“What actions, Tam?” she asked, bitter. “What actions could we possibly take that would show them what they can’t see? You know what we can do? Nothing. We could all commit suicide tomorrow and they’d think it came out of nowhere.”
Tam glanced at her sharply. “You wouldn’t—”
“No, of course not. But sometimes I do think about mutiny. About tying them up and making them take us Home.”
“Anastasia!” Their mother’s voice floated up the stairs. “Stasi?”
Stasi got up and went out onto the landing. “Yeah, Mom?”
“There’s someone down here to see you. Elaine?”
Stasi froze for a moment, suddenly loathe to carry on what she had started.
“Um, okay,” she said finally. “I’ll be right down.” She padded downstairs with Tam on her heels and met her Mom and Elaine in the front hall. “Hi, Elaine. What’s—what’s up?” The last word came out a little too brightly.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“Yeah. I’m all right.” She looked at her Mom. “Can Elaine come up to my room?”
Helen smiled, her eyes anxious. “As long as it’s clean, dear.”
Stasi remembered the book Reader. “Oh, I—”
“It’s clean,” Tam averred. “Of course, all the embarrassing stuff is under the pillows.” He favored his sister with a secret glance.
“Thanks,” she told him, and led her new friend upstairs.
oOo
Troy and Helen Jones appeared in the offices of the Papillion Community School just before classes were to start the morning after Stasi’s run-in with school regulations.
Miss Tindall was obviously surprised to see them—surprised and a little nervous. That they were both dressed in the khaki uniform of field anthropologists might have contributed to that unease. She was determined not to let it show.
“Hello, Miss Tindall, isn’t it?” Troy Jones shook her hand. “I’m Troy Jones and this is my wife, Helen.”
Helen smiled. “That’s me—Helen of Troy.”
Miss Tindall smiled in return. “Yes, of course. How amusing.” She seated them in a conference cubicle and moved to barricade herself behind a wooden desk. “Frankly, I’m surprised to see you. I didn’t expect Anastasia to tell you much about our little misunderstanding.”
“Our children tell us everything, Miss Tindall,” Troy assured her. “We have a very open relationship.”
Miss Tindall looked doubtful. “Did she tell you why I sent her home?”
“Yes, inappropriate dress, wasn’t it? You know, I really don’t understand that. With the weather being so nippy these days, I’d think blue jeans would be just what the meteorologist ordered.”
Miss Tindall blinked. “I . . . There are rules, Mr. Jones.”
“Doctor Jones.”
“Excuse me. Doctor Jones. There are rules that govern how our young ladies dress. We expect them to be obeyed.”
“Why? Good God, surely you don’t want your young ladies freezing to death at their bus stops in the winter?”
“Of course not. They’re free to wear nice pants to school as long as they remove them and put them in their lockers during class.”
Dr. Jones gaped. “They run around in their underwear?”
Helen giggled into her hand.
Miss Tindall did not giggle. She didn’t even smile. She fixed him with a cool gaze and said, “They wear the pants under their skirts, Dr. Jones.”
“But that’s redundant.”
“It’s the rule, Doctor. I didn’t make the rule. I only enforce it. Do you honestly want your daughter parading around dressed like a boy?”
“Miss Tindall, who defines which clothes are male and which are female? Medieval gentlemen (such as they were) wore leggings and skirts. Scotsmen wear kilts to this day. And in Egypt, at this very moment, men stroll the avenues wearing what you would call dresses while their wives do the shopping in what you would call pants.”
“This is America, Dr. Jones, not Egypt. And it’s 1950, not the Middle Ages.”
“Miss Tindall,” said Helen quietly, “our children have led a much less sheltered life than their classmates. They’ve accumulated a vast library of diverse experiences. Anastasia’s spent most of her life in jeans and khaki field trousers, digging up history your students here have only read about. It’s going to take while for her to make the adjustment to this more restrictive lifestyle. All we’re asking is that you try to understand that what seems bizarre or out of place to you is normal to Stasi.”
“Normal,” repeated Miss Tindall. “Maroon hair, dresses that look like ankle-length sacks and earrings made from giant fishing lures?”
