Part 10 (2/2)

”You mean we're going to keep on being being like this?” Abigail burst out, unable to control herself. ”Isn't it going to go like this?” Abigail burst out, unable to control herself. ”Isn't it going to go away away?”

The doctor took a deep breath and nervously adjusted his gla.s.ses. ”I hope not, but as yet I cannot say for sure,” he said stiffly, as though it annoyed him not to have the answer to everything. ”This is the first project of its kind, so of course we have no extinction curves. Charts, you know, showing how long the behavior lasts after it is no longer reinforced, and if, in fact, it ever really does stop. That is what we will now begin learning from you.”

They were walking in the hospital grounds. Blossom, Abigail, and Oliver did not seem very comfortable being out of doors. Their bodies were tense, and their eyes moved constantly up to the sky and then from side to side. And though they were huddled together in a little group, they rigidly kept from touching one another. They did not smile.

They were between tests. Lola and Peter, they had just learned, were soon to be sent away. ”To an island,” the doctor had announced, ”where misfits are kept.” The other three had more tests to go through, and then were to begin their training. What the training specifically was to be, none of them knew.

Lola and Peter were walking behind, watching the others curiously. Suddenly, Oliver spun around. ”Stop staring at us!” he said.

”We weren't staring,” said Peter, and stopped walking. ”We were just-”

”I don't care what you were 'just' doing,” Oliver said. ”Leave us alone.”

Abigail looked terrible, still very thin, with sunken, shadowed eyes.

Blossom was fat, pink, and healthy. ”Yes, we don't want you around,” she said. ”Stop tagging along after us. We don't need you. Get away.”

”With pleasure,” Lola almost said, but stopped herself. They were pitiful; there was no point in being nasty. ”Come on, Pete,” she said, and they turned and started in the other direction.

He reached out and took her hand. Neither cared that someone might see. They had been taught all their lives that the only deep feelings between men and women were s.e.xual, but now they knew that it was a lie. They were friends and they loved one another, and their hand-holding was perfectly innocent. It was one more thing to rejoice in, one more way in which they had risen above the system, above the machine. They had won, there was no better feeling than that; and now they were to be sent away. Sent away to a place where people might be like themselves; a place where things would be different, and perhaps better.

”It's too bad about Abigail,” Peter said. ”She looks so sad, and she was really okay once.”

”I know,” said Lola. ”I wonder what will happen to her. I wonder if that conditioning will ever go away.”

”The doctor said no one knows,” Peter answered, and they strolled together toward a cl.u.s.ter of stunted trees.

Still in their little group, Blossom, Abigail, and Oliver hurried (they were unable to walk slowly), across the hospital grounds. They stuck closely to the cement wall, feeling safer there. And then the wall came to an end, the path took a sudden turn, and they were face to face with a traffic light-a green, blinking traffic light. Without hesitation they began to dance.

WILLIAM SLEATOR is the author of The Angry Moon The Angry Moon, a picture book ill.u.s.trated by Blair Lent, and Blackbriar Blackbriar and and Run Run, novels for young people. A 1967 graduate of Harvard College, where he studied both music and English, Mr. Sleator spent a year in London studying composition and working as an accompanist at the Royal Ballet School. He now lives in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts.

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