The Resisters Read online

  “I am the person who took this young person at her word,” she began. “I won’t say his or her, as I think you all know I am the coach of the Thistles, and that we are an all-girl team. So, yes, the young person was a her. And let me say right off that I am not standing here so you can eye my players and make conjectures about them. I am standing here to help Eleanor and Grant. Because, finally, it was not one thing that went wrong. It was many things. And as some of you have suggested, it wasn’t just one person who made mistakes, either. Yes, some of the problem was sloppiness and laziness. But it was not simple carelessness on the part of Eleanor and Grant, and it is important to realize that. There might have been better safeguards, but this is not like a bank that has had hundreds of years to figure things out. This is a volunteer organization, invented on the fly and run on a shoestring. I don’t mean to attack anyone. But I know from my own experience with the ShelterBoat what that means. While the League seems like a miracle, there are in fact no miracles. Mistakes were bound to be made as we got bigger. And if any of you thinks it ironic that I, the youngest and greenest of the coaches, should be the one to recognize that there were going to be growing pains, really, it is and isn’t. Because I am actually the age most aware of what a growing pain is.”

  Andrea took a deep breath, trying to maintain her composure; above her, the sky seemed to grow as it brightened. The crowd waited.

  “I cannot say how sorry I am for my part in this,” she went on. “I was wrong not to follow up with this unhacked player. I cannot apologize enough for jeopardizing your safety, and I only wish I knew how to undo what I’ve done. And I cannot apologize enough to Eleanor and Grant.” She turned to us. “I’ve wrecked your beautiful project with my carelessness, and if you never spoke to me again I could hardly blame you.”

  Such an impressive and affecting young lady—I was in awe of her right up until that “if you never spoke to me again.” But then it was in part to stifle a smile that I joined Eleanor and Gwen in immediately stepping forward to hug her, whereupon she started to cry the halting cry of someone who had been determined—who was, in fact, still determined—not to cry.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry”—even as so many tissues were proffered that they almost seemed part of a magic trick, emerging and emerging as they did from sleeves, from hats, from thin air. People gave her time to collect herself.

  Then the father of one of the Thistles stood—a light-skinned man with a turban. “You have served our children so well. I cannot speak for other parents, but I am not angry at you. Has any of us not made mistakes? And not just when we were young, by the way. As a matter of fact, slow learner than I am, I myself have not had a chance to forget what growing pains are like.”

  Laughter.

  “You have given so generously to the ShelterBoat and to this League,” he went on, “and in return were, frankly, taken advantage of. I do not blame you. Or, all right, if I blame you, I only blame you a little.”

  More laughter.

  “You should have followed up. Definitely. That was a terrible mistake. But mostly,” he finished, “I thank you for your service and your honesty.”

  Some of the players were unsure how to react, but the parents, practiced as they were in positivity, immediately began to cheer. “Yay, Andrea! Thank you! Thank you!”

  Which one of the Thistles was his daughter? And what had happened to her that she had proved in need of sheltering? He hardly seemed the head of an abusive household; I just hoped his was not one of the girls who had been rescued from addiction or prostitution. In the meanwhile, so genuine and well-put was his appreciation that Andrea’s eyes began to fill again.

  Then a young woman in a flannel shirt stood. “We can understand your reticence,” she said. “We can understand your desire not to point fingers, and we do not particularly want to point fingers ourselves. But what if our children are hanging around with this girl? The one who played unhacked, I mean. Don’t we have a right to know? Don’t our kids have a right to make an informed decision about whether to remain friends? Does this girl’s privacy trump our kids’ safety?”

  “I absolutely see your point,” Andrea began to say. “But I do not feel at liberty…” She looked to Eleanor and me for a cue. I nodded and was about to take over when Ondi stood.

  Her red-and-gold hair was as glorious as ever and adorned with an astonishing number of clips; she wore a shiny blue jacket and dark orange harem pants. Yet for all her sartorial exuberance, she looked as if she had not slept one night since she sat with us in the garden.

  “My name is Ondi Nickelhoff, and you can blame me,” she began.

  “Say what?” said someone.

  “Louder!” said someone else.

  She started again. “My name is Ondi Nickelhoff, and you can blame me,” she said, raising her voice. “I’m not the girl who told an unhacked person about the League. And I’m not the coach who trusted a girl she shouldn’t have. I am the girl herself. I am the girl who breached your security and ruined things for everyone here.” She paused, gathering her strength, and I remember thinking that she really needed an ampliphone—or if not an ampliphone, something else to hang on to. Something to help her. People craned forward to catch her words. “There is no excuse for what I’ve done. I am truly sorry. Please do not blame Andrea, or Eleanor and Grant, or anyone else. I and I alone have done a terrible thing. It is one of the most terrible things I have ever done in my life, and I deserve every terrible thing you may say about me.”

