Hungry (37 page)

I almost laugh thinking about how my grandmother used to say,
If Yaz told you to jump off a bridge, would you?
Clearly, here the answer is
Yes
. If Gaia tells you to pee in a cup, you pee in a cup.

As we leave the latrine and head toward the dining hall, a woman walks out of the pump house. A little breeze catches the door and holds it open for a few seconds so that I get a glimpse inside. What I see startles me and I quickly look away embarrassed. By the time I look back, someone has slammed the door, and I wonder if my eyes were playing tricks on me.

“Were all the women in there half naked?” I ask Shiloh and Wren. They answer me with frowns. “Because it looked like they weren’t wearing tops. Not even bras!” This makes me giggle. “What exactly are they doing in there?”

“How would we know?” Shiloh asks.

“Only mothers work in there,” Wren adds. “And we aren’t mothers yet.”

“Gaia says, There’s a reason for everything, but not every reason is for us to know,” Shiloh adds.

Right
, I think. If Gaia tells you to go in the pump house and take off your shirt, you go in the pump house and take off your shirt. This place is getting stranger by the minute.

*   *   *

In the dining hall, while we have our morning ration of kudzu soup and a strangely sweet, cloudy tea, I look everywhere for Basil, but I can’t find him. When I ask, Wren tells me he probably ate during an earlier shift since the dining hall can’t hold everyone at once. I realize then that I have no idea where he sleeps or what job he does, so I can’t go in search of him after the morning meal. Instead, I follow my bunk mates from the dining hall. I’ll have to ask around for him later.

We take the right-hand path out of the main clearing and stop in front of a building that’s modern and sleek, made of metal and glass. No kudzu here. “Is this the hospital or the harvest house?” I ask.

“Both,” says Wren.

“Do you think I could get a brace or a steroid injection for my ankle?” I ask as we enter through the front door.

Wren looks at me bewildered.

“I sprained it,” I tell her.

She looks away as if none of this computes.

“Can you at least tell me where the doctor is?” I ask.

“He won’t be here until the harvest,” Shiloh tells me. Then she introduces me to a freckled worker named Bex who looks like her belly is about to pop and a quiet girl named Leeda whose bump is barely showing beneath her dress. “You’ve been assigned to help them,” Shiloh says and leaves.

“Are you nurses?” I ask the girls.

Bex bursts out laughing. “Hardly!” she says. “Come on. We’ve got a lot to do.”

We change into freshly washed blue hospital scrubs in a small dressing room near the back of the building. I never thought I would be in heaven wearing Cottonyle, but the fabric feels luxurious against my skin after the scratchy kudzu of my dress. Bex also gives me a little blue cap and tells me to tuck my hair up inside. I follow them to a clean, quiet lab with white tiled floors and walls and stainless steel surfaces, where they set to work processing pee samples that someone brought over from the latrine.

I like Bex immediately and am glad to have the company of someone chattier than Shiloh and Wren, who seem shocked every time I ask a question or make a comment. “Do you know how I would find someone here?” I ask Bex while we write down the number from each cup on a chart, dunk a strip of paper into the urine, then note the color that appears.

“Depends on who you’re looking for,” she says.

“The person I came with.”

“That guy Basil?” She grins big. “You two ran away from the Loops together, didn’t you?”

“News travels fast,” I say, slightly embarrassed by what she already knows.

Bex pulls a strip from a cup. “Yeah, well, nothing much happens around here so when someone new shows up, it’s kind of a big deal.”

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

Bex puffs out her cheeks. “A while,” is all she says.

“And did you come with someone?”

“There was a group of us.…”

“This is not appropriate conversation,” Leeda snaps.

“Sorry,” I say, stung by her disapproval. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just want to find Basil—that’s all.”

Bex looks at me with sympathy. “You’ll see him soon,” she says and hands me a new tray of urine samples.

We work silently hunched over the pee cups for another ten minutes, then Bex stands up straight to stretch. “Ugh,” she says holding her lower back.

“How far along are you?” I ask.

“Thirty-two weeks,” she says. “And my back is killing me.”

“Gaia says, ‘Being a vessel is a gift from Mother Nature,’” says Leeda, barely above a whisper.

