me stuff, like that I was really cute, or that I had a pretty mouth. One liked to braid my hair. I liked having my hair braided, and I liked hearing that I was cute, so I thought that meant they loved me.
“They wanted to do certain—stuff—with me, like stuff boyfriends-girlfriends do on the casts, so I thought that meant they loved me, too.” She paused to cough several raspy, barren coughs, covering her mouth tightly with her gloves.
Listening to this, my skin began to feel wrong on my bones. I didn't want her to keep talking, but I didn't have the words in me to tell her to stop. I wanted to go to the bathroom just so I could get away, escape the reality Aidann had just given me. But I couldn't leave. Woolthersham's orders.
“When I got older,” she resumed, “around the time I started school, the grown-ups that hung out with my mom stopped leaving the door shut. They started bringing me in to the party. Up close and inside, her room smelled, and the smoke stung my eyes and made me dizzy. It was the smoke from the burners on my mom's dorf lab—she was a chemist, a dealer. While she was busy cooking for her friends, they'd give me drinks that left sores in my mouth in the mornings. They'd give me some of the pollies on patchies my mom made. Just dorfs, you know. Nothing addictive, no lasting effects.
“Sometimes I'd wake up on the couch in the morning with funny rashes where they'd put the patchies, or with bruises—in weird places. Once, I woke up screaming and screaming. I still don't know why. I screamed and screamed until the landlord came and broke down the door. Even that didn't snap my mom from her trance.”
“Didn't the landlord call the police?” my smallest voice asked.
Aidann breathed something approaching a laugh. “Even if they had, the cops wouldn't have showed, not in that neighborhood. After that, though, I started going off by myself. All I remember is just staring at this brick wall in the basement utility room, next to the furnace.”
“What for?”
“Have you ever seen dorf addicts coming down from a polly high?”
I shook my head. They didn't give that actie until sixth grade. I'd only made it to fourth.
“I think they used to call it autism, before they found what genes to fix. Same thing for somebody crashing off dorfs. I'd be like that for hours, I guess, days maybe, just staring at the brick wall and rocking myself. I don't really remember it much. I just remember the relief of being alone. I'd forget to go to school, to eat, to go to the bathroom.”
“Didn't your mom remind you?”
“She was doing the same thing, just at a different wall. Her friends were, too, until they'd all come out of it and get my mom cooking again. Sometimes I'd come to back upstairs on the couch watching a cast. Wouldn't even know how I got there. Anybody who'd try to come near me, I'd scratch them. Sometimes, I bit. So they started staying away from me. Once they started staying away from me, the dorfs started to clear from my system. So I was nine years old, and I was the smartest person in the place.
“And then one day I came back from school. My mom was sitting outside in the hall on the floor, dorf-crashed again. The apartment door was locked. I tried asking my mom what happened, but she was too hard-crashed to answer. I looked for the landlord. I found her. She told me we were being evicted.”
“Evicted. That means 'thrown out,' right?”
Aidann nodded. “Couldn't live there anymore.”
“Where did you go?”
“Another lab house where my mom knew some people who got equipment for her. She'd stay there and patch up, and I'd go to school. All our stuff had been left back at the old apartment. Nobody even noticed that I was wearing the same clothes weeks in a row. I had to wash up in the school bathroom. I remember I itched a lot. We only stayed there a few weeks before the house got busted one night. I watched the cops take my mom away with all the other lab rats. When the cops went back through to make sure they didn't miss anybody, one of them found me. A month later, my social worker told me that my mother had gotten accepted by a vork clinic.”
I felt my jaw drop. “So that means your mom—”
Aidann nodded. “Yeah. She was gone. So I applied for emancipation.”
“And that's when you came to Naomi?”
She nodded again.
I looked back at Aidann through the corner of my eye. She was staring straight ahead, and I could almost see the basement brick wall that had absorbed her eyes' focus. I shuddered. After a moment, she breathed and blinked, looking up at the sky above. I followed her gaze. The bird was gone.
“People always fail you,” she said, “Grown-ups. People who say they're your friends. People who are supposed to love you. Even if you do everything they ask, they'll still fail.”
I felt a crust of ice clench around my heart. Cold tears prickled at my eyelids. I blinked them back. I tried to force that ice into my own voice. “You're right,” I said, “The only one I can depend on is me.”
Aidann fixed her eyes on me and cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “So you're perfect? Never make a mistake?”
I felt my jaw loosen. My inward vision of Aidann's brick wall was replaced with something entirely different: a lace runner-topped coffee table strewn with the shards of figurines, a fortune in collectibles smashed by my own feet.
