Among the Impostors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  And when he hesitated between classrooms, jackal boy was quick to tell him where to go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Luke didn’t go back to his garden by himself anymore. But two or three times a week, jackal boy would whisper in his ear, “Tonight,” and Luke’s heart would jump. “Tonight” meant, “We’re going to the woods. We’re meeting the girls.”

  Each time he stepped outside, Luke would breathe in deeply, the same way a starving man gobbled down food. But he noticed that most of the others, all so brave and imposing indoors, positively cowered in the open air. They squeezed their eyes shut and took halting steps forward, like condemned men walking to their executions.

  “You don’t like the outdoors, do you?” Luke asked Trey once as they walked across the lawn to the woods.

  Trey shook his head slowly, as if moving too quickly might make him throw up. He looked a little green already.

  “It’s better in the woods,” he said through gritted teeth. “At least there we’re covered.”

  “But—” Luke took another deep breath, savoring the smell of newly mowed grass and spring rain. He couldn’t understand Trey. “Don’t you hate being cooped up all the time?”

  Trey gave him a sidelong glance.

  “I spent thirteen years in the same room. I didn’t step foot outside even once until I came here.”

  “Oh,” Luke said. He suddenly saw that, for a third child, he’d been very lucky. Before the Government tore down the woods behind his house and built a neighborhood there instead, he’d spent most of his time outdoors. Except for not going to school, he hadn’t lived that differently from his older brothers.

  He couldn’t imagine spending thirteen years in the same room.

  “Jen went shopping on fake passes,” he told Trey. “Her mother took her to play groups. I thought other third children lived like her.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Trey said. “I—I wished—” He hesitated. “I miss my room.”

  Luke felt sorry for the other boy. How many of his other new friends had basically lived their entire lives in a box?

  He watched jackal boy running ahead, then circling back to encourage the others.

  “Jacka—I mean, Jason must have been like Jen,” Luke said. “He must have gotten out a lot. He’s not afraid of anything.”

  “No,” Trey said. “He’s not. He says he’s overcome all his hiding-related phobias. And he’s only been here a few weeks longer than you.”

  “He has?” Luke asked in surprise. He’d assumed jackal boy was a long-timer, with years of experience at Hendricks.

  “The rest of us only started last fall,” Trey continued. “I think. No one talked much before Jason got here.”

  Before he could make sense of that, Luke had to remind himself all over again that “Jason” was really jackal boy. It was no wonder that Luke had been confused when he first started at Hendricks—the boys, at least the ones he hung out with now, did go by three or four different names. They might answer to the first or last part of their fake name at school, and the first or last part of their real name out in the woods. That was riskier. A few just went by initials.

  Trey had explained that his name just meant “three.” He wouldn’t tell even jackal boy his real name.

  They reached the woods, and what Trey had said finally sunk in.

  “Wait a minute,” Luke said. “You mean you weren’t all friends before Jason came? You haven’t been meeting in the woods all along?”

  Trey flashed him a puzzled look.

  “Just since April,” he said.

  Luke’s mind was racing.

  “The rally was in April,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Trey said with a shrug.

  The girls met them then, and they started the same kind of banter Luke had witnessed the first night. It sounded different to Luke now, not as if they were all worldly and experienced, but as if they were reading lines in a play, pretending to talk to each other the way normal boys and girls talked. Nina made jokes about how stupid boys were, and Jason made fun of the girls. Luke watched the faces of the ones who were quiet. They all looked scared.

  “What’s this meeting for?” Luke asked suddenly.

  Jason turned to look at Luke in surprise.

  “Why—we’re planning ways to resist the Government over the Population Law. To follow up the rally.”

  “The rally,” Nina echoed wistfully.

  Luke’s heart beat fast. This was what he’d wanted! He’d wanted to do something brave like Jen. It would be like apologizing to her for not going with her, for doubting her.

  But could he be as brave as Jen?

  Without dying, too?