“Her hair is burgundy, Miss Tindall,” said Helen, “and all of those things you just mentioned were quite normal the last place we lived.”
Miss Tindall pursed her lips. “Paris, she said.”
“Paris,” agreed Helen.
“Mrs. Jones—”
“Doctor Jones.”
“Doctor Jones, I’m aware that Paris is the birth place of modern fashion, but I find it hard to believe that young ladies there wear such outlandish styles.”
“Well, they wore them while we were there.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” asked Helen. “You see that Stasi is different, but do you see that there’s nothing wrong with that?”
Miss Tindall sighed. “Dr. Jones—”
“There is nothing wrong with that, Miss Tindall. Stasi is an excellent student. A model teenager—honest, caring, mature beyond her years. Stasi is an individual. That individuality, that diversity, is very precious to her and to us. If you try to make her over in the image of some narrow ideal, if you try to squelch that individuality, we will have no choice but to withdraw our children from this school.”
Miss Tindall’s face went crimson. “That’s illegal, Mrs. Jones.”
“Doctor Jones,” Helen corrected her. “And we’ll worry about the legality of it. This is not a threat; please don’t take it that way. We simply want you to understand that we are willing to go to great lengths to protect our children’s individual rights. Stasi’s qualities, Miss Tindall, are on the inside; they are not woven into her clothing.” She looked at her husband, who was nodding thoughtfully. “I think we’ve done all we can here, dear. Shall we go?”
“Certainly.” He rose and reached across the desk/barricade for Miss Tindall’s hand. “Thank you for your time, Miss Tindall.”
They left the cubicle, drawing the gazes of the office staff after them.
Royalty in khaki, thought Mildred Tindall, and wondered where they’d come from.
oOo
Constantine Jones had a problem. He had come to school without his book bag. He had no pencils, no pens, no paper and, worst of all, no textbooks. When the teacher asked the class to take out paper and a pencil, he sat, frozen inside, glancing nervously around the room.
Two rows to the right, Tahireh caught his eye.
“What?” she mouthed.
He shrugged and signed that he had forgotten the sacred bag.
She looked thoughtful for a second, then pointedly lifted her desktop and put her own pencil in. Then she withdrew it.
Constantine knew what she was suggesting. He tried to swallow the lump of panic in his throat, but it wouldn’t budge. “Here?” he mouthed.
“Constantine, paper and pencil, please,” said Mr. Matthews.
“Yes, sir.”
Constantine lifted the top of his desk, reached inside and, after a moment of eye clenched hesitation, pulled out a pencil and a piece of lined paper.
Mr. Matthews smiled pleasantly and proceeded to hand out in-class assignments. Everything was fine until he asked them to take out their history readers. Constantine panicked again. He could just say he’d forgotten his books, but that would mean a mandatory after-school session, an extra assignment and utter humiliation before a council of his peers. His eyes cast about, clutching the boy next to h
im who had withdrawn the little textbook from his desk. It was covered in a crisp, brown paper bag.
Constantine echoed the movement, pulling out his own smartly attired book. His neighbor opened his book. He opened his, frowned in consternation, and quickly curved his arms around it.
“Page fifteen, please,” said Mr. Matthews. “I want you all to take a moment to read page fifteen, then we’ll talk about the New World.”
Constantine put his head down and sweated. He could feel his sister’s concern wash around and over him, felt it intensify to matching panic when Mr. Matthews took a bad turn and strolled up the aisle behind him.
Seeing a child hunkered so low over a textbook raises immediate suspicions in the mind of a teacher, and Mr. Matthews’ teacherly instincts were about as fully developed as they could be. He stopped right over Constantine and looked down. Then, he tapped Constantine on the shoulder.
“How are we doing, Mr. Jones?”
“Fine.”
“And what are we reading about?”
“The New World.”
“Isn’t it a little difficult to read about the New World all hunched over like that?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, straighten up, please. We don’t want you to ruin your eyes.”
Constantine stared at him for a moment, a wrinkle of pure anguish between his brows. Then he straightened up.
