Surviving Minimized by Andrea White

Author:Andrea White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: River Grove Books

23

TURTLE BATH

Once Zert had escaped, he glanced back at the schoolhouse. Through the walls of the bottle, all the kids looked warped, as if he were viewing them through a fun house mirror. Everyone was working on the math problem except Beth. She stared at Zert through the glass.

Bug eyes, he’d say to her if she gave him any more trouble. Only here, he was sure that was a compliment. To get to the rock formation that looked like a hat, he had to navigate around a pair of BIG blue jeans, a green-and-pink T-shirt, a pair of black Breathe shorts, a pair of ladies’ underwear, and a trampo-shoe, without the springs, which blocked the path. It was like a Rosie mall.

Setting off down the path, he hiked past the houses where the Rosies lived. They weren’t built of wood and enclosed with picket fences as he had imagined last night. Instead, they were boxes perched between intertwined tree trunks, FastGrow bottles wedged between boulders, a Bot’s head hidden by a bush, a plant holder obscured by tall grasses, a crate for cloned dodo food covered with leaves, and even half of a discarded globe smeared with mud. To the eyes of a BIG Zert, the village would look like a jumble of trash.

Maybe he could escape this place and find Abbot and they could … That was the problem. There were no urban trash rifles, 3-D pool halls, or anti-gravity fun houses here. Even if he bolted, there was nothing he wanted to do. The Rocky Mountain park may have been wide open, but he felt as cramped as if he were locked up in a cell at Teen Jail.

At the Hat, he turned right and headed toward the cave.

A filthy Styrofoam doormat greeted him in front of their hut. Correction. Calling the place a hut made it sound grander than it actually was. It looked more like one of the shanties in Botland where the scavengers lived among the headless robots.

He pushed the door open. In first grade, he had had a lunchbox that looked like the blue-and-white cybratom that covered one wall.

I live at Number One Lunchbox Lane.

Only this shack wasn’t funny. Their apartment in the back of their store hadn’t been luxurious, but this Rosie house was one of the poorest he had ever seen. The magazine photos were torn and holey. The floor was packed dirt.

His father looked up. He was pushing a metal desk cut from a soda can against the wall. “Why are you home so early?”

“Their school is really stupid,” Zert complained.

“So you already know everything that the Rosie kids are learning?” his father asked.

“They use abacuses and feather pens,” Zert said.

“It’s our new life,” his father said, stroking his chin. “Let’s try to make the best of it.”

Zert looked around at the nearly empty shack. “We should have stayed home.”

His father let out a sigh. “This is our home.” He paused. “At least I hope it is.”

“It may be your home.”

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