Goodhouse (2 page)

“I have just received word that a delivery of roofing tiles will arrive this morning. I know you are all eager to see your Founders' Day pavilion finished.” Tanner forced a smile that made his paper-bag face look especially crumpled and sour. “It is,” he said, “for every one of us, a matter of pride that this important edifice be completed in a timely manner, and so—I regret very much that some of you must stay behind to unload the truck.”

The boys around me looked sullen. No one was excited about Founders' Day next month. Goodhouse would be fifty years old on June 15, and Ione was hosting the celebration. But so far, the event was synonymous with longer days and endless work details.

“South Dormitories,” Tanner said, “you will return to your rooms and prepare for service. The rest of you, get on the buses.”

The South Dormitory boys, who were among the oldest, exploded into protest as they pulled off their neckties and woolen coats. “Quietly,” hissed Tanner. “Quietly! Get in your lines. I will not tolerate antics. You there, stand still.” He gestured for several proctors to descend, and they jogged down from the balcony. Their steel-toed boots made the metal stair treads hum.

“I will not have chaos,” Tanner shouted. “The rest of you, line up.” But we were already in our lines, standing shoulder to shoulder with our roommates, organized by distance to our destination.

“Bus 1,” a proctor bellowed. The line to our left shuffled forward. Some boys appeared to be holding hands, but I knew they were
palming
—sending messages through sign language, one hand making shapes into the palm of another. It was extremely complex, all but unlearnable unless mastered young. As a transfer I was considered unlucky. New roommates were randomly assigned on the first of every year. Students were always paired with like-standing students, but that was the only guideline. There were no reassignments, no preferences. I had been an unfortunate choice for Owen. I was unable to palm, so I'd condemned him to a semester of silence. He'd tried to teach me the alphabet, and when that was hopeless, he'd taught me
shorts
—gestures that communicated different phrases and commands. There was a lot of profanity in the shorts. I caught on fast.

Creighton and Davis patrolled our lines. “Hands apart,” Creighton said. “Can't have you ladies gossiping.” I felt a little surge of hatred, which I struggled to master. Class leaders couldn't give demerits, but they were allowed to do whatever else they wanted; they could break your bones or assign you to an overnight work detail. Every class leader in the Goodhouse system was promised a Level 1 job after graduation. They ate the best food; they lived in private rooms; they could drive patrol vehicles within campus limits. At most schools they were appointed by the administration. At Ione, however, you could appoint yourself. All you had to do was step forward and announce that you wanted your chance.

Creighton and Davis had been my welcome there; they'd taken me into the bathroom and knocked me around. It had been a relatively mild beating, just a taste of what was possible. A proctor had stood watch to issue demerits if I fought back. It took everything I had to submit, not to feel cornered on the lawn at night with the building still on fire.

“What are you looking at?” asked Davis. “Eyes to the front.” He slapped me on the back of the head.

“Bus 2,” a proctor called. Our line shuffled forward. We walked outside and were directed to a yellow school bus with a magnetic Goodhouse logo affixed to its side—a
G
and an
H
intertwined. Underneath the logo was a small, simple line drawing of a swan. This was the symbol on all our delivery trucks, on all of our boxes of food and many of the products we used, on our toothbrushes and on our soap. For the past ten years, Goodhouse had been owned by Swann Industries, a private company that produced pharmaceuticals and—it seemed to me—everything else.

I hurried onto the bus and sat down, eagerly sliding my hand between the fold in the cushions. These buses were used by the public school system and sometimes we found plastic buttons in the seats, found coins or brightly colored candy wrappers. This time, however, the seat was clean. As a boy in the system, I didn't possess anything, and I craved the experience of ownership. I coveted anything with beauty: a fluffy tuft of wheatgrass, a dead ladybug, an autumn leaf struck red or gold. I'd pick them up and fold them into a shirt cuff or a sock, and this always made me feel powerful.