I hung my head. “So there's nobody I can rely on,” I concluded.
Aidann looked away and shook her head. “I don't believe that's true, either.”
“Then what do you believe?”
Aidann looked at me again, her suspicious eyebrow lowering mere millimeters. Her facial muscles focusing once more, she leaned to the side and reopened her Naomi-issue purse. She pulled forth that scroll of grimy fabric I remembered her using on that first ride to the skyport. With slow, reverent hands, she held it out to me. I took it.
It was pliable and light between my fingers. I unrolled the first portion of it and tried to read its warp and weft. My fingertips relayed the changes in texture as ones and zeroes as I had been taught upstairs in Bhenji Nealingson's classroom and in the sweatshop under Bhenji Roth's tutelage. I tried to make sense of what my fingertips were reading, but it just seemed like so much random babble, numbers that did not correspond to any translation table I'd been taught so far.
“Encrypted,” Aidann explained. “From my first run for Naomi.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Didn't you deliver it?”
She shook her head and took the scroll back. “It was a pickup, way up in the mountains in Colombia. Place looked like it'd been firebombed. We were supposed to go into the basement, and when we got there, a group of old women all wearing the same black dresses and black veils had us memorize something. We came back here, encrypted it, and wove it.”
“So that's why Bhenji Nealingson has us do all those memory games,” I said. “The runners memorize the contracts?”
“This,” Aidann said, pointing to the fabric in my hand, “is one of the scrolls from my first run. It starts off saying:
Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly to thee, O Virgin of Virgins, my mother. To you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petition but in your mercy hear and answer me.
Aidann didn't need to touch the scroll to speak its words. The way she said them, with a whispered confidence, spoke of years of repetition. I could tell by the way her features lifted, almost in a smile, that this repetition was nothing like the blank-faced staring I imagined was generated by dorf-crash. This was something chosen, intentional.
“Is that—” I paused, pitched my voice to a murmur, “—is that a Catholic prayer?”
This new trance broke. She frowned again, as if answering required great effort. “It's part of what I believe.”
I kicked at the dust again. “I don't believe in anything I can't see.”
Her eyebrow lifted again, but so did her smile. “Can you see the wind? Can you see your heart or lungs?”
I snorted. “Yeah, if you open me up!”
“That's right,” she said, her voice metered, as if her vocal cords were humming over the wonder inspired by my derision. She repeated, “That's right. The more you open up, the more of yourself you see.”
“What does that mean?” I was getting irritable again.
“Open up,” she repeated, and she began to draw a character on the ground with her toe. I soon recognized it as the Chinese character feng, wind. “Be honest and see everything. See the wind's power to move things around. Fleuvbleu tells us not to be like stone. She's right. Stone might look strong, but it erodes.”
“That's why we're supposed to be like water,” I parroted.
“Water,” Aidann said, her voice verging on the shadows of disdain. She stood and reached for the rope, pulling the bucket up from the well.
I stood with her and watched. “What are you doing? Are you thirsty?”
She pulled, the bucket heavy within her grasp. “Watch.”
Then she carefully poured a trickle from the bucket lip onto the stones of the well wall. It cut a thin course down the rocks to pool in the dust below. Then she rested the bucket back on the ledge.
Squatting, she pointed at the dark mini-river along the wall. “See how it just goes any which way the rocks tell it to go? It has no mind of its own. Now, watch again.”
Once more, Aidann poured a few drops of water onto the same place she had before. “What do you see?” she asked.
“It went the same way as the first water you poured. Well, the stuff that didn't get absorbed by the rocks.”
“Have you ever seen a tornado?”
“On nature casts. DisasterNet.”
“So you know what I'm talking about. Water just follows water,” Aidann said, “but wind gets its power from the world around it, from the clash of cold and heat, and once it starts, nothing can stop it.”
I toddled my head back and forth, trying to grasp what she was saying. “Where did you learn all this stuff?”
With her elbow, Aidann knocked the bucket back into the well. It jerked the rope tightly as it fell. “Contract pickups,” she said. “We don't just weave and run transactions for our customers. We also run other info that customers don't want phreaked.”
I paused and kept still as I began to comprehend. “So that's why you learned all this Catholic stuff! If people pass all that Catholic info around on Naomi scrolls, governments won't find out, and nobody gets arrested on population growth charges.”
“Probably won't find out,” Aidann added. “And it's not just Catholic stuff. Don't forget, BINGO represses the Muslims and Buddhists, too.”
