Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A.S. King

Author:A.S. King [KING, A.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Girls & Women, Juvenile Fiction / Social Issues / Suicide, Juvenile Fiction / Social Issues / Depression & Mental Illness, Juvenile Fiction / Social Issues / Friendship, Juvenile Fiction / Family / General (See Also Headings Under Social Issues)
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2014-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Ferret Company will sniff out exiles

Just a Tuesday lunch hour at the mall. Just two country girls hanging out eating nachos in flip-flops and shorts. The older women had tans already. Some of them had babies in strollers. Some of the baby-stroller women were young. As young as us, maybe. Some had tattooed boyfriends in baseball caps. Some had boyfriends in business suits. They all seemed to scorn each other.

It was one big competition, this food court.

People drew lines.

The food court was just like everything else now: Divisive. Self-righteous. Hopeless. I could totally see why a second civil war was on its way… if it wasn’t just in my bat-ingesting head.

Transmission from the tattooed baby-daddy in the baseball cap: His grandfather escaped a gunfight in Vietnam that killed twenty-one in his platoon. He came home to find that his wife had had a kid with someone else, so he hitchhiked all the way to Crescent City, California, where he discovered giant redwood trees and decided they were the most beautiful creatures on the planet. Even more beautiful than his wife, who’d had a baby with someone else while he was getting shot at in Vietnam. So he stayed there. He wrote a letter home to his wife only once. It said, “Thank you.”

“See that girl over there?” Ellie said to me. “Her ancestors were Lenape Indians. They used to carve arrowheads and hunt, like, ten miles from here. Her great-great-great-grandmother was a talented weaver and died from tuberculosis.”

I looked around. The food court was filling up. It was a mix of mall employees, shoppers, mall rats and the old guys who sit on the benches all day and people-watch. I got transmissions from some of them, but nothing about the war.

Then the old guy in the wheelchair showed up.

Transmission from a wheelchair-bound old guy with a big smile and a USS Pledge baseball cap: His father was a great talker and he never got a word in edgeways. So he took the role of the quiet kid. When his father died, he was finally able to hold real conversations and be funny. He was sixty-one when that happened. He regrets it taking that long. Also, his great-great-grandson will somehow hurt my family during the Second Civil War. Something involving fire and a tunnel.

The way he looked at me, it was like he could see infinity, too. Or maybe I was staring at him. Anyway, his great-great-grandson would hurt the O’Briens. And there is a tunnel.

“Are you seeing tunnels anywhere?” I asked Ellie.

“Tunnels?” she asked, still looking at the kid she was reading. “No tunnels. I see, like, hospitals or something. Not like I’ve ever been to a hospital.”

She meant the camps. They looked like hospitals. “No tunnels, though?”

“Nope.”

Something told me I needed to know more about the tunnels, so I looked back at the old man in the USS Pledge hat. Another transmission: The tunnels will be filled with smoke and there will be no escape. Before the smoke, the tunnels will facilitate an exodus… an exodus led by the women who live in the trees.

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