Sometimes I start my story here. I say, Things turned out the way they did because I was too long in the habit of acquisition. But if I want to be truthful, I'll say that my story begins on a freezing night in January of that year. I lay on the icy lawn watching my dormitory burn. There were boys trapped inside, beating on the safety glass of the windows. Little stars of impact bloomed again and again as a spotlight swept lazily over the façade. Men in red balaclavas wandered the yard, checking to make sure that no one got out.

I have only to close my eyes and I'm back there, shivering on the grass, choking on smoke. The fire moans and hisses like a monster. It's still feeding on the building, on the bodies of my friends, and I can do nothing but cower and hope that when the men find me they will use a gun and not their boots and hands.

I'd assumed that it was the end. I never thought there would be more.

 

TWO

The bus lumbered down the main road, circling the old athletic field, which was currently being tilled and planted with vegetables. In the distance was the partially finished Founders' Day pavilion, its exposed beams and rounded shape giving it the look of a half-eaten turkey carcass. We passed the Proctors' Quarters—that cluster of gardens and homes where most of the staff lived. Some of the houses were older, brought in from Ione itself and positioned there, made into a neighborhood. Every structure had been painted gray with white trim. Red geraniums hung from window boxes, and from afar they looked like gashes in the siding, blood welling and then freezing in place. In one yard laundry dried on a line—empty shirt arms and trouser legs kicked and waved us on.

Nearer the gate, we passed the wooden kennel where Tanner kept his bluetick hounds. They were just for show now. There were better ways to track an escaped boy, but the hounds were a tradition at the Ione Goodhouse. They were supposed to be mascots of sorts—though we didn't have a sports team or anything we needed to rally against except ourselves. Tanner had cut their vocal cords, and as we drove past, the dogs lunged at the fence, their mouths opening and closing in a pantomime of agitation.

Our bus stopped at the main gate, taking its place in the line of buses waiting to be cleared. At my old school in La Pine, Oregon, the campus had been rural and isolated, not well protected. But since the attack, Goodhouses nationwide had been increasing and standardizing their security. Now, instead of simply having guardhouses and fences, there were concrete barriers at every entrance, iris and facial scans for all staff members, embedded microchips for every student.

We pulled to the front of the line, and several guards scanned the bus, checking their handhelds to verify the passenger list. One guard stepped forward with a round mirror on the end of a long pole. He dipped it under the bus and walked along each side. A moment later another guard deactivated the electromagnetic barrier and waved us through the gate. Almost immediately, we entered open landscape. The summer droughts hadn't yet begun. There were still green patches and lots of jackrabbits moving away from the road, their splayed ears visible above the grass.

In a year I would graduate, and if I kept my status high, I might qualify for a job, a marriage license, an apartment—I might slip into civilian life, with its private spaces and things, so many things. I was waiting for my real life to start, and a student's status level at graduation controlled all his options and freedoms. I'd heard rumors of graduates who lived off the grid, who lived in the drought country, in the Midwestern towns that had been deserted in the middle of the twenty-first century. But the whole point of graduating was to begin something—not to hide, not to remain on the margins. Sometimes this seemed unfair, as if Goodhouse were a game that ended. But I'd had it explained to me like this—you achieved control or you did not. Without a deadline, students would never truly feel the sum of their choices.

I knew we were close to a town when we started passing billboards. One claimed,
Vacationland is for the whole family!
It featured children holding balloons and ice cream cones. Beyond this billboard was a tent city, a large one. I'd seen smaller ones in Oregon, but this city stretched to the horizon, and I smelled the unpleasant reek of raw sewage. Some of the tents had walls and plastic windows, but most were just open-sided tarps tied to poles. A few men leaned against the fence, staring at the road. They all had beards, which were forbidden at school and which I'd rarely seen.

The bus downshifted as it pushed uphill, and the engine revved. Citizens who had been hunched over cookstoves now stood and watched our ascent. A pack of children surged toward the fence, shouting something. One woman who'd been draping wet laundry over the top of a tent turned to stare at us. I had the impression of disruption, a feeling of drawing unwanted attention.