Mr. Matthews reached over his shoulder and nudged the book out of his protective embrace. After a moment of silence, during which Constantine was certain the entire Cosmos had collapsed, Mr. Matthews drew in a long breath and said, “Mr. Jones, can you explain to me why the pages of this book are blank?”
oOo
Constantine, clutching his older brother’s hand, cowered tearfully in the principal’s office. The offending volume was in the hands of the enemy and all was lost. He had no true conception of the magnitude of his crime, but he was certain it would mean the end of the world as he knew it.
Beside him, Tamujin breathed confidence and comfort into the ether.
“It’s really very simple, sir,” Tam said. “Connie just picked up the wrong book.”
“The wrong book?”
“Yes, sir. That’s mine.”
“Yours? But it has blank pages.”
“Yes, sir. It’s a writer’s journal. You know, a thought book. I got it just before we left Paris. Connie must have mistaken it for his history book. He’d wrapped that in a paper bag too, and they’re about the same size.” He smiled engagingly. “I guess I should’ve put my name on it. Sorry, sir. I feel real bad about putting Constantine through this.” He squeezed his little brother’s trembling shoulder and turned the smile down into his tear-streaked face.
Mr. Benoit looked at Tam for a moment, then turned his spectacled gaze to Constantine. “Well, no harm done, I suppose. Be more careful next time, young man. Check the contents of a book before you carry it to school.”
Outside in the corridor, Constantine’s gratitude was effusive.
“Whatever possessed you to do that?” Tam asked, completely ignoring his worshipful elegy.
“Tahireh.”
Tam looked down and shook Con’s shoulder. “Try again.”
“I forgot my book bag and the rule says if you forget your books, you have to do detention.”
“Oh, yeah,” Tam conceded. “I do recall that, now that you mention it. So, you just thought you’d go for a lesser penalty?”
Constantine glowered. “I didn’t mean to get caught.”
“Who does?”
“Do you think they’ll tell Mom and Dad?”
Tam shook his head and rolled his eyes. “You’d better hope not. You know the rules about ‘importing technologies across cultural boundaries.’ Dad would have a fit.”
Constantine stared down the empty corridor toward the distant classroom. “Yeah, he sure would.”
oOo
“Miss Tindall hates me,” said Stasi. “What did you say to her?”
Helen blinked. Next to her, her husband echoed the movement, staring at his eldest child as if she were an anthropological specimen that had suddenly risen up to protest being dug out of the ground.
“We just spoke to her about the importance of your individuality,” said Helen. “That’s all.”
“Well, now she’s treating me like—like a pariah. She won’t call on me unless I’m the only one with my hand raised, and even then she won’t look at me or smile at me or anything.”
Helen glanced at Troy, who was glancing at his notes as if he were preparing to dive back into them. She caught his eye pre-dive and he shrugged.
“If it gets too bad, we’ll talk to her again,” he promised.
“Oh, great!”
“Now, Anastasia, your father and I were only trying to help.”
Stasi had the grace to look contrite. “I know, but I’m afraid she’ll flunk me or something.”
Her mother laughed. “Good heavens! Why worry about something as trivial as that? It’s not like she’s actually teaching you anything. A local educator’s arbitrary marks aren’t going to affect your degree, honey.”
“I know, but you can get black marks for failure to acculturate. She might make Professor Amadiyeh think I have a bad attitude.”
“We’ll tell him otherwise.”
Stasi was silent for a moment, feeling incredibly freighted down and lonely. Thinking about Professor Amadiyeh made her think of Home and Danice Patten and all the other friends that now seemed light-years away. Friends she couldn’t reach by land or by sea.
“Can’t we please go home?”
Her mother looked sympathetic (she always looked sympathetic) and said, “Stasi, honey, your father and I are in the middle of a Project.”
“Can’t you finish it at home?”
“How can we study the culture in and around military installations in Post World War Two America without having access to those installations?”
“Couldn’t you use QuestLabs as a home base and just pop into a military base when you need to look at one?”
