Searching for Sky by Jillian Cantor Page A

does is sit on it. “Now,” she says, still smiling. “I’d just like forus to get acquainted today. Most children your age would have already been in school for ten or eleven years, so you’ll have a lot to catch up on, and Alice has asked me here to see if I might be able to help you with that. Today, I’d just like to assess where you’re at. How far behind in school you might be.”
    I don’t know what school is, but I remember Ben mentioned it last night, when he talked about things that suck here, so I imagine it is a place where you go to eat, and she said something about catch, so maybe also learn to catch food? I will be good at this, I think, and I hope this can go quickly so I can make my way back to Cold Ocean in the daylight, where I hope it will suddenly be warmer.
    “Now,” she says, “do you know what this is?”
    She hands me a small, thin wooden spear, and I think this must be another eating tool. This would be perfect for eating the blue berries. There is one left on the plate, and I use the thin wooden spear to stab it, then pick it up, and suck it off. It tastes funny, and I make a face, wondering if this is why “suck” sounded like a bad thing when Ben said it.
    “Oh, no, no!” She pulls the spear quickly from my hand. The grandmother woman makes a startled noise and puts her hand over her mouth, reminding me of the way the green birds sound at night. “This is a pen-cil,” Missusfairfield says. “We don’t put this in our mouths.” Her voice is very slow and high, the way I remember my mother’s sounding when River and I were very small, and I am embarrassed that I have done something wrong and that she is talking to me like I am a child. “We use this to write and draw,” she is saying now. “Do you know what that is?”
    “River and I would draw in the sand,” I say quietly.
    “Okay, yes. Very good.” She claps her hands together. “But here we use a pen-cil to write on paper.” She holds up something else, very white, like Military Hospital, but very fine and fluttery like feathers, only square. She puts it down on the table and then presses it in with a pen-cil, moving a pen-cil to make a black shape, the way River and I would use our fingers in the sand. “Now,” she says, handing me back a pen-cil, “you try.”
    I hold on to a pen-cil, just the way she did, and press against paper. A small black notch appears.
    “Did you used to write in the sand, too?” she asks me. I nod. “Well, go ahead and show me, then; show me what you know. Can you write your name?”
    The feel of a pen-cil in my hand is very strange, and I grip it hard and tight like a fishing spear. I move it slowly and watch a thin black line moving around, until I have made a circle. I want to draw another one, just like we used to draw in the sand. Two interconnected circles, me and River. River and me. But as I move a pen-cil, I hear a noise, like a trap snapping, and then it makes no more black.
    Missusfairfield takes it from my hand. “You just pressed a little too hard and broke the point,” she says. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.” She pauses and puts her finger on my circle. “Now, tell me what this is?”
    “Me,” I say. Because isn’t that what she asked me for?
    She nods slowly and then turns and looks at the grandmother woman.
    “Honey, why don’t you go lie down in the living room for abit, rest your leg on the couch, while Missusfairfield and I have a little chat.”
    She walks me into a new space that I haven’t seen yet, Living Room . I expect for animals to be in here, something living, and I cautiously tiptoe around, listening for their sounds. But I hear and see nothing but strange-shaped caves and boxes and rocks, kind of like Bed, but not exactly. The grandmother woman walks back out, and I don’t know what the couch is, but there is a very bright multicolored rabbit pelt on the ground, so I lie on that.
    I close my eyes, squeeze them shut tightly,