Year of the Flood: Novel by Margaret Atwood Page B

bottle was leaning against it, the squeeze kind.
    “Look at this,” she said. She’d written her name in syrup on the slab, and a stream of ants was feeding on the letters, so that each letter had an edging of black ants. That was how I first learned Amanda’s name — I saw it written in ants. Amanda Payne.
    “Cool, huh?” she said. “Want to write your own name?”
    “Why are you doing that?” I said.
    “It’s neat,” said Amanda. “You write things, then they eat your writing. So you appear, then you disappear. That way no one can find you.”
    Why did this make sense to me? I don’t know, but it did. “Where do you live?” I asked.
    “Oh, around,” said Amanda carelessly. That meant she didn’t really live anywhere: she was sleeping in a squat somewhere, or worse. “I used to live in Texas,” she added.
    So she was a refugee. A lot of Texas refugees had turned up after the hurricanes and then the droughts. They were mostly illegal. Now I could see why Amanda would be so interested in disappearing.
    “You can come and live with me,” I said. I hadn’t planned that, it just came out of my mouth.
    At that moment Bernice squeezed through the gap in the fence. She’d relented, she’d returned to collect me, except now I didn’t want her.
    “Ren! What’re you doing!” she yelled. She came clomping across the vacant lot in that purposeful way she had. I found myself thinking she had big feet, and her body was too square and her nose too small, and her neck ought to be longer and thinner. More like Amanda’s.
    “Here comes a friend of yours, I guess,” said Amanda, smiling. I felt like saying, She’s not my friend, but I wasn’t brave enough to be that treacherous.
    Bernice came up to us, red-faced. She always got red when she was mad. “Come on, Ren,” she said. “You’re not supposed to talk to her.” She spotted Amanda’s jellyfish bracelet, and I could tell she wanted it as much as I did. “You’re evil,” she said to Amanda. “Pleebrat!” She stuck her arm through mine.
    “This is Amanda,” I said. “She’s coming to live with me.”
    I thought Bernice would fly into one of her rages. But I was giving her my stony-eyed stare, the one that said I wasn’t going to give in. She’d risk losing face in front of a stranger if she pushed too hard, so instead she gave me a silent, calculating look. “Okay then,” she said. “She can help carry the vinegar wine.”
    “Amanda knows how to steal things,” I said to Bernice as we trudged back to the Wellness Clinic. I meant this as a peace offering, but Bernice only grunted.

16
    I knew I couldn’t really take Amanda home with me like a stray kitten: Lucerne would’ve told me to put her back where I found her, because Amanda was a pleebrat and Lucerne hated pleebrats. According to her they were ruined children, thieves and liars all, and once a child had been ruined it was like a wild dog, it could never be trained or trusted. She was afraid to walk along the street from one Gardener place to another because of the pleebrat gangs that could swarm you and run off with anything they could grab. She never learned about picking up stones and hitting back and yelling. It was because of her earlier life. She was a hothouse flower: that’s what Zeb called her. I used to think this was a compliment, because of the word flower.
    So Amanda would be sent packing, unless I got Adam One’s permission first. He loved people joining the Gardeners, especially kids — he was always going on about how the Gardeners should mould young minds. If he said Amanda should live with us, Lucerne wouldn’t be able to say no.
    The three of us found Adam One at the Wellness Clinic, helping to bottle the vinegar. I explained that I’d picked up Amanda — ”gleaned” her, I said — and that she wished to join us, having seen the Light, and could she live at my house?
    “Is that true, my child?” Adam One asked Amanda. The other Gardeners had stopped