by Maggie Allen
“Yes,” Mom said, “Nia will have the right accent.”
“Really, Dr. Philips, there is no—”
“Yes,” Mom said, in her Council voice. The scientist didn’t argue anymore.
Dad went with me into the tunnel. What if it picked that minute to disassemble more, and rocks fell on us? But it didn’t. I turned my face toward the ceiling, raised my ring finger, said “clanth!” twisted my thumb, said, “pof,” very softly and then, “tarn!-dal!” while I jumped just right. Three times.
Nothing happened.
“It’s still disassembling!” I cried.
“Maybe not,” a scientist said, studying his computer screen. “It may take a minute for the embedded instruments to register any change….wait….yes. Fracture 16A is no longer widening!”
Nobody said anything else. The silence bit me, sort of like when you know there’s a mosquito sucking your blood but you can’t reach it to swat it away. I had to say something. So I said, “Can we get the bic!dul out of the cement so I can have it back to play with?”
Wrong thing to say.
So I saved Alpha Base. I stopped the moon from disassembling.
Of course, I also had started the moon disassembling. Mom didn’t forget that. She didn’t ground me for a century, but it felt that long. Also, I had to apologize to everybody in the known universe. Also, I had to write an essay on what I learned from this whole thing. I wrote that I learned three things:
Never play with alien toys that you aren’t supposed to have.
Language and accents really are learned better by kids than adults.
If you have an alien friend who takes off for his people’s colony world, so that he can’t share in the blame for something he did just as much as you, don’t whine about it because you have to take responsibility for the part you did. That’s being mature.
Don’t trust robots because they don’t get blamed for anything even when it’s their fault!
Mom made me take that last one out.
But it’s still true.
In the Middle Gray
by Valerie Hunter
Valerie Hunter is a high school English teacher as well as a graduate student at Vermont College of Fine Arts’ Writing for Children and Young Adults program. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies including Real Girls Don’t Rust, Cleavage: Real Fiction for Real Girls, One Thousand Words for War, Brave New Girls, and (Re)Sisters.
Cal had walked with Reg to town on three August tenths in a row, but this was the first time he felt nervous.
He tried to hide it. Reg never looked nervous at all, with her chin held high and her shoulders squared. Then again, Reg had nothing to worry about.
His older sister was the most brilliant tinker Cal knew, and also the most enterprising. Three years ago, when Reg was barely ten but already able to make or fix anything, a neighbor hired her to go to Hartland and pretend to be his son and take the exam to get into the Mechanical Institute in the States. Reg had passed both the written and practical tests with flying colors, and every year after that, she’d been hired by someone else and had been just as successful, getting paid more each year.
This year, now that Cal was ten, she’d gotten him hired, as well. Cal knew he wasn’t nearly as brilliant as Reg, but she’d been convinced he was ready. “You’re up against amateurs who’ve never seen real competition and rich kids who see this as their ticket out of the Territories but who can’t tell a flit sprocket from a tomb wheel. You’ll have no difficulty getting Winston Kearns in.”
Winston Kearns was the boy Cal had been hired to be. Winston had tried to get in himself last year, when he was eleven, and failed.
Reg prepared Cal for the written test, quizzing him on questions until he had them memorized. They were mostly common sense.
Reg designed the practical component for him, too: a contraption that measured and poured flour very precisely. Cal thought it was stupid— it took at least as long as it would for a person to do the same task, if not longer— but Reg said it was exactly the type of machine the competition judges liked. So Cal built it to Reg’s specifications, and it worked well, even if it was stupid.
The competition had been three weeks ago. Cal knew he’d done well on the written test, and his machine had worked just fine and hadn’t looked any more pointless than most of the other gadgets there. But he’d fumbled and flustered his way through the interview even though he’d known all the answers, and he’d been clumsy disassembling and reassembling the machine.
Now he and Reg were walking to town to get the newspaper that printed the list of who had been accepted to the Institute, and despite Reg's reassurances that Winston Kearns’ name would be there, Cal wasn’t sure.
“I don't know why you're so worried,” Reg said for the hundredth time. “You were taught by the best—me. Next year you can take over my business altogether, and I can get in as myself.”
Reg would be thirteen next year, the oldest age the Institute accepted. It made Cal happy to think of her going, but he didn’t like thinking about pretending to be someone else again. The whole idea of getting someone else into the Institute muddled his head. Lying and cheating were wrong, and what Reg and he were doing seemed like both. Yet here were adults hiring them to do it, and their own parents allowing it like it was nothing at all.
When Cal mentioned this to Reg, she snorted. “Are you five years old? Haven’t you figured out that’s the way of things in the Territories? If you’re not willing to lie and cheat a little, you’ll never get anywhere.”
When Cal just looked at her, not really sure what she meant but unwilling to ask, Reg’s expression softened. “The Institute accepts anyone from the States without even a test. It’s only in the Territories that they have these silly competitions, because they think we’re backwards riff-raff who shouldn’t be allowed to go east unless we’re something truly special.”
“But that’s not fair,” Cal blurted out.
