Amanda snuck away after that because more people were getting sick and no one was taking away the crap and garbage or bringing food. She changed her name, because she didn't want to be put back in the football stadium: the refugees were supposed to be farmed out to work in whatever job they were told to. "No free lunch," people were saying: you had to pay for everything, one way or another.
"What did you change it from?" I asked her. "Your name."
"It was a white-trash name. Barb Jones," said Amanda. "That was my identity. But I don't have an identity now. So I'm invisible." It was one more thing I could admire about her -- her invisibility.
Amanda walked north, along with thousands of other people. "I tried to hitch, but I only got one lift, with a guy who said he was a chicken farmer," she said. "He pushed his hand between my legs; you can tell that's coming when they breathe funny. I stuck my thumbs in his eyes and got out of there fast." She made it sound like thumbs in the eyes was normal in the Exfernal World. I wanted to learn how to do it, but I didn't think I could work up the nerve.
"Then I had to get past the Wall," she said.
"What wall?"
"Don't you watch the news? The Wall they're building to keep the Tex refugees out, because just the fence wasn't enough. There's men with sprayguns -- it's a CorpSeCorps wall. But they can't patrol every inch -- the Tex-Mex kids know all the tunnels, they helped me get through."
"You could've been shot," I said. "Then what?"
"Then I worked my way up here. For food and stuff. It took a while."
In her place I would have just laid down in a ditch and cried myself to death. But Amanda says if there's something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time.
I worried that there might be trouble with the other Gardener kids: after all, Amanda was a pleebrat -- one of our enemies. Bernice hated her, of course, but she didn't dare say so because like everyone else she was in awe of her. First of all, no Gardener kid could dance, and Amanda had excellent moves -- it was like her hips were dislocated. She'd teach me when Lucerne and Zeb weren't there. We'd get the music off her purple phone, which she kept hidden in our mattress, and when the card was used up she'd lift another one. She had some flashy pleeblander clothes hidden away as well, so when she needed to lift something she'd put those clothes on and go off to the Sinkhole mallway.
I could see that Shackleton and Crozier and the older boys were in love with her. She was very pretty, with her tawny skin and her long neck and her big eyes, but you could be pretty and still get called a carrot-sucker or a meat-hole on legs by those boys; they had a bunch of sick names for girls.
Not for Amanda, though: she had their respect. She had a piece of glass with duct tape along one edge to hold it with, and she said this glass had saved her life more than once. She showed us how to ram a guy in the crotch or trip him up and then kick him under the chin and break his neck. There were lots of tricks like that, she said -- ones you could use if you had to.
But on Festival days or at Buds and Blooms Choir practice, no one was as pious as her. You'd think she'd been washed in milk.
THE FESTIVAL OF ARKS
THE FESTIVAL OF ARKS
YEAR TEN.
OF THE TWO FLOODS AND THE TWO COVENANTS.
SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.
Dear Friends and Fellow Mortals:
Today the Children have built their little Arks and launched them on the Arboretum Creek to carry their messages of respect for God's Creatures to other children who may happen to find them on the seashore. In an increasingly endangered world, what a caring act that is! Let us remember: It is better to hope than to mope!
This evening we will share a special Festival meal -- Rebecca's delicious lentil soup, representing the First Flood, with Noah's Ark dumplings stuffed with vegetable Animal forms. One of those dumplings contains a turnip Noah, and whoever finds that Noah will get a special prize -- thus teaching us not to gobble our food in a heedless manner.
That prize is a picture painted by Nuala, our talented Eve Nine: Saint Brendan the Voyager, shown with the essential items we must include in our Ararat storerooms in preparation for the Waterless Flood. In this artwork, Nuala has given the tinned soydines and the soybits their due prominence. But let us remind ourselves to refresh our Ararats regularly. You wouldn't want to open that tin of soydines on the day of need and find that the contents have gone bad.
Burt's worthy wife, Veena, is in a Fallow state and cannot be with us for this Festival, but we look forward to welcoming her among us very soon.
Now let us turn to our Devotion for the Festival of Arks.
On this day we mourn, but we also rejoice. We mourn the deaths of all those Creatures of the land that were destroyed in the First Flood of extinctions -- whenever those occurred -- but we rejoice that the Fishes and Whales, and the Corals, and the Sea Turtles and the Dolphins, and the Sea Urchins, yea, also the Sharks -- we rejoice that they were spared, unless a change in ocean temperature and salinity caused by the great downpour of fresh waters did harm to some Species unknown to us.
We mourn the carnage that took place among the Animals. God was evidently willing to do away with numerous Species, as the fossil records attest, but many were saved until our times, and these are the ones He bequeathed anew to our care. If you had composed a splendid symphony, would you want it to be obliterated? The Earth and the music thereof, the Universe and the harmony therein -- these are God's works of Creativity, of which Man's creativity is but a poor shadow.
According to the Human Words of God, the task of saving the chosen Species was given to Noah, symbolizing the aware ones among Mankind
. He alone was forewarned; he alone took upon himself Adam's original stewardship, keeping God's beloved Species safe until the waters of the Flood had receded and his Ark was beached upon Ararat. Then the rescued Creatures were set loose upon the Earth, as if at a second Creation.
At the first Creation all was rejoicing, but the second event was qualified: God was no longer so well pleased. He knew something had gone very wrong with his last experiment, Man, but that it was too late for him to fix it. "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite every thing living, as I have done," say the Human Words of God in Genesis 8:21.