The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

special case. To be honest, the number of people who love you is small and the number who hate you is large. They can’t get around the fact that you’re a clone. It makes it hard to send you to school.”
    “I know.” Matt thought bitterly of María. If she really loved him, she’d take him with her and not care about how the other kids felt.
    “El Patrón insists that you be educated and live, as nearly as possible, a normal life. The problem is, no private teacher wants to teach a clone. And so the Alacráns got an eejit.”
    Matt was startled. He’d heard the word so often—mostly from María—he’d thought it was only a swear word, like dum-dum or cootie face .
    “An eejit is a person or animal with an implant in its head,” said Tam Lin.
    “Like the horse?” said Matt as a terrible thought occurred to him.
    “Correct. Eejits can do only simple things. They pick fruit or sweep floors or, as you’ve seen, harvest opium.”
    “The Farm workers are eejits!” cried Matt.
    “That’s why they work without resting until the foreman orders them to stop and why they don’t drink water unless someone tells them to.”
    Matt’s thoughts were whirling. If the horse could stand there and die in front of a trough of water, then the man—
    “The man,” he said aloud.
    “You’re bright as a button, lad,” said Tam Lin. “The man we saw on the ground probably lagged behind the other workers and didn’t hear the foreman tell them to stop. He might have worked all night, getting thirstier and thirstier—”
    “Stop!” shrilled Matt. He covered his ears. This was horrible! He didn’t want to know any more.
    Tam Lin was at his side at once. “That’s enough lessons for one day. We’re on a picnic and we haven’t had any fun yet. Come on. I’ll show you a beehive and a coyote den. Everything lives around water in the desert.”
    They spent the rest of the day exploring the burrows, the crevices, the hidden lairs of the secret valley. Tam Lin might not have gone to school for too long, but he knew a great deal about nature. He taught Matt to sit still and wait for things to come to him. He told him how to tell the mood of a beehive by its hum. He pointed out droppings and tracks and bone fragments.
    Finally, as shadows began to fill up the oasis, Tam Lin helped Matt climb through the hole in the rock and return to the horse. It was waiting exactly where they’d left it. Tam Lin ordered it to take another drink before they set off.
    The fields were empty, and the long shadows of hills flowed across the land. Where they ended, the late-afternoon sun made the poppies glow with a golden light. They passed the dry field where the man’s body had lain, but it was gone.
    “Teacher was an eejit,” said Matt, breaking the silence.
    “She was one of the brighter ones,” said Tam Lin. “Even so, she could do only one lesson over and over.”
    “Will she come back?”
    “No.” The bodyguard sighed. “They’ll put her to work mending curtains or peeling potatoes. Let’s talk about something more cheerful.”
    “Could you teach me?” asked Matt.
    Tam Lin let out a bellow of genuine laughter. “I could if you wanted to learn how to break desks with karate chops. I reckon you’ll do your schooling off the TV. I’ll be around to hang you out the window by your ankles if you don’t study.”

9

THE SECRET PASSAGE
    O n the surface Matt’s life settled into a pleasant rhythm. He studied via distance learning over the TV, Tam Lin sent off the homework, it came back with excellent grades, and Celia praised Matt lavishly. María praised him too when she visited. It didn’t hurt either that Tom had lousy grades and managed to stay in boarding school only because Mr. Alacrán sent the headmaster a large donation.
    But underneath Matt felt a hollowness. He understood he was only a photograph of a human, and that meant he wasn’t really important. Photographs could lie forgotten in drawers for years. They