Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

“What was left. There were parts missing – liver, kidneys, heart. Zeb says the mobs will sell the parts, then keep the rest in the freezer until they need to send a message.”

“Ren! Where are you?” It was Lucerne, in my room.

“I have to go,” I whispered. I tucked the phone back into the tiger. “In here,” I said. My teeth were chattering. Freezers were so cold.

“What are you doing in the closet, darling?” said Lucerne. “Come and have some lunch! You’ll feel better soon!” She sounded chirpy: the crazier and more disturbed I acted, the better it was for her, because the less anyone would believe me if I told on her.

Her story was that I’d been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with.

Once I’d adjusted enough – adjusted was the word they used, as if I was a bra strap – Lucerne said I had to go to school because it was bad for me to be moping around the house: I needed to get out and make a whole new life for myself, as she was doing. It was a risk for her – I was a walking cluster bomb, the truth about her might come popping out of my mouth at any time. But she knew I was judging her silently, and that annoyed her, so she really wanted me elsewhere.

Frank seemed to have believed her story, though he didn’t seem to care about it one way or the other. I could see now why Lucerne had run off with Zeb: at least Zeb had noticed her. And he’d noticed me, as well, whereas Frank treated me like a window: he never looked at me, only through me.

Sometimes I dreamed about Zeb. He’d be wearing a bear suit, and the fur would unzip down the middle like a pyjama bag, and Zeb would step out. He’d smell comforting, in the dream – like rained-on grass, and cinnamon, and the salty, vinegary, singed-leaf smell of the Gardeners.

The school was called HelthWyzer High. On the first day I put on one of the new outfits that Lucerne had picked out for me. It was pink and lemon yellow – colours the Gardeners never would have allowed because they’d show the dirt and waste the soap.

My new clothes felt like a disguise. I couldn’t get used to how tight they were compared to my old loose dresses, and how my bare arms stuck out from the sleeves and my bare legs came out from the bottom of the knee-length, pleated skirt. But this was what the girls at HelthWyzer High all wore, according to Lucerne.

“Don’t forget your sunblock, Brenda,” she said as I headed towards the door. She was calling me Brenda now: she claimed it was my real name.

HelthWyzer sent a student to be my guide – walk me to the school, show me around. Her name was Wakulla Price; she was thin, with glossy skin like toffee. She was wearing a pastel yellow top like mine, but she had pants on the bottom. She gazed at my pleated skirt, her eyes wide. “I like your skirt,” she said.

“My mother bought it,” I said.

“Oh,” she said in a sorry voice. “My mother bought me one like that two years ago.” So I liked her.

On the way to school, Wakulla said, What does your dad do, when did you get here, and so on, but she didn’t mention any cults; and I said, How do you like the school, who are the teachers, and that got us safely there. The houses we were passing were all different styles, but with solarskins. They had the latest tech in the Compounds, which Lucerne had pointed out a lot. Really, Brenda, they’re so much more truly green than those purist Gardeners so you don’t have to worry about how much hot water you’re using, and isn’t it time you took another shower?

The high-school building was sparkling clean – no graffiti, no pieces falling off, no smashed windows. It had a deep green lawn and some shrubs pruned into round balls, and a statue: “Florence Nightingale,” it said on the plaque, “The Lady of the Lamp.” But someone had changed the a to a u, so it said The Lady of the Lump.

“Jimmy did that,” said Wakulla. “He’s my lab partner in Nanoforms Biotech, he’s always doing dumb things like that.” She smiled: she had really white teeth. Lucerne had been saying how dingy my own teeth were and I needed a cosmetic dentist. She was already planning to redecorate our entire house, but she had some alterations planned for me as well.

At least I didn’t have any cavities. The Gardeners were against refined sugar products and were strict about brushing, though you had to use a frayed twig because they hated the idea of putting either plastic or animal bristles inside their mouths.

The first morning at that school was very strange. I felt as if the classes were in a foreign language. All the subjects were different, the words were different, and then there were the computers and the paper notebooks. I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find – you couldn’t just wipe it away, not like a slate. I wanted to run into the washroom and wash my hands after touching the keyboards and pages; the danger had surely rubbed off on me.

Lucerne said that our so-called personal history – the forcible abduction and so on – would be kept confidential by the officials at the HelthWyzer Compound. But someone had leaked because the kids at the school all knew. At least they hadn’t heard about Lucerne ’s sex-slave lust-mad pervert story. But I knew I’d lie about that if I had to, in order to protect Amanda, and Zeb, and Adam One, and even the ordinary Gardeners. We are all in one another’s hands, Adam One used to say. I was beginning to find out what that meant.

At lunch hour a group gathered around me. Not a mean group, just curious. So, you lived with a cult? Weird! How crazy were they? They had a lot of questions. Meanwhile they were eating their lunches, and there was meat smell everywhere. Bacon. Fish sticks, 20 per cent real fish. Burgers – they were called WyzeBurgers, and they were made of meat cultured on stretchy racks. So no animals had actually been killed. But it still smelled like meat. Amanda would’ve eaten the bacon to show she hadn’t been brainwashed by the leaf-eaters, but I couldn’t go that far. I peeled the bun off my WyzeBurger and tried to eat that, but it stank of dead animal.

“Like, how bad was it?” said Wakulla.

“It was just a greenie cult,” I said.

“Like the Wolf Isaiahists,” said one kid. “Were they terrorists?” They all leaned forward: they wanted horror stories.

“No. They were pacifists,” I said. “We had to work on this rooftop garden.” And I told them about the slug and snail relocation. It sounded so strange to me, when I told it.

“At least you didn’t eat them,” said one girl. “Some of those cults, they eat road kill.”

“The Wolf Isaiahists do, for sure. It was on the Web.”

“You lived in the pleebs, though. Cool.” Then I realized I had an edge, because I’d lived in the pleeblands where none of them had ever been except maybe on a school trip, or dragged along with their slumming parents to the Tree of Life. So I could make up whatever I liked.

“You were child labour,” one boy said. “A little enviroserf. Sexy!” They all laughed.

“Jimmy, don’t be so dumb,” said Wakulla. “It’s okay,” she said to me, “he always says stuff like that.”

Jimmy grinned. “Did you worship cabbages?” he went on. “Oh Great Cabbage, I kiss your cabbagey cabbageness!” He went down on one knee and grabbed a handful of my pleated skirt. “Nice leaves, do they come off?”

“Don’t be such a meat-breath,” I said.

“A what?” he said, laughing. “A meat-breath?”

Then I had to explain how that was a harsh name to call someone, among the extreme greens. Like pig-eater. Like slug-face. This made Jimmy laugh more.