I took a step back, my spine scraping against the solid wood of the door behind me. Boarding school? I’d never known anyone who’d gone to boarding school. Back in Fredtown, family was everything—even if it was just a fake family, with Fred-parents, not real ones. Freds wanted to spend every moment possible with their kids. As far as I knew, boarding schools only existed in stories, the kind the Freds read at bedtime from odd old books, the stories that began, Once upon a time in a distant land . . . Or Long ago and far away . . .
“But I just got here!” I protested. I was ashamed of how whiny I sounded, like the little kids leaving Fredtown just a couple of days ago crying, But Fred-mommy! Fred-daddy! I don’t want to leave! I love you!
I hadn’t had time to decide if I would ever love my real parents or not. I hadn’t had time to know much of anything about them.
But maybe I knew enough.
I glanced quickly around my father’s secret underground office, with its thick rugs and its enormous, gleaming desk. No joke—it had artwork enshrined under glass all along the walls. Expensive artwork, I’d guess.
“You’re a smuggler and a thief,” I said. “All the money you have is money you stole from someone else. The warehouse you have farther on in this tunnel? I bet it’s full of stolen property. If—if you send me to boarding school, I’ll tell everyone what you are. That you’re a criminal.”
I was guessing at half of that. Obviously I hadn’t seen any warehouse. Yet. But my father’s already rocklike face hardened.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody would believe you. You’re just a kid.”
I wondered if I’d taken the right tack. The Freds wouldn’t have wanted me trying to blackmail and manipulate my father. They would have suggested some namby-pamby approach when I first saw other kids’ luggage in my parents’ house earlier today—the Freds would have wanted me to gently tell my father, Don’t you realize that when you take other people’s property, it hurts them? Don’t you know you always have to take other people’s feelings into account? And have respect for their property rights, and all their other rights too?
I’d returned Rosi’s luggage to her immediately, along with her younger brother Bobo’s. I hadn’t decided yet what to do about the other kids’.
But what I’d really wanted to do was ask my parents a lot more questions: How does it work, stealing things? How do you get away with it? Aren’t you scared that you’ll be thrown into prison? Aren’t you scared that, if people think they can get away with taking things that don’t belong to them, then someone will take away something you want to keep?
Oops. I think that last question might have sneaked in from a Fred lecture.
Questions weren’t going to work now anyway. I’d started down the blackmail path; I needed to stick with it.
“Someone will believe me,” I said. “I’m a good liar. Maybe I’ll say worse things about you. I’ll say you’re the type of person who would hurt a kid.”
Back in Fredtown, that was the worst crime anyone could commit.
My father’s expression seemed to go up a few notches on the Mohs’ hardness scale. Hadn’t Rosi and I learned in science class that diamond was the hardest rock of all? If that was true, then my father’s face had turned into black diamond.
“Your mother and I are sending you away for your own good,” he said. “She’s so upset about it, she can’t even bear to come down and say good-bye.”
“She’s barely spent twenty-four hours with me!” I protested, before I had time to think. “What does she care?”
Maybe my father’s face wasn’t quite black diamond. He winced.
“Nevertheless,” he said.
He strode over to his desk and reached under it. I’d seen his desk upstairs in the house, in his nonsecret office. I’d seen where he had a button underneath it to call servants.
“Are you calling back the man who just dumped me on the floor?” I said. “Really? You’re going to put me in the care of a man who would threaten me? I guess you told him to kidnap me, but do you know he said he might hand me over to people who would kill me?”
“I trust Udans to get you out of this town and safely on to the boarding school in Refuge City,” my father said. But he hesitated.
“Refuge City? Huh?” I asked. “Where’s that? And what happens when I get there? I’m twelve years old! You trust this Udans guy to raise me? Udans and some boarding school . . . Would you and my mother even come to visit? Would I even have a family anymore? Every kid needs a family!”
Sometimes I couldn’t help it, and something really, really Fred-like came out of my mouth.
Rosi said her parents punished her for sounding like a Fred. But my father just bit his lip.
“Unfortunately, your mother and I will not be able to visit,” he said. “But you will have family with you at boarding school. You’ll have your brother and sister.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Do you know anything about me? I don’t have a brother and sister! I’m an only child! I’ve always been an only child!”
“Is that what the Freds told you?” my father asked, and now his voice was hard too. “Is that something else they lied about?”
I waved my hands in the empty air before me, emphasizing that I was alone.
“Did you get any other kids back from Fredtown besides me?” I taunted. “Would you have noticed one way or another? Oh, that’s right, you went twelve years without seeing your own kid, so maybe it’s hard to remember if there’s just one of me, or more!”
My father slumped into the chair behind the desk.
“Your brother and sister are both older than you,” he said. “But . . .” The fierceness went out of his face and voice. “We haven’t seen them in twelve years either. That’s how long they’ve been in Refuge City.”