  Her self-possession was astonishing and her manner disarming. Had she ever spoken before a crowd before? Had Andrea’s example perhaps helped her? Someone started to boo but, hearing it, Gwen—showing fantastic aplomb, too, I thought—quickly began to clap, upon which signal, others followed suit. The applause was not thunderous. But it was sustained enough that Ondi, after a stunned moment—recalling, I wanted to think, how she had not only failed to help Gwen when she was being booed by the Thistles, but had in fact encouraged the booers—gave Gwen what appeared to be a rueful smile of thanks.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t tell you exactly how I came to do this terrible thing. I wish I knew myself. But I can tell you a little about my background. And maybe understanding where I am coming from will help you understand where I ended up.”

  Ondi did not explain about Grandpa Barney—because, she told Gwen later, she didn’t want to play her grandfather’s death for sympathy. As for whether it was that, or whether her instincts told her that that part of the story might not cast her in an altogether sympathetic light, we never knew. Perhaps—collected as she seemed on the surface—she truly was unprepared to share so emotional a part of her story. In any case, she left it out.

  She largely left our family out, too, except to say that we had taught her to knit, and that it was thanks to knitting that she became interested in carding and spinning wool, and in old ways generally. She talked about SpritzGramming animal smells from Vermont—drawing a spate of laughter—and about how much trouble that brought. She talked about the trial, and about the punishment, which did seem disproportionate to the crime. Funny as it sounds, she said, it seemed punitive. She mentioned how Eleanor and Gwen had knit blankets and sweaters for her family, and how I had devised a messenger drone for them as well. She thanked us.

  But mostly she talked about the experience of being Cast Off—something most people had heard of but did not know much about. She talked about the size of the waves—as big as tankers, she told them, just as she had told us. She talked about the pitching of the boat, and about the Enforcers and the HydroBikes and the EnforceBots and the AquaDrones. She talked about the wind, the never-ceasing wind, and about the sharks—the first we had heard about the sharks. Why had she not mentioned the sharks when she explained to us why she had not wanted to jump into the water after her grandfather? Now she talked about how hungry she and her family were, to
o, and how thirsty—things she had not made much of in her first account of their ordeal, either, although the privation must have been terrible. Perhaps she had simply forgotten about the sharks, as she had about her family’s hunger and thirst? Even now, so many years later, I wonder. Perhaps she had left them out originally because the sharks were mitigating—because she wanted to be damned for her reluctance to dive into the cold water. Though wasn’t that reluctance really just a way of saying she didn’t want to be as cold as her grandfather—that she didn’t want to be dead? Something no one could blame her for?

  She talked now instead about how they had all wanted to throw themselves overboard. She talked about how her parents couldn’t jump because they had her, and how she couldn’t jump because she was all her parents had. And then she talked about how angry she was when she got back to shore—how deranged, really—and though full of hatred toward Aunt Nettie, how anxious to cooperate with her, too. How she just wanted never to find herself on anything like that boat again.

  “But now, I am ashamed,” she finished. “I hate myself and I would not blame you if you could not forgive me, since I cannot forgive myself.”

  Of course, some people were still upset. One man yelled, “You’re damned right we don’t forgive you! You’ve fucked us all!” and I heard another say, “Too bad life takes more than talk.” But some were sympathetic, especially when they heard that Ondi had at least, yes, belatedly gotten herself hacked.

  “You’re not the first one to seek to appease your captors,” said one person.

  “The desire to submit to authority is as old as mankind,” said another.

  “None of us knows what she’ll do in extremis,” said a third.

  And to all of this, many nodded, though it did seem the sentiments that had received approval; Ondi herself was not bathed in forgiveness the way Andrea had been. Quite the contrary, anyone could hear in the silence of the many who had not spoken, How could you? How could you? How could you? A chorus that Eleanor and I could have joined. You had us black-coded? You turned us in? You jeopardized the safety of everyone in the League—including Eleanor? You endangered Eleanor?

  If anything checked our anger, it was Gwen quietly standing by Ondi just as, back when they were in grade school, Ondi, we knew, had many times stood by her. Could she really have forgiven Ondi? And how had they ended up almost exactly the same height, and with such similar builds and skin? It was pure coincidence that they were both mixes of African, Asian, and Caucasian blood. There was nothing in it. They were not sisters. But the sun having risen by now, their heads were haloed as if blessed by nature itself—by the mountains and the rivers and the tides and the sand, my mother would have said. Meaning by whatever forces had placed one girl in one family and one in another with no more care than they had for a fish or a crab.

  Then there was, at least for Eleanor and me, the choreography of the meeting to attend to. Like group leaders everywhere, we had planned for an airing of emotions to be followed by a channeling of those feelings into the making of a decision—a tricky transition to manage, especially as the question we had to raise was devastating. But, now, the time had come to ask, What next?

  “I’m sorry to say,” I said—trying to be as brave as Andrea and Ondi—“that I believe we should disband.”

  Silence. Of course, people could see the logic of this. If nothing else, if we kept on—“think of the impact on our Living Points!” said someone, absurdly.

  But yet more absurdly, someone in the back disagreed.

  “I do not want to disband,” said a pyramidal woman in a baseball hat.

