VIVIEN WORE a robin’s-egg-blue burka to school.
“How do you know it’s her?” asked Ezra. She was walking down the hall looking like a little blue pup tent. “She doesn’t have any legs, any arms, any head.”
Dec shrugged. “It’s something in the way she moves.”
Ezra stared at him, then at Vivien and then back at Dec. “Suddenly you’ve got X-ray vision?”
Dec smiled. “I wish.”
She was at their usual table at lunch. There was a little rectangular screen where her eyes were. Dec could see them buzzing green.
“You look very spring-like,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He paused with a French fry halfway to his mouth. Vivien was not eating. “Does that eye-hole thing open up?” he asked. She shook her head. “Too bad. I could, you know, slip you a fry or something.”
“I’m good,” she said. “I can do without lunch for one day. I mean, all over the world people go without food.”
Dec’s fry suddenly tasted cold and mealy. “So is that what this is all about?” he asked. “A protest?”
“Not so much,” she said. “I just wanted to see what it felt like. Experience it, you know?”
“And?”
“Well, it’s pretty warm. But it’s kind of nice in a way.
Private, I mean. Like wearing your own little house.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“Like a hermit crab. Once you outgrow your house, you just slide on out of it and find a new one.”
Dec found himself thinking about a house you could abandon when it got too small. A disposable house. And that led him to consider how big a place could be and yet still be too small. His shoulders slumped.
Vivien leaned closer. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
What could he say? That he felt like a hermit crab that had grown too big too fast?
“There’s this contest I want to enter,” he said after a bit. “It’s called ‘The Shape of Things to Come.’ You have to design a house of the future.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah, it’s cool. Except my mind’s been kind of occupied lately.”
Vivien laughed. “That’s perfect.”
“Well, I don’t know. A person occupies a house, right? So if your mind is occupied then at least you’re on the right track.” Her voice trailed off, as if the idea wasn’t quite baked yet.
What surprised Dec was that he did almost understand what she was talking about. The mind as a house. He liked the idea. And then he thought how if his mind was a house, it was a haunted house these days.
When he looked at Vivien again he got the idea that something was going on under the burka.
“You’ve got your journal in there,” he said. “Is that allowed?”
Her eyes made contact with his and even through the netting he could see that she was smiling.
“I never leave home without it,” she said. She wrote for another moment and then paused again. “You know when you get an idea that you can’t put into words?”
He nodded vaguely.
“Well, isn’t it ironic that those are exactly the ideas you have to put into words?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That is ironic.”
She smiled and then her eyes dropped and he could tell by the movements under the burka that she was writing. The pale blue cloth bunched and stretched, bunched and stretched. Suddenly he found himself wondering what she was wearing under that thing.
She looked up and, as if she was reading his mind, she said, “About what you’d expect.”