  “How?” he demanded. “How are we going to resist?”

  Nina and Jason looked at each other.

  “Well, that’s what we’re deciding,” Nina said. “Just like a boy, asking dumb questions!”

  But they didn’t decide anything that night. They just joked around some more, made a game of guessing one boy’s real name, and headed back to their schools.

  Jason pulled Luke aside as they stepped back into the school building.

  “Not everyone’s as ready as you,” he said. “You’ve got to give the others time. As long as they’re trembling in their shoes every time they step outside, they’ll never make good subversives.”

  Luke was flattered. It made sense.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Jason playfully punched Luke’s arm.

  “Knew you’d understand. Hey—you ready for finals?”

  “Finals?” Luke asked.

  “You know, next week? End-of-term tests?” Jason said. “You pass, you get out of here, you fail, you’re stuck for life?”

  Luke stopped short.

  “Oh, no . . .,” he breathed.

  Jason laughed.

  “Scared you, huh? Remember, you stay on my good side, I’ll make sure your ‘parents’ get to look at a brilliant report!”

  “I’m not even going to the right classes!” Luke said, panic coursing through his veins. “And I can’t ask anyone now. It’s been too long—”

  “I’ll find out for you!” Jason said, laughing again. He was already halfway down the hall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jason was as good as his word. The next morning at breakfast, he handed Luke a computer printout that said, at the top, CLASS SCHEDULE FOR LEE GRANT. It had times, room numbers, teachers’ names.

  “Where’d you get this?” Luke asked.

  “You think your only computer hacker friend is dead?” Jason said.

  He meant Jen. Luke had a flash of missing her all over again. He could picture her sitting at the computer, typing fast. She’d created a chat room for third children, with the password of “free.” She’d connected hundreds of third children, so they weren’t just sitting in their little rooms, all alone. She’d hacked into the records of the national police, to make sure none of the kids going to the third-child rally were caught before they got to the capital.

  But what good had all her hacking done?

  “Earth to Lee,” Jason was saying. “Or whatever your name is. You should know, your schedule really doesn’t matter. I can change all your grades on the computer, anyhow.”

  But after breakfast, Luke determinedly marched off to his first class, listened closely, and took detailed notes. By the end of the hour, he knew something he’d never known before: Prime numbers could be divided only by themselves and one.

  In his second class, he boldly grabbed a textbook off the bookshelf and read the poem whose page number the teacher had written on the board. He could even make sense of the fancy language—two people were friends, and one of them died, and the other one felt sad.

  Luke figured he had an unfair advantage, understanding that.

  In science and technology class, the teacher was talking about gasoline motors. Luke could just picture one, all grease-covered, in Father’s tractor. And now he knew how they worked.


  By lunchtime, Luke was ready to brag to Jason, “I am learning something now.” He was even confident enough to tease, “Maybe I won’t need your help with my grades.”

  “You’re going to learn a whole term’s worth in just a week?” jackal boy mocked. “Right. Next week, Friday, at five o’clock, you’ll come begging, ‘Please, please, I need help! I’ll do anything!’ ”

  Luke only set his jaw and pulled out a book to study.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  By the end of the week, all the teachers had test dates written in chalk on their blackboards. And Luke was spending every spare moment studying.

  “Why?” Trey asked him one night as they were trudging out to the woods. “Jason can fix your grades. And it’s not like your real parents are going to see them, anyway.”

  “When you were stuck in your room,” Luke said, “didn’t you ever want to know anything about the outside world? About whether other people were like you, or different, or whether grass grows the same way all over the world, or how a car runs?”

  “Not really,” Trey said.

  Luke was sorry that he couldn’t explain. It wasn’t the grades themselves that mattered to him. But he felt like he had something to prove. Maybe that people from the country—leckers—weren’t so dumb, after all. Maybe that Jen’s dad hadn’t risked his life for nothing, getting Luke a fake identity. Maybe that Luke wasn’t wasting time just hanging out in the woods making jokes with the girls from Harlow while other third children still had to hide.

