The Other Side of the Island

  Gardens and castles and spun sugar ribbons and bows. Circus cakes with sparkling acrobats and sports cakes with soccer balls. The cakes kept coming, one after another. Happy Birthday, Abe; Happy Birthday, Irina.

  There was one orderly on the end who seemed to work faster than any other. From her position in the gallery, Honor watched as this orderly painted cakes with rainbows and balloons and fairy princesses. Each princess wore a tiny crown with sugar candy jewels. The orderly dusted each fairy princess gown with glittering sugar in lilac or in pink. The orderly drew a cat on her next cake and then three kittens playing. Honor tensed. This orderly drew with icing the way her mother drew animals on paper. She drew just the way she had learned from the drawing book. Honor wanted to tell Helix. She wanted to call out to him sitting two rows back. She gripped the sides of her chair with her hands instead. I’m here, she told her mother silently. Turn around, she begged her mother in her mind. I’m right behind you in the gallery.

  Honor’s mother slid the cat cake to the side. There was no message on that one. She took a large rectangular sheet cake and began painting it green. She took brown icing and painted bases and a pitcher’s mound. She was creating a baseball diamond for a sports cake. She reached over to her supply boxes and pulled out tiny plastic baseball players. They were dressed in Colony uniforms of green, with blue numbers on their backs. She placed one on the pitcher’s mound, one at bat, one on second base. Then she paused for a split second and switched the pitcher and second baseman. Honor could just barely make out that the figure on second base was number seven. The number was painted on the back of his shirt.

  All along the table, other orderlies kept making their cakes. There was a cake with a yellow mother duck and seven little yellow ducklings waddling behind. There was a great cake with the earth on it and the words Safe and Secure. That one must have been for some official function. But Honor’s mother hesitated. She seemed to be reading her order forms. Then she turned back to the baseball cake and began to write Happy Birthday just above the baseball diamond. She paused and Honor held her breath. Her mother was writing her name! Happy Birthday, H-o-n . . . Honor watched in shock as her mother scribed the first three letters. The world seemed to stop right there. The other orphans were pointing at the grand earth cake. The Bakery Guide was saying there were fewer than two errors a month in the cake-decorating department. But for Honor, time froze. Her mother was telling her happy birthday. She had remembered. Even now. Honor’s mother was not just an orderly. She could blink.

  What if Pamela got caught writing what she was not supposed to write! She would get caught and taken away again. Honor was terrified. She could scarcely watch. And then the world began spinning again. Honor’s mother finished H-o-n-with an e-y. She did not write Honor. She had written Happy Birthday, Honey. Honor sank down in her chair, head on her knees.

  “Heloise? Heloise!” said Mrs. Edwards.

  “I’m sorry,” said Honor. Her voice was muffled. “I don’t feel well.”

  “Are you going to be sick?” Mrs. Edwards asked.

  “No.”

  “Do I need to take you outside to rest?” Mrs. Edwards asked less urgently.

  “No,” said Honor. She knew Mrs. Edwards didn’t want to miss the rest of the cake decorating.

  “Then pull yourself together, please,” said Mrs. Edwards.

  “Ooh,” Honor heard the visitors gasp around her.

  “A rare error,” announced the Bakery Guide.

  Honor lifted her head and peeked. Her mother had been trimming the baseball cake with a sharp knife and had somehow slashed the cake in two.

  “You are all in luck,” said the Guide. “We will be distributing the erroneous cake to visitors. You may pick up your own piece as soon as you return to the lobby.”

  All the orphans cheered, and the other visitors applauded. And of course Honor clapped as well, ducking her head to wipe away her tears on her sleeves.

  PART FOUR

  ONE

  “TELL ME!” WHISPERED HELIX AS HE AND HONOR CLEARED the orphans’ table after dinner. “Did you get a good look at her?”

  “Just one look at her face,” Honor whispered back.

  “Are you sure?” Helix asked.

  She nodded and piled her stack of plates on the cart to return to the kitchen.

  Suddenly she didn’t want to talk about seeing her mother. She didn’t want to tell Helix about seeing those blue eyes and those small ears. She was afraid if she spoke about it, she would forget. She would lose the feeling of seeing her mother’s face.

  But Helix was full of questions. He couldn’t wait. “Did she make a sign? Did she recognize you? Did she try to tell you anything?”

  “How could she tell me anything?” Honor whispered furiously. “They can’t talk. You know that.”

  “But she could give you a signal. She could tell you without words.”

  “She didn’t give me any signal. I got in the elevator. She went to the bakery floor and started decorating cakes. She did the fairy cake and the kittens and the baseball cake. . . .”

  “The erroneous cake, the one we ate,” said Helix. “Maybe that one was for you.”

  “She made it up,” said Honor. “She started to write my name on it. Did you see?”

  “Yes! She must have been trying to send a message.”

  But what message had Pamela sent? For days Helix and Honor thought about it. There was the baseball diamond. There was the message, Happy Birthday, Honey. Did honey mean something? Or was Pamela just disguising Honor’s name? And how did she remember it was Honor’s birthday? She must have some memory. But did orderlies have a sense of time?