I glanced at Owen, who just shrugged and picked at the dried yellow paint on his cuticles. Today he was interviewing for a scholarship to the San Francisco College of Art, meeting at the house of an alumnus, someone important—a man who'd endowed a building or two. Owen had been up late last night, unable to sleep, laboring over a commission for a proctor—a canvas of an icy mountain range. He charged a lot of credits for his work, and nobody knew how much money he'd saved. It was a special privilege to have art supplies in our room, and he'd forbidden me to touch them.

And then we were driving through a downtown, not Ione, but some other gold rush–style town with boxy wooden buildings, all painted different colors. Only a few civilians were out on the street, most of them women. One wore a skirt that ended above the knee, and all the boys stared. The ones on the opposite side of the bus stood up to get a better view.

“Sit down,” a proctor shouted. “Everyone in his seat.” Proctors stalked the aisles, and I noticed, for the first time, that they had real guns strapped to their sides. At school they wore Lewiston Volts—standard-issue tasers—bright red, the color of caution, of warning. Last week a boy had bitten off a part of his tongue when a proctor had used one to subdue him outside the cafeteria. Today, however, the sight of their guns frightened me more. I grabbed Owen's hand and palmed, “Why?”

He didn't understand, and I didn't know the sign for “weapon.”

“Is that normal?” I whispered. “With the pistols?”

“No talking,” a proctor said. He pointed his handheld in my direction and scanned the chip in my belly. Then he checked the screen embedded in his device. I knew my picture would show up there to confirm that it was me. I glanced at Owen. He was furious. At the end of the day we shared each other's demerits, and Owen palmed a short that meant
fuck off.
I shut my mouth. I couldn't lose control like that. I couldn't lose control at all.

*   *   *

We drove to an upscale gated community called Meadowlands. There were no meadows in sight. Presumably, the development had obliterated its namesake. The bus stopped beside a gatehouse. Two guards stepped forward. Both were overweight and appeared to be stuffed into their brown coats and pants. One took our information into a little booth, and the other collected iris scans from the proctors. This guard was the first civilian I'd seen wearing a suit and tie. We had not been dressed to fit in, after all.

“This is a nice area,” the guard said. “We won't tolerate any trouble.”

“No, sir,” we chorused.

They waved us through—no mirrors, no dogs—and on the other side was a real neighborhood, a park with a little stone path and two iron benches. Each home seemed gigantic to me, imposing, set on a slight rise at the end of a driveway, surrounded by a yard—a lake of synthetic lawn.

A proctor at the head of the bus called roommates forward and assigned them to various addresses. The bus traveled deeper into the neighborhood, stopping and starting. The seats around me emptied. Owen was dropped off at an enormous estate. I watched him ascend a long, sloping driveway lined with trees. I was taken to a street where the houses were smaller and closer together. “James Goodhouse,” a proctor called. “Address 3715.” He pointed to a residence with a red front door. A little flagpole jutted from the front of the house. On it was a banner with the picture of a leggy bird carrying a sack in its beak. When I didn't immediately rise, the proctor said, “Don't make me drag you out.”

I walked down the aisle, and then I stood on the sidewalk listening to the bus retreat and turn a corner. It had been months since I'd been alone. At Ione, I was contained by the new security protocols, but at my old school I'd been good at sneaking out of the dormitory. I'd spent hours lying on the banks of the Deschutes, listening to the owls hunt, watching searchlights cross the school commons—beautiful beams of light, luminous tunnels, like gods come to earth.

I stepped up to the red door. There was a glass panel at the top and my reflection stared back at me. My skin was a light brown and my eyes were a bright, vivid green—a color that was evident even in the muted quality of the glass. I had grown enormously in the last year. By the time I'd transferred to Ione, I'd hit six feet, and I was grateful. It had bought me a little respect. Now I worked to make my face expressionless. I straightened the collar of my shirt, and then there was no point in putting it off any longer. I knocked and waited.

A teenage girl answered the door. “Yes?” she asked. Her long brown hair was braided into a glossy rope that draped over one shoulder. She was very thin, and a scar rose from the neckline of her sundress like a red, puffed worm. I lowered my gaze. I wasn't sure if I should speak to her. But there was no one else.