Her father laughed. “Stasi, you crack my mind! Do you have any idea how prohibitively expensive that would be? We blow over a hundred grand every time we power up the Grid, hon. Just settle down and enjoy Papillion, okay? It’s not such a bad little town. When we’re done here at Offutt, I’ll see if we can’t cut straight to the Pentagon. You kids’ll love Washington D.C.. Now, why don’t you go study before dinner?”
She stared at him, at her mother, already bending over the thin plate display in her hands, scanning faux-3D pictures of military personnel in their monotone uniforms.
They’re so happy, she thought. Like two kids in a sand box.
She went upstairs. On the second floor landing, Tam met her.
“Secret meeting of the Jones Gang,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “My room. Five minutes.”
“Thank you, Bugsy Malone,” she said.
Tam deflated. “That was my best John Wayne.”
“John who?”
“God, a current-cultural illiterate. You’d better bone up on your Twentieth Century films.”
“Yeah, yeah. What’s the meeting?”
Tam pointed at her nose. “It’s a secret. Be there or be a rhombus.” He turned and headed downstairs.
Five minutes later, they shared soda pop and greasy potato chips on the floor of Tam’s room. Of the four, only Tahireh seemed disinclined to glower.
“I guess you’re wondering why I’ve called you here,” said Tam, munching.
“Get on with it,” growled Stasi.
“I have an idea about how we might just possibly get Home before Mom and Dad retire.”
Stasi snorted. “Oh, this should be good. We’re gonna mutiny and take over the Grid Controller, right? Tie up Mom and Dad and slam this baby into reverse.”
“Close.” Tam took a swig of soda, looking arch.
“Well?” prompted Constantine. “C’mon, Tam. I could be out catching bugs,
y’know.”
“Mutiny,” said Tam deliciously, dangerously.
“Mutiny,” repeated Stasi. “Where’d you get a fuzz-brained idea like that?”
“Actually, I got it from you and Connie.”
“Con.”
Tam toyed with a chip crumb on the hardwood floor, scooting it around and around with his finger.
“Have you ever wondered what would happen if we didn’t try so hard to fit in wherever we go—if we sort of, oh, had trouble blending into the landscape?”
Stasi looked at him—hard. “Go on.”
“What would Mom and Dad do if these little settling-in problems kept happening—maybe even got worse?”
“Ignore them?” suggested Constantine.
“They might try.” Tam shrugged. “But if it got really bad and the teachers all got in an uproar and the Education Council got wind of it—”
Stasi’s face finally lit up. “Professor Amadiyeh! If we all flunked out of school or started upsetting the local golf cart—”
“Apple cart.”
“I can have any kind of cart I want, thank you. He’d have to get involved, wouldn’t he? I mean, after all, it’s his responsibility to see that our educational environment is sound.”
“Yeah,” Tam agreed pleasantly.
Constantine just folded his arms and smiled.
Between them, Tahireh, clutching a favored doll, stared at her siblings in horror. “Oh, you can’t! You can’t do something like that. Why, Mom and Dad would be . . . Well, they’d think there was something wrong with us.”
“There is something wrong with us, Tahireh,” said Stasi. “We’re from another century, another world, almost. We don’t belong here. We’re . . . an anachronism.”
“But Mom and Dad are so happy here!”
“Mom and Dad are happy anywhere they can dig up something or write papers,” said Tam.
“But, it’s not fair for us to ask them to give up their work.”
“We’re not asking them to give up their work, Tar. We’re just asking them to reorganize it a little.”
“Reorganize?” repeated Tahireh dubiously.
“Yeah,” said Tam and munched another handful of chips.
oOo
No one in Papillion, Nebraska had ever seen an outfit like the one Anastasia Jones wore on a particular Monday. The ankle-length jumper was a deep shade of burgundy that rivaled its wearer’s hair. That hair was caught up in a fluorescing green clip on one side of her head, forming a stiffened fan. From her ears dangled the most amazing set of orange and green “giant fishing lures” imaginable, and the shirt she wore was of a shade of orange almost never found in nature.
All the Colors of Time Page 16