  “I heard Fanny say they get drops in their eyes every day,” said Honor. “That’s why they only see straight ahead. They get drugs in their food.”

  “They get trained to do just one thing as long as they’re awake so they don’t have time to think,” said Helix. “I don’t know how they’d keep track of days.”

  They were up early before the others and had begun weeding in the vegetable gardens. They were whispering with their heads down.

  “There was a baseball diamond and a pitcher and a man on second base. Did she play baseball with you?” Helix asked.

  Honor shook her head. “I don’t think she knew anything about baseball. She knew how to draw.”

  “Something about drawing . . .” Helix tugged at the crabgrass sprouting between carrot tops. “Did she teach you to draw?”

  “No.”

  “What did she do with you?”

  “Number games,” said Honor. “When we were walking home from the bus stop. She taught me how to count in different—” She stopped short.

  “What is it?” asked Helix.

  “In different bases,” said Honor. “She taught me how to count in base two.”

  “The little plastic baseball player on second base,” said Helix.

  “And he had the number seven on his shirt. She moved number seven from pitcher to second base.”

  They stared at each other.

  “It’s a code,” said Helix. “It’s a secret number. What’s seven in base two?”

  “One hundred eleven,” said Honor.

  “That’s it, then. She was sending you a secret code.”

  “One hundred eleven isn’t a big enough number,” Honor protested. “How could that be a code?”

  “It is; it is.” Helix was excited. “It must be.”

  That night Honor stayed awake in bed. She lay in the dark and waited until she heard quiet breathing all around her. Then she snuck outside into the night. Of course sneaking out at night was Not Allowed, but she wasn’t frightened. She felt so calm she might have been dreaming. Ever since she’d seen her mother, she felt as though she were living in a dream.

  She ran as softly as she could in her pajamas to the vegetable gardens, where Helix was waiting. He held a key to the potting shed and gestured for her to follow him.

  Hour ten. Indigo. The night was
warm. The artificial moon was almost but not quite full.

  “Where did you get the key?” Honor asked.

  “Shh.”

  Helix opened the potting shed door. It was dark inside, and the shed smelled of dirt and dry moss and the grass clippings that stuck to the lawn mowers orderlies pushed across the school grounds. There were no windows in the potting shed. Once Helix closed the door, it was safe to turn on a light. He pulled a string to a dim lightbulb. Then he dragged a huge bag of fertilizer to one side of a table and revealed an old utility sink full of rusty trowels, garden stakes, flowerpots. The sink was lined with yellowed newspapers. He lifted a stack of newspapers to reveal white pages underneath. These were pieces of books, cut scraps he’d saved from the recycling plant and even whole sections of books without their covers and their binding threads hanging out. There were torn-up red cards and folded papers. There were more keys, small ones like the key to the potting shed. There were tools, a pliers and a screwdriver, and there were paper packets of salt and pepper, the kind the school stocked in the kitchen. There were pictures. Colored photographs from magazines. Flooded cities. Bridges, boats, streets flowing with water.

  “See,” Helix whispered to Honor. “This is my collection.”

  She must have looked disappointed, because Helix turned on her with some indignation and said, “I have the end of Bridge to Terabithia, and I have the middle of A Wizard of Earthsea. I have an almanac of Old Weather.”

  “What’s an almanac?” asked Honor.

  “It gives you advice and tells you what the weather used to be and predicts what it will be like next.”

  “Is it an almanac for the Colonies?” Honor asked.

  “Yes,” said Helix, “but it’s very ancient. “It’s called Poor Richard’s.”

  “This isn’t going to help anything,” said Honor, turning the torn pages of the almanac and staring for a moment at the calendar of the old month February with its little pictures of the phases of the moon. “‘Waste not, want not,’” she read, and then she pointed out, “That’s just a saying of Earth Mother.” She handed the almanac back to Helix and folded her arms across her chest. “I thought you had something important.”

  “Look at this, then,” said Helix, and he carefully unfolded a creased paper.

  “What is it?” Honor asked, even though she saw what it was. “Where did you get that?” she whispered in awe.

  Helix had unfolded the entire paper, and Honor was looking at something she had never seen before, in school or out, a detailed map of the entire island.

  There was the island, like a short-tailed fish with a sharp nose and big fins. The volcanic mountains across the middle of the island looked like the fish’s spine. The Capital City was colored pale green. The rest of the island, beyond city limits, was tinted yellow. On the City Side, the map showed neighborhoods rising up between the ridges of the volcano. There were the bus routes drawn in blue like veins leading from the City up to the highest houses. The other side of the island was easily twice the size of the City Side, but it was almost empty. There were no neighborhoods. There was only one road shown on the other side of the island. That road emerged from the mouth of a tunnel into a valley. In the valley was a square camp of buildings labeled Barracks. “The tunnel is gated and locked at both ends,” said Helix. “You can’t get into it. Only the bus drivers have the keys to the tunnel. They drive in a convoy and the first driver unlocks the tunnel and then the last bus driver locks up after them. But look. If you climb up through the Model Forest, you can get into the real forest. Then you hike over the mountains.”