  He was surprised that, with each day that passed, his classes made more sense to him. The teachers weren’t really that bad, just distant. The history teacher, Mr. Dirk, could tell fascinating stories about kings and knights and battles, and they were all true. The literature teacher could recite whole poems from memory. Luke didn’t always understand all the words, but he liked the cadence and rhyme. The math teacher said once, ‘Aren’t numbers friendly?” and he really seemed to believe it. Luke wondered if the teachers were shy, too—if they had some of those phobias Trey and Jason had talked about, and were downright terrified of looking their students straight in the eye.

  The night before his first test, Luke studied through dinner, and skipped going to the woods with all the others during Indoctrination so he could hunch over in a hallway, reading history. Jason mocked him—“What are you trying to do, bookworm? Learn as many big words as Trey?” and, “You could read all night and still not pass your tests. Come on.”

  “Leave me alone,” Luke growled, eager to get back to the Trojan War.

  Luke was surprised that Jason stepped back instead of insisting.

  “Fine,” he said. “Waste your time. See if I care.”

  The words sounded like the swaggering boy Luke was used to. But his tone seemed to say something else. So did the set of his shoulders as he walked away. He sounded wary, on edge.

  Could Jason possibly be scared of Luke?

  Luke was nobody. Jason was in charge. Luke decided he was imagining things, and went back to his book.

  Still, after lights out, Luke couldn’t sleep. He was too unsettled—worried about the test the next day, wondering what his family was doing back home, wishing Jen were there to figure out Jason for him. He even thought back to the advice Jen’s dad had written for Luke: “Blend in.” Who was Luke supposed to blend in with? The boys who trudged blindly through the halls each day? The ones who followed Jason? Or Jason himself?

  Somewhere in the room, a bed creaked.

  Luke thought it was just someone turning over in his sleep but he stiffened anyway, and listened hard.

  There was a pat-pat-pat that could have been footsteps, or could have been Luke’s imagination. And then, the hall light shone briefly into the room as the door was opened and closed.

  Luke sat up. He crept over to the door and opened it a crack so he’d have light to see by.

  All the beds were filled with sleeping boys except two. Luke’s.

  And Jason’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Luke took time to grab one of his textbooks so he’d have an excuse if someone caught him out of his room after lights out. “I only wanted to study some more,” he could say. Tm worried about my tests.”

  But the only person who might catch him was Jason.

  Out in the dimly lit hall Luke looked back and forth, not sure which way to go. Probably Jason had only needed to go to the bathroom, and Luke was foolish to follow him. Luke headed toward the bathroom first.

  Why didn’t I think to go to the bathroom after lights out, back when I was trying to find a place to read my note? Luke wondered. But Luke had been too terrified back then to think like that. He wouldn’t have dared leave his bed. He had actually blended in quite well. And if I’d read the note right away, I wouldn’t have discovered the door to outdoors or the woods. I wouldn’t have had those few days of setting up my garden. He still missed his garden. He tried not to think about it. And I never would have gotten to know anybody.

  But how well did he know his new friends? The only friend he’d ever had before was Jen, and that friendship had been entirely different.

  It wasn’t fair to compare.

  He sneaked quietly down the hall, feeling foolish. Of course Jason would be in the bathroom, and he’d only have rude comments and mockery for Luke when he saw him. “Can’t even pee without your books, huh?” maybe, or even, “Hey, lecker, we’ve got toilet paper here and everything. You won’t need to use that.”

  The bathroom was empty.

  Luke backtracked, and glanced in his room again. Jason’s bed was still empty. Luke went the opposite direction from the bathroom. All that lay down this hallway was the back stairs.

  Maybe Luke wouldn’t look for Jason anymore. What did he think he was going to do when he found him? But Luke was so thoroughly awake now that he decided he might as well study. The details of the Trojan War and the Peloponnesian War were blurring in his mind.