“Yeah, the gift that keeps on giving,” Bex jokes. “Giving me gas, giving me hemorrhoids, giving me a fat ass! Plus, now this baby is hanging out on my bladder like it’s his own personal water bed so I have to pee every fifteen minutes. If I run out of the door with my legs crossed, don’t be surprised.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I can cover for you if you need to go.”

Leeda’s head snaps up. “Gaia says, ‘We must each earn our keep.’”

I’ve had just about enough of her. “So I can’t offer to help someone?” I ask. “I thought this was supposed to be some kind of commune or something!”

“It’s okay,” Bex says as she pours urine samples into a large red bucket. “Leeda’s right. I have to earn my keep like anyone else. ‘There’s no charity on the Farm.’ Besides, I’m fine. Just complaining to pass the time.”

“What are we doing, anyway?” I study the chart I’ve been filling out. “Checking nutrient levels?”

Bex just shrugs and continues dunking paper into pee. The crazy part is that dealing with the samples makes me miss my mom. I remember her saying the work you do when you start out as a scientist can be rote and boring—prepping experiments, reading results, entering data. But the excitement is in solving a problem in which each piece of data is part of the puzzle. Knowing that at the end you might be responsible for a major breakthrough makes it all worthwhile. Without knowing what I’m doing or why makes this work mindless, and I don’t care for that.

When we’re done with the pee, Leeda hauls one bucket out the door while Bex removes a tray of syringes from a refrigerated drawer and spreads them across a long table.

I pick one up but there’s no label. “What’s this for?”

Again she shrugs, but this time she says, “Just what the dear doctor ordered, I guess!”

“Who is this dear doctor I keep hearing about?”

“You’ll meet him soon.” She hands me a packet of antiseptic wipes.

“How soon?”

“During the full moon,” she tells me, and I laugh, thinking she must be joking, but she looks at me quizzically and I realize that she’s serious.

Before I can ask why he only comes out when the moon is full, Leeda sticks her head in the door from the hallway. “Ready?”

“Send them in,” Bex says, then she turns to me. “You hand out the wipes and I’ll do the syringes.”

The door opens again, and a long line of girls quietly enters the room. One by one, they recite their numbers to Leeda, who makes a mark on the charts we’ve been filling out. Then the girls step up to the table. I hand out swab after swab and watch as the girls systematically lift their dresses, rub a clean spot on their skin, take a syringe from Bex, and jab themselves in the belly. Nobody speaks. Nobody flinches. When they’re done, they drop their dresses, toss the used syringe in a blue bucket, and walk out of the room without a word.

Fifty girls must come through, including Wren and Shiloh, who pass by silently like everyone else. The whole thing takes less than fifteen minutes. When the room is empty again, I look at Bex and say, “Wow, that was … interesting.”

“See how interesting you think it is after you do this four times a day for seven days straight. Gets dead boring if you ask me.”

The last thing Leeda, Bex, and I do is clean up the lab. Once we’ve disposed of all the used syringes and wiped down the tables with disinfectant, Bex goes to lift the last red bucket of urine and grimaces.

“Hey,” I say, rushing to her side. “Let me do that. You should rest. Put your feet up. Take it easy for a while. Make your husband do something nice for you tonight.”

She bursts out laughing and puts the bucket down. “My husband?”

“Oh,” I say embarrassed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed, I mean, I thought … so you’re not married?”

Bex continues to chuckle, but Leeda glowers at me. “Gaia says, ‘Marriage is an outdated institution.’”

“But what about the baby’s dad? Do you get to live with him?”

Bex swallows her laughter and shakes her head.

“That’s so sad,” I say. “Don’t you miss him? Doesn’t he want to be a part of the baby’s life?”

“No need,” says Bex. “The other mothers will help us when the time comes.” She rubs her belly affectionately.

“But dads are so important,” I say, and wonder how my dad is—if he’s in trouble with Ahimsa for trying to help me, or if she’s turned him against me? But that would never happen. My dad will always have my back. “I wish I could talk to my father,” I say quietly.

Bex frowns like she’s not sure what to make of me pining away for my dad. She nods to the bucket of pee. “You really going to take this out for me? I have to get to the kitchen soon.”

“Of course I will,” I say.

Bex directs me down the long corridor, past the dressing room, to the back door and tells me to dump the urine in the woods. When I go outside, it’s quiet and peaceful. The kudzu has been cut back about twenty feet from the steps, so I take my time, wandering around under the canopy of trees. From a distance I hear something clanging, like metal against metal, and I wonder if a new building is being constructed.

When I come back inside, the hall is quiet and the lights inside the lab where we worked are out. I look inside the dressing room and see Bex and Leeda’s scrubs folded neatly on a bench. I change into my scratchy dress, but rather than leave as I’m supposed to, I decide to pull a Yaz to see what I can find behind closed doors. I’m hoping for something to wrap my ankle and, if I’m lucky, maybe a screen so I can send a message to my family.

The first door I try opens easily, so I slip inside. The room is as stark and empty as the lab I’ve been working in all morning and the drawers only hold more plastic cups, syringes, and antiseptic wipes. I make my way down the hall, opening each door along the way, but every room is the same nondescript tile box, except for one where I can hear the hum of electrical equipment and see the faint glow of light emitted between the slats of blinds that cover the window. If there’s a screen here, surely that’s where it would be, but just my luck, the door is locked tight.

*   *   *

When I come outside, Shiloh waits for me in front of the hospital. “Come on,” she says. “We’re late.”

“You go ahead,” I tell her. “There’s something else I need to do.” I turn toward Gaia’s house, determined to speak to my parents today.

She grabs my wrist and yanks me along with her. “If we’re late, I’ll be in trouble.”

She drags me back to Collection House No. 4 in the main clearing, where Wren and five other women are strapping large baskets to their backs. Shiloh hands me one, then we follow Reba, our squad leader, into the woods.

“What are we doing? Where are we going?” I ask as I limp behind them.

As usual, Shiloh frowns at me.

“Can’t you ever just follow along?” Wren asks.

“No,” I tell her honestly.

She twists her face and looks away as if I’ve deeply offended her, but I don’t care. If more people asked questions around here, maybe nobody would have to pee in cups and jab themselves in the belly with mystery drugs or have two kids at fifteen. Once I find Basil and tell him everything I’ve seen today, surely he’ll concede there’s something strange about this place.

Since no one will talk to me, I hang back marveling at the beauty around me. It’s so lush and green. The air is like nothing I’ve ever breathed before. It feels crisp and clean, moist and pure. I raise my face toward the sky, letting the sun warm my skin as the faint scent of sweetness tickles my nose. It’s like a place from my dreams, only it’s real. In that moment, part of me can understand why Basil is so smitten.

Reba leads us off the main path to a smaller one, not cut, just trampled, and drops her basket. “This is our spot today,” she says, consulting a hand-drawn map. She only looks a few years older than I am. She’s tall with broad shoulders and fuzzy red hair that she pulls back into a messy knot, but she has a natural confidence that makes her easy to follow. The other girls in the group, Kiki, Jance, and Lu, look about the same age as Shiloh, Wren, and me. Only a woman named Enid appears older, with frown lines etched around her mouth and a few gray hairs spiraling from her scalp. When she takes the basket off her back, she stretches as if in pain.

“Come,” says Shiloh. “We’ll show you what to do.”

I follow her and Wren into a thicket of kudzu. They drop their baskets. I do the same.

“There’s a knife inside,” Wren tells me. She’s smaller than I am. Short and compact, but she moves fast, every motion like a quick jab.

I reach inside my basket and find the blade. I unsheathe it. “Good god.” Sun glints off the shining surface. “That looks sharp!”

“Has to be,” says Shiloh, who is as willowy as the vines and has eyes as green as the kudzu leaves. “Got to hack through this stuff. But be careful, it’ll slice right through you, too.”

They show me the best way to cut the vines then wrap them into coils and shove them in my basket. Although the work is tiring, I don’t mind. For days, my brain has felt like one big jumble. I can’t quite remember the order of events or how long I’ve been gone from home. But, the solitude of repetitive motion helps me unravel that knot. As I cut the vine, coil the vine, and stack the vine, I slowly go over everything that’s happened to me in the past few days, trying to make sense of it all, and I wonder what the others have gone through to get here.

“So, Shiloh,” I say, moving my basket closer to where she and Wren are working and chatting. “Where are you from?”