  Andrea, scrambling to her feet, backed the woman up. “I do not want to disband, either,” she said. She was still wearing her men’s overcoat, but it was unbuttoned now, and in the rising breeze, it flew up behind her as if she were standing on the prow of a boat determinedly under sail. “I understand what has happened. I understand that we find ourselves at this juncture because of a member of my team. And let me say again that I take responsibility for not following up with Ondi.

  “But if I am getting this right, we have reason to believe that Aunt Nettie is onto us. So what do we have to lose? It makes no sense to cut ourselves off from this, one of the few good things we have left to our lives. Maybe we will only last another game or two. Who knows? But if our gig is up, I’d rather play as much as we possibly can than sit home and wait for the ax to fall. We must all make our own decisions. But I myself am not dropping out. As long as there are people to throw and people to hit, I will be here. As my mom used to say, Might as well go out swinging. And as for Aunt Nettie, all I can say is, to hell with her!”

  At this people started shouting,

  To hell with Aunt Nettie! To hell with her!

  To hell with Aunt Nettie! To hell with her!

  Eleanor and I looked at each other in amazement as the chanting morphed into,

  To hell with Aunt Nettie! Let’s play ball!

  To hell with Aunt Nettie! Let’s play ball!

  “Thank you, Andrea,” said Eleanor at last. “So the question is, how many of you are in? How many of you want to join Andrea—and, I will say, Grant and me and”—she looked at Gwen and Ondi, whose answer was plain—“the girls, and continue?”

  “I am! I am! I am!” The responses were overwhelming.

  “Think it over,” cautioned Eleanor. “Don’t be rash. And let me say that, whatever you think today, you can change your mind tomorrow. But if we can get a nonbinding show of hands—how many of you want to keep playing? Risk and all?”

  And to our astonishment, though the hands came up at different rates—with some shooting up straightaway, and others rising only after a moment or two—every hand was finally raised high.

  “Well, all right,” said Eleanor then. She could not have looked more stunned had she been clear-floated to a different galaxy. “We’ll go on.” And with that, we packed up to go home.

  * * *

  ◆

  The next day brought continued elation but also—when we finally told Gwen about her ball speed—distraction. Had Mimi really said that about a seventy-mile-per-hour pitch guaranteeing a place on the Netted League team? Gwen asked. And had I really recorded her pitch at the Jets game as seventy-three miles per hour? And why hadn’t Eleanor and I told her about Dana the Enforcer’s visit, and why had I measured her ball speeds anyway, and how?

  The how question was the easiest to answer. I tried to hide my pride as I showed Gwen my meter, although a full-functioning meter small enough to hide in the palm of my hand was, for this tinkerer, an achievement.

  “Wow, cool,” she said, with an air that suggested that the whole thing was, after all, pretty twentieth century.

  Daughters. As for why I thought to measure her ball speed: “Parents the world over keep an eye on their kids, trying to understand their strengths and weaknesses, the better to help square them with reality,” I began.

  Gwen rolled her eyes.

  “In any case,” I went on, “isn’t the important thing what Mimi had to say?” I watched closely as she gave a diffident nod.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Presenting as it does a bit of quandary, perhaps?”

  “What quandary?” she said. “There is no quandary. I am not going to Net U.”

  * * *

  —

  Since there was nothing to discuss, we did not discuss it, especially as Eleanor and I were preoccupied with the Surplus Fields case. In this, there had been three developments. The first was that I had come up with a meter capable of establishing beyond dispute that there were indeed emanations. The second was that Eleanor, Yuri, Heraldine, and Sue were all but done exhausting the National Park Service’s remedies to their complaint. They still had one to go and I had yet to identify the emanations; we had much work ahead. All the same, Eleanor and her team were anx
ious to begin constructing their case, especially after—the third development—not one but four young kids affected by the emanations had found their way to Eleanor’s office. All four—two boys and two girls—had ExoLimbs without which they could not move, though they had all moved normally before they played on the Surplus Fields. In fact, if her daughter had had a problem, one parent said, it was that she never stopped running and climbing. Now the girl stared at us from within her openwork armor.

  “It works,” she reported, “but everything hurts.”

  And the others concurred. The pain never stopped. They could take something for it but then they slept all the time and couldn’t wake up.

  “We’re going to fight,” Eleanor promised. “We’re going to fight with everything we have.” She didn’t say what we all knew, that there was no saving these kids, only the children who came after them. What’s more, even if damages were finally paid—a big if—they could not begin to compensate the victims for the loss of their healthy limbs. But as for the suggestion, made a little while later, that Eleanor let someone else take the lead on this case, rather than intensify the heat with which she already lived, the answer was simply no. And, no, she would not discuss it.

  * * *

  —

  Mimi, meanwhile, had been in touch with Gwen again. To reduce the stress of training for the Netted League tryouts, every prospect was entitled, it seemed, to a training partner. In Gwen’s case, this involved three choices, two of whom she didn’t know. But could we guess who the third choice was?