  He went over to the stairwell and sat down on the top step. He leaned against the wall, opened his book, and began reading. “The Greeks fought battles for—”

  Far below Luke, someone was murmuring.

  Luke sat still for a minute, tempted to ignore it. It probably was Jason, but so what? If he was having a secret meeting without Luke, why should Luke care? It wasn’t like Jason’s gang ever planned anything real, anyway.

  But Luke did care. If Jason’s gang was going to help third children, Luke owed it to himself—to his family, to Jen, to Jen’s dad—to take part.

  Luke eased down to the next step. And the next. And the next. He kept clutching his book because he didn’t want to make any noise putting it down. Yet he wondered if he should be making noise, acting normal, so he could come upon the secret meeting casually, “Oh, hi, guys—didn’t know you were down here. Can I help?”

  There was nothing normal about walking around Hendricks in the middle of the night. Luke stayed quiet.

  When he rounded the corner of the second flight of stairs, he could begin to distinguish words. The only person who seemed to be talking was Jason. Nothing new about that. Luke crouched behind the half-wall that surrounded the stairs. He listened closely.

  “But it’s too soon!” Jason was pleading.

  Luke risked a peek over the banister. Maybe Trey was there, and would call out, “Hey, Lee! Glad you’re here! I was hoping you would come!”

  But Jason appeared to be alone.

  He was talking into a small portable phone. At least, that’s what Luke thought it was. He’d never seen one before, except in sketches in his science textbook.

  Jason was facing the other way, so Luke kept watching and listening.

  “I told you. There’s no danger in waiting!” he exclaimed. “They’re just sitting ducks!”

  Jason was silent, listening. He turned slightly and Luke caught a glimpse of the side of his face. Jason’s expression was set, dead serious. Luke thought about all the times he’d seen Jason joking, joshing, prodd
ing, mocking. Luke wouldn’t have thought Jason could be 100 percent serious about anything. He seemed like a different boy.

  Frightened, Luke ducked out of sight.

  “I’ve got four and she’s got two,” Jason said. “But I could have more by the end of the week.”

  Four and two and more of what? Luke wondered.

  “Well, I don’t know about Nina,” Jason said. “You’d have to ask her. But she says girls are harder to recruit.”

  Girls? Luke thought he’d solved his puzzle. Jason was making plans for some action against the Government—something like the rally, but safer, Luke hoped. He was telling someone how many boys and girls—how many exnays—were available to help. Except . . . the group that met in the woods had nine boys now, with Luke, and five girls.

  Hadn’t Jason told Luke once that the whole group wasn’t brave enough yet to be subversives? Luke wondered whom Jason was counting and whom he was leaving out. Trey was pretty timid. So were several of the others.

  What about Luke? What if Jason wasn’t including Luke because Luke hadn’t gone to the meeting in the woods that evening? Or because he knew that Luke was secretly the biggest chicken of all?

  Luke started to stand up, to say, “Wait! Count me in!” His legs were quivering, but he could make himself be brave. He’d have to.

  Jason had his back turned to Luke again. He was practically snarling into the phone now.

  “You want names? All right, I’ll give you the ones I have. Antonio Blanco, alias Samuel Irving. Denton Weathers, alias Travis Spencer. Sherman Kymanski, alias Ryan Mann. Patrick Kerrigan, alias Tyrone Janson.”

  Jason was saying the boys’ real names. Luke was so thrilled, he couldn’t speak. If only he’d told Jason his real name. He could just imagine hearing, “Luke Garner, subversive for the cause, coming to the aid of third children everywhere.” Forget the alias. It didn’t matter.

  Jason shifted his portable phone in his hand, and Luke had a terrible thought. What if Jason’s phone was bugged? Then Luke realized something even worse: Since it was a portable phone, the Population Police didn’t even have to bug it. Luke had learned in science and technology class just last week that portable phones sent out messages indiscriminately. Didn’t Jason know that? All the Population Police needed was a receiver.