“Obviously! So what’s wrong with cheating a system that’s already unfair?”
He didn’t answer because he didn’t have an answer. He knew it wasn’t right, the people of the Territories always being treated like second-class citizens, but Ma was fond of saying two wrongs didn’t make a right.
So he asked Ma about it. She didn’t snort at him. Instead she looked thoughtful.
“It doesn’t entirely sit right with me, either,” she said finally. “But sometimes things aren’t as black and white as we’d like them to be. Maybe we just have to get used to living in the middle gray.”
Cal pictured a great rolling fog. It was easy to be confused in a fog like that.
“Anyhow,” Ma said, “I trust you and Reg to make your own decisions on the matter.”
Cal wasn’t sure he had made the decision, though. Reg had made it for him. The fog continued to swirl around him, even now as they walked to town. Maybe it would clear if Winston Kearns’ name was on the list.
When they got to town, Reg bought a copy of the Prairie Sentinel. Just like every year, she waited until they were back out on the prairie to look at it, but this time she passed it to Cal rather than opening it herself.
Cal turned to page eight. Twenty names. Albert Brunner, the boy Reg had pretended to be, was right at the top.
Cal read the list three times. Winston Kearns’ name was not there.
The fog thickened until the entire world felt gray. He’d failed.
No one said much after. Not Reg. Not Ma or Pa or his little sister Agatha. Cal didn’t even hear from Winston Kearns’ father, since Reg took care of that correspondence.
He wished someone would say something, but maybe, like him, they didn’t know what to say.
Reg kept working with him in their workshop in the barn like nothing was different. In October, she shoved a newspaper at him. “Look.”
Cal had been avoiding newspapers since August, but he took it and looked where she pointed. The article was about a clock being installed in Boston nea
r the Mechanical Institute. The senior students had designed it, creating different figures to emerge at each hour.
The article wasn’t long enough to excite Cal’s imagination. “Maybe you’ll get to see it when you go to the Institute,” he said.
“Never mind that. Let’s build a clock like that ourselves.”
“Us?” Was she pure crazy?
“Not an enormous public clock, but a little one. You’re good with miniatures, and I’m good with plans. I bet we can do it.”
“What about your entry for the competition?” Reg usually spent months planning and building her new invention. Last year she’d started even earlier, since they had both his and hers to work on. “Or is this going to be your entry?”
“I’ve got plenty of time to think about the competition,” Reg said. “This is just for us.”
So Reg made the plans, and Cal helped with everything else—cleaning and fixing an old mantel clock and building the frame to go around it with twelve doors and twelve little rooms inside to hold the figures. He came up with the figures himself, fashioning them from tin, painting on the tiny details, and then rigging them up with the mechanisms he and Reg designed to make them move.
Every day the hour between the end of school and the beginning of their chores was filled with their clock, and Cal remembered just how satisfying Reg’s projects were. When he was working on the clock, he didn’t think about failing or whether or not he’d be hired for the competition again or anything else that troubled him the rest of the time. He just focused on the task in front of him, and if something didn’t work the first time, well, he just kept trying till it did.
When the weather got cold, they moved from their workshop to the house, and even though Ma complained about the mess, she marveled at those tiny figures in a way that made Cal feel proud. Even Agatha, who previously thought all of Reg’s and Cal’s work to be dirty and boring, watched him paint and offered opinions on color choices.
The article about the clock in Boston hadn’t said what the figures were, so Cal made up his own, everything from a queen and a knight to a farmer and a steam locomotive engineer. He tried to give the queen Reg’s fierce expression, but in the end she just had beady eyes and a bit of a frown as she thumped her staff emphatically.
“You could have picked one theme and stuck to it,” Reg said as they worked at attaching the figures.
Cal shrugged. He liked the randomness of the figures. It was their clock, after all.
When they finished, Reg showed it off to the whole family, nudging the hour hand forward so they could see all twelve figures in quick succession. Cal watched with wonder, as though he hadn’t helped make it.
Afterwards, Reg hung it in their workshop. “Because it’s ours, and we should never forget how good we are at tinkering,” she said, and Cal nodded even though he knew he wasn’t half the tinker she was.
“All right, time to apply ourselves,” said Reg, like the clock hadn't been work. Well, maybe it hadn't been; it had been fun. “This is the year we get Winston Kearns into the Institute.”
Time seemed to stutter a moment, and Cal had to swallow a few times before he could speak. “They've hired me again?”
Reg avoided his eyes. “They've hired me.”
No. No, that was all wrong. This was the last year Reg was eligible to get into the Institute. This was the year she was supposed to be herself.
He tried to say that, but the words wouldn’t come out right. “But you... what...? You can't...”
Reg raised her eyebrows. “Sure I can. I've done it for the past three years, haven't I? And I can pass for a thirteen-year-old boy for another few years after this, at least. Think of the money I'll make!”
The money she would have been happy to have him earn, if he’d been able to. This was his fault.
“You should enter for yourself,” he insisted. “Let me be Winston Kearns.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he felt foolish. He hadn’t been good enough last year, and now it was too late.
“You need another year apprenticing with me,” Reg said. “We'll hire you out again next year. Now let's go. I've got a plan for a mechanical churn...”
Ma tried to talk her out of it at supper. “You're being short-sighted, Regina. Think of the money you'll make down the road with a proper education. We can get by fine without your money, right, John?”
“Yes,” Pa said, his tone neutral.
“But an education is no guarantee,” Reg argued. “How many people around here would be looking to hire a mechanical engineer? They’d think me too posh. And in the States, even with an education they might still think I'm some know-nothing girl from the Territories. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush—I can keep making money this way for a few more years, and once I'm grown I can get all sorts of jobs as a tinker.”
Cal waited for Ma to keep arguing, to tell Reg she shouldn't do it. But Ma just frowned. “If you're sure...”
“I am,” Reg said. “There’s nothing more to say about it.”
Cal thought there was, but he couldn’t seem to find the words.
They set to work on the churn, even though Cal hated every moment of it. It made a clattery racket that gave him a headache, even though Reg kept trying to make it quieter.
“Anyhow, it works. That's all that matters. The judges won't care about the noise.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Those judges don't care a whit about how good a mechanic you are or what wonderful things you can make. All they care about is that you come with something practical and that you sound smart when you explain it.”
He had failed miserably at that, at sounding posh and polished. He’d practiced everything else, but he hadn’t been able to practice not being nervous.
“That's why there's no sense in my attending the Institute,” Reg went on, cranking her wrench so hard that Cal was afraid she might break the churn handle. “Who wants to go to a school where they expect everyone to be automatons? Where they don’t want creative mechanics?”
“They let their senior students make that clock,” Cal said.
Reg frowned. “The Institute would never let the likes of you or me in with our clock, no matter how splendid. And it is splendid, no doubt about that. So why should I want to go there and stop making splendid things of my own?”
Her expression was so fierce that Cal had to look away. In that moment he knew just how badly she wanted to go. Not because she wanted to stop making splendid things, but because she wanted to keep making them, to make them even better, and deep down she knew the Institute might actually be a place where she could do that, even if she was trying really hard to convince herself it wasn’t.
The plan sprouted in Cal’s mind at that moment, and it grew as crazily as a weed. He had to get her in. His job this year was to be Regina Robbins.
He tried to uproot this idea. He wasn’t a girl. He didn’t have an invention, and it was less than a month till the competition. He could hardly build something wonderful in that time, especially without Reg seeing. He would need a parent to accompany him to the competition, and Pa would think the idea pure nonsense. And even if he managed to do all that, the fact remained that he was the same tongue-tied simpleton as last year.
It was a horrible idea, an impossible idea, yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He was the reason Reg wasn’t trying to get into the Institute, so he had to be the one to do it for her.
One problem at a time. If he needed to look like a girl, he would need a girl’s help. The only girls he knew well enough to trust with a secret like this were his sisters, and he couldn’t very well tell Reg. It would have to be Agatha.
His younger sister was tricky. She liked to tattle, but it also puffed her up to be trusted. If she thought she was the only one he trusted enough to tell, she might feel too honored to tattle.
He grabbed her after supper that evening. “I need your help,” he said, both because he knew it would mak
e her feel important and because it was true.
Agatha smiled. “With what?”
“It’s a secret. I’m trusting you, all right?”
She nodded, her smile growing.
He’d thought this next part over carefully. Agatha and Reg didn’t get on. They were too different—Reg with her gears and clutter and Agatha all neat and proper—but they were also similar. They were both stubborn, and they both liked having their own way. Agatha enjoyed getting Reg in trouble whenever she could because Reg was always nasty to Agatha. Or maybe Reg was always nasty to Agatha because Agatha was always tattling on Reg. Cal couldn’t quite tell.
But both his sisters got along with him, and right now that was all that mattered.
“I got hired to get someone into the Institute. A girl.”
Agatha’s eyes got wider, and then they narrowed. “A girl? Why didn’t they hire Reg?”
“She was already hired.”
Agatha continued to look at him. Cal waited for her to ask why anyone would hire the likes of him, but maybe she was too nice to say that. Instead she said, “Reg doesn’t know?”
He nodded.
“Who arranged it?”
“I did. On the sly.”
Agatha’s eyebrows knit together. She knew as well as Cal did that he was not a sneaky person.
“I want to prove Reg wrong,” he blurted out. “That I can do this as well as she can. But on the off chance I don’t get in… I don’t want her to know I failed again.”
These half-truths seemed to make sense to Agatha, just like he figured they would. “How can I help?” she asked.
“Can you help me be a convincing girl?” he asked.
All the skepticism cleared from Agatha’s face. “Of course.”
Agatha proved an excellent ally. She borrowed one of Ma’s old dresses for him, and even though he felt ridiculous in it and Agatha giggled as soon as she saw him, she managed to keep a straight face after that. She also found Reg’s braid of hair that Ma had kept when Reg cut it off before that first competition. Cal and Reg had nearly the same shade of hair, and after a lot of hair pins stabbing his scalp, Agatha managed to get it attached.