BINGO—the alliance to which the VanDeers' belonged, the ones that lobbied to get all those religions outlawed throughout the informalized world.
“But I still don't get why you believe all that,” I said, eyeing her with superiority only a ten-year-old girl could affect. “All the statistics say that genetic plagues would wipe us out if we didn't have all that experimentation.”
“Experiments on humans,” Aidann said. “Embryonic small ones, but they're still humans.”
“Says who?”
“Why would somebody try to get cures out of experimenting on them if they weren't human?”
“Okay, but all the statistics say that without abortion, the world would starve to death. There's just not enough to go around.”
“Not if people make the effort to share.”
“But—Aidann! Everybody normal's okay with the vork clinics. Without them, there'd be no escape from—”
Aidann froze. For the first time ever, I saw her eyes blink as if she were fighting tears. She looked at me, and the raw pain that twisted her expression pierced through me, freezing my mouth mid-word.
“Without vork clinics,” she said with a quiver, “my mother would have had a chance to get better. She might not have, but at least she would have had the chance.”
I looked away, feeling my heart drop worse than it had when Woolthersham declared me defective, worse than when the other girls kicked me. Worse than when they called me a deef. Worse even than when I had destroyed Mrs. VanDeer's figurines.
I turned away from her and slid back down to sit on the ground. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.”
After a few seconds, Aidann sat down next to me. “S'okay,” she said.
We sat together like that for some time, then, neither of us saying a word. The afternoon sun was dropping, and the air began to cool. Light breezes lifted the dust from the courtyard and danced it around, and I thought of Aidann's meditation on the nature of wind. I thought of Aidann's mother, and I thought of wanting to fall into the well, never to rise again.
“Thanks for pulling me out,” I said
Aidann shrugged. “If you'd drowned in there, you wouldn't have learned that you might be able to find your parents.”
“Parents,” I whispered, my thoughts returning to the possibilities Aidann had highlighted earlier, gently nudging my shame into the background. My voice took on the same shade Aidann's had when she had recited her prayer. “A mother and a father. Did you have a father, too?”
Aidann opened her mouth to answer, but closed it again in thought. After a second, she said, “I still have a father.”
“Then why are you at Naomi? Why don't you live with him?”
Her face became sad, a little scared. She touched one travelgloved hand to the smudge on her cheek. Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply but then began coughing. Around coughs, she said, “I will, probably soon. When he's ready for me.”
A runner stuck her head out from a second-floor hallway window. She caught sight of Aidann and, grimacing at her coughing, called, “Aidann! Another run.”
Aidann pulled her arms tightly around her chest, as if she could still her spastic lungs by force. She turned to me, brows tense with concern. “Will you be okay here?”
Sadness pulled at the corners of my lips, but I immediately straightened them. “You have to go,” I said.
Aidann stood and began heading upstairs to accept her next run, but she stopped mid-stride. She came back to me, reached into her purse, and pulled forth the fabric scroll that carried her prayer.
“Take this,” she said. “Try to decode it. It'll be good practice for your next test.”
I took the scroll with both hands and ran my fingers over it. I looked up at Aidann. My throat stopped up my thanks. Aidann pressed her palms together solemnly. I mirrored the gesture.
“Namaste,” we said together.
Then she left.
I spent the rest of the hours by the well in a sort of cavernous contemplation. My mind was running at full capacity, but I wasn't mature enough to formulate cogent appreciation of all I had just received. The sun dipped lower in the sky until finally it was time for all the girls to have their last water before the serving of the day's final meal. They approached and brought with them another helping of mocking and humiliation. Their unkindness remained the same, but something was different.
Not something. Someone. I was different. I couldn't imagine from where inside of my nervous, proud self was the source of such composed, steady calm. This was like nothing Fleuvbleu's meditations could inspire. I felt as if I were becoming lighter than air. My shoulders were no longer being pressed upon by Aidann's travelgloves. They rose of their own accord, bringing my spirits with them. My chin lifted, but not in feigned arrogance. Instead I was standing tall, full of oxygen, too light to be pinned down and stepped upon—like a piece of trash so small that it escapes the notice of the robots sent to collect it and its sisters from the side of the highway.
Who knew trash could be so powerful? I thought. And without truly understanding Aidann's words, I intuited her point: Who knew wind could be so strong?
I weathered the icy looks, the withering sneers, the overall cootie-phobic behavior of my fellow Naomi inmates until they had drunk their fill from the cistern and dribbled off to the refectory. When at last sunset came, I left the well, ascended the stairs and returned to my place in the dojo grid, my place in the Naomi structure.