  Honor was gazing at the drawings of the Barracks. The buildings were all rectangular. There were hundreds set up in a quadrangle with an open square between them. At the corners of the camp, the map showed small square buildings. “Those must be watchtowers,” Honor said.

  Outside the camp there were only two other buildings. One was labeled Maintenance and the other Transportation. “I think those are for the buses,” said Helix.

  Honor stared hard at the Barracks. “She’s there,” she whispered.

  “All the taken parents are there,” said Helix. “And I’m going to get mine.”

  “But how?”

  “I’m waiting for a storm. A big one.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed, “but the last one was over two years ago. Remember?”

  She nodded. Of course she remembered the night she and her parents had stayed with Helix and his parents in the safe room. She missed that night when they had all been safe together.

  “Approximately every three years,” Helix said, quoting the climatology textbook, “there has been a typhoon in the Colonies. When the storm comes and everyone runs to the shelter, I’ll escape.”

  “But even if you could escape, how would you get to the other side?” Honor asked. “And how could you find them?”

  “The map,” said Helix, as if it were simple.

  “They’d catch you,” said Honor. “They’d . . . Wait,” she said suddenly. “Why should you go? What about me?”

  Helix bristled. “I could get them out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I stole this map from the library, didn’t I?”

  “And how did you get it?”

  “I started a fire in the bathroom—just a little one. Then, when the alarm went off, I stole the map from Miss Tuttle’s desk.”

  “But it was my mother who gave me the code,” said Honor. “She’s waiting for me. Even if you got to the other side, she might not recognize you. I have to go.”

  TWO

  THEY MADE A PLAN. THEY MADE A HUNDRED PLANS TO leave school and rescue their parents. The plans were detailed, but they were detailed like the plans in dreams, full of little pieces of information, like how many steps it would take to get from the classrooms to the potting shed or how they would meet in the Model Forest at the lookout and start off from there. Their plans were missing the most important ideas, like how they would make their way across the steep volcanic mountains and what they would do once they got to the other side. Honor and Helix could not figure out answers to these questions, partly because they disagreed about what to do, and partly because they had so little sense of what the other side of the island would be like.

  All their plans began with a storm. When everyone was hiding in the shelters, when the power went down and the world went black, that would be their chance. But where was bad weather? Where were the rain and surf? Where were the floods? Every day, Honor and Helix listened to the weather bulletins, but no storm was predicted. Every storm drill, Honor and Helix looked at the sky and hoped the sirens were sounding for the real thing. No such luck. Days passed and weeks, and not a drop of rain.

  Honor had trouble concentrating in class. During geography tests, when she filled in blank maps with Corporation district numbers, she kept thinking of Helix’s secret map of the island. She couldn’t stop thinking about that map, folded in the potting shed. The map seemed to her to have magic powers, it was so strange and dangerous and Not Allowed. Every year in school she’d studied weather maps and oceanic maps, but she’d never seen a map of where she lived. She thought of the map and she thought of the escape plans and she did poorly on her algebra tests.

  Quintilian was having trouble too. He had begun drawing on every scrap of paper he could find, even in the margins of his schoolbooks. The pictures were always the same, round smiling faces of the family and a big round face above them for Earth Mother. Sometimes he drew Earth Mother with lines radiating from her head like the sun.

  He said his pencil couldn’t help it. Drawings sprouted everywhere. One day, after three warnings, his teacher and Mr. Edwards met and decided Quintilian had to learn his lesson. He got a punishment of extra garden chores to do.

  Quintilian’s little hands were too small to weed the garden. He wasn’t strong enough to push a wheelbarrow. All the orphans helped him when they thought Mr. and Mrs. Edwar
ds weren’t looking. After several days of weeding, Quintilian stopped drawing. He drooped sadly at his desk and ate hardly any dinner.

  “How will you grow?” Honor asked him.

  Quintilian shrugged.

  “You can’t grow if you don’t eat,” she said.

  “I don’t like food,” he told her.

  “But how do you know, if you don’t even try?” she demanded. She didn’t know what to do with him. Fanny had told her that orphans who didn’t eat had to go to the infirmary and Nurse Applebee made them eat. She was afraid this would happen to Quintilian. He looked so listless and sad. He acted like a boy who thought nothing good would ever happen again.

  “I’m going to tell him I saw our mother,” she told Helix.

  Helix was upset. “He’s too little. He’s only four. He can’t keep a secret.”

  “Yes, he can,” said Honor.

  “Telling him is a mistake,” Helix warned her.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want him to be disappointed,” Helix said softly.

  Honor was surprised at this. She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think we’ll be able to get them out?”

  The next chance she got, she whispered in Quintilian’s ear, “Promise if I tell you a secret, you’ll eat.”

  “What’s the secret?” Quintilian asked.