Margaret Haddix: Among the Hidden

"Mom got me a forged shopping pass a long time ago. Supposedly, I'm her niece. It's good enough to convince store clerks, but if the Population Police ever found me in a roadside stop, I'd be dead. There you have it: my mother's priorities. Shopping is more important than my life."

Luke shook his head and sat down on the couch because his knees were feeling a little shaky.

"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know thirds could do that."

What if Mother and Dad got him a forged pass? For a minute he could almost picture it-they could hide him under burlap bags in the pickup truck bed until they got into town.

Everybody in town knew Mother and Dad. Everybody knew Mother and Dad had only two sons. Matthew and Mark.

"You went to the city," he said.

"Well, yeah," Jen said. "You don't see any malls around here, do you?"

"What was it like?" Luke almost whispered.

"Boring," Jen said. "Really, really boring. Mom wanted to buy me a dress-who knows why-so we went to one store after another, and I had to try on all these dresses that scratched and pricked and poked me. And then she made me get a bunch of bras-oh, sorry," she said when Luke blushed a deep red. "I guess you don't talk much about bras at your house."

"Matthew and Mark do, sometimes, when they're being… dirty," Luke said.

"Well, bras aren't dirty," Jen said. "They're just torture devices invented by men or mothers or something."

"Oh," Luke said, looking down.

"But, anyway," Jen said, with a bounce that propelled her off the couch. "I checked you out on the computer and you're all right, you don't exist. Not officially, anyway. So you're safe. And-"

Hearing Jen say that so flippantly-you don't exist - made Luke feel funny.

"How do you know I'm safe?" he interrupted.

"Fingerprints," Jen said. When Luke gave her a blank look, she explained. "My brother Brawn went through this phase where he wanted to be a detective-not that he ever would have been smart enough for it-and I remembered he still has a fingerprinting kit. So I dusted for your fingerprints on things you touched, just like on TV. I got a really good print off the wall. Then I scanned that into the computer, linked into the national file of fingerprints and, voila, I discovered your fingerprints don't exist, so neither do you. Officially."

She made a mocking face for emphasis. Luke wanted to ask, The Population Police can't find me because of what you did, can they? But he understood so little of what she'd explained that he didn't think it would help to ask anything. And Jen was already onto the next thought.

"And, anyhow, you seem trustworthy. So-o-o, now that I know you're safe, I can tell you about the rally and show you our secret chat rooms and everything-"

Jen was already leaving the room, so he had to follow just to hear the rest of her sentence.

"Want something to eat or drink?" she asked, hesitating at the doorway to the grand kitchen. "I was so surprised, I forgot to be a good hostess the last time. What'll it be? Soda? Potato chips?"

"But those are illegal," Luke protested. He remembered reading something about junk food in one of the books in the attic and asking his mother about it. She'd explained that it was something people used to eat all the time, until the Government shut down the factories that made it She wouldn't tell him why. But, as a special treat, she'd brought out a bag of potato chips she'd been saving for years and shared them, just with him. They were salty, but hard to chew. Luke had pretended to like them only because Mother seemed to want him to.

"Yeah, well, we're illegal, too, so why shouldn't we enjoy ourselves?" Jen asked, thrusting a bowl of chips at him. To be polite, Luke took one chip. And then another. And another. These potato chips were so good, he had to hold himself back from grabbing them by the handful. Jen stared at him.

"Do you go hungry sometimes?" she asked in a low voice.

"No," Luke said in surprise.

"Some shadow children do because they don't have food ration cards, and the rest of their family doesn't share," she said, opening a refrigerator that was bigger than every appliance in the Garners' kitchen put together. "My family can get all the food we want, of course, but"-she looked at him in a way that once again made him conscious of his ragged clothes-"How does your family get food for you?"

The question puzzled Luke.

"The same way they get it for themselves," he said. "We grow it. We have a garden-I used to work in it a lot, before, you know. And then, we have the hogs, or used to, and I guess sometimes we'd trade a butchered hog for someone else's butchered steer, so we'd have beef-"

Those were all shadowy transactions in Luke's mind. He had to strain his brain to remember overhearing Dad or Matthew reporting to Mother, "Ready to cook some steak? Johnston up near Libertyville wants some ham…"

Jen dropped a plastic bottle full of brown liquid. "You eat meat!" she exclaimed.

"Sure. Don't you?" Luke asked.

"When Dad can get it," Jen said, bending to pick up the bottle. She poured a glassful for Luke and one for herself. Both drinks fizzed and bubbled. "Even his clout isn't that great. The Government's been trying to force everyone, even the Barons, to become vegetarians."

"Why?" Luke asked.

Jen handed him his glass.

"Something about vegetables being more efficient," she said. "Farmers have to use a lot more land to produce one pound of meat than to produce a pound of-what's it called?-soybeans."

Luke wrinkled his nose at the thought of eating soybeans.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "We always fed our hogs the grain we couldn't sell because it didn't meet Government standards. But since the Government made us get rid of our hogs, Dad just lets that grain rot in the field."

"Really?" Jen grinned as if he'd just announced the overthrow of the Government. She thumped him on the back just as he took his first sip of soda. Between the bubbly drink and her enthusiastic pounding, Luke started coughing. Jen didn't seem to notice. "See, I told you you'd be a big help. I'm going to go post that on a bulletin board right now!"

"Wait-" Luke sputtered between coughs. He didn't know what she was talking about. But he couldn't let her get his family in trouble. He chased her down the hall, catching up just as she was sliding into the chair in front of the computer. She switched it on, and it made the be-be-be-be-beeep sounds Luke had heard the last time. Luke stood to the side, carefully out of sight of the screen.

"It's not going to bite you," Jen said. "Grab a chair. Sit down."

Luke inched back.

"But the Government-" he said.

"The Government's incompetent and stupid," Jen said. "Get it? Believe me, if they were watching through my computer screen, I'd know by now."

Meekly, Luke pulled over a padded chair and sat down.

He watched as Jen typed in, "If the Government let farmers feed their animals the grain they can't sell, there'd be more meat."

Luke was relieved that she hadn't mentioned his family. But, unless the Government was spying on them, he couldn't understand what difference it made for her to write that.

"Where'd that go?" he asked as the words disappeared. "Who's going to see it?"

"I put it on a Department of Agriculture bulletin board. Anyone with a computer can find it now. Maybe a Government worker with half a brain will see it and actually think for the first time this decade."

"But-" Luke squinted in confusion. "Why does it matter?"

Jen fixed her gaze on Luke.

"You don't even know, do you?" she asked. "You don't know why they passed the Population Law."

"N-no," Luke admitted.

"It's all about food," Jen said. "The Government was scared we'd all run out of food if the population kept growing. That's why they made you and me illegal, to